Suchergebnisse

Prologue : Before the second wave : scholarship on women from the early twentieth century into the 1960s -- Second-wave feminism and the rediscovery of women's history, 1968-1975 -- Feminist historians and the 'new' social history : 1968-1995 -- Is female to male as nature is to culture? : Feminist anthropology and the search for a key to all misogynist mythologies -- Beyond separate spheres : from women's history to gender history -- Gender history, cultural history and the history of masculinity -- Gender, poststructuralism and the 'cultural/linguistic turn' in history -- Gender and history in a postcolonial world -- From separate spheres to the public sphere : gender and the sexual politics of citizenship -- Gender and history in a post-poststructuralist world -- Women's and gender history as a work in progress

The First Civilizations And The Rise Of Empires -- Ancient India -- China In Antiquity -- The Civilization Of The Greeks -- The Roman World Empire -- The Americas -- Ferment In The Middle East: The Rise Of Islam -- Early Civilizations In Africa -- The Expansion Of Civilization In South And Southeast Asia -- The Flowering Of Traditional China -- The East Asian Rimlands: Early Japan, Korea, And Vietnam -- The Making Of Europe -- The Byzantine Empire And Crisis And Recovery In The West -- New Encounters: The Creation Of A World Market -- Europe Transformed: Reform And State Building -- The Muslim Empires -- The East Asian World -- The West On The Eve Of A New World Order.

It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolumeHistory and Culture of the Indian People(Majumdar 1951) by Indian scholars, published shortly after independence. But the consensus was eroded by the rise of what we may call the "colonial knowledge" paradigm, which asserted a close connection between European rule and European knowledge of India. It tended to discredit the old consensus and to lighten the specific gravity of Orientalist knowledge, simplifying it as an object of historical explanation. This development has cleared an opening, in recent decades, for a rush of new studies tending to create an opposing consensus, that Indiadidhave history of a kind, it being the task of scholars to explicate what kind, exactly, that was (for example, Pathak 1966; Warder 1972; Thapar 1992; Wagoner 1993; Ali, ed. 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Guha 2004; Mantena 2007). This in itself has been very much to the good, by reopening questions that had been closed by the old consensus. The old consensus itself, by contrast, was dismissed without much examination, and was attributed to colonial interest, cultural misunderstanding, or insufficient grasp of Indian languages and literatures. The old consensus now is seen as a simple ideological projection, easily explained and dismissed, with little complexity or interest for historical investigation. But this simplifying action of the prevailing paradigm renders invisible some of the very real effects of the old consensus, effects whose explanation can be very valuable to us. In order to gain the benefit it holds we have to take it seriously, trying both to explain it historically and to decide whether or in what way it is true.

This stimulating volume presents an overview of key gender theories and debates, tracing the development of gender as an analytic category in the writing of history. Covering a broad timespan, Kent makes the origins, concepts and methods of gender history accessible to students, showing how they can use gender in their own historical studies.

The history of ancient Rome has had a perennial fascination for statesmen and publicists in their search for clues to an understanding of the problems of the modern world. In France, whether under Louis XIV, during the Reign of Terror, or under Napoleon, Rome was the school of statesmen. As Britain and Germany drifted deeper into their fatal rivalry before 1914, the ancient struggle of Rome and Carthage was repeatedly recalled, and each of the rivals identified itself with Rome, its opponent with Carthage. Today again, we seek to learn the wisdom, and to avoid the fatal decisions, of the statesmen of ancient Rome.