...Stefan Tanaka This essay calls for historians to move beyond chronological time in the writing and understanding of history. It first shows that chronology and modern history are historical, not natural, and then offers some simple correctives, such as recognizing different timescales and writing...

...Marnia Lazreg This essay analyzes the pitfalls of the adoption of postcolonial studies by French colonial historians and traces their roots to a deep-seated identity investment in the colonial empire, especially Algeria. It examines French colonial historiography's elision of racism as a willed...

...Seth Koven In this interview, Thomas Laqueur ranges widely across his childhood in 1940s Istanbul and 1950s small-town West Virginia to his “crisis” as a social historian that propelled him to cultural history and the study of sexuality and to his attempt to understand the cultural work of the dead...

...Thomas Medvetz The controversy surrounding historian William Cronon, whose blog post about the collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin generated fierce reprisals from Republicans, has frequently been cited as an assault on academic freedom. This essay argues that the “Cronon...

...Sharon Marcus Historian Judith R. Walkowitz, interviewed by Sharon Marcus, talks about how she came to study Victorian prostitution and the evolution of London’s Soho neighborhood, her efforts to connect political engagement and scholarship, how the discipline of history has and hasn’t changed over...

... as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience...

... and affective ties and reborn as secular citizens of a democratic state. Historians turned to the past to counter communal repre- sentations of history, question communal stereotypes, and write a secular national history. The critique of communal prejudice was seen as necessary for developing a history...

... not refer to the role that historians can and do sometimes play as specialists or experts appointed by governments or to the particular questions that have been raised about this role in forums such as the Public Historian. I have in mind a different question: under what conditions can history...

... The Public Life of History Bain Attwood, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Claudio Lomnitz In September 2005, Bain Attwood and Dipesh Chakrabarty convened a group of historians at the Australian National University to discuss the productive effects...

... and marriage that stress change and discontinuity over stasis in social arrangements and moral reasoning, and in doing so they have relied heavily on the authority of professionally credentialed historians. In June 2003, when the Supreme Court reversed itself by overturn- ing the nation’s remaining...

... with the possibilities of the visual media for history. Why the traditional historical film cannot be satisfying as history. Why such works are always compromised. How the conventions of narrative film demand the inclusion of in- vented dramatic elements that all historians judge fictional. How...

... written documents. Differences between historical practices are not valued symmetrically by courts and tribunals that investigate claims, or by state bureaucracies that negoti- ate settlements, or by most historians trained in the academic disciplines. Oral histories and traditions...

... no longer be cited by card-carrying historians of science (teaching is another matter, as we’ll see), but this book is definitely Undead. Despite his lame answers on the author’s questionnaire, Kuhn was not modest in his ambitions for his book. By the time the University of Chicago Press finally...

..., “Postcolonial Studies,” 58. 202 discarded as obscure. While the historian Emmanuelle Sibeud criticizes French Return of the Native historians for their lack of attention to postcolonial studies, she nevertheless attri- butes the current revival of an “anticolonialism of the rear guard...

... (VS): A friend of mine who is a modern Italianist once said that they were the cynics and the French historians were the romantics. Do you agree with that characterization? Put otherwise, can we learn about who someone is by considering what he or she has studied and written about? So what does...

... the present political regime they are intended to create the new citizen. Public culture allows us not only to hypothesize a terrain of contest and debate in contemporary India, but also directs our attention to some limita- tions in current approaches to culture among anthropologists and historians...

... of these books looked at major transformations in scientific and mathematical understandings of probabil- ity. What is the difference between what you do in these books and what a typical historian of science working on the same topics might do...

... 'the enormous condescension of history'. But whereas social historians and feminists had to attack the assumptions that great men and great events made history, nationalist historians in India had to start with a more basic point; they had to replace British great men and great events with Indian ones...

... Guha among other anti- colonial writers such as the Trinidadian author C.L.R.’James, the Syrian intellectual George Antonius, and the Malaysian, historian S.H. Alatas. None of them are in any sense “aaditional” or nativist intellectuals; they operate fully within the knowledge-procedures...

... Anderson, Benedict and Perry, on postwar human science. So this is a gloriously Undead work. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (hereafter IC ) appeared, in 1983, amid a spate of new studies on nationalism written mainly by sociologists and historians of Europe ( Kedourie 1970 ; Nairn 1977...