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Humanities LibreTexts

1.1: Introduction

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What is history? Is it simply a record of things people have done? Is it what writer Maya Angelou suggested—a way to meet the pain of the past and overcome it? Or is it, as Winston Churchill said, a chronicle by the victors, an interpretation by those who write it? History is all this and more. Above all else, it is a path to knowing why we are the way we are—all our greatness, all our faults—and therefore a means for us to understand ourselves and change for the better.

But history serves this function only if it is a true reflection of the past. It cannot be a way to mask the darker parts of human nature, nor a way to justify acts of previous generations. It is the historian’s task to paint as clear a picture as sources will allow.

Will history ever be a perfect telling of the human tale? No. There are voices we may never hear. Yet each new history book written and each new source uncovered reveal an ever more precise record of events around the world (Figure 1.1). You are about to take a journey into human history.

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History: A Very Short Introduction

History: A Very Short Introduction

History: A Very Short Introduction

Professor of History, School of History, Classics and Archaeology,

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History: A Very Short Introduction is an essay about how we study and understand history. Rather than concentrating on a specific period of history, it discusses the theory of history in a general way. It begins by inviting us to think about various questions provoked by our investigation of history, and explores the ways these questions have been answered in the past. Concepts such as causation, interpretation, and periodization are introduced by means of concrete examples of how historians work, giving the reader a sense of the excitement of discovering not only the past, but also ourselves.

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Grad Coach

How To Write A Dissertation Introduction Chapter:

The 7 essential ingredients of an a-grade introduction.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA). Reviewed By Dr Eunice Rautenbach (D. Tech) | March 2020

If you’re reading this, you’re probably at the daunting early phases of writing up the introduction chapter of your dissertation or thesis. It can be intimidating, I know. 

In this post, we’ll look at the 7 essential ingredients of a strong dissertation or thesis introduction chapter, as well as the essential things you need to keep in mind as you craft each section. We’ll also share some useful tips to help you optimize your approach.

Overview: How To Write An Introduction Chapter

  • Understand the purpose and function of the intro chapter
  • Craft an enticing and engaging opening section
  • Provide a background and context to the study
  • Clearly define the research problem
  • State your research aims, objectives and questions
  • Explain the significance of your study
  • Identify the limitations of your research
  • Outline the structure of your dissertation or thesis

The perfect dissertation or thesis introduction chapter

A quick sidenote:

You’ll notice that I’ve used the words dissertation and thesis interchangeably. While these terms reflect different levels of research – for example, Masters vs PhD-level research – the introduction chapter generally contains the same 7 essential ingredients regardless of level. So, in this post, dissertation introduction equals thesis introduction.

Start with why.

To craft a high-quality dissertation or thesis introduction chapter, you need to understand exactly what this chapter needs to achieve. In other words, what’s its purpose ? As the name suggests, the introduction chapter needs to introduce the reader to your research so that they understand what you’re trying to figure out, or what problem you’re trying to solve. More specifically, you need to answer four important questions in your introduction chapter.

These questions are:

  • What will you be researching? (in other words, your research topic)
  • Why is that worthwhile? (in other words, your justification)
  • What will the scope of your research be? (in other words, what will you cover and what won’t you cover)
  • What will the limitations of your research be? (in other words, what will the potential shortcomings of your research be?)

Simply put, your dissertation’s introduction chapter needs to provide an overview of your planned research , as well as a clear rationale for it. In other words, this chapter has to explain the “what” and the “why” of your research – what’s it all about and why’s that important.

Simple enough, right?

Well, the trick is finding the appropriate depth of information. As the researcher, you’ll be extremely close to your topic and this makes it easy to get caught up in the minor details. While these intricate details might be interesting, you need to write your introduction chapter on more of a “need-to-know” type basis, or it will end up way too lengthy and dense. You need to balance painting a clear picture with keeping things concise. Don’t worry though – you’ll be able to explore all the intricate details in later chapters.

The core ingredients of a dissertation introduction chapter

Now that you understand what you need to achieve from your introduction chapter, we can get into the details. While the exact requirements for this chapter can vary from university to university, there are seven core components that most universities will require. We call these the seven essential ingredients . 

The 7 Essential Ingredients

  • The opening section – where you’ll introduce the reader to your research in high-level terms
  • The background to the study – where you’ll explain the context of your project
  • The research problem – where you’ll explain the “gap” that exists in the current research
  • The research aims , objectives and questions – where you’ll clearly state what your research will aim to achieve
  • The significance (or justification) – where you’ll explain why your research is worth doing and the value it will provide to the world
  • The limitations – where you’ll acknowledge the potential limitations of your project and approach
  • The structure – where you’ll briefly outline the structure of your dissertation or thesis to help orient the reader

By incorporating these seven essential ingredients into your introduction chapter, you’ll comprehensively cover both the “ what ” and the “ why ” I mentioned earlier – in other words, you’ll achieve the purpose of the chapter.

Side note – you can also use these 7 ingredients in this order as the structure for your chapter to ensure a smooth, logical flow. This isn’t essential, but, generally speaking, it helps create an engaging narrative that’s easy for your reader to understand. If you’d like, you can also download our free introduction chapter template here.

Alright – let’s look at each of the ingredients now.

history introduction chapter 1

#1 – The Opening Section

The very first essential ingredient for your dissertation introduction is, well, an introduction or opening section. Just like every other chapter, your introduction chapter needs to start by providing a brief overview of what you’ll be covering in the chapter.

This section needs to engage the reader with clear, concise language that can be easily understood and digested. If the reader (your marker!) has to struggle through it, they’ll lose interest, which will make it harder for you to earn marks. Just because you’re writing an academic paper doesn’t mean you can ignore the basic principles of engaging writing used by marketers, bloggers, and journalists. At the end of the day, you’re all trying to sell an idea – yours is just a research idea.

So, what goes into this opening section?

Well, while there’s no set formula, it’s a good idea to include the following four foundational sentences in your opening section:

1 – A sentence or two introducing the overall field of your research.

For example:

“Organisational skills development involves identifying current or potential skills gaps within a business and developing programs to resolve these gaps. Management research, including X, Y and Z, has clearly established that organisational skills development is an essential contributor to business growth.”

2 – A sentence introducing your specific research problem.

“However, there are conflicting views and an overall lack of research regarding how best to manage skills development initiatives in highly dynamic environments where subject knowledge is rapidly and continuously evolving – for example, in the website development industry.”

3 – A sentence stating your research aims and objectives.

“This research aims to identify and evaluate skills development approaches and strategies for highly dynamic industries in which subject knowledge is continuously evolving.”.

4 – A sentence outlining the layout of the chapter.

“This chapter will provide an introduction to the study by first discussing the background and context, followed by the research problem, the research aims, objectives and questions, the significance and finally, the limitations.”

As I mentioned, this opening section of your introduction chapter shouldn’t be lengthy . Typically, these four sentences should fit neatly into one or two paragraphs, max. What you’re aiming for here is a clear, concise introduction to your research – not a detailed account.

PS – If some of this terminology sounds unfamiliar, don’t stress – I’ll explain each of the concepts later in this post.

Dissertation writing

#2 – Background to the study

Now that you’ve provided a high-level overview of your dissertation or thesis, it’s time to go a little deeper and lay a foundation for your research topic. This foundation is what the second ingredient is all about – the background to your study.

So, what is the background section all about?

Well, this section of your introduction chapter should provide a broad overview of the topic area that you’ll be researching, as well as the current contextual factors . This could include, for example, a brief history of the topic, recent developments in the area, key pieces of research in the area and so on. In other words, in this section, you need to provide the relevant background information to give the reader a decent foundational understanding of your research area.

Let’s look at an example to make this a little more concrete.

If we stick with the skills development topic I mentioned earlier, the background to the study section would start by providing an overview of the skills development area and outline the key existing research. Then, it would go on to discuss how the modern-day context has created a new challenge for traditional skills development strategies and approaches. Specifically, that in many industries, technical knowledge is constantly and rapidly evolving, and traditional education providers struggle to keep up with the pace of new technologies.

Importantly, you need to write this section with the assumption that the reader is not an expert in your topic area. So, if there are industry-specific jargon and complex terminology, you should briefly explain that here , so that the reader can understand the rest of your document.

Don’t make assumptions about the reader’s knowledge – in most cases, your markers will not be able to ask you questions if they don’t understand something. So, always err on the safe side and explain anything that’s not common knowledge.

Dissertation Coaching

#3 – The research problem

Now that you’ve given your reader an overview of your research area, it’s time to get specific about the research problem that you’ll address in your dissertation or thesis. While the background section would have eluded to a potential research problem (or even multiple research problems), the purpose of this section is to narrow the focus and highlight the specific research problem you’ll focus on.

But, what exactly is a research problem, you ask?

Well, a research problem can be any issue or question for which there isn’t already a well-established and agreed-upon answer in the existing research. In other words, a research problem exists when there’s a need to answer a question (or set of questions), but there’s a gap in the existing literature , or the existing research is conflicting and/or inconsistent.

So, to present your research problem, you need to make it clear what exactly is missing in the current literature and why this is a problem . It’s usually a good idea to structure this discussion into three sections – specifically:

  • What’s already well-established in the literature (in other words, the current state of research)
  • What’s missing in the literature (in other words, the literature gap)
  • Why this is a problem (in other words, why it’s important to fill this gap)

Let’s look at an example of this structure using the skills development topic.

Organisational skills development is critically important for employee satisfaction and company performance (reference). Numerous studies have investigated strategies and approaches to manage skills development programs within organisations (reference).

(this paragraph explains what’s already well-established in the literature)

However, these studies have traditionally focused on relatively slow-paced industries where key skills and knowledge do not change particularly often. This body of theory presents a problem for industries that face a rapidly changing skills landscape – for example, the website development industry – where new platforms, languages and best practices emerge on an extremely frequent basis.

(this paragraph explains what’s missing from the literature)

As a result, the existing research is inadequate for industries in which essential knowledge and skills are constantly and rapidly evolving, as it assumes a slow pace of knowledge development. Industries in such environments, therefore, find themselves ill-equipped in terms of skills development strategies and approaches.

(this paragraph explains why the research gap is problematic)

As you can see in this example, in a few lines, we’ve explained (1) the current state of research, (2) the literature gap and (3) why that gap is problematic. By doing this, the research problem is made crystal clear, which lays the foundation for the next ingredient.

#4 – The research aims, objectives and questions

Now that you’ve clearly identified your research problem, it’s time to identify your research aims and objectives , as well as your research questions . In other words, it’s time to explain what you’re going to do about the research problem.

So, what do you need to do here?

Well, the starting point is to clearly state your research aim (or aims) . The research aim is the main goal or the overarching purpose of your dissertation or thesis. In other words, it’s a high-level statement of what you’re aiming to achieve.

Let’s look at an example, sticking with the skills development topic:

“Given the lack of research regarding organisational skills development in fast-moving industries, this study will aim to identify and evaluate the skills development approaches utilised by web development companies in the UK”.

As you can see in this example, the research aim is clearly outlined, as well as the specific context in which the research will be undertaken (in other words, web development companies in the UK).

Next up is the research objective (or objectives) . While the research aims cover the high-level “what”, the research objectives are a bit more practically oriented, looking at specific things you’ll be doing to achieve those research aims.

Let’s take a look at an example of some research objectives (ROs) to fit the research aim.

  • RO1 – To identify common skills development strategies and approaches utilised by web development companies in the UK.
  • RO2 – To evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies and approaches.
  • RO3 – To compare and contrast these strategies and approaches in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.

As you can see from this example, these objectives describe the actions you’ll take and the specific things you’ll investigate in order to achieve your research aims. They break down the research aims into more specific, actionable objectives.

The final step is to state your research questions . Your research questions bring the aims and objectives another level “down to earth”. These are the specific questions that your dissertation or theses will seek to answer. They’re not fluffy, ambiguous or conceptual – they’re very specific and you’ll need to directly answer them in your conclusions chapter .

The research questions typically relate directly to the research objectives and sometimes can look a bit obvious, but they are still extremely important. Let’s take a look at an example of the research questions (RQs) that would flow from the research objectives I mentioned earlier.

  • RQ1 – What skills development strategies and approaches are currently being used by web development companies in the UK?
  • RQ2 – How effective are each of these strategies and approaches?
  • RQ3 – What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of these strategies and approaches?

As you can see, the research questions mimic the research objectives , but they are presented in question format. These questions will act as the driving force throughout your dissertation or thesis – from the literature review to the methodology and onward – so they’re really important.

A final note about this section – it’s really important to be clear about the scope of your study (more technically, the delimitations ). In other words, what you WILL cover and what you WON’T cover. If your research aims, objectives and questions are too broad, you’ll risk losing focus or investigating a problem that is too big to solve within a single dissertation.

Simply put, you need to establish clear boundaries in your research. You can do this, for example, by limiting it to a specific industry, country or time period. That way, you’ll ringfence your research, which will allow you to investigate your topic deeply and thoroughly – which is what earns marks!

Need a helping hand?

history introduction chapter 1

#5 – Significance

Now that you’ve made it clear what you’ll be researching, it’s time to make a strong argument regarding your study’s importance and significance . In other words, now that you’ve covered the what, it’s time to cover the why – enter essential ingredient number 5 – significance.

Of course, by this stage, you’ve already briefly alluded to the importance of your study in your background and research problem sections, but you haven’t explicitly stated how your research findings will benefit the world . So, now’s your chance to clearly state how your study will benefit either industry , academia , or – ideally – both . In other words, you need to explain how your research will make a difference and what implications it will have.

Let’s take a look at an example.

“This study will contribute to the body of knowledge on skills development by incorporating skills development strategies and approaches for industries in which knowledge and skills are rapidly and constantly changing. This will help address the current shortage of research in this area and provide real-world value to organisations operating in such dynamic environments.”

As you can see in this example, the paragraph clearly explains how the research will help fill a gap in the literature and also provide practical real-world value to organisations.

This section doesn’t need to be particularly lengthy, but it does need to be convincing . You need to “sell” the value of your research here so that the reader understands why it’s worth committing an entire dissertation or thesis to it. This section needs to be the salesman of your research. So, spend some time thinking about the ways in which your research will make a unique contribution to the world and how the knowledge you create could benefit both academia and industry – and then “sell it” in this section.

studying and prep for henley exams

#6 – The limitations

Now that you’ve “sold” your research to the reader and hopefully got them excited about what’s coming up in the rest of your dissertation, it’s time to briefly discuss the potential limitations of your research.

But you’re probably thinking, hold up – what limitations? My research is well thought out and carefully designed – why would there be limitations?

Well, no piece of research is perfect . This is especially true for a dissertation or thesis – which typically has a very low or zero budget, tight time constraints and limited researcher experience. Generally, your dissertation will be the first or second formal research project you’ve ever undertaken, so it’s unlikely to win any research awards…

Simply put, your research will invariably have limitations. Don’t stress yourself out though – this is completely acceptable (and expected). Even “professional” research has limitations – as I said, no piece of research is perfect. The key is to recognise the limitations upfront and be completely transparent about them, so that future researchers are aware of them and can improve the study’s design to minimise the limitations and strengthen the findings.

Generally, you’ll want to consider at least the following four common limitations. These are:

  • Your scope – for example, perhaps your focus is very narrow and doesn’t consider how certain variables interact with each other.
  • Your research methodology – for example, a qualitative methodology could be criticised for being overly subjective, or a quantitative methodology could be criticised for oversimplifying the situation (learn more about methodologies here ).
  • Your resources – for example, a lack of time, money, equipment and your own research experience.
  • The generalisability of your findings – for example, the findings from the study of a specific industry or country can’t necessarily be generalised to other industries or countries.

Don’t be shy here. There’s no use trying to hide the limitations or weaknesses of your research. In fact, the more critical you can be of your study, the better. The markers want to see that you are aware of the limitations as this demonstrates your understanding of research design – so be brutal.

#7 – The structural outline

Now that you’ve clearly communicated what your research is going to be about, why it’s important and what the limitations of your research will be, the final ingredient is the structural outline.The purpose of this section is simply to provide your reader with a roadmap of what to expect in terms of the structure of your dissertation or thesis.

In this section, you’ll need to provide a brief summary of each chapter’s purpose and contents (including the introduction chapter). A sentence or two explaining what you’ll do in each chapter is generally enough to orient the reader. You don’t want to get too detailed here – it’s purely an outline, not a summary of your research.

Let’s look at an example:

In Chapter One, the context of the study has been introduced. The research objectives and questions have been identified, and the value of such research argued. The limitations of the study have also been discussed.

In Chapter Two, the existing literature will be reviewed and a foundation of theory will be laid out to identify key skills development approaches and strategies within the context of fast-moving industries, especially technology-intensive industries.

In Chapter Three, the methodological choices will be explored. Specifically, the adoption of a qualitative, inductive research approach will be justified, and the broader research design will be discussed, including the limitations thereof.

So, as you can see from the example, this section is simply an outline of the chapter structure, allocating a short paragraph to each chapter. Done correctly, the outline will help your reader understand what to expect and reassure them that you’ll address the multiple facets of the study.

By the way – if you’re unsure of how to structure your dissertation or thesis, be sure to check out our video post which explains dissertation structure .

Keep calm and carry on.

Hopefully you feel a bit more prepared for this challenge of crafting your dissertation or thesis introduction chapter now. Take a deep breath and remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day – conquer one ingredient at a time and you’ll be firmly on the path to success.

