Without History

Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.

Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, and contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity.

A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Chris Andersen, Juliana Barr, David R. M. Beck, Jacob Betz, Paul T. Conrad, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, Adam Jortner, Rosalyn R. LaPier, John J. Laukaitis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robert J. Miller, Mindy J. Morgan, Andrew Needham, Jean M. O'Brien, Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, James D. Rice, Phillip H. Round, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Scott Manning Stevens.

'The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.' (AMAZON)

Conventional chronologies of world history concentrate on the reigns of kings and queens, the dates of battles and treaties, the publication dates of great books, the completion of famous buildings, the deaths of iconic figures, and the years of major discoveries. But there are other more interesting stories to tell--stories that don't usually get into the history books, but which can nevertheless bring the past vividly and excitingly to life. Imagine a history lesson that spares you the details of such seminal events as the 11th-century papal-imperial conflict, that fails to say much at all about the 1815 Congress of Vienna--and that neglects entirely to mention the world-changing moment that was the 1521 Diet of Worms. Imagine instead a book that tells you the date of the ancient Roman law that made it legal to break wind at banquets; the name of the defunct medieval pope whose putrefying corpse was subjected to the humiliation of a trial before a court of law; the identity of the priapic monarch who sired more bastards than any other king of England; and last but not least the date of the demise in London of the first goat to have circumnavigated the globe twice. Imagine a book crammed with such deliciously disposable information, and you have History without the Boring Bits. By turns bizarre, surprising, trivial, and enlightening, History without the Boring Bits offers rich pickings for the browser, and entertainment and inspiration aplenty for those who have grown weary of more conventional works of history.

In the mid-twentieth century the digital revolution began with the introduction of the first electronic computers, which were first introduced into companies and in the state bodies then they spread strongly in the private houses as personal computers; later all these computers were connected to each other by a global telecommunication network called Internet, which had a massive development at the end of the century becoming the backbone of the worldwide information circulation. At the beginning of the 21st century the digital revolution was completed and the information of any kind (texts, images, video clips and TV broadcasts, music and songs, WEB pages) started to be recorded and disseminated in digital form rather than with a traditional media (paper, film, magnetic tape), with a displacement that engaged all human activities of any type, both collective and individual. While the development of digital technology continue at an accelerated pace the problem of information retention begin to arise, what was previously mainly entrusted to printing on paper and now is in abandonment phase: printed records are increasingly transformed into digital format and the new information is generated directly in electronic form. But while a book or a letter could be read directly even centuries after their writing, digital information has a short life because of the same technological development, that makes quickly obsolete any recording by irreversibly mutating both its hardware and reading software; other recordings arethen volatile by their very nature, such as e-mails or WEB pages, even if they could host information that could be of value in the future. Moreover digital recordings are carried out in a great variety of different formats, sometimes incompatible with each other or subject themselves to obsolescence, thus unnecessarily complicating the task of preserving their content. Most part of human culture, gradually poured into electronic form, is now jeopardized, and we risk of delivering to posterity a world without history: this book describes the current situation and what is sought to do to remedy the danger.

Why is something a masterpiece? Art History 101 . . . Without the Exams is about revisiting famous works of art that we may have studied in an art history class or seen in a textbook. Each discussion delves into one great masterpiece and asks the questions that help us understand how it has shaped history. What is the piece about? How did the original owner look at this piece? Where was it originally placed? Why is it in this museum now? How did it get famous? From the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna and the painted bulls of Altamira, Spain, dated 12,500 BCE, to an incense burner from twelfth-century Seljuk Iran, frescoes from a Late Byzantine funerary chapel, and masterworks by Botticelli, Caravaggio, Monet, and Sargent, this book shows readers how to look closely. It welcomes us to the joy of art history—but without the papers, notes, and exams.

This book has the following features: • When we say “West,” what do we really mean? The prologue sets out to explore this question from literary, historical, strategic, philosophical, and cultural vantage points • In order to understand today’s West, different shades of the long and arduous transatlantic dialogue starting with Christopher Columbus’s accidental discovery of America to the collapse of Soviet Union have been reasonably accounted for. The second chapter traces back this evolutionary journey in simple, easily understandable way. • The book has been a fifteen-year story of phenomenal change, which redefined the very nature of the Western Alliance after the collapse of Soviet Union. • Changes in the geopolitical map of Europe, emergence of European Union, re-orientation of NATO, and the mutual play between the United States and Europe all throughout the decade of 1990s have been woven into the narrative of this book with the aim to understand how the West, if at all, has changed. • Three major events of post–Cold War history—the Balkan Crisis, the 9/11, and Iraq War 2003—had played major stimulus in re-understanding the West. Detailed chronological accounts of these events have been presented before the reader. • What are the rationale, motivations, and implications of EU and NATO’s enlargements to the East, and how has the enlargement impacted the Alliance. • The epilogue reflects upon what has changed and what continues in today’s West across different historical phases. • How have the schemes of European security in post-cold war era been coexisting with the changing face of NATO is yet another theme this book seeks to address.