Clio And Antiquity

Clio’s Bastards uses an examination of the discipline of history in Canadian universities as the point of entry for a much larger exploration of the intellectual, spiritual, and moral crisis confronting Western civilization today. Over the past four decades, academic history was slowly perverted as historians adopted new sociological approaches to the study of the past. Historians altered the content, purpose, and goals of the discipline as they sought not Truth but Justice as part of a larger ideological program of radical social change. And today, the pervasive sociological way of seeing, understanding, and explaining our world has become the “new common sense” right across the Western world, both inside and outside the academy. Sociological thought, however, is neither “new” nor “advanced” nor is it “progressive” as its adherents claim: it is simply recrudescent Sophistry and Cynicism, destructive philosophies which ruined and fouled ancient Athens, the source and inspiration for Western civilization.

Squier, who gave no credit to his source."--BOOK JACKET.

A survey of the variety of readings we have of the past and of how those readings are used in the present day to validate, discredit, unite, or divide. To write history is to consider how to explicate the past, to weigh the myriad possible approaches to the past, and to come to terms with how the past can be and has been used. In this book, prize-winning historian Jeremy Black considers both popular and academic approaches to the past. His focus is on the interaction between the presentation of the past and current circumstances, on how history is used to validate one view of the present or to discredit another, and on readings of the past that unite and those that divide. Black opens with an account that underscores the differences and developments in traditions of writing history from the ancient world to the present. Subsequent chapters take up more recent decades, notably the post–Cold War period, discussing how different perspectives can fuel discussions of the past by individuals interested in shaping public opinion or public perceptions of the past. Black then turns to the possible future uses of the then past as a way to gain perspective on how we use the past today. Clio’s Battles is an ambitious account of the engagement with the past across world history and of the clash over the content and interpretation of history and its implications for the present and future. “Remarkable both for its geographical scope and historical scale, and for its command of scholarship on a breathtaking range of subjects. I can’t imagine another historian who could attempt such an ambitious work or pull it off with such aplomb.” —William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University “Refreshing . . . Black eschews “Eurocentricism” and includes considerable material on other areas of the world that one does not usually find in such a work. Typical of Black’s writing, there is much to learn in the numerous small asides throughout the text. Taken together these form an impressive whole.” —Spencer C. Tucker, VMI

A discussion of the first written histories of Babylon and Egypt

When antiquities begin to go missing from London drawing rooms Miss Calliope Chase sets out to restore order. The thief must be a well-connected member of the Ton. And she doesn't need to look much further than Cameron de Vere, Earl of Westwood, for a suspect. What she doesn't realize is that her determined pursuit of a criminal is beginning to look like a budding romance. Until Cameron kisses her, and her ordered life is thrown into appalling confusion!

In this book seventeen leading scholars examine the interaction between historiography and poetry in the Augustan age: how poets drew on or reacted against historians presentation of the world, and how, conversely, historians transformed poetic themes for their own ends.