Let’s quickly recap – the 7 ingredients are:

  • The opening section – where you give a brief, high-level overview of what your research will be about.
  • The study background – where you introduce the reader to key theory, concepts and terminology, as well as the context of your study.
  • The research problem – where you explain what the problem with the current research is. In other words, the research gap.
  • The research aims , objectives and questions – where you clearly state what your dissertation will investigate.
  • The significance – where you explain what value your research will provide to the world.
  • The limitations – where you explain what the potential shortcomings and limitations of your research may be.
  • The structural outline – where you provide a high-level overview of the structure of your document

If you bake these ingredients into your dissertation introduction chapter, you’ll be well on your way to building an engaging introduction chapter that lays a rock-solid foundation for the rest of your document.

Remember, while we’ve covered the essential ingredients here, there may be some additional components that your university requires, so be sure to double-check your project brief!

history introduction chapter 1

Psst… there’s more (for free)

This post is part of our dissertation mini-course, which covers everything you need to get started with your dissertation, thesis or research project. 

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40 Comments

Derique

Thanks very much for such an insight. I feel confident enough in undertaking my thesis on the survey;The future of facial recognition and learning non verbal interaction

Derek Jansen

Glad to hear that. Good luck with your thesis!

Thanks very much for such an insight. I feel confident now undertaking my thesis; The future of facial recognition and learning non verbal interaction.

Emmanuel Chukwuebuka Okoli

Thanks so much for this article. I found myself struggling and wasting a lot of time in my thesis writing but after reading this article and watching some of your youtube videos, I now have a clear understanding of what is required for a thesis.

Saima Kashif

Thank you Derek, i find your each post so useful. Keep it up.

Aletta

Thank you so much Derek ,for shedding the light and making it easier for me to handle the daunting task of academic writing .

Alice kasaka

Thanks do much Dereck for the comprehensive guide. It will assist me queit a lot in my thesis.

dawood

thanks a lot for helping

SALly henderson

i LOVE the gifs, such a fun way to engage readers. thanks for the advice, much appreciated

NAG

Thanks a lot Derek! It will be really useful to the beginner in research!

Derek Jansen

You’re welcome

ravi

This is a well written, easily comprehensible, simple introduction to the basics of a Research Dissertation../the need to keep the reader in mind while writing the dissertation is an important point that is covered../ I appreciate the efforts of the author../

Laxmi kanta Sharma

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Halima Ringim

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Shamim Nabankema

Thanks so much ❤️😘 I feel am ready to start writing my research methodology

Sapphire Kellichan

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Abdul

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Amelia

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Dennis

This is an awesome masterpiece. It is one of the most comprehensive guides to writing a Dissertation/Thesis I have seen and read.

You just saved me from going astray in writing a Dissertation for my undergraduate studies. I could not be more grateful for such a relevant guide like this. Thank you so much.

Maria

Thank you so much Derek, this has been extremely helpful!!

I do have one question though, in the limitations part do you refer to the scope as the focus of the research on a specific industry/country/chronological period? I assume that in order to talk about whether or not the research could be generalized, the above would need to be already presented and described in the introduction.

Thank you again!

Jackson Lubari Wani

Phew! You have genuinely rescued me. I was stuck how to go about my thesis. Now l have started. Thank you.

Valmont Dain

This is the very best guide in anything that has to do with thesis or dissertation writing. The numerous blends of examples and detailed insights make it worth a read and in fact, a treasure that is worthy to be bookmarked.

Thanks a lot for this masterpiece!

Steve

Powerful insight. I can now take a step

Bayaruna

Thank you very much for these valuable introductions to thesis chapters. I saw all your videos about writing the introduction, discussion, and conclusion chapter. Then, I am wondering if we need to explain our research limitations in all three chapters, introduction, discussion, and conclusion? Isn’t it a bit redundant? If not, could you please explain how can we write in different ways? Thank you.

Md. Abdullah-Al-mahbub

Excellent!!! Thank you…

shahrin

Thanks for this informative content. I have a question. The research gap is mentioned in both the introduction and literature section. I would like to know how can I demonstrate the research gap in both sections without repeating the contents?

Sarah

I’m incredibly grateful for this invaluable content. I’ve been dreading compiling my postgrad thesis but breaking each chapter down into sections has made it so much easier for me to engage with the material without feeling overwhelmed. After relying on your guidance, I’m really happy with how I’ve laid out my introduction.

mahdi

Thank you for the informative content you provided

Steven

Hi Derrick and Team, thank you so much for the comprehensive guide on how to write a dissertation or a thesis introduction section. For some of us first-timers, it is a daunting task. However, the instruction with relevant examples makes it clear and easy to follow through. Much appreciated.

Raza Bukhari

It was so helpful. God Bless you. Thanks very much

beza

I thank you Grad coach for your priceless help. I have two questions I have learned from your video the limitations of the research presented in chapter one. but in another video also presented in chapter five. which chapter limitation should be included? If possible, I need your answer since I am doing my thesis. how can I explain If I am asked what is my motivation for this research?

Simon Musa Wuranjiya

Thank you guys for the great work you are doing. Honestly, you have made the research to be interesting and simplified. Even a novice will easily grasp the ideas you put forward, Thank you once again.

Natalie

Excellent piece!

Simon

I feel like just settling for a good topic is usually the hardest part.

Kate

Thank you so much. My confidence has been completely destroyed during my first year of PhD and you have helped me pull myself together again

Happy to help 🙂

Linda Adhoch

I am so glad I ran into your resources and did not waste time doing the wrong this. Research is now making so much sense now.

Danyal Ahmad

Gratitude to Derrick and the team I was looking for a solid article that would aid me in drafting the thesis’ introduction. I felt quite happy when I came across the piece you wrote because it was so well-written and insightful. I wish you success in the future.

ria M

thank you so much. God Bless you

Arnold C

Thank you so much Grad Coach for these helpful insights. Now I can get started, with a great deal of confidence.

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Chapter 1: Proof and the problem of objectivity

  • History: a science or an art?
  • History and the status of historical knowledge
  • Choosing evidence, challenging interpretations
  • Causes in history

Introduction

This chapter introduces history as a discipline and as an approach to historical knowledge. While it cannot be comprehensive, its aim nevertheless is to explore problems faced by historians as they seek to understand past societies. How they do this depends on many factors. At its simplest, however, it largely depends on whether history is regarded as a science which has the historian as objective fact finder and analyst. Or whether, alternatively, history is treated as an art in which the historian presents an interpretation of the past that is a result of either personal experience or the social and cultural milieu in which the historian is located. The first section introduces these issues by looking afresh at the argument first raised in the 1960s between historians E. H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton but in the newer context of postmodernism. It sets out the varying ways in which each of these prominent historians approached the discipline and dealt with historical evidence in all its varied forms. Section two uses historical writing concerned with the events of 1857, the Indian Mutiny, in order to discuss whether history is truly a dependable basis of knowledge that can provide a comprehensive and reliable explanation of how past societies change. The third section will focus in on another dispute between historians, that of Chartism. We shall see how historical facts are generated but how too historians select evidence and then use innovative techniques to inform our historical understanding. This section will explain how historical explanations for a single historical event or period can change radically over time, either by the discovery of new evidence or more likely the altering approach to evidence by historians influenced by developing methodologies. The last section goes to the heart of the historical project. How can the historian establish cause and correlation? Occasionally we can know when ‘stuff happened’, but these events and circumstances can exist in parallel narratives unless meaningful connections can be found and then proved beyond reasonable doubt.

Discussion documents

Click the buttons below to open the Discussion documents in a new tab.

The four sections of this chapter said four things:

  • Historians, certainly English‐speaking historians, quite often protest that they would prefer to get on with the business of researching and writing history than concentrating on that theory that serves this evidence. Despite this, a surprising number are happy to engage in discussing the boundaries of history. In particular, the extent to which the discipline has a history and the historian interrelate. In order to illustrate this simple problem, this section has explored the debate as to what history is about and how it is (or should be) practiced. Nowhere has the important question about the objectivity or subjectivity of the historian been more comprehensively debated than in the argument between E. H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton. The section tends not to take sides in this debate but recognises that the notion of history as a verifiable ‘science’ or an art where the subjectivity or imagination of the historian is taken into account has been one of the most enduring problems in historiography. It does argue, however, that as the historian is part of history, subjectivity may be impossible and may even be an advantage, once admitted and in some circumstances.
  • Questions regarding objectivity and subjectivity are highlighted by looking at the way in which the Indian Mutiny in the nineteenth century has bequeathed us both ‘hard’ empirical evidence and received ideas about the role of the British during the imperialist experience. Here, by looking how one historians has used evidence and through the application of a simple exercise, it can be demonstrated how a perfectly respectable history of India is written using certain historical and linguistic assumptions held by the author. This then allows us to reconsider afresh the view of Geoffrey Elton that history should be evidence led with the historian decentred from the application of clear historical method applied to the evidence.
  • Since the decline of Chartism in the 1850s, historians have sought to explain its demise. Biographical approaches to approaches that examine the expressive aspects of Chartism have all been used at one time or other. Chartism has also been the source of present‐day tussles that have emphasised the political nature of the movement, its national or local character, its economic basis and so on. Choosing evidence to support this or that viewpoint has differed, while the interpretation of that evidence has often depended on the preoccupations of the here and now. The section emphasises, however, that the most significant breakthrough in this field was prompted by the work of Dorothy Thompson and then Gareth Stedman Jones. They agreed on much, but the use by Stedman Jones of linguistic theory succeeded in transforming our knowledge of Chartism without the addition of a single new fact.
  • The final section investigates the problem of causation in history. Since the Enlightenment (see Chapter 5), historians and social scientists have attempted to identify precisely what caused particular historical episodes to take place. The transition from facts to general laws, however, which seemed to be accomplished with great success in the natural sciences, worked less well in history. The main problem was in the evidence itself. Scientific evidence tended to be much more secure, reliable and controllable. Facts were gathered by scientists (or social scientists such as Auguste Comte) under strictly monitored conditions. They derived from first‐hand observation which, if necessary, could be repeated time and again. No historian enjoyed such privileges. The inevitable outcome was that history remained rooted in the compilation of facts which came to be seen as its sole raison d’être. So where does all this leave the question of historical causation? If we reject the idea of a single causal factor or of the determining influence of individual actors, then are we necessarily forced to accept the view that historical causation is multivalent and multi‐layered? Yes, we think it does.

Further Reading

* http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/focus/whatishistory/carr1.html.

Here the historian Alun Munslow examines the importance of the seminal work of both E. H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton in the light of historiographical advances since the 1960s and, in particular, the way in which postmodernists have cast doubt on history as a dependable basis of knowledge

Geoffrey Elton (2002) [1967] The Practice of History .

The standard case for history as an objective science. The Blackwell edition has a useful introduction by Richard Evans.

Mark Hewitson (2014) History and Causality .

An excellent exploration of the subject and theme of causality. It pulls in much context and lays out clearly the main challenges in this area faced by the historian.

E. H. Carr (1961) What is History?

The standard case for history as a subjective art.

Dorothy Thompson (1984), Chartism: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution .

The emphasis here is on the national characteristics of Chartism and the culmination of working class radicalism. The renewed focus is on the political, rather than the economic roots of Chartism and the occupations of those that became Chartists.

* Gareth Stedman Jones (1983), ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in The Languages of Class .

Probably the most controversial and influential account of Chartism which asks questions about the significance and role of language and its relation to class consciousness, finally suggesting that Peel’s reforms in the 1840s rendered the Chartist critique of the state as out of date.

* Miles Taylor (1996), ‘Rethinking the Chartists: Searching for Synthesis in the Historiography of Chartism’.

Is a wonderful overview of the historiography by an historian who really understands nineteenth-century popular politics.

Chapter 2: Ordering of time

  • Time, history, modernity
  • Newton and the ‘time reckoner’
  • Time, history and the shape of things to come
  • Events, people and periods: what is ‘Victorian’? When were the ‘sixties’?

This chapter explores the connection between history and time. The very idea of time, its relationship to human history and our understanding of it as either circular, coming back on itself, linear where it moves inextricably forward or as existing in isolated pockets of experience, differs within and across cultures. Notions of time then relate to the nature of society, for example, whether the society under review is pre-literate, agrarian or advanced industrial. Time is also a site of struggle; the modern world is the outcome of a reordering of time driven by capitalist rationalization.

Historians tend to order past time by slicing it up into epochs and periods, but there are incongruities in so doing. The decade that we call the 1960s is not necessary congruent with the ‘sixties’ as an historical period. The 1960s is measurable as a block of time, not so the cultural phenomena that we associate with the ‘sixties’. And as a distinct period which, for example, was detectable in the United States, France, Britain and Italy, it may have passed almost without trace in, say, South America or the Soviet Union.

Questions follow from this. What are the elements that might be associated with historical periods? To be a Victorian, for example, is to be associated with a particular time but also with an historical style. Think Victorian and, more likely than not, we can conjure up a world of extreme richness and extreme poverty – shoeless children working in chimneys and gentlemen in top hats making their way through the London fog carrying silver-topped canes. Sex and hypocrisy sleep together. When do historical periods begin and end? Is the decade we call the ‘sixties’ actually a discrete period with its own associations of free love and counter-cultural protest, quite unlike the period that came before it, the ‘age of austerity’ characterized by war, food shortages and drabness? Answers to questions such as these and to others like it, must always be given in the knowledge that historians impose ‘periods’, ‘eras’, ‘epochs’ and ‘ages’ on time. In a recent controversy at the University of Oxford about a demand for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes with unpleasant imperialist associations, the chancellor of the university was not alone in saying that ‘you can’t rewrite history’. This is, of course, precisely what historians do, and our conception and reconception of period is a great aid in this endeavour.

  • Time and its relation to contemporary forms of history are inextricably bound up with modernity and notions of time that historians tend to associate with advanced, industrial countries. Whether that results in ideas of time that are culturally contingent is explored as ‘family time’, ‘industrial time’ and time that became linked with the western imperial project, such as the struggle to locate longitude at sea or the commodification and rationalization of time by a dynamic, rapacious, capitalist system.
  • History writing also depends on an understanding of time developed by Christian chronologies and chronologies informed by other religious traditions. Yet the exact dating of events, for example, between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, has remained a problem for Christian historiography. This is a model of time and history that has been at the core of developmental theories of history treated elsewhere in this book but not necessarily in non-linear histories that regard the narrow periods adopted by historians as stifling and pessimistic about the trajectory of history.
  • These chronologies, however, have often been conceived as linear and progressive, pointing history forward but have also led to skepticism about the ability of history to anticipate the future. The process of industrialization has been influenced by conceptions of time, but religious ideas of time remain important to the seventeenth and eighteenth century English, Scottish and European Enlightenments. While the notion of ‘absolute’ time developed by Sir Isaac Newton in the eighteenth century established the first widely accepted chronology, free of religious influence, time/space and ‘time compression’, it made possible profound political and cultural relationships of power and hegemony in the West.
  • ‘Watersheds’ and ‘periods’ imposed by historians, such as the Victorian period and ‘the sixties’, depend on a particular understanding of time developed in the West in the period since the eighteenth century. The imposition by historians of ‘periods’, ‘eras’ and ‘ages’ on time is a product of an understanding which is historically influenced.

Further reading

* penelope j. corfield (2007) time and the shape of history ..

Provides a useful and comprehensive review of the literature, but more than this, it is a major intervention into this important area of historiography. Conceptually complex and difficult in places, it nevertheless succeeds in prompting careful thought about the temporal nature of history and history writing.

Niall Ferguson (ed.) (1997) Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals .

A flawed but intellectually brave attempt to prompt debate about the way that historians adopt chronologies and timelines. By inviting us to think about these chronologies and timelines in a counterfactual way, we also think about the relationship between time itself and how historians use time in their periodization.

J. Flood, J. Ginther, & J. Goering (eds.) (2013) Robert Grosseteste and His Intellectual Milieu .

This draws a picture of the medieval Bishop Grosseteste and the importance of his ‘natural philosophy’ and medieval science to the knowledge of phenomena such as light and time.

William Gallois (2007), Religion, Time and History .

Complex and sometimes elusive as an introductory text, it nonetheless provides an intelligent and wide-ranging coverage of time/history as a cultural construction and which in turn can define our very humanity.

* Stephen Kern (2003) The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1914 .

A tremendously detailed and ambitious account of changes in technology and culture in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War, and our modern understanding of how space and time work in the light of these fundamental changes and how, indeed, these changes may impact on history.

Jonathan Sacks (2003) The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah .

A regular around the Passover table in many Ashkenazi Jewish families, but also it is also a learned study with some informed and interesting commentary on the concept of Jewish time and how it has been understood historically.

D. J. Wilcox (1987) The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time .

A fine and comprehensive commentary on how time was measured before ‘absolute time’ and ‘objectivity’ associated with Newton and the eighteenth century. This book is difficult but rewarding as it takes us back to pre-modern ideas of discontinuous, relative time in the late Middle Ages.

Chapter 3: Ideas of history; from the ancients to the Christians

  • Herodotus and gold-digging ants
  • Thucydides and reason: an historian for our times?
  • What did the Romans ever do for history?
  • Late antiquity, Christianity and the end of days

This chapter takes us across centuries, mapping the developments in historical writing from the time of the ancient Greeks to late antiquity. This timeline covers the decline of the Roman Empire to the rise of Christianity. The opening section, therefore, examines the emergence of historical writing in ancient Greece with the contributions of Herodotus and Thucydides. A distinction is made between mythical writing about the past (such as The Iliad and The Odyssey), and the ethnographical histories of Herodotus and of the more systematic Thucydides. The next section covers the development of historical writing in the Hellenic and Roman periods. Roman historians are seen to be in many ways much less ambitious in approach and scope than the Greeks who they had succeeded. Finally, we explore the differences in approaches to historical theory, method and practice introduced by Christianity in Europe. This shift in power and influence leads directly to histories which not only seek to understand the past in the present but also to suggest a millennial concern with the future. In this narrow sense, these early interventions from Christian historians set up a latter predominance of history writing that (unlike say Thucydides) is concerned with prophecy and portents.

