Passion For History

The pathbreaking work of renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis has added profoundly to our understanding of early modern society and culture. She rescues men and women from oblivion using her unique combination of rich imagination, keen intelligence, and archival sleuthing to uncover the past. Davis brings to life a dazzling cast of extraordinary people, revealing their thoughts, emotions, and choices in the world in which they lived. Thanks to Davis we can meet the impostor Arnaud du Tilh in her classic, The Return of Martin Guerre, follow three remarkable lives in Women on the Margins, and journey alongside a traveler and scholar in Trickster Travels as he moves between the Muslim and Christian worlds. In these conversations with Denis Crouzet, professor of history at the Sorbonne and well-known specialist on the French Wars of Religion, Natalie Zemon Davis examines the practices of history and controversies in historical method. Their discussion reveals how Davis has always pursued the thrill and joy of discovery through historical research. Her quest is influenced by growing up Jewish in the Midwest as a descendant of emigrants from Eastern Europe. She recounts how her own life as a citizen, a woman, and a scholar compels her to ceaselessly examine and transcend received opinions and certitudes. Davis reminds the reader of the broad possibilities to be found by studying the lives of those who came before us, and teaches us how to give voice to what was once silent.

James Percoco demonstrates how, using applied history, you can bring to life the people, places, and events of our nation's history, inspiring in your students a passion for the past.

The wild blood-on-the-mat saga of the rise and fall of the infamous Stampede Wrestling company.

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America. From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

A Passion for Wildlife chronicles the history of the Canadian Wildlife Service and the evolution of Canadian wildlife policy over its first half century. It presents the exploits and accomplishments of a group of men and women whose dedication to the ideals of science, conservation, and a shared vision of Canada as a country that treasures its natural heritage has earned them the respect of their profession around the world.

Originally published in 1964, The Rebel Passion endeavours to tell the continuous story, in terms of their ideas and personalities and the vital flame that inspired them, of a group of very different yet spiritually related Christians who sought to confront a world involved in deeper conflict than any could fully realize, with the basic essentials of peace. Individual and corporate witness, beginning even before 1914, is presented against the dark background of many countries involved directly or indirectly in war, and illustrates the international scene, dangerous and tragic yet revolutionary and apocalyptic, over the tremendous half-century through which the older generation had lived, and which shaped the lives of their juniors. In 1941 the last revised edition was issued of a factual historic record of the work of the I.F.o.R. up to twenty years ago. The present book aims at a different treatment, which instead of mainly summarizing missions, conferences and committees, seeks to interpret persons and events rather than merely describe them. It tries above all to indicate how the philosophy and example of prophetic personalities influenced their various communities, in spite of totally different official values and the consistent opposition of ‘establishments’ to minority opinions based on insight and inspiration. It suggests that the thinking of ordinary individuals with distinguished minds, without the advantage of conspicuous social labels or the opportunity to stand on political pedestals, actually operates as a leaven which changes the thought of a generation. The fact that such a result had been achieved within measurable time should have encouraged those who worked on the contemporary scene to create spiritual foundations for the labours of future man and women. This book was published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded at Cambridge in December, 1914, and followed by the International Fellowship in 1919.

Passion and Power brings together some of the most recent and innovative writings on the history of sexuality and explores the experiences, ideas, and conflicts that have shaped the emergence of modern sexual identities. Arguing that sexuality is not an unchanging biological reality or a universal natural force, the essays in this volume discuss sexuality as an integral part of the history of human experience. Articles on sexual assault, homosexuality, birth control, venereal disease, sexual repression, pornography, and the AIDS epidemic examine the ways that sexuality has become a core element of modern social identity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.It is only in recent years that historians have begun to examine the social construction of sexuality. This is the first anthology that addresses this issue from a radical historical perspective, examining sexuality as a field of contention in itself and as part of other struggles rooted in divisions of gender, class, and race. Author note: Kathy Peiss is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-century New York (Temple). >P>Christina Simmons is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati-Raymond Walters College.

The pathbreaking work of renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis has added profoundly to our understanding of early modern society and culture. She rescues men and women from oblivion using her unique combination of rich imagination, keen intelligence, and archival sleuthing to uncover the past. Davis brings to life a dazzling cast of extraordinary people, revealing their thoughts, emotions, and choices in the world in which they lived. Thanks to Davis we can meet the impostor Arnaud du Tilh in her classic, The Return of Martin Guerre, follow three remarkable lives in Women on the Margins, and journey alongside a traveler and scholar in Trickster Travels as he moves between the Muslim and Christian worlds. In these conversations with Denis Crouzet, professor of history at the Sorbonne and well-known specialist on the French Wars of Religion, Natalie Zemon Davis examines the practices of history and controversies in historical method. Their discussion reveals how Davis has always pursued the thrill and joy of discovery through historical research. Her quest is influenced by growing up Jewish in the Midwest as a descendant of emigrants from Eastern Europe. She recounts how her own life as a citizen, a woman, and a scholar compels her to ceaselessly examine and transcend received opinions and certitudes. Davis reminds the reader of the broad possibilities to be found by studying the lives of those who came before us, and teaches us how to give voice to what was once silent.