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Modern British intellectual history has been a particularly flourishing field of enquiry in recent years, and these two tightly integrated volumes contain major new essays by almost all of its leading proponents. The contributors examine the history of British ideas over the past two centuries from a number of perspectives that together constitute a major new overview of the subject. History, Religion, and Culture begins with eighteenth-century historiography, especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It takes up different aspects of the place of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes towards the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver Cromwell, and the religious sensibility of John Ruskin. Finally, in discussions which range up to the middle of the twentieth century, the volume explores relations between scientific ideas about change or development and assumptions about the nature and growth of the national community.

"This new edition of Writing Material Culture History examines the methodologies currently used in the historical study of material culture. Touching on archaeology, anthropology, art history and literary studies, the book provides history students with a fundamental understanding of the relationship between artefacts and historical narratives. The role of museums, the impact of the digital age and the representations of objects in public history are just some of the issues addressed in a book that brings together distinguished scholars from around the world"

This essay focuses on the uniqueness of Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan through the lenses of history and culture, for instance, the significance of hair, not just as an abject figure, as seminally theorized by Julia Kristeva, but as symbolic of the avenging spirit of a distinct woman, a trait not uncommon in the East. Similarly, the significance of the ears to the musician: it has to do with art, as detailed by scholars, but more importantly, with Kobayashi's history during wartime. The final episode often considered inferior to the other episodes by critics, is arguably the most effective invocation of the specter to indict the erasure of homosexuality in the official history of the male-centric Samurai world and, thereby, wartime Japan. Additionally, the second story of the Yoko-onna––the snow woman, at the intersection of the material and the ethereal deconstructs the angry ghost by positing it as the mindless victim of the militarist system by disavowing any personal reason for her murderous action. This essay interrogates the importance of causality through her behavior. Through such a reading, I want to draw attention to the cultural specificity of Kwaidan in engaging with the horror genre to address the specters which haunt the Japanese psyche. The disregard of a loving and caring wife and the inattention to the words of a wife who is seductive but part of the system, the possibility of music to evoke nostalgia and simultaneously mourn loss/destruction point to Kwaidan's investment in the sensorium through sight and sound. Furthermore, the teacup that instead of leading to a meditative state, as entrenched in the popular imaginary regarding the Eastern ritual of tea drinking, invokes a past and simultaneously threatens the present, and leads us through the eruption of transgressive desire to the rupture of the apparent calmness and control of heteropatriarchy. Most important, Kobayashi's ornate sets, stylized framing, and mise-en-scene, and Toru Takemitsu's experimental music point to their predilection for art and sensuosity to layer the surface and delineate the uncanniness of the specter and play with its ephemeral quality through presence and absence rather than one of unswerving fearsomeness and devastation/conquest like in much cinema in the West where the ghost is posited as a binary opposite to be yielded to or challenged. Thus, the point of entry into Kwaidan is in reading it as a specter of history and departure is analyzing it as an exemplar of the horror genre predicated on the specificity of culture that privileges the sensorium.

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading

The Rise and Fall of Culture History. R. Lee Lyman. Michael J. O'Brien. and Robert C. Dunnell. New York: Plenum Press, 1997.271pp.Americanist Culture History: Fundamentals of Time, Space, and Form. R. Lee Lyman. Michael J. O'Brien. and Robert C. Dunnell. eds. New York: Plenum Press, 1997.499 p

"This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nation's have voiced claims about their past by establishing 'proof' of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders"--Provided by publisher.