  • Greek historiography is at the root of both western value systems and structures and the history has proved to be a major element in the development of western civilization. The section is careful to pay close attention to the work of Herodotus as the so-called Father of History. While much of his work is acknowledged to be gullible and far-fetched, the determination to record ethnographical details of the people and civilizations he studied has left us with valuable evidence of the lives and habits of once great peoples that are now lost to history, save for some contemporary archaeology. While Herodotus refers to gold-digging ants and other (to us) fantastic phenomena, he nevertheless has a real sense of historical method and imagination which remain both interesting and of usefulness to students of history.
  • There were continuities within Greek approaches to the past but also distinct differences. In particular, comparisons are made between Herodotus and Thucydides. Using the criteria set out by Collingwood of what constitutes ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ history, it seems that Thucydides was by far more systematic in both method and approach. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides was less likely to construct his history within the contemporary conventions of theatre or rhetoric. He was, however, adept at reading evidence and providing reasonable speculation about historical patterns to be found in that evidence. Above all, Thucydides tended to discount the role of the gods, or supernatural phenomena, in the processes of historical change. Finally, we consider the vital role played by Polybius in his more sophisticated approach to the archive.
  • The historians of Rome had some similarities. The differences, however, were fairly profound. They tended to be centred on morality and the wielding of power. There was also a tendency for Roman historians to concentrate less than the Greeks on performance. Instead, we find the historians of this great empire concentrating (in addition to politics and morality) on the evidence of history. In particular, this would include the lives of the emperors which could be retrieved through reminiscences, biography, autobiography, correspondence, and speeches. In this sense at least, historians in Rome could be said to be in the service of the state.
  • Both Greek and Roman approaches to history had a lasting effect on future societies and civilizations, especially in what we now think of as the West. In particular, the Greek historians made initial innovations in technique and imagination. Christian approaches to the past particularly introduced the notion that present day society was constantly on the cusp of a new world which was to be announced in a moment of a catastrophic crisis, forcing historians to think differently about the past but in the context of a future now weighed against prophecy.

A standard undergraduate account of Greek historians that is very good at taking the student by the hand, and gives a real sense of the development of the historian across a long period.

* G. A. Press (1982) The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity .

Very useful as both an introduction to historiography and as an informed and lively narrative which is very aware of both the classics and the reassessment of the classics in later periods. In this sense, it can also be read with both Chapters 1 and 2 in mind.

Herodotus, The Histories (2000), ed. John Marincola.

This Penguin edition is both comprehensive and informative. The introduction gives a good account of the changing reputation of Herodotus with a good bibliography, maps, etc.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (1998), eds. Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts.

Both an annotated edition of The Peloponnesian War and a compilation of some of the comments it has attracted from historians in the modern period. This is a very good way of orientating yourself into Thucydides, his work and commentaries about the importance of his work.

* Stephen Usher (1985) The Historians of Greece and Rome .

A very fine account (especially for the uninitiated) of the importance and elements of both Greek and Roman historiography. Look especially for the interesting take on Thucydides.

* Ronald Mellor (ed.) (2004) The Historians of Ancient Rome .

Set out clearly and with obvious attractions for a student new to the subject.

Ronald Mellor (ed.) (1999) The Roman Historians .

As informed as his later book but probably with less clarity. The section on the origins of Roman historiography is especially useful, as is the section on historical writing.

Suetonius (2003) The Twelve Caesars .

For the worth of biography and autobiography in ancient Rome see Mellor (1999) but also this Penguin edition, which is translated by Robert Graves and introduced by Michael Grant.

* Robert Graves and Barry Unsworth (2006) I, Claudius .

Such is the original research and scholarship by Robert Graves, this should be required undergraduate reading in this area, especially when considering the role of biography and autobiography in Roman historiography.

* David Rohrbacher (2002) The Historians of Late Antiquity .

This deals with both the framework and context of the period and the provenance of ecclesiastical and church history, hagiography and the rest of the Christian canon in historiography. It also surveys the life and works of notable individual historians. It is invaluable as a survey, but also pay attention to the bibliography.

Chapter 4: From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern

  • European Christendom and the ‘age of Bede’
  • Peoples of the book: Jewish and Islamic conceptions of history
  • The Renaissance, humanism and the rediscovery of the classics
  • The battle of books: Camden, Clarendon and English historical writing

Here we take up the story where the last chapter finished by examining historiographical trends in the period that in the West was known as the Middle Ages. The main focus in the opening section is the Venerable Bede, who as a seventh-century Christian historian developed a remarkable technique of reading sources. His purpose was better to understand chronology in order that the End of Days might be calculated according to prophecy. Christian notions of the past were predicated on the notion that since history was moved forward by an omnipotent God, there was an urgent need to calculate the timing of the Second Coming. This notion of forward movement was shared by the monotheistic religious traditions, most notably, Judaism and Islam. The Jewish tradition believed that history had a forward trajectory but also inhabited a narrative of its own that was provided by a rich tradition of the Tanakh representing the canon of the Hebrew Bible and commentaries. Thus from the first century to the fifteenth century, Jewish historians remained silent in that they tended not to articulate histories outside of their own communities and the narrow concerns of the Hebrew Bible. Islamic scholarship, in contrast, thrived; was rich in content and voluminous in scale and scope. This innovative tradition in Islam became less dynamic after the end of the Spanish ‘Golden Age’ in the 1400s and, indeed, gave way to scholarship which was more conservative and inevitably less self-critical of the ways of reading testimony and evidence. The West ended the so-called ‘dark ages’ (or so it was thought) by a Renaissance of ideas, art and culture. Its importance to the history of historiography was the rediscovery of the classics (not that they completely went away) and all that the Greek and Roman historians were to mean to the discipline in the centuries to follow.

The researching and writing of English history changed fundamentally by the early modern period. When exactly it changed is a matter of dispute but sometime in the late sixteenth century or early seventeenth century seems generally agreed by most historians. How it changed is disputed less. The chronicles of the period before about 1580 took their cue from religious concerns and their primary sources from the Bible. The results tended to disregard evidence based in testimony or verifiable fact and instead reproduced narratives of the past that were mythical and fantastic. As we see in the last section, the writing and research of the national story was influenced largely by the Renaissance and Italian commentators (themselves influenced by the classics) and became the preserve not of monks or churchmen but of the new professional classes who used antiquarian evidence drawn from, say, coins, ruins or landscapes to compose humanist histories.

The sections of this chapter argued four things:

  • Christian approaches to history in the Middle Ages were based on uses of historical evidence that would not be deemed acceptable or robust to modern sensibilities regarding the objectivity of the historian and the subjectivity of the witness. Historians such as Bede in the early medieval world were overwhelmingly concerned to locate the signs and portents inherent in historical events that would help confirm how far humanity was on the timeline towards the End of Days, discerned according to prophecy. In this sense, Bede was concerned to both establish a chronology that could locate the common feasts and festivals on the Christian calendar and to locate the history of Christianity in Britain.
  • Non-European ideas of the nature of history were somewhat different from those of Christianity. Jewish historiography had a vivid exponent in the shape of Flavius Josephus, who wrote with verve and colour, giving us an extraordinary account of what it was like to live under Roman rule. This was the last heard of Jewish historians, however, until the sixteenth century. Islamic historiography, on the other hand, was enormously rich by the time Bede was writing in the European context and even richer as the European Renaissance approached. Some attention was given to how Islamic historians understood the methodology needed, for example, to determine how the words of the Prophet Muhammad could be verified. This historical culture dissipated after the fifteenth century when movements toward reformation, secularization and attempts to create a public sphere where the veracity of the Koran could be criticized were thwarted.
  • The end of the Middle Ages was greeted, arguably, with a Renaissance of ideas, culture and individuality but also, unarguably, with new approaches to the past. These were characterized by a number of notable scholars but most had in common a certain reverence for the ancients as humanism took a fresh prominence. Once again the methods and concerns of the great classical historians – most Roman but some Greek – were celebrated. So too was the civic virtue of the city state. Florence in particular and Italy in general were soon viewed in a renewed light. The attributes that we associate both with antiquity and again with the Renaissance were to have a profound effect on the historiography that was to come after, not least to the revolutionary creed of seventeenth-century England.
  • There was some sort of radical shift in the way histories of England were written around 1580. Different types of people began to write histories of the nation. Somewhere between the age of Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century Civil War, histories of the nation became much less reliant on fantastic accounts of a land of giants based on biblical prophecy and were transformed into histories of rational political and economic government and of constitution. No longer were historians drawn from the church and various civil authorities; now they tended to be antiquarians taken from a rising class of new professionals who, like Clarendon and Camden, rarely strayed from accounts that could be empirically verified, i.e. proved by the use of our senses. The sources that historians used also changed. Further, this transformation could not have happened without the influence of Italian humanism based upon the characteristics of human beings free from any mystical influence.

* Chris Given-Wilson (2004) Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval Britain .

Deals with a relatively short time span (c.1270–1430), yet gives a sophisticated account of late-medieval or early-modern historiography, asking essential questions about the writing and practicing of history in this period.

Bede (1999) The Ecclesiastical History of the English , ed. Judith McClure.

This is an invaluable complement to this chapter. It is best read alongside Penguin’s Age of Bede, reprinted in 2004.

* Paolo Delogu (2002) An Introduction to Medieval History .

Translated from the Italian, this short volume is fantastically rich both in its treatment of historians and chroniclers over a long period (longer than that covered by Given-Wilson) and is very comprehensive in its discussion of medieval history across Europe, paying particular attention to developments in individual countries.

* Arnaldo Momigliano (1990) Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography .

This is the definitive work in the field and should be read at all costs, not least for its treatment of diverse religious traditions that interact over time.

* Chase F. Robinson (2003) Islamic Historiography .

Comprehensive and provocative, this take on Islamic historiography is well-researched, clear and accessible to the uninitiated.

* Lucille Kekewich (ed.) (2000) The Impact of Humanism: A Cultural Enquiry .

Published to accompany an Open University course and therefore broken down in a way that is easy to understand. It also contains ready-made questions and discussions around the subject area.

Jonathan Woolfson (ed.) (2005) Renaissance Historiography .

This collection of essays is designed to orientate students in the wake of a good deal of recent work on the Renaissance, self-consciously styling itself as an updating of Ferguson (1948). Essays by Peter Burke, James Hankins, Robert Black and Jonathan Woolfson himself are the most useful.

Chapter 5: Enlightenment and Romanticism

  • The English Enlightenment?
  • Secular histories
  • Romanticism, nationalism and the hero in history: Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle

This chapter is concerned with history writing and how the Enlightenment and Romantic movements affected an understanding of the past. New methods of observing phenomena emerged from the seventeenth century in England and in eighteenth-century Scotland and Europe as Enlightenment thinkers attacked the beliefs and assumptions of organized religion. In this respect, the philosopher historians of the eighteenth century, David Hume (1711–1776) and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), were the most important while the more modern methods of the Scot, William Robertson (1721–1793), pointed us towards historiography as it developed in the nineteenth century. Also a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith (1723–1790) both constructed a blueprint for capitalist economics, and described how societies changed and developed. In contrast to the reason, order, symmetry and harmony that are associated with the Enlightenment, Romantic notions of nationalism and heroism impacted on the writing of history in the modern period. Here, we will explore the significance of freethinking, emotionalism, spiritualism and a profound engagement with nature to the growth in the nineteenth century of Romanticism.

The three sections of this chapter said three things:

  • The Enlightenment affected the writing and understanding of history. Specifically this is to recall its beginnings in eighteenth century France and Germany or, alternatively, the contribution made through empirical or observational natural science that can be traced back to seventeenth century Britain. The contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment is especially noted. The main aim of the section is to say something about the importance of secular approaches to the past in the work of Hume, Smith and Gibbon. The section concludes with a short discussion of William Robertson – a great figure of his time – who combined Enlightenment rational method with Romantic religiosity and respect for cultural diversity in the past.
  • Romanticism as a phenomenon ran counter to the Enlightenment but also grew out of it. In particular, we are keen to establish how a more mystical, spiritual and emotional approach to the world affected historical practice. The fixation of nationalism and national heroes, folklore and the effort to retrieve a world that existed before the voraciousness of industrialization is discussed by looking closely at the contribution to history of Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle. Where Scott described the wildness of his native Scots borders in order to allow us to imagine the past, Carlyle fashioned his histories and his approach to the past through biography, both personal and collective. Each viewed the modern world with a certain amount of regret as they each understood that the world that they once knew was slipping beyond memory.
  • Continental Enlightenment and Romanticism influenced early attempts to describe and then to claim the new lands of North America, from ‘sea to shining sea’. Imagination, culture, language, myth and subjectivity came into historical view with the work of Herder, Michelet and Vico. These were all Europeans who directly influenced approaches to the past in the New World. These departures, from what one contemporary com mentator called ‘Enlightenment dogma’, opened up new historical vistas by beginning the process of distancing history from the natural sciences. From these commentators, moreover, we can see one upshot of the Enlightenment: the American faith in historical or ‘manifest destiny’ and the supposed universal human longing for democracy and liberty.

* Isaiah Berlin (1976) Vico and Herder , esp. pp. 3–142.

An innovative approach to the work of two fundamentally important commentators of what Berlin thinks of as the ‘counter-Enlightenment’; that is, the movement that ran against some of the dogmas of rationality and science. It is worth reading closely as it is often quoted by historians and philosophers working in this important area.

Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman (eds) (2004) The Enlightenment World.

A collection of essays that deal with the origins of the Enlightenment, the so-called High Enlightenment, science, popular culture, print culture and so on. Probably the most useful are those dealing with origins and historical writing.

Edward Gibbon (1998) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

The introduction is a useful and close analysis, not just on the contribution of this marvellous historian and commentator of his own time, but on Gibbon’s literary and performative style. Gibbon’s chapters on Christianity should be read especially carefully, not least because of the impact they made in Gibbon’s society.

Cecilia Miller (1993) Vico’s Imagination and Historical Imagination .

A monograph that, as the title suggests, deals with the importance of Vico to succeeding historians, but also Vico’s historical methodology, his approach to cycles and spirals of time, and the impact of Vico’s New Science .

* Roy Porter (1995) Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World .

Porter pursues the argument that Britain, not Germany or France, was the cradle of the Enlightenment. His reading of the origins of observational natural science or cosmology is important to the development of history.

G. B. Tennyson (ed) (1984) A Carlyle Reader .

A comprehensive account of Carlyle as social commentator and, more unusually, as historian. Here we can find tracts and speeches by Carlyle which demonstrate history within the context of Romantic notions of nationalism, biography and the hero in history.

Giambattista Vico (1999) [1744] Principi di Scienza Nouva , trans. David March.

A classic of historiography for this period.

Chapter 6: The English Tradition

  • Responses to the Enlightenment: Edmund Burke
  • Constitutionalism and the Whig interpretation of history
  • The ‘new Whigs’? The school of J. H. Plumb

Edmund Burke is the subject of the opening section. He used all his political skills to oppose the French Revolution of 1779 as it turned into a bloody assize. He became an outspoken critic of the excesses of the revolution and mourned both the death of the queen and the passing of an era. As such, he has been seen as a champion of the counter Enlightenment and a forerunner of conservatism, despite his support for the Whig group associated with Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, who had supported the American Revolution as a welcome continuity with the 1688 Glorious Revolution.

The second section outlines the Whig inheritance of the accompanying ‘revolution’ in the understanding of, and regard given to history. From the Magna Carta to the culmination of English liberties in the events that led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Protestant ascendency had resulted, it was thought, in a perfect constitution. It was a constitution that compared favourably with that of the French. Whig history approved those historical players who were allies to the perfecting of the constitution and condemned those who stood in its way.

Whig history was, then, present minded in that it judged the past in the light of the present. This led to a school of history practice and outlook that the third section argues can be traced via Macaulay and then Trevelyan to his student Jack Plumb, and now to a coterie of ‘New Whig’ Cambridge historians – Linda Colley, David Cannadine, Simon Schama, Roy Porter and others such as Neil McKendrick and John Vincent – who were taught by or were profoundly influenced by Plumb.

* J. W. Barrow (1981) A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past .

Now a classic text. Its argument for coherent Burkean whig tradition takes in some of the important figures we touched on in this chapter, such as Macaulay and Stubbs, as well as others, such as Froude. The chapter ‘Protestant Island’ is especially useful.

Stefan Collin (1999) English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture .

Presented as a series of essays on England and Englishness. His opening chapter on ‘Writing the National History: Trevelyan and After’, along with the introduction, is especially useful to themes covered in this chapter.

Frank Smith Fussner (2010) [1962] The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought , 1580–1640 .

This is an invaluable volume that deals in comprehensive terms with what the author calls the intellectual revolution that fundamentally changed both writing generally and history writing. The result was different types of history books and different types of historians.

Peter Ghosh (1999) ‘Whig Interpretation of History’, in K. Boyd (ed.), Encyclopedia of Historians and History Writing .

A succinct and forceful statement of the importance and genesis of the whig interpretation. It combines both useful definition and a commentary of the genre. It is particularly strong as an interpretation of Butterfield and how Butterfield has been understood and used by historians.

J. R. Plumb (1988) The Making of an Historian: The Collected Essays of J. R. Plumb .

Fascinating for its account of Plumb’s life at Cambridge and his encounters with Trevelyan, Butterfield and Namier. The first volume is especially pertinent in this respect and is often very insightful and very sharp in its observations.

J. R. Plumb (2004) [1969] The Death of the Past .

A well-known work or commentary on historiography and historical practice that makes the case above all for the social uses of history. The 2004 edition is especially useful as it contains a preface by Simon Schama and an introduction by Niall Ferguson.

D. R. Woolf (2000) Reading History in Early Modern England .

An essential read for a thorough coverage of this topic area. As stated in the introduction, it is a history book about history books that seeks to place early modern historiography firmly in its social context. The opening chapter ‘Death of the Chronicle’ is very useful for our purposes.

Chapter 7: The North American Tradition

  • America and the New Order of the Ages
  • The progressive or ‘new’ historians
  • The consensus historians
  • The other America

The one-dollar bill reflects the development of American approaches to the past. First issued in 1862, its focus has been both the founding constitution and the vicissitudes of the nation. As such, it has altered – like historians in the United States have altered – with the changing political, social and economic weather and like the US itself, the bill has been redeemed and reinvented on numerous occasions, often in the teeth of hardship and conflict. The reverse side of the ever-popular ‘buck’ gives us in narrowly expressive terms the section headers from which changes to north American historiography will be described and analysed in the course of this chapter. Constant is the Great Seal of the United States, which acts for the various arms of the state as the national coat of arms and which has been in use since 1782, although it wasn’t added to the dollar bill until 1935. On the back, we can see the object of our opening section: histories that begin with the desolate landscape of the pre-European America and the all-seeing eye of providence. Roman numerals (MDCCLXXVI) spell out the date when the 13 colonies gained independence from Great Britain (1776). Among other Latin phrases, we can spot a banner which shouts Novus Ordo Seclorum or the ‘New Order of the Ages’ and which gives notice for the era of Pax Americanus . How historians responded to this instituting moment of the United States of America is also discussed in the opening section. Of those Latin phrases, ‘Out of many states, one nation’, until 1956 a motto of the country, probably best sums of the changes in American approaches to the past reviewed in sections 2 and 3. From the Progressive historians who moved beyond the so-called ‘frontier thesis’ to a fundamental questioning of the motivations and interests of the founders, to the Consensus historians who shifted from the class-based, social scientific and largely secular viewpoints that had dominated up until the Second World War. It was probably no accident that in the context in which these historians lived and wrote was the Cold War and the Age of Affluence; by 1957, ‘In God We Trust’ had been included by law on the one-dollar ‘greenback’. The final section of the chapter moves the great American story away from the narrow confines of constitution, economic interests and American exceptionalism, in order to take into account narratives connected to the experiences of black people, the oppressed and the poor, the local and encounters with those who were not American.

  • Originally from Europe (England), Thomas Cole was part of the Hudson River School of art that recorded on canvas the vast fragility of an ever expanding nation. Europeans like Cole and George Bancroft brought with them various Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment ideas which had at their core some key intellectual assumptions about the role of the past. Here Herder, Michelet and Vico are identified as chief influencers. These strands are picked up by the all-powerful American Historical Association (AHA) and become popular inside and outside of the academy by whiggish figures such as Bancroft but also by historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, who identified the American as a ‘new man’. By 1893, as president of the AHA and a Harvard professor, he could speak convincingly about the importance of the West to the growth of the American as ‘rugged individualist’. The experience of the expansion to the West, the so-called ‘frontier thesis as it was articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner,’ became the foundational myth of American historiography. This account that saw the expansion to the West as transformative was to endure for a hundred years: ‘the type and master of our American life’ which was to ultimately lead this mighty new country away from European influence.
  • Charles Beard was perhaps the central figure in challenging the ‘frontier thesis’. With others such as Carl Becker, James Harvey Robinson and V. L. Partington, the Becker/Beard thesis took the American narrative back to the founding moment of the Constitution. The Progressive historians (as they became known) saw class, power and special interests as central to the development of the United States and the consequent slow break from European influence. Beard’s main focus was economic yet this approach was not economically determinist with simultaneous attention paid to ‘political man,’ particularly the attention given to the Bill of Rights and the Federalists among the so-called ‘founding fathers’, as much as ‘economic man’ – those plantation and slave owners, it was thought, had deployed inappropriate influence on the drafting of the Constitution.
  • If Beard was the eminence grise of American historiography in the early part of the twentieth century, then a more formal distinction passed to Richard Hofstander and others in the post-1945 era. Some of these figures had moved away from progressive positions. The triumphs of war had ushered in a nationalism that emphasized American exceptionalism as the home of liberty and prosperity. ‘National character’ replaced internal division and class strife as historical categories while historiography adopted the lines and grids set fast by the enveloping Cold War. The Consensus historians lived under the shadow of the bomb but declared that ‘In God They Trust’. The past was seen then through the political and economic ascendency of the United States while the newly found ‘affluent worker’ hardly noticed (and cared less about) the retreat of radical interpretations of American history. Yet a new chronology was forged for the nation which had begun in the late eighteenth century under the imperial thumb but which now, in the 1960s, cultural pressures undermined post-war liberal and affluent pluralism.
  • The ‘Other America’ was emerging. It had always been there, of course, but now workers, socialists, black people and women were brought to the front of American historiography. Historians such as W.E.B. Du Bois wanted to explore the historical experiences of those non-white and non-Christian. Marxism and New Left approaches to the past by brilliant newcomers such as Eric Williams gained renewed currency as the lives of slaves, the slave trade and its abolition were rescued from oblivion.  This brought sharply into relief the contradictions of the Constitution. It had promised individual freedom but then made that freedom divisible and dependent on a test of race or class. This further undermined the case for consensus as it emerged just how many had been left outside that consensus. Here we find that the work of David Brion Davis has been particularly noteworthy while non-American historians such as Stephen Tuck have made American history transnational in scope and ambition.

Barton Bernstein (ed.) (1968)  Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History.

Although uneven and variously presented these essays are a representative sample of the liberal or Marxist or Charles Beard era-influenced histories that signify a particular period.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (1974)  Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery.

There is a more recent edition (1995). This controversial collaboration promoted a thesis that looked closely at the economics of slave ownership and came out with conclusions that remain bitterly contested.

L.W. Levine (1977)  Black Culture and Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom.

This was an important book that looked closely at black culture such as song and folk tales as a way of looking at some neglected areas of the African American experience.

* Peter Novick (1988)  That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession.

This serves as an engaging overview of the importance of objectivity in the large and mighty historical profession in America.

Stephen Skowronek (2005) The Search for American Political Development.

Not only for historians but also for economists and political scientists and focuses on politics and political affairs

* Stephen Tuck (2005) ‘The New American Histories’, The Historical Journal , Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 811–832.

This is an excellent overview to be read at all costs.

Chapter 8: Histories of revolutions; revolutionary histories

  • Thomas Paine and the radical tradition
  • Contemporary responses to the American and French revolutions
  • Germany, G.W.F. Hegel and the Spirit of History
  • Karl Marx and ‘historical materialism’
  • Marxism in the twentieth century

This chapter explores through the eyes of protagonists the revolutionary impulses which convulsed the western world in the latter stages of the eighteenth century, and their legacy for political activists aspiring to world revolution in the ensuing decades. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and the resurgence of popular radicalism in Britain during the 1790s together point to a massive shift in the world order, the reverberations from which affected every corner of the globe, and continue to this day. Signs of change had been apparent for decades to those who cared to look for them. Calls for freedom from the constraints of the ancien régime which found voice in the writings of leading French philosophes reached a crescendo in the 1760s. Simultaneously, in London the charismatic John Wilkes orchestrated popular resentment against the monarchy and an aristocratic parliament to press for radical reform. From 1760 to 1775, pamphlets and newspapers helped foster a radical culture in the American states which led ultimately to the War of Independence. Widespread protests in the major cities against the imposition of the 1765 Stamp Act forced its repeal in the following year. This about turn may have pre-empted open rebellion against British rule, but the protest had helped to define grievances, and in many respects acted as a blueprint for the revolutionary struggles of the next decade.

There were shared ideals which shaped the revolutions, many inherited from Enlightenment thought and recognized by protagonists as having the power to change the world order. Overall, they are perhaps captured best in the slogan ‘ Liberté, egalité, fraternité ’, although how they played out  differed from one context to another – in America, for example, such ideals did not apply to the large population of slaves. At their core were the notions of liberty and equality. Liberty meant self-determination, that is, the right for the citizenry to overthrow oppressive, corrupt and arbitrary forms of rule, and so determine and realize its collective will. Equality was based on the idea that all men and woman are equal before nature, and that this equality entitles us to certain rights which need to be protected by the law. Enshrined in America’s Declaration of Independence (1776) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), these ideals were considered ‘self evident’ truths. The Declaration famously advanced the notion, for example, that ‘all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’. France’s Declaration, which consciously drew upon that of America, declared ‘All men are equal by nature and before the law’, and set forth a programme of individual and collective rights protected when threatened by any government that seeks to violate them.

How did historians respond to these momentous events? Were they enthusiastically welcomed as harbingers of a more just new world, or feared because they overthrew centuries of tradition, and led to unrestrained violence? And to what extent did they influence later historians of revolutions? These are the questions to which we now need to devote attention.

The five sections of this chapter said five things:

  • The radical impulses that led to both the American and French Revolutions were related and simultaneously different. 1776 was the culmination of discontent over the constitutional rights of the American Colonists within the context of what had essentially been shared values, a shared constitution and common links of kinship. 1779 turned the world upside down. This was not remotely a continuity of either politics or manners but an attempt to change property relations and alter the very essence of human nature. Support for both revolutions came together in the person of Thomas Paine. His Common Sense and Rights of Man make an immense impact both intellectually and in praxis.
  • Contemporary responses to the both the American and French Revolutions were widespread and formative from George Bancroft in America to Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Michelet in Europe. Perhaps the definitive response to both seminal events came in the person of Edmund Burke. This philosopher and practical politician supported the American bid for independence as the standard-bearers of the English constitution as established by the Glorious Revolution of 1666 and trenchantly opposed the French adventure as an improbable and a potentially murderous leap into the unknown, ill-informed by history.
  • The philosophy of history as outlined by Hegel is vitally important to understand in its own right. Although Hegel was an immensely important figure as a philosopher, he is now set firmly within the context of the German Enlightenment. Critically, Hegel argued for a view of world history that had the notion of a ‘spirit’ or ‘idea’ that ran through history. This spirit was peculiar to the German nation and a specific national development that is known to us as the Sonderweg. Hegel’s major gift to Marx (and to both Left Hegelians and Right Hegelians alike) was the idea that history was dialectical; that is, it moves forward by the clash of opposing ideas. It is this dialectic that Marx adapted in his own theory of history.
  • Historical materialism as set out by Marx was adapted from Hegel. Here we learn how the Hegelian notion of ‘spirit’ or ‘ideas’ that run through world history is turned upside down. Instead the material conditions of human existence – the forces and relations of production – can explain historical change. This theory of history has been enormously important to historians and has been used as a framework for many histories. The effectiveness of historical materialism can now be seen clearly in the wake of the terminal decline of Marxism as a practical and actually existing politics and as a theory of history that can offer a comprehensive explanation of the past and the present alike, both explaining the world and simultaneously changing it.
  • Arguments within Marxism have affected historiography since the 1960s and 1970s. The crisis in communism forced a reassessment of Marxist approaches to history as evidenced by the Communist Party Historians Group, E. P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. We finish with the historian Gareth Stedman Jones, who by emphasizing the metaphysical basis of Marxist theories of history has sought to place Marx back into the context of the Enlightenment and its legacy.

Bernard Bailyn (1992) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution .

An authoritative survey of one of the most fascinating aspects of the American revolution, demonstrating the full and complex range of political currents which fed into it.

Hedva Ben-Israel (1968) English Historians on the French Revolution .

A somewhat dated but still invaluable guide to how English historians tackled the French Revolution. Comprehensive and intelligent.

Thomas Carlyle (2010) [1837]  Carlyle’s French Revolution , ed. Ruth Scurr.

With the publication of Carlyle’s study, English accounts of the French Revolution came of age. It is still a good read, even if it does not stand up to the rigours of modern historical investigation.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic .

A wonderfully engaging account of how the radical culture of seventeenth-century England was sustained by the Atlantic maritime community.

Iain McCalman (ed) (1999)  An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776–1832.

The best survey of the culture and politics of this vital period in modern British history when radicalism was at its height.

* Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (2002) [1844] The Communist Manifesto.

An excellent edition of this seminal work with a fine introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones. Short and reasonably accessible, it was the first attempt by Marx and Engels to lay out a theory of revolution.

Chapter 9: Postmodernism and postcolonialism

  • Modernity and the Enlightenment
  • Postmodernism
  • Postcolonialism and the West

In many respects this chapter carries forward the debate introduced in Chapter 1 on the status of historical knowledge. There we discussed the problem of historical truth, and whether or not it was attainable. In recent years these concerns have intensified, as a result of which the debate has taken some perhaps unexpected twists and turns which have occurred against the backdrop of a changing world order. The experience of the Second World War and the immediate post-war period in Europe transformed an order based on the possession of colonies by western powers; instead, this period witnessed the demise of the imperial order as colonies fought successfully for their independence from foreign rule, and the rise of new superpowers, and it was these that redefined the balance of power. The new order, it was argued by theoretically driven historians, could not be interpreted by the conventional methods of history. Not only that, the horrors of the experience of colonial rule and the Second World War threw into crisis any belief that the West – and Enlightenment thought upon which it was built – could claim superiority over the non-Western world. Indeed, for some, the distinct historical trajectory which purported to describe an inevitable rise of the West was no longer tenable. 

These events forced a fundamental re-examination of the historiographical approaches which had sprung from the Enlightenment to create two new fields of intellectual inquiry – postmodernism and postcolonialism. Although addressing different historical concerns they shared certain suspicions of traditional historiography, in particular those related to the operation of specific types of narratives. By abandoning such narratives, it was argued, history would be released from a straitjacket. This promise, however, posed its own sets of awkward questions, most of which remain unresolved. It is this process which we wish to examine in the chapter.

  • The Second World War and its aftermath had a profound impact on the nature of historical thinking. Seen either as the end of the Enlightenment project or the supersession of modernity by postmodernity, what was apparent to contemporary observers was that they had entered into a new historical era, the analysis of which was not necessarily amenable to the tools of conventional analysis. The formal demise of the Enlightenment project was brought about by a loss of confidence in the idea of progress which had been driven and controlled by western civilization, while postmodernity heralded novel ways of organizing production, using space and creating cultural forms increasingly reliant on visual imagery.
  • These changes engendered an acute sense that the past could no longer be understood using grand narratives, whether they be of progress, liberalization, democratization or empowerment. All historical frameworks which in various ways were framed by such narratives were therefore treated with growing suspicion because they were seen to impose overarching structures on the historical record in order to provide a sense of order. Postmodern historians have therefore argued consistently for the contingent nature of historical knowledge, and a degree of relativism in history is subject to competing accounts, all of which have legitimacy and value.
  • This same period witnessed the closure of European empires. In ways that drew upon postmodern thought, historians of empire began seriously to question narratives of the imperial experience which had promoted the agency of Europeans and any idea of progress and Enlightenment which had been seen to accompany imperial endeavour. Postcolonial historians therefore subjected to detailed scrutiny the record of European imperialism as a means of exposing its exploitative and in many ways regressive nature. In order to redress past neglect, they also embarked on a project to write into the imperial experience those colonized subjects – in particular the urban and rural poor – who had been systematically excluded from dominant accounts.

Homi Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture.

An influential collection of pieces by one of the leading postcolonial thinkers in which he reflects upon the colonial experience. Not for the faint-hearted because it is imbued with difficult theorising.

Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.) (2000), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial.

A collection of recent articles which have debated the approaches of Subaltern Studies. Scholarly and provocative, but not easy-going.

Peter Childs and Patrick Williams (1997) An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory.

Accessible and knowledgeable, this is probably the best introduction to the topic.

* David Harvey (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity.

Written by a geographer, this is one of the most insightful analyses of modernity and postmodernity. Harvey successfully takes from postmodernism what he considers useful, but at the same times clings to the radical potential of a more orthodox Marxist historiography.

* Keith Jenkins (ed.) (1997) The Postmodern History Reader.

The best single collection of articles written by a wide range of interested parties on the question of postmodernism. Some of the most critical perspectives are included; tough at times, but the material is valuable.

* Edward Said (1991) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.

Although flawed, this remains one of the few examples of a book which has founded a new discipline. Surprisingly accessible, always engaging.

Robert Young (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.

The definitive study of how postcolonial theory emerged from anticolonial struggles around the world. It is almost a history of the world written around narratives of resistance.

Chapter 10: Political history

  • Theories of the state
  • High and low politics: the case of the British Labour Party
  • Beyond state and party: political theories and civil society

Approaches to political history have traditionally been divided. On the one hand, histories of the structures of state and government have relied on high theory and ‘long’ histories with empirical facts sometimes sparse and thin on the ground. On the other hand, when evidence-driven history has been brought to bear over a long period and across vast spaces, the results have been both impressive and useful to the historian. The theory of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, for example, has influentially been used to explain the relative decline of the British economy by focusing on the role of the state and finance capitalism. A discussion on the challenges in finding workable theories of the state comprises the opening section.

High politics and the history of elites has been the preserve of historians who have placed emphasis on the importance of decision-making in the political process. Its sources have been specifically concerned with the private motivations of historical actors in critical positions of power and influence. Popular or ‘low’ political history has focused on structures of power such as political parties. The second section of the chapter, therefore, examines the evolution of the British Labour party from both perspectives: the high politics of its leaders, plus the role of electoral sociology that determined its development as a political movement.

We return to the City in the final section in order to understand how extra-parliamentary pressure in the clubs, societies and associations of the square mile acted as important political levers in the transformation of radicalism and liberalism in late nineteenth-century Britain.

  • Historians require an understanding of the state and its works. After all, the state is a structure of human organization that governs or influences political, economic, social and cultural affairs.  State formation is also often linked with the process of becoming modern such as the experience of the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ with the City of London as a locus of financial activity but also as a community which is a theme we pursue in section 3. Historians have turned to theorists of the state in order to best understand this historical and changing phenomenon and have also attempted themselves to see the state over long periods and in a multitude of places. Historians, sociologists and political theorists such as Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol and others have been especially interested in grand narratives that concern questions of power, authority, capital, conflict, class and other state structures.
  • Political history is concerned with politics and politics is largely about power relations in society, and so its potential brief is extremely wide. In practice, however, political historians have devoted themselves to the study of political organisations which have impacted upon the formal, parliamentary arena. Using a case study of the rise of the Labour Party, we show that the study of politics – narrowly defined – can be approached in different ways. An older tradition focused on the role of influential figures and their hold over strategic decision making almost exclusively in the field of formal party politics. Underlying this was the premise that to an extent these individuals lived in rarefied atmospheres, taking key decisions not on the basis of any preconceived ideas or rooted in particular ideologies, but often because they were impelled by peculiar circumstances of the moment, or because of distinctive personal traits. In part as a response to this, there has emerged more recently an approach which is rather more interested in the extent to which the arena of formal politics reflected wider social movements, in the case of the Labour Party, its relationship to working-class culture and behaviour. This approach to politics has also been more concerned to move beyond the boundaries of formal politics to consider political events and movements of all shades of opinion in the extra-parliamentary sphere.
  • Returning to the case study of the City, we can see how in the eighteenth century the cry ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ argued for the rights of the American colonials but also for the rights of extra-parliamentary political activity. If the City and the City’s government championed this approach it also was to transform the relationship between state and civil society, becoming decidedly less radical by the end of the nineteenth century. City businessmen and aldermen alike disappeared behind closed doors, relaxing into the leather armchairs of member limited associations dedicated to personal and property rights and imperialism. These clubs influenced political parties as once Wilkes had pressured the Whigs but reinvented the Liberals, remade the Conservative Party and saw the eventual emergence of the Labour Party which offered in the twentieth century a collectivist alternative to previously dominant liberal and Individualist ideologies.

Perry Anderson (1975) Lineages of the Absolutist State.

A wide-ranging study of state formations across the globe which draws upon Marxist theory but attempts – not always successfully – to avoid simplistic schemes of historical change.

* Peter Cain and A. G. Hopkins (2001) British Imperialism, 1688–2000 .

A pioneering study of the political economy of British imperialism which influentially drew upon the notion of gentlemanly capitalism.

Maurice Cowling (1971) The Impact of Labour.

A study of politics which focuses on the minutiae of decision making among the political elite, thereby avoiding all grand narratives which see political change as the inevitable outcome of more fundamental societal forces.

Duncan Tanner (1990) Political Change and the Labour Party.

A detailed study of the party which stresses the important of considering the local rather than the national, written by an important figure in political history before an untimely death cut short much promise.

Chapter 11: Economic history

  • Economics, population and social change
  • Economic historians and the big historical questions
  • The business of business history

Economic history has a massive influence on the wider discipline of history, even if it has become a little unfashionable in recent years. Marxist history has particularly benefited from a concentration on what it would call the ‘economic base’ of historical societies but more generally economic history has been sufficiently strong in the recent past to have maintained academic departments separate from ‘straight’ history and a number of dedicated professional journals. Economic history can reasonably claim to explain societies holistically while working on data (often by the application of the most up-to-date technology) which raise fresh questions about past societies. The opening section of the chapter examines how population data can unpick the shape of past societies; while the methods of economic history (with help from other disciplines such as archaeology) can add significantly to our historical knowledge. The second section focuses upon the contribution by economic historians to the understanding of wealth and poverty over centuries; in particular, we are concerned with the role of luxury and luxury goods in the modernising process and the way that historians have dealt with pessimistic and optimistic approaches to industrialisation; that is, economic understandings of industrialisation that argue whether the industrial revolution benefited the economic lives of contemporaries. The final section of the chapter switches attention to the role that business historians play in understanding past societies, defining and explaining the relationship of business history to economic history.

  • The parameters of economic history are wide but its modern origins lay in the 1880s when social inequalities were startlingly obvious and there was a backdrop of economic decline. It is suggested that economic history deals not with money per se but with the distribution of resources. The Eyam plague is examined as a way of discussing what it is that economic historians do – both those historians that are concerned with a more ‘number-crunching’ approach and those content to use evidence that is more richly contextualised. The uses of quantitative and qualitative evidence are discussed, and questions about how wide the concerns of economic historians go are addressed. It is also an opportunity to explain the Marxist strand of economic history and to introduce an approach within economic history that looks at population, family fertility, migration patterns and so on. We then have a rounded way of explaining the phenomenon of the seventeenth-century plague at Eyam but also the approach to the economic history of epidemics more generally.
  • Production and consumption, poverty and luxury have all played important roles in the debates within economic history, but now, it can be argued, this role has been challenged by a fresh historiography. Indeed, the growth of a luxury economy is traced through the way economic historians have explained the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and how both consumption and production as issues in the economy are still problems for the historian of industrialisation to understand. This section ends with a description of the ‘optimist’ versus ‘pessimist’ contribution to the so-called standard of living debate and the way that economic historians of every kind have sought to explain and assess the industrial revolution, but also how this debate gives an insight into (1) the sources used by economic historians and (2) how they evaluate these sources.
  • The growing importance of business history to economic history more generally and how it is derived from interests in the micro concerns of the firm as much as the aggregated and macro concerns of the national economy. It is explained that in the modern period at least, the history of the company is a history that by definition tends to be wide ranging: from the history of a corporation to the history of the so-called knowledge economy, where information and its distribution is now under the auspices of economic and business history. Finally, the growing importance of new archives to the writing of these histories is dissected as a way of extending the discussion throughout the chapter on sources and their uses.

Maxine Berg (2005) Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain .

Berg makes an important intervention in economic debates by making the case for consumption (as well as production) as the main source of change, both industrial change and changes in the manners and mores of the urban middle class.

D. C. Coleman (1992) Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution.

Contains some excellent and important essays. Chief among them are ‘Industrial Growth and Industrial Revolutions’, ‘Gentlemen and Players’ and ‘The Uses and Abuses of Business History’.

Christopher Dyer (2009) Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520.

A survey of the economy of the centuries that spanned the Viking invasion to the Reformation. Its early reflection on approaches to the economic history of medieval Britain is invaluable.

Andrew Hinde (2003) England’s Population.

Provides an excellent introduction to the demographic history of England. It not only uses sources but explains them and does so in the medieval and early modern periods up to the twentieth century.

* David Landes (1999) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

A controversial book that brings the growth and importance of modernity and industrial development back to Europe, asserting that its advancement was ultimately down to its Protestantism, its climate and its approach to science. This book is especially interesting for us because it is an economic history that examines the importance of culture not simply economic data.

N.J.G. Pounds (1994) Economic History of Medieval Europe.

An excellent account of its subject area but also a very good example of how economic history approaches can assist historical understanding over a long period.

* Gareth Stedman Jones (2004) An End to Poverty: An Historical Debate.

A comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the history of poverty from a very influential social historian. It examines closely historical debates about the economy and the role of poverty and the poor in it.

* Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005) The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.

An extraordinary intervention on a well-worn area of historiography – the reasons that surround the decline of Rome in the West. Ward-Perkins takes a resolute approach that challenges historical conventions using economic history throughout.

* E. A. Wrigley (1990) Continuity, Chance and Change.

An amazing example of an informed scholar taking an argumentative stand and offering a provocative hypothesis. Since challenged by empirical research, it has remained an exemplar of how to frame the industrial revolution and is an invaluable spur to research for students.

For some excellent pamphlets written in the late 1980s to early 1990s in the ReFRESH series on the industrial revolution, women and the standard of living, go to the Economic History Society website at http://www.ehs.org.uk/the-society/refresh.html .

Chapter 12: Social History

  • The emergence of social history
  • Class and authority
  • The family in history
  • The social history of faith

The chapter explores the contribution of social history to historical inquiry. Often thought in the past to be a somewhat marginal interest, devoted for the most part to aspects of the human experience which were trivial when compared with weightier matters such as politics, recent years have witnessed a sharp growth in studies broadly under the umbrella of social history. In addition, the deep-seated suspicion among historians that sociologists are concerned to elaborate universal laws began to recede as they found sociological concepts of value in interpreting historical evidence. The result has been a widening of the historiographical agenda, and a flowering of interest in topics such as leisure, language, rituals and customs that have defined our social lives.

No theme has attracted more interest than class, and in the second section we examine the ways in which social historians have found the concept of value in social stratification. The initial interest was provoked by the writings of Marx who placed class centre stage. This notion has proved to be extremely fertile, particularly in those historical inquiries concerned with changing societal relationships, but in recent years, and largely under the influence of feminist and postcolonial historians, class has been displaced by gender and race. The third section then discusses one of the other organizing concepts of social history, namely, the family. In full recognition of its longevity and near universality, sociologists and social historians have long been interested in the family. There have been diverse approaches, however, which foregrounded different aspects of the family experience, often leading to different conclusions about its role in past and present societies. Lastly we turn to the social history of faith and the sociology of religion in order to examine the practical utility of sociology (particularly the contribution of Durkheim, Weber and Marx) to the historian.

  • Sociology as a discipline has a history of its own, and may be seen to use theory excessively and generate data in the present, but nevertheless has proved to be of distinct use to historians. Looking at how we might understand mutiny through sociological understandings of bureaucracy and authority, for example, we can see precisely why historians should be interested in sociology. On the one hand, if we use ideas from Max Weber about how individuals behave within a bureaucracy, then it is a small leap (one taken by Ashworth) to investigate the particular circumstances of, say, the French or Russian mutinies of 1917. From this model, we can discover similarities and differences between each when the danger might have been to miss patterns or join up historical dots when it was inappropriate so to do. Historians, on the other hand, who seek to go beyond sociological modelling because they are sceptical of its ability to provide explanations for particular historical phenomena, have sometimes missed a valuable insight.
  • Looking at the working class cultures of the coalfields of North-East England, we found how useful sociological notions of social stratification are to the historian. We also discovered that sociology’s tendency to generalise can pose a danger to the aims and objectives of an historian. While it can probably be agreed that modernity – social organisations changing rapidly in the face of industrialisation, secularisation and urbanisation – is the chief concern of sociologists, the use made of it by sociologists has limits. The methods derived from Marx, Durkheim and Weber can be useful but may tend towards generalisations such as ‘the market’ or ‘bureaucracy’ which can be hypothetical or too general for the historian concerned with the particular and the untypical. This said Weber’s constructs of authority and power, especially his notion of charisma, is useful to the historian if used with cautious imagination and confirms that historians can use sociological methods.
  • Early sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber took the family seriously as a unit of study, as should historians. Demography has constituted an important factor as has the role of marriage and the wider dynamics of family relationships more generally in both preindustrial and industrial societies. Sentiments within and towards the family, however, vary across cultures and notwithstanding the variations of class and religion. All these areas feed into the family economy and have obvious interest for social historians and are aided by constructs gifted to us by sociology as a separate, if related, discipline. Yet the family is not just an ideological construct but (as the section argues) a functioning economic and social unit which is of profound interest to historians and sociologists alike.
  • Secularisation as a process has, until recently, been accepted by both sociologists and historians, although relatively recent research has cast doubt on the application of assumptions regarding the decline of religious affiliation, in whatever form. This research has emphasised surviving forms of religion and religiosity that no longer take conventional forms. Sociological models encourage generalisations based on theory and a ‘process’ but the historian would begin research from another place and would explain secularisation as an historical process in ways quite different from sociology.

* Peter Burke (2005) History and Social Theory.

An invaluable text for comparing the uses of social theory for historians. That this is a re-publication of a book whose title once explicitly mentioned sociology as a major concern is perhaps demonstration of the recent relevance sociology has for historians.

British Journal of Sociology, vol. 27, no. 3, Special Issue: History and Sociology (September, 1976).

This special edition of the major journal for sociologists has many articles worth consulting. It was also a symptom at its time of publication how sociology and sociological method was influencing social history of the time. It is certainly worth revisiting.

Peter Saunders (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question.

An excellent but very theoretical account of Weber, Marx and Durkheim as social theorists, although as the title suggests its focus is very much centred on the urban.

* S.J.D. Green (1996) Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire 1870–1920 .

A wonderful example of modern research on a common problem for sociologists and historians alike: secularisation. The introduction provides an invaluable summary and commentary on the historiographical debate on this subject.

Tony Ashworth (1980) Trench Warfare 1914–1918.

A solid and imaginative example of how sociological theory particularly that derived from Weber can be put to the service of the historian willing to bend theory to fact and not the other way around.

Chapter 13: Cultural history

  • Toward a definition of cultural history
  • Survival of the carnival
  • Empire and the cultural turn

For most of its existence as a distinct discipline, history has tended to neglect culture. Part of the problem was that when compared with the political and economic in human affairs, culture was seen as trivial and inconsequential. How, for example, could songs have had any influence on the important matter of historical change? Another problem was actually in defining the object of inquiry. Since culture was notoriously difficult to define, it was entirely understandable that historians felt a degree of apprehension in approaching it. We review some of these concerns in Section 1, and proceed to argue that despite the reticence among historians there have been pioneering – albeit isolated – studies of what now would be considered cultural history.

All that was to change in the postwar period, when we witnessed a genuine flowering of interest in the cultural sphere. Aided by the questioning of any privileging of the economic, and the emergence of poststructuralism, historians turned with enthusiasm to topics such as art, music, language and customs, so creating a body of exciting and innovative historical work. In Section 2 we take as a case study the carnival, and discuss how historians have approached this extraordinary phenomenon. Arising to become the great form of popular entertainment in medieval Europe, carnival suffused the lives of the whole community, and even following its suppression in the early modern age, tended to shape the course of popular culture.

Finally, in Section 3 we explore how an interest in culture has enriched the study of imperialism. It is now widely accepted that colonial authorities did not rule simply through the exercise of political, economic and military power; arguably of equal if not more importance were interventions in the realms of education, religion and popular culture writ large. Not only that, the experience of imperial endeavor was driven by, and reflected back on metropolitan culture with immense long-term consequences for notions of Britishness.

By exploring cultural history by charting the move from elites in the Italian Renaissance, and the medieval carnival, to history on television we have detected, as in other fields of history, a shift toward the popular in recent years. Cultural historians are now interested in revealing the nature and significance of popular cultural forms which had previously been thought of as trivial and of little worth. Thus the minutiae of daily life – eating, washing, smoking, courting and so on – attract the attention they deserve. The other challenge has come from what we referred to as structuralism, that is, the notion that cultural forms resemble a language and are therefore open to methods developed in linguistics. The task here is to excavate beneath surface appearance to uncover the deep structures that have a profound influence on the course of people’s lives. Cultural historians have created a rich and varied body of work in the past 20 years or so which has greatly extended our understanding of the importance of culture in the lives of people, and hence in explaining the nature of historical change.

  • Exploring cultural history by charting the move from elites in the Italian Renaissance to history on television we have detected, as in other fields of history, a shift toward the popular in recent years. Cultural historians are now interested in revealing the nature and significance of popular cultural forms which had previously been thought of as trivial and of little worth. Thus the minutiae of daily life – eating, washing, smoking, courting and so on – attract the attention they deserve. The other challenge has come from what we referred to as structuralism, that is, the notion that cultural forms resemble a language and are therefore open to methods developed in linguistics. The task here is to excavate beneath surface appearance to uncover the deep structures that have a profound influence on the course of people’s lives. Cultural historians have created a rich and varied body of work in the past 20 years or so which has greatly extended our understanding of the importance of culture in the lives of people, and hence in explaining the nature of historical change.
  • The study of medieval carnival has been one way that cultural historians have been able to record and analyze counter culture in society. Where structuralism (as we saw in the first section) encouraged historians to increase the scrutiny of elites and the mythology in high cultures, popular manifestations of rebellion and revolt have taken historians of culture into spectacularly new and exciting areas to focus on ‘rough music’ or ever-changing ‘speech communities’ that manifested themselves in differing historical moments that challenge authority. In one moment ‘the king becomes a clown, and old truths a comic monster’ and in another parody and mockery are turned into a weapon of transgression or even revolution. Cultural history takes the carnival seriously and gets down to the level of the street; ritual is revealing and language exposes a range of historical possibilities.
  • Recent studies of imperialism and the imperial experience have seen a definite focus on culture over the more usual approaches that we associate with the field, namely, military, political and economic spheres. Starting with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the ‘cultural turn’ in histories of empire have seen the importance of nationhood and identity, political and urban culture and the expressive aspects of empire from an analysis of advertising to the representation of imperialism in social reform, free trade and religion.

* Peter Burke (2008) What is Cultural History?

A valuable guide to historical approaches from a widely published historian in an area in which he is well qualified to comment.

Peter Burke (1997) Varieties of Cultural History.

A lively account of the origins of cultural history that is accompanied by some equally valuable essays on memory, mentalities and gesture.

Lynn Hunt (ed.) (1989) The New Cultural History.

A critical intervention in the subject, it should be read both for its important introduction and for some notable essays, particularly Roger Chartier’s.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1965) Rabelais and His World.

As a study of literary endeavour, this is a book that seeks to understand the nature of marketplace carnival, spectacle, folk humour and laughter, ridicule of elites and sacred texts. Collectively it speaks to a shared consciousness of the power of culture to affect power and challenge repression. 

Nicolas Dirks (ed) (1992) Colonialism and Culture.

The imperial state was predicated on knowledge of the cultural forms of its subjects – forms that came to be transformed by the very process that sought to understand them. Culture, according to Dirks ‘was imbricated both in the means and the ends of colonial conquest’, and ‘culture was invented in relationship to a variety of internal colonialisms.’

Chapter 14: Feminism, gender and women’s history

  • Feminism and history
  • The attack on class
  • Gender and identity

This chapter describes how historiography has been transformed by the question of gender, both in the ways that the subject is now researched and written, but also how historians have read evidence to include women and gender issues more generally. The opening section tackles the relationship between gender and class in historical analysis, and investigates how an interest in female experiences in the past has created a considerable and diverse body of work. Approaches have been variously determined by theoretical perspectives including conservative, liberal and Marxist feminisms, which in their various ways have influenced male-centred histories. It is not merely a question of reasserting women into the historical record, but of understanding fully how a concern with gender relationships can provide more satisfying accounts of historical change. In section 2 we examine how feminist work since the 1980s has effectively challenged the primacy previously placed on class to provide nuanced interpretations of such events as the industrial revolution and Italian Renaissance. Finally, in section 3 we explore questions around feminine and masculine identities, and the significance of recent work on witchcraft with due consideration of approaches which borrow from psychoanalytical and linguistic theory.

The three sections of this chapter have said three things:

  • That feminism is not simply defined by equal rights but is construed differently from within different ideological positions. Conservative feminism believed that women had natural attributes such as motherhood which were best expressed in a domestic setting. In contrast the public sphere was competitive and the opposite of genteel: the very antithesis of what it meant to be a woman. Liberal feminists recognized these feminine attributes and qualities but argued that the disadvantages of biology, such as child-rearing, could be mitigated by public policy. Marxists originally downplayed gender differences, preferring instead to concentrate on class. The emphasis on gender-led history among female Marxist historians, however, led to dissatisfaction with the Marxist attempt to retain class as the primary means of analyzing inequality in a capitalist society over time. Histories where class was the primary object of analysis were challenged by feminist historians who now insisted that the most important tool for historians was not class analysis but a ‘patriarchy first’ analysis where class exploited class but men, more importantly, exploited women. While this approach proved fatal for Marxism, histories of patriarchy also became questionable. Nor did the ‘domestic ideology debate’ (whereupon men and women occupied public and private spheres respectively) prove satisfactory as an explanation for the role of women in history with liberal, radical and Marxist feminist stances outlasting their conceptual usefulness.
  • Women-centred histories in the early days of feminist agitation, especially since 1970, have successfully reintegrated women back into the historical record. By foregrounding women as an object of study, innovative new histories were researched and written by an extraordinary generation of women activists and historians. These women, however, could not go beyond the early and necessary task of reappraising the standard tests used by (male) historians and create histories where men and women were treated together or where the story of women was constructed in the shadow of men. This meant that there were an increasing number of histories of women that concentrated on their exclusion from public life. Women’s bodies and sexuality were stressed as well as their relationship in one way or another to men. These gendered histories, however, became very influential indeed and it is now quite impossible to imagine histories without sensitivity to gender issues. The result in very many cases was to challenge the narrative of male class relations. This section then builds on the last.
  • An interest in identity has led to some innovative histories that consider subjective issues such as emotion, fantasy or the unconscious as legitimate areas of historical study. Questions of femininity and masculinity have opened up interesting avenues of inquiry into national and imperial cultures. In the meantime, witchcraft continues to attract enormous interest, and remains useful as a vehicle with which to explore issues around gender, identity, culture and the body that go the very heart of feminist history. Here psychological approaches have moved markedly from experimental phase to become central to the way that women and women’s bodies and mentalities are researched and written. No longer are gendered histories seen as providing ‘balance’ to what was essentially male stories of power and influence but rather whole epochs and periods (such as the Renaissance) have been repositioned, irrevocably repositioned, in a profound way that now effects our narratives of nation but also of how we conceive global histories.

Sally Alexander (1984) Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Feminist History.

Alexander has been an important figure in women’s history and feminist studies since she was a student at Ruskin College. These essays represent the intellectual and theoretical development of her work.

Sheila Rowbotham (1973) Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It.

Rarely does a history book so perfectly reflect the times in which it was written. Almost a pamphlet for the liberation struggle, it nonetheless is a scholarly attempt to write women back into the historical record.

Joan Kelly (1984) Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly.

Contains all her key essays, including ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ and deals with periodization, social analysis and theories of social change from a gendered and feminist standpoint.

Joan W. Scott (1988) Gender and the Politics of History.

This is not a simple read but nonetheless as a collection of essays that span a long and important career in gender history and theory, it is an important one. The sections mentioned explicitly in the text above should especially be consulted.

John Tosh (2005) Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain.

An innovative collection of essays that open up a genuine new area of study. His emphasis on both the family and empire effectively explores the interaction between theory, masculinity and patriarchy in history.

Judith M. Bennett (2006) History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, and (2008) ‘Forgetting the Past’, Gender and History, vol. 20, pp. 669–77.

Bennett very ably makes the case for history in the wider field of gender studies. In the 1970s, she argues, feminism and history were closely linked. Now feminists embrace political and theoretical positions that seemingly don’t need an historical perspective, although patriarchy remains alive and well.

* American Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 5, December 2008.

Revisits the work of Joan Scott from a variety of angles; particularly interesting is the essay by Joanne Meyerowitz, ‘A History of “Gender”’, and ‘Unanswered Questions’ by Scott herself.

Lyndal Roper (1994) Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion.

In many ways the remarkable work of Lyndal is rooted in some familiar anthropological tropes. However, her take on the fantasies and fears (especially of infertility) of mainly older women at a critical time of German-speaking Europe reveals and approach to history that takes in much that had formally remained undiscussed by historians.

Chapter 15: Public history

  • What is public about history?
  • Consumption of public history
  • Producing public history
  • Public history as contested knowledge

This chapter examined public history and its chief elements: present-mindedness, promiscuous in its choice of what constitutes historical evidence, multi-disciplinary and anti-expert. It reaches out to historical constituencies such as family historians or popular collectors who are quite untouched by university style history, what is called here the ‘academy’. These are not necessarily readers of popular histories that fill the shelves of booksellers but local and community ‘historians’ who are themselves potentially well placed to tell their own stories without acting as passive participants in histories written by professional historians. However, if these are the claims of its advocates, public and popular forms of history have a soft underbelly. At its worst, academic historians perceive public history as untheorised and uncritical. History becomes heritage, nostalgic and conservative, packaged in such a way that celebrates the past by dressing it up to encourage social consensus, an antiquarian ruse to make us believe that consent and conformity is a natural feature of the present. By collecting evidence of past societies, public historians have allowed those scholars working in the academy to rewrite histories in ways that would have remained quite impossible without their intervention. In so doing, the basis of historical knowledge is challenged. In order to explore these issues, the first section used the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 as a way of discussing the range and scope of sources used by the public historian, the definition of public history, how it differs from the publishing phenomenon of popular history and is perceived differently across the world. Section 2 explored differing views about heritage and the ‘heritage industry’ and the ways that the past is conceptualised, and ways too that public history is ‘consumed’ by the general public. While public history seems to be a different enterprise from university history, it nevertheless produces evidence that professional historians and students can utilize. This is the subject of the third section while the last section explored the tensions created between public history and the academy in what precisely constitutes historical knowledge.

  • Public history is defined by its approach to evidence, its appeal to a popular audience, its interest in the way the past is represented in the present and its scepticism towards history as a profession. These elements were explored by looking closely at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, which was a street riot and proved to be an earthquake for modern multiculturalism, perhaps, but the aftershocks that followed it are the concerns of public history. It should be emphasised, as it is in the first section, that public history has taken on different guises in different countries: notably, in the cases of Australia, the United States and Britain.
  • Heritage is the prominent way that the past is consumed by a mass public. The debate about whether heritage and the ‘heritage industry’ (say through its presentation in the work and activities of the National Trust) was seen by historians such as Patrick Wright or Raphael Samuel as either conservative or progressive depended on its context. Because of these divisions in understanding the role of heritage as a suppressor of present day dissent or a device that passively consumes the past – it remains an approach to research that has much promise.
  • Although public history is primarily concerned with the consumption of past narratives through a language of heritage public historians have also been prominent in the production of historical knowledge, say through collecting objects from everyday life. How so doing, definitions of history and who can claim the title of historian is brought into relief while the archive is redefined to be more promiscuous than in other genres of history.
  • Public history approaches may challenge the very basis of what is conventionally regarded as the limits of historical knowledge. This section sought to demonstrate how conventional notions of, say, archaeology, biography or classical literature is overshadowed by, say, metal detecting, in-flight magazines or pulp fiction.

Hilda Kean et al. (eds.) (2000), Seeing History: Public History Now in Britain.

A collection of essays that outline the plethora of ways in which public history approaches to the past have influenced historical approaches. Essays include Bruce Wheeler, in ‘Language and Landscape: The Construction of Place in an East London Borough’; Paul Long, ‘But It’s Not All Nostalgia: Public History and Local Identity in Birmingham’; and Peter Claus, ‘Managing Boundaries: History and Community at the Bishopsgate Institute’.

John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (1994) The Cultures of Collecting.

Covers to some extent the trends of public history which are apparent in the world of professional museum studies but also in popular forms of collecting.

* Raphael Samuel (1995) Theatres of Memory: The Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.

Sometimes repetitive and overloaded with examples, this is nevertheless a remarkable manifesto for a democratic approach to history, taking into the ranks of ‘historian’ all manner of amateur practitioners of public history.

Ludmilla Jordanova (2006) History in Practice.

Chapter 6, ‘Public History’, covers American and Australian models of public history and arrives at different conclusions.

Chapter 16: Visual history

  • Visual histories in film and television
  • Ways of seeing: paintings
  • Ways of seeing: prints and photographs
  • Playing with history: the rise of the video game

As a discipline which emerged in the nineteenth century under the guidance of von Ranke and others, history has tended to rely almost exclusively on documentary evidence for its sources. For most historians, written documents remain the most reliable to hand and thus provide the best access to the period under study. Belatedly, however, other sources broadly considered as visual are now treated with seriousness, and so we investigated how films, television programmes, paintings and photographs are increasingly employed as legitimate means of engaging with history. In certain respects this is surprising given that they are generally considered as works of the imagination, and therefore not ‘reliable’ sources. And it is true that our techniques for reading them are little developed in comparison with those we bring to bear on documentary evidence, and yet when used skilfully images can enhance the historical imagination and provide at least part of the basis for good history.

In section 1 we discussed the considerable interest which films and television exert on the popular historical imagination. Using specific examples, we investigate how they convey a sense of history, and whether or not they can be considered as historical documents. Denying that because they are works of imagination they ought necessarily be dismissed as evidence, our contention is that in particular ways they can offer valuable interpretations of historical events.

In a similar way, sections 2 and 3 viewed the roles played by paintings, prints and photographs. Before the advent of moving images, paintings and prints provided some of the most eloquent representations of contemporary and past societies, and as such have to be taken seriously as historical evidence. In this respect they are no less reliable or ‘true’ than documentary evidence. But as with such evidence, we need to understand the conventions and languages used to construct them, and these skills have yet to be fully developed by historians. The final section brought us up to date with the importance of visual sources by surveying how video games have created fantastic virtual environments and alternative histories which have informed new audiences about the past by lighting up the historical imagination.

  • For the majority of people a sense of history is not acquired through books written by trained historians but at school and through various visual media. We make no apology for devoting most attention in this textbook to such scholarly books for these are still the staple fare of history students, but it would be remiss of us not to consider at some point the more popular forms of historical production and consumption. Thus in this chapter we look in some detail at broadcast history and how it is represented in other visual media.
  • Anyone doubtful of the continued popularity of history need only consider just how pervasive history programmes are on television, either in the form of documentaries or fictionalized reconstructions. Compared with ‘serious’ books such programmes are lightweight; indeed, they are often dismissed by historians as trivial and inaccurate on those grounds. We beg to differ. To our minds, many forms of producing history are based on the same depth of historical research, and adapt to the same broad narrative structures as do history books. Even films and fictionalized historical novels (Chapter 21) display a profound knowledge of the context. It goes further. Most history books, like broadcast history programmes and novels, attempt to tell a good story; indeed, that is one of the great and seductive attractions of learning about the past. But films and broadcast programmes, it could be argued, are able at the same time to convey affect through sound, vision and word in an even more emotionally engaging way.
  • We have glanced at paintings, prints and photographs as sources of historical knowledge. We may live increasingly in a visual culture, but it is not so obvious that such images need to be taken seriously; indeed, our capacity to analyze them does not compare well with our skills at reading printed textual sources, but again, when used appropriately, they are vital sources of evidence. No image is a neutral record of the moment, all images are the product in part of generic convention, and thus they give us real insight into the mentalities and ideologies of the time. Think, for example, how landscape paintings convey discrete range of feelings, or how English prints of the 1790s reveal fissures in politics of the age.
  • Finally, it is apparent that among younger generations these visual media are increasingly being superseded by digital technologies. If most historians are somewhat nervous at the suggestion that television and film are legitimate sources of historical knowledge, then you might imagine their sense of disbelief that so too are, say, video games. Well, even if such games seem remote from the strictures of historical inquiry, for legions of the young they are sources of historical knowledge. The questions are therefore, what historical knowledge is being conveyed, and what devices are used by the games to produce it? The answers are perhaps unexpected.

* John Berger (1973) Ways of Seeing .

Was a sensation when first broadcast. It established visual culture as a vital part of the western aesthetic in a way that separated it from the Renaissance and Enlightenment inspired idea of the canon that emerged with notions of the modern. Above it revealed art and photography or even advertisements as instruments of ideology.

Peter Burke (2001) Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence.

A book that does exactly what it promises dealing with the problems and opportunities that visual culture as evidence presents to the historian. In this respect, it is valuable.

Francis Haskell (1993) History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past .

An authoritative if fairly conventional approach to art and its interpretations by historians.

* Robert Rosenstone (2006) History on Film/Film on History.

Working out of the California Institute of Technology, the author has proved to be a major player in discussions about the use of history on film. This book (there is another edition published in 2012) is an excellent undergraduate introduction and proves beyond any doubt the value of film in our understanding of the past.

Chapter 17: Global histories

  • The challenge of global history
  • Origins of the global imagination
  • Enter ‘new world history’

This chapter focuses on the genre of world or global history. Section 1 discusses contemporary interest in globalisation, and investigates whether processes which operate at a global level are a modern phenomenon or have their lineages in the distant past. It shows that many of the features which are now considered to be part of globalisation can be traced back to earlier periods, although recent years have experienced an acceleration of globalisation. It is possible, for example, to devise a periodisation of global history based on such features. Section 2 develops this theme by looking at the extent to which writers of the premodern period shared a concern to think beyond their immediate environments, whether local or national. Here we examine the accounts of some of the great travellers who were responsible more than any others for bringing an awareness of other regions of the world to popular attention, and helped to lift Europe from what might be thought of, in modern terms, as medieval ignorance. Such accounts were marginalised when history emerged as a discipline in its own right during the nineteenth century and turned its interest to nationalist narratives based on notions of the nation state that are associated with the period after the French Revolution. Finally, the chapter considers the promise of fresh approaches to world history which have appeared in the last 30 years, not only in how these accounts reveal a multiplicity of global interconnections, but also in challenging views of historical change that have placed the West at centre stage.

  • There is real promise in the study of global or world history. In many respects we live in an age of globalisation, for rarely has a single topic entered so pervasively into media commentary, or been able to mobilise so many people onto the streets around the world. It is hardly surprising under these circumstances that some historians have turned to the global as a means of better understanding the past and therefore the contemporary world. And yet ever since the past was chronicled there have been writers who have demonstrated a desire to move beyond their geographical and cultural boundaries to think more expansively about other, far removed cultures, and the interrelationships which propelled historical change. We saw that, in premodern periods, many of these were travellers who wrote detailed accounts of their experiences. Many of these were hugely popular and brought an awareness of other countries, civilisations and cultures to an eager public.
  • The western nation state in the nineteenth century rose when history emerged as a discipline in its own right. Narratives charting the development of individual nations came to be accepted as part of orthodoxy, a marker of what proper research and writing was all about. And yet there remained historians wedded to global perspectives: Hegel, Herder, and to an extent Marx, were all acutely sensitive to the importance of a global imagination. What distinguished their work, however, was a use of evidence to illustrate the role of abstract categories as the driving forces of change. Freedom, progress and class struggle were erected as grand themes to help chart the unfolding of history over time.
  • The cataclysmic events of the twentieth century compelled some writers to return once more to the matter of grand, overarching themes as a means of shedding light on human frailties. In their different ways, Spengler, Toynbee and Mumford addressed themselves to this problem by taking up the mantle of their nineteenth-century predecessors. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a number of path-breaking studies heralded an approach which eschewed grand narratives, instead placing stress on revealing the complex interrelationships that existed among different regions of the world as a more satisfying way of explaining change, whether of civilisations or of events which have had a profound impact on human affairs. In so doing, such accounts have displaced the centrality of the West evident in nationalist narratives, and forced onto the agenda previously marginalised world cultures.

Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1993) Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History.

A posthumous collection of essays by one of the pioneers of world history in which he argues lucidly and persuasively for the importance of a global history to an understanding of the West.

* Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang (2008) A Global History of Modern Historiography.

An ambitious book that examines historical thinking and writing from around the world since the late eighteenth century. Accessible and learned, but even at 400 pages plus, the coverage is spread a little thin.

Patrick Manning (2003) Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past.

This is not only a well-informed survey of the terrain of world historiography, but provides useful nuts-and-bolts guidance on how this complex field can be approached. To be consulted rather than read from cover to cover.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

A brief but brilliant study of world history, not in the form of a survey or critical reflection, but one that uses a concrete episode – the Haitian slave revolt – to demonstrate how Western historiographical power has operated to distort the record.

* Journal of World History.

Edited by Jerry Bentley at the University of Hawaii, this is the official journal of the World Historical Association. Patchy at times, but essential reading for those who wish to keep abreast of the changing paradigm of world history.

Chapter 18: Environmental history

  • The scope of environmental history and historical precedents
  • European colonialism and the environment
  • Modern environmentalism

At first glance the scope of environmental history is immense. Given that it conventionally includes the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between human behaviour and natural world, and the ways in which the latter has been viewed by peoples over time, there are large areas of the sciences and arts which could legitimately be encompassed by its remit. Section 1 considered these issues before moving on to discuss how the environment has been understood in the past. Given the utter dependency of early societies on the environment, it comes as no surprise that from the beginnings of recorded history peoples have thought about the natural world and the climate. They lacked knowledge derived from modern science, but their understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment was sophisticated. Later, historians of the ancient Greek and Roman world demonstrated an awareness, albeit limited, of the natural world and its impact on societal change, before medieval historians and travellers began to paint much larger pictures of the globe. Later, in the long-running General Global Crisis debate, historians argued whether evidence exists to find a causal connection between the very real extremes in climate that is a feature of the seventeenth century and the no less real anomalies of conflict, rebellion, revolution and war which were also such a distinct feature of the period until the eighteenth century ushered in a relative stability.

As was so often the case, however, the age of European imperial expansion witnessed the most rapid advances. In India, for example, the need of colonial authorities to understand and hence control the environment promoted major research projects (Section 3). What emerged was an increased sensitivity both to the vulnerability of the natural world in the face of human depredation, and the reciprocal impact that such change had on people, as evidenced, for example, in devastating famines that swept through large areas of India.

It is something of a paradox that despite the long recognition of such problems that academics were not attracted to environmental science and history until the post-war years (Section 4). Paralleling the rise of concern about the impact of human behaviour on the environment, university courses were offered which attracted large numbers of students, and there appeared a number of pioneering studies which for the first time foregrounded the environment in the history of the modern world. Arguably, more than any other area of inquiry associated with history, environmental history remains truly interdisciplinary.

The three sections of this chapter said three things.

  • In addressing environmental history we face something of a paradox. If for the sake of argument we consider that the field seeks to understand the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the environment and human activity then how can we explain why it has only recently appeared in university programmes, and why it has failed to intervene in mainstream historical research? The paradox is even more striking when we realize that the environment has attracted the interest of scholars, administrators, rulers and indigenous communities from early times. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, for example, were well aware of the influence of topography and climate on human populations and this is expanded a little in the section. To take another example, medieval India indigenous communities developed a sophisticated – but largely unwritten – sense of how humans best manage different land types. Historians have also been debating the possibility changes in the natural environment such as rapid climate change might even been causally linked to historical events.
  • As was the case in so many other fields including anthropology and medicine, the colonial experience was instrumental in placing environmental history on a more secure and scientific basis. Through empirical studies on fields, forests, famines and irrigation systems, in particular, colonial administrators began to understand something of the vulnerability of the environment to the destructive influence of human depradation. And it was largely from such studies that historians began to consider how the global environment shaped the course of societal evolution at a global level.
  • If environmental history reached maturity in the postwar years with the publication of ground-breaking studies such as Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism , it was as an adolescent. A growing awareness of human destruction of the planet provided much of the impetus for this resurgence of interest, but this level of concern has not been matched by the same determination to write the environment into historical accounts. Until this happens, there is always the chance that the environment will – like many other historical fashions – gradually fade from the scene. For our understanding of the planet, this will be unfortunate to say the least; for the discipline of history, it will be deeply damaging because it threatens to stifle not only the development of global history, but also to the one area of truly interdisciplinary study.

Fernand Braudel (1972) [1946] The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

The transformative effect of this work can be scarcely overstated. In a sense Braudel can be read as an introduction to this growing area of historical study.

Alfred Crosby (1972) The Columbian Exchange. Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.

As a pioneering text of the genre, Crosby makes the arresting argument that the motives for Columbia and his expeditions were centrally environmental rather than political or economic. Glacken (1967), also mentioned in the chapter, should be read for similar reasons.

Richard Grove (1995) Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860.

Charles mann (2011) 1493. how europe’s discovery of the americas revolutionized trade, ecology and life on earth..

Like Braudel, this is a history of both width and depth. The ambition of the work is quite breathtaking and is very much worth reading within the context of the themes of this chapter.

* Geoffrey Parker (2013) Global Crisis. War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century .

The idea at the centre of this comprehensive and audacious thesis is not entirely new, but it is wide-ranging and is a fine example of an historian drawing a series of close correlations between change over time and the environment.

Chapter 19: Archaeology

  • The lure of archaeology
  • The theoretical turn: Collingwood and Childe
  • Historical archaeology
  • Jerusalem and its layers

For many there seems no significant difference between archaeology and history. Both are devoted to uncovering the past (although literally in the case of archaeology), both recognize the importance of historical chronology, and in broad terms there are strong parallels in the how the two disciplines have developed. Are archaeologists, therefore, nothing more than historians with dirty hands?

If we dig beneath the surface (to continue the metaphor) then certain significant differences can be detected. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the writing of history has an ancient lineage in Greece and Rome, while archaeology has developed only in recent times (Section 1). True, for millennia people have unearthed the remains of previous civilizations, but this was in the search for precious artefacts. Indeed, this motive impelled much of the work of unearthing the past until the modern era. At this point, underpinned by the intellectual transformations of the nineteenth century, archaeology emerged as a discipline in its own right, and embarked on a quest to understand more about the ancient past through the collection and classification of material artefacts.

In the early decades, and despite the tentative identification of stages of societal development, the emphasis remained on empirically-based description. In the mid twentieth century, archaeology came under the spell of theory as Gordon Childe urged his contemporaries seriously to address the matter of explanation (Section 2). In other words, it was no longer sufficient to collect and organize artefacts, they were there to help us provide explanations of how societies changed. This move unleashed in the post-war years an extraordinarily diverse and fragmented body of work, from which emerged one strand which attempted to bring together archaeology and history. So called historical archaeology has to our minds offered considerable potential in overcoming artificial barriers between the disciplines, as evidenced, for example, in the recent work on early imperial formations (Section 3).

The three sections of this chapter have said three things.

  • The similarities between archaeology and history are obvious enough. Both disciplines seek to reveal the past through the recovery and interpretation of what remains from the period in question. Both have lineages which can be traced back to antiquity, and have similar trajectories in their emergence as scholarly disciplines, especially during the nineteenth century when they came under the thrall of professionalization. There are, however, important differences. Conventionally, archaeologists have been concerned with preliterate cultures, and because of this have relied principally on material artefacts as sources of evidence, while historians have been concerned overwhelmingly with literate cultures and therefore have focused on written, documentary sources.
  • Types of evidence have tended to influence the respective approaches of the disciplines. Initially, the archaeologist set out to discover finds, which later were classified according to increasingly elaborate schemes which had the immense merit of providing reasonably reliable guides to dating. Only in the twentieth century, and largely under the influence of Collingwood and Childe, did archaeology acquire theoretical predispositions, which led to unseemly splits into warring factions. Historians have not been spared from such developments. Thus while the discipline has remained conservative – tied to Rankean notions of historical practice – it too has been punctured in recent years by attacks from the likes of postmodernism.
  • Now we see evidence of a certain convergence as archaeologists move into periods and cultures which have previously been the concern of historians, and historians accept with greater enthusiasm material artefacts as forms of evidence. Maybe this rapprochement means that the only real distinction is the state of their hands. Whatever the case might be, it is evident that both archaeology and history have lost something of their innocence in recent times.
  • Whether we are talking of the excavation of burial mounds in eighteenth-century America, or interpretation of the rise of European civilization, it is likely that no work was simply a quest for the truth. But lately, as we have seen in the case of Jerusalem, and example much in evidence in this final section, such work has become highly politicized, probably to the detriment of all concerned.

Katharina Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn (2013) The Archaeology of Jerusalem .

Is a good introduction to an important place for archaeology and an epicentre for the major monotheistic religious traditions.

* Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (2012) Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice.

This looks at archaeology in the round and in so doing highlights the scientific as well as the historical concerns of the discipline.

Bruce Trigger (2006) A History of Archaeological Thought.

This second edition is a valuable resource for the historian wishing to understand the intellectual context of archaeology from a noted archaeologist.

Peter Ucko (ed) (1995) Theory in Archaeology.

The author was a distinguished and experienced practitioner who conducted studies across the world. As part of an impressive collection, the Ucko contribution sets out differences in European and worldwide approaches to archaeology.

Chapter 20: Anthropology

  • Pens and pith helmets: the influence of anthropology on history
  • Functionalism and structuralism: understanding the Lord Mayor’s Show
  • Myths and history: Jewish conspiracies and the ‘blood libel’
  • The ‘dying god’: Captain Cook and ethnohistory
  • Microhistories: cheese, worms, night battles and ecstasies

This chapter began by outlining the differences between anthropology and history before going on to explore the considerable areas of common ground between the two disciplines. The use of ritual in historical studies influenced a whole generation of historiography, especially apparent since the 1960s. In the course of the discussion in Section 2 we looked at how theories like functionalism and structuralism, so influential in anthropology, were understood by major historians such as Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Natalie Zemon Davis. The third section examined the rich and fascinating universe of history and mythology within the framework of anthropology. The case study used here is the so-called ‘blood libel’ which across centuries and different cultures has maintained a myth that Jews require blood for their religious rituals. Anthropological approaches used by historians have gone some way in obtaining more sophisticated historical explanations for why this myth has enjoyed such extraordinary longevity. The common ground between anthropology and history includes the use of historical methods by anthropologists interested in ethnography that in turn has significant impact on how historians approach social and cultural history – a relationship that we find entwined in Section 4. Without sensitivity towards pre-literate societies such as those encountered in the anthropological writings about Captain Cook we would never have understood the full circumstances of his death. Finally, we will look at how microhistories, influenced by approaches associated with social anthropology seek ‘to detect the large in the small’. Here the work of Carlo Ginzburg is recognised as especially significant.

The five sections of this chapter have said five things:

  • Anthropology and history, where once separated and remote, began to find commonality in method and approach. Much of this commonality was organised around a shared understanding of culture. The first section traces the progeny of social or cultural anthropology and the use historians began to make in the 1960s and 1970s of anthropological approaches to ritual in particular. A hybrid historical anthropology learnt how to decode symbols.
  • An understanding of the signs and symbols that make up any study of so-called primitive societies can be utilised to know how the apparently ancient ritual of the Lord Mayor’s Show in nineteenth-century London, perhaps held in the most modern place on earth, could be understood through its cultural symbols. As historians became more anthropological and anthropologists became more historical, then areas of study such as religion, magic and witchcraft became open to different methodologies.
  • The importance of myth to anthropology is an area of shared concern to the historian. By looking in some detail at the myth of the Jewish blood libel, that is, the accusation that Jews require blood for their religious rituals, we ask how myth travels across time and geography. Clearly myth has a role as being important to those that believe the myth but, because of that, it also becomes important to the historian.
  • The approaches of anthropologists to preliterate societies can give an invaluable insight to historians of, say, imperialism. The example given here is the death of Captain Cook. Without knowledge of local customs and religious beliefs, his murder would be seen simply as an irrational act of a ‘child-like’ ‘primitive’ people. Instead, we now know that the natives’ understanding of religious destiny makes his demise entirely rational – to them.
  • The anthropological fixation on social systems, symbols and an emphasis on the interpretation of culture have led historians to look very closely at the microhistory of phenomena that for all intents and purposes appear quite unconnected. The extraordinary work of Carlo Ginzburg is looked at in some detail and, in particular, his painstaking use of what would be otherwise considered to be unconnected fragments of evidence.

Clifford Geertz (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures.

A brilliant collection of essays which captures so much of the productive sharing between anthropology and history. The essay on Balinese cock fights is perhaps the most important and certainly the most memorable to non-specialists.

Carlo Ginzburg (1990) Myths, Emblems, Clues.

Again a collection of essays which serve to support some of the themes developed throughout this chapter and also to provide a sketch of Ginsburg’s intellectual development.

Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds) (2002) Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

These are complex issues and this volume, while comprehensive, does not go out of its way to simplify the discussion of areas such as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’.

* Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (2002) Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present.

A comprehensive account of the mythologies and misunderstandings of Jews and Judaism which have been built up and relayed across centuries and cultures.

Robert Deliege (2004) Lévi-Strauss Today.

A very good retrospective of the enormous contribution made by Lévi-Strauss to the social sciences. It combines biographical insights with clear explanations of his theories to a range of disciplines, although not especially to history.

* Simon Gunn (2006) History and Cultural Theory.

A fine tool for historians wanting to understand the theoretical positions that have impacted on history. For the purposes of social and cultural anthropology and history, Chapter 3 is very useful indeed.

* Marshall Sahlins (1987) Islands of History.

The central text of Section 4 – follow the references in the text.

* Marshall Sahlins (1995) How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example.

This serves as a reply to Obeyesekere. Again do follow up references from the text, particularly as Sahlins is a prodigious writer in the academic journals. It also has the advantage of setting out the author’s summary of Islands of History .

Marshall Sahlins (1981) Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands.

A short pamphlet but one which outlines the theoretical contours of the argument very well.

Marshall Sahlins (2004)   Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History and Culture and Vice-Versa.

Should be read as the authoritative account from this particular author on the relation between anthropology and history.

Emmanuelle Le Roy Ladurie (1978) Montaillou.

Entertaining and important, Le Roy Ladurie’s research was based upon the large archive of manuscripts that survive concerning Montaillou and the terminal dates he uses are quite precise – 1294 to 1324. The emphasis of the book concerns the ‘Cathars and Catholics in a French village’ at a time of extreme duress. While by no means the first history of a small community, this was a ground-breaking work in microhistory.

Carlo Ginzburg (1982) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller.

Carlo ginzburg (1983) the night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries., * carlo ginzburg (2004) ecstasies: deciphering the witches’ sabbath..

All these books are exemplars of the anthropological approach. The last probably has the most developed introduction to the theoretical contours of microhistory.

Chapter 21: Literature

  • Literature as history
  • Historicism: text and context
  • Nostalgia and the graphic novel
  • Writing the metropolis

Literary cultures provide sources of historical evidence that greatly enrich understandings of the past. In the opening section we discussed how literary scholars have historicized their examination of the novel in ways that blur the boundaries between historical and fictional narrative, and provide both challenges and opportunities for the historian. New Historicism was discussed in the second section. This approach favours an informed interaction between ‘imaginary’ texts and the ‘real’ evidence which has resulted in an interdisciplinary between literary scholars and historians. The third section takes as its focus the graphic novel and how it too can hold up a mirror to both individuals and society, and as such may be worthy of examination, telling us something about our contemporary preoccupations with the past. The final section used the literary and historical writing of the metropolis in order to illustrate how literature and history can enjoy a fruitful and productive relationship.

The four sections of this chapter have said four things:

  • Historians and literary scholars are both driven by narrative. People, places, and events are given coherence through imagination. The historian is more likely to press a case that his or her story is true and verified by fact while those more concerned with literature achieves a deeper truth about the human condition. Both are on to something. True historians do place emphasis on source and method and may well prefer detail over the broad sweep of history as often painted by literary forms.  By using examples from Arthur Conan Doyle to Hilary Mandel we can readily see that literature itself tells us something about present concerns, anxieties and fears while promising to reach parts that historians – bound by the limits of the archive – may well miss yet can still be both credible and compelling. 
  • With the so-called ‘New Historicism’ came a realization among literature specialists that the value of a text could not be judged in some objective, neutral space that separated the expert reader from the text itself. Hence, it was recognized, the literary scholar was as tainted by contemporary culture as the work itself. The solution was to take into account the context of when the work was written and when the same work was read. Therefore, it was concluded, history and culture defined each other. So the relationship between historians and the scholars of literature has been either enhanced or used as a way of arguing that historical method could never be said to arrive at a final truth. At its most positive, acts of ‘literal archaeology’ have produced works in each discipline that have demonstrated a remarkable dexterity and imagination.
  • ‘Graphic narration’ is another way in which stories that are past-regarding escape the narrower methodologies of the trained historian. The response to 9/11 came in many forms but not least among them was an eruption of comic or graphic novels. Quite often these themes emerged in the genre as forms of social anxiety or, on another register, as forms of nostalgia for times and places where the future could be anticipated in contour and shape. In either case, the section suggests, the graphic novel has come into its own as a way of understanding personal stories in parallel or simple juxtaposition with narratives of nation or even of a reductionist notion of good versus evil. We ignore this consideration of the past and change very much at our peril.
  • Finally we returned to the metropolis has a site in which both historians and those concerned with fiction have often trod on similar paths. Perhaps key here is the unknowability of the modern city. Historians could study say local government or public utilities but how to give voice to the voiceless and how to understand complex urban spaces that contemporaries themselves believed to be essentially beyond comprehension. Enter a Mayhew, a Booth or a Dickens. Surely the great ‘Condition of England’ novels that chartered the progress of the Industrial Revolution had something to say as did the social investigators – each surely not uninfluenced by the so-called slum novelists such as George Gissing of Arthur Morrison. Either way, our view of the past is surely enhanced.

Alison Light (2015) Common People and the History of an English Family.

This is public history and it is family history. Using some of the sources routinely employed by the genealogist the results here are neither purely ‘history from below’ nor wholly a memorial to ancestors. The critical interlocutor is an intimate knowledge and use of language which succeeds, brilliantly, to unite text with context.

Simon Schama (1991) Dead Certainties.

Reveals more about the complex relationship between fiction and historical truth by providing answers to questions that cannot be answered by conventional historical method and reflecting on the process of how narratives are created. In doing this, Schama self-consciously used literary devices.

* Dominick La Capra (2013) History, Literature, Critical Theory.

This is an accomplished attempt to consider the layered and complex intercourse between literature and history. It is clear but not mechanical and sees history as a discipline and a process. It should be consulted by those who wish to search further on the conceptual boundaries where literature and history co-exist.

Chapter 22: Geography

  • History, space and place
  • Geographies of empire
  • How to lie with maps: maps, methodology and the metropolis

Geography and its methods have been especially useful to historians in recent years, particularly for those historians working on urban topics and on empire. The first section acknowledges the way place and space have been understood in both urban and imperial studies and charts the development of historical geography as a sub-discipline, closely related to both anthropology, which we have explored, and sociology, which is the subject of the next. This section, therefore, will concentrate on the contribution of historical geography and its importance to the historical method in the study of space or place, using examples that illustrate how geographical approaches to history have become critical to historians. By the end of the section we will have a robust idea of why geography counts in historical analysis more generally and why it is important to history. The second section investigates empire geographies: geographies closely aligned with postcolonial criticisms of imperialism, postcolonial discourses and the problem of how power was wielded in imperial spaces, in both the past and the present. The final section concentrates on urban spaces and the mapping used by Charles Booth, the late nineteenth-century statistician, philanthropist and social investigator. Maps have been a constant if changing focus for historical geography and are useful as a way of illustrating the extent to which geography has moved away from the social sciences and towards the arts or humanities, facilitating the use of maps as historical sources.

  • The methods of historical geography are important in understanding place and the changing nature of places. Geography has been particularly important in charting empire and understanding the role of place in urban environments. The main point to grasp from this section, however, is that how we define what historical geography is has been largely dependent on the changing nature of what historical geography does. On occasion, it has embedded itself within the sciences, at other times it has focused on ‘softer’ evidence such as language or culture. It has gone through a postmodern phase where ‘representations’ of phenomena have become more important than the phenomena itself. In either case, it can be safely stated that historical geography is set apart from physical geography and its focus on place and the comparison with place in the past has proved to be both useful and innovative to historians.
  • Empire geographies have explored in some depth over recent years the relationship between centre and colonial periphery and the way cartography proved to be an aid in the imperialist project. Indeed the focus on the centre/periphery metaphor in understanding both urban and imperial spaces continues to yield some fascinating historical questions. One such question is the nature of the relationship between so-called urban social investigators in the past, anxious to understand and map the ‘poor man’s country’ and the imperial explorers who wanted to chart the boundaries of the known world. By looking closely at the way mapping has evolved since 1400, it was possible in this section to see how mapping the world could assist (for the West) the process of ruling the world. In this sense, geographers quite often have been at the forefront of what it meant to be modern. Without the tools of historical geography, we would have remained quite ignorant of this process.
  • Urban geographies have exposed the constructed nature of map-making as, in the case of Charles Booth in the nineteenth century, the result of subjective moralising not objective ‘scientific’ approaches. By taking Booth as a case study, it became possible to see how mapping social phenomena could appear objective and scientific but in reality owed more to subjectivity and the moralising (if well-meaning) of a late-Victorian gentleman. Indeed it was suggested in this section that Booth was very much influenced by contemporary social reportage; that is, portrayals of the poor and of different ethnic groups (notably Jews and the Irish) by sensationalist journalism, slum literature and paintings that claimed to be socially realistic. Mapping and the historical study of place remain vital as a facet of our overall historical understanding.

David N. Livingstone (1992) The Geographical Tradition.

This has proved to be a seminal work in its comprehensive treatment of the changing meaning of geography and its relationship to the discipline of history.

Felix Driver (2001) Geography Militant: Geography, Exploration and Empire.

Driver takes a comprehensive view of the whole panoply of empire geographies, looking closely at the role of explorers and scientists but finishes with an interesting and important chapter on descriptions of empire in the context of late Victorian London.

Jeremy Black (1997) Maps in History: Constructing Images of the Past.

This should be read in conjunction with the author’s Maps in Politics, published in the same year. Both books are especially strong on warning about the opportunities and pitfalls of using maps as sources.

Eric Wolf (1983) Europe and the People Without History.

This is an extraordinarily ambitious world history written not by an historian but by an anthropologist. Not only does it challenge triumphant narratives of the rise of the West, but puts squarely on the agenda the importance of space to an understanding of historical change.

Chapter 23: Archives in a digital world

  • What is an archive?
  • ‘When we return as human beings again’: archives and the ashes
  • ‘Speaking for ourselves’: state and community archives
  • Archives and the digital turn

The idea of the archive is an ancient one and the archive itself is often a locus of power. Archives can take the form of a stone inscription, a clay tablet or perhaps even a recorded memory and need not simply comprise parchment and paper. This chapter moved beyond definitions and interpretations of the archive by examining how an archive is built and developed, the sheer variety of sources that can make up an archive, and how the archive can increase or recede in importance depending on the preoccupations and fashions of the day. This explored, the second section examined the preservation of an extensive archive of East European shtetl or small town Jewry through the YIVO, an institute for Jewish research. The mere existence of the YIVO archive allows, in a sense, a way of life to survive, even to live on, making it possible for historians to map the road to evil and back. This case study shows the possible extent of the archive but also the political nature and dimensions of archives more generally. By discussing The National Archives at Kew and the concept of community archives in the final section, we ask once again, not only what an archive is but also whom it should serve. In this way, the chapter finishes by moving away from an examination of the ‘official’ or national archives governed by agreed professional standards to the ‘democratisation of the archive’ and proposals for archives to be generated, not by the state, but by local associations and communities. Finally, we looked at the lasting importance of turn to digitization on archives and the practice of historians.

  • Archives have traditionally been defined by sets of power relationships; most often in the modern period by the acquisition of the archive by the nation state. The archive is also acquired, maintained and read in ways more subjective than the professionalisation of the process might allow. This has led to a judgement about the archive that naturally questions its overall subjectivity and its ability to be a simple reflection of the society in which it is located. This has led to questions about the nature of the archive as a form of knowledge production. It has also prompted notions that the boundaries of the archive are very fluid with the archive seen as a partial survival of the past as well as a wholly owned subsidiary of the here and now.
  • Archives can be varied and multi-layered and mean different things at different times. They can also, as in the case of the YIVO Jewish Research Institute, identify very closely with a particular subject; in this case collecting the last fragments of eastern European Jewry as they found ways of making sense of their lives and identities before many were murdered in the labour and death camps of the Nazi regime. While the archive that was surreptitiously collected proved to be very varied indeed, it nonetheless was an archive that was supplanted by the memories of those that survived. Its main function, however, was to rescue and then consolidate the narrative of a people or nation.
  • The Public Record Office (now The National Archives) has gained over the centuries both influence and power over our national memory – this despite years when the archive was not gathered in one place and tended to be in poor shape. Yet, it has gathered to itself a good deal of expertise. Archives dominated by official approaches can by the application of new technologies also empower individuals and communities, opening up different types of archives and changing traditional approaches to the collection and maintenance of the archive. These so-called community archives open up distinct opportunities for the national archive to be more locally focused, and less beholden to the organised and professional systems that are charged with selecting the raw material today for the history that is likely to be written tomorrow.
  • Without doubt the digital turn has opened up a universe of possibilities for the historian. Once obscure and distant collections – from the records of the Old Bailey to the squalid details of the slave trade – are but a click away. This does, however, present theoretical challenges and even ethical choices for teacher and learner alike. The ultimate challenge will (as ever) be our selection of archive and the integrity we bring to both history as a discipline and to the dead themselves.

* Antoinette Burton (ed.) (2005) Archive Stories, Fictions and the Writing of History.

This collection rejects the idea of the archive as static and objective, ‘innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretative application’. Researchers expand on this theme by telling their stories of archives consulted in India, Australia and so on. The introduction by Burton is excellent.

Natalie Zemon Davis (1987) Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France.

Confronts the usual practice of historians to either ignore the fictive elements of an historical document or by the application of ‘scientific’ methodology peel away these stories to get at what is truly important – in this case ‘pardon tales’ that in the sixteenth century provided mitigation for crimes such as murder and so forth. Instead, it questions the boundary of fact and fiction in the archive.

Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds) (2002) Refiguring the Archive.

The result of a sustained project about archives and their uses, this collection contains papers presented at a conference on the subject. Its main concern is to both theorise the archive but also to interrogate the nature of the archive, especially the state archive of South Africa in the period after the colonial and apartheid eras.

* G. H. Martin and Peter Spufford (eds) (1990) The Records of the Nation.

A reminder that The National Archives at Kew is not only the keeper of at least one nation’s memory but also the centre of important scholarship. It tells the fascinating story of the world’s largest continuously existing state archive and its conservation. Contains essays by G. H. Martin, Peter Spufford and Elizabeth M. Hallam.

Chapter 24: Oral history

  • ‘Anthropologies of ourselves’: urban, rural, foreign
  • Oral historiography
  • Interviewing techniques and the limits of memory: Arthur Harding and the East End underworld
  • The wider conceptual problems

This chapter discusses the subject of oral history in terms of the opportunities it offers to the historian and in relation to the conceptual and methodological issues that it raises. In the first instance, this involves looking at the use made of oral history, not just in colleges and universities, but also in the wider community where it has found a home. Much of the ideological and political importance of oral history as a method can be understood by examining how it rose to its current popular status. To do this involves describing how it grew out of a background in social history and ‘history from below’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, collecting and interpreting oral evidence has a much older history than this. Sociologists began using interviews and participant observation in urban settings as early as the 1920s and historians adopting such techniques were well aware of this. Finally, oral history is moved by an urgent sense of recovering a world of memory, the reflections of older people, that are about to be lost as they slip over the lip of memory into a forgotten obscurity. At a wider level, this informed the fear that whole cultures and sub-cultures might disappear. This thought alone opens up another lineage for oral history. While anthropologists and ethnographers had long used such techniques in their fieldwork in Africa, Asia and South America, the work of Jan Vansina in Africa most notably has had a somewhat different purpose. Taking both anthropology and history as his starting point, the aim was not to recover the memories of those who had participated in an historical event but to make use of African oral traditions that passed down stories from the past but which were then manifested as homilies or metaphors for current political or power relationships.

  • Oral history is an invaluable tool for the historian and can be used in a variety of different situations to give us an invaluable view on the past. The subject area for these methodologies may differ – for example, urban change, rural social development or political transformation in South Africa. In all these instances, the need to contextualise findings derived from oral history remains paramount.
  • Oral history exists within a wider context of myth, unreliable memory and competing narratives about the past, but this presents methodological problems. The development of oral history in its modern, western guise is traced via its influence from attempts to retrieve a ‘history from below’ as the new social history developed in the 1960s. Oral history was seen as one way that a previous untold history could be pieced together using its methods.
  • These methodological problems were played out in the chosen case study of an oral history from the 1980s, Raphael Samuel’s East End Underworld . These were very clear when focusing on the detailed lives and preoccupations of historian and interviewee. In the case of Samuel and Harding, it became clear that each was influenced by the historical context of the East End of London and its popular construction and came to the project with their own priorities and assumptions.
  • The practice of oral history has existed in more anthropologically based oral methodologies in Africa and elsewhere that have at their centre a desire to understand the oral histories of pre-literate societies. These societies tend to tell the lineage of their cultures collectively, handing down stories which then serve to make sense of their present and most certainly do not rely on living memory. It also exists in western cultures to provide a basic human need to retrieve memories from oblivion and this need has its origins in Enlightenment folklorist traditions.

Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds) (2006) The Oral History Reader.

Celebrates the establishment of oral history as an accepted part of the wider discipline; this impressive anthology takes in contributions from across the world. Of particular interest are the essays by Paul Thompson, Liusa Passarini, Joanna Bornat and Trevor Lummis.

* Raphael Samuel (1981) East End Underworld. Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding.

An extraordinary example of the oral history method. Contentious in its planning and execution it nonetheless stands out as a model of interviewing technique. Unfortunately, this volume is now out of print but well worth consulting if possible. A supplementary volume by Claus and Marriott is forthcoming.

Elizabeth Tonkin (1992) Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History.

A complex argument, focused on the processes in which self-consciousness is constructed through a medley of social influences and which are understood through a multi-disciplinary approach.

Jan Vansina (1985) Oral Tradition as History.

Gives an insight into pioneering approaches in anthropological fieldwork as well as, for the oral historian, ideas on the importance of language, memory, performance and ritual.

Anthony Selden and Joanna Pappworth (1983) By Word of Mouth: Elite Oral History.

A guide to the study of elite oral history. This volume is especially notable because it is concerned with political power in socially high places.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Imagine that you are not reading this textbook. Imagine instead that you are lying on your back in some soft grass on a warm summ er night, far from city lights, staring into the vast, dark night sky. As you continue to gaze at the stars, you would likely notice that over the course of hours they all slowly move – in unison – in the same direction. From the Northern Hemisphere, you will always see the constellation Canis Major near Orion , or the constellation of the Celestial Bear flanked by its seven hunters, but all of them will seem to rotate around Polaris , the North Star. If you are incredibly perceptive, however, you may notice that not all points of light in the night sky move together. Some of them follow their own path, wandering through the sky with the stars as a backdrop. The ancient Greeks called them asteres planetai , meaning wandering stars , which is where we get the word planet from. If you were to carefully track the path of a planet over the course of a few nights, you would realize that – even though its movement is different from that of the stars – it is far from random. It follows a certain path through the night sky. Indeed, while different planets follow different paths, you could begin to notice similarities between the motions of all the planets as they wander through the heavens. Observed from the Earth, they all appear to move in an eastward direction, and their paths are roughly on the same plane.

But why? What kind of explanation could we give for why planets’ paths differ from those of the stars? Why do planets seem to behave in very similar ways to one another? What are the best scientific theories we have to explain planetary motion?

Let’s try a familiar explanation. Those planets are actually no different from the Earth: they are large massive objects, all orbiting around a much more massive object in the centre of our solar system – the Sun. Isaac Newton showed in his law of universal gravitation that the very same force which pulls an apple to the ground, and which causes the parabolic paths of projectiles, also causes planets and moons to take the precise paths they do through space. The speed of the planets and the force of gravity keep planets like the Earth and Mars in orbit around the Sun. From the vantage point of Earth, therefore, planets seem to wander through the night sky because they are following their own, elliptical paths around our nearby Sun. Meanwhile, the constellations and positions of the stars remain relatively fixed because they are so far away from the solar system, and they rotate together due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. This is the answer you would receive if you were able to travel back to the year 1800 and ask a member of the scientific community at the Royal Society in London, England to give you their best , agreed-upon scientific theories about planetary motion.

But what if we were to travel even further back in time, say 500 years? What accepted theories would an astronomer from the University of Paris in the year 1500 use to explain the wandering of the planets? A late-medieval astronomer would explain planetary motion by referencing Aristotelian natural philosophy. This set of theories accounted for the motion of objects by considering the movements that are natural to different elements. It was believed at the time that the universe is made of two completely distinct regions – terrestrial and celestial. Everything in the terrestrial region was thought to be composed of a certain combination of the four terrestrial elements – earth , water , air , and fire . The elements earth and water were believed to be heavy , while the elements air and fire were believed to be light .

Each of the four elements was thought to have a natural position to which it is predisposed. For heavy elements, the natural position is the centre of the universe, which explained why everything made of elements earth and water has a tendency to fall down. This is why, they would say, when you drop a rock it goes straight down. This would also suggest that the terrestrial globe, which is predominantly a combination of the elements earth and water, should necessarily be at the centre of the universe. In the celestial region , in contrast, everything, including the planets and the stars, was believed to be made of a completely different element, aether . The natural tendency of aether is to revolve in a circular path around the centre of the universe. The planets, being between the stationary sphere of the Earth and the slowly-rotating stars, naturally follow their own circular paths through the night sky, accounting for their apparent “wandering” in front of the distant stars.

Tired of all this hypothetical time travel, let’s say you made an actual voyage to the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, USA, and – after a relaxing day at the beach – asked a modern-day astronomer to explain planetary motion using the best, agreed-upon scientific theories. The astronomer would not give you the Aristotelian-Medieval answer, nor would they give you the Newtonian answer you may be familiar with from basic physics or astronomy classes. The accepted view today is that the paths of the planets, like the Earth, are best explained by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, not Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Today, the elliptical paths of planets around the sun are not taken to be due to a force called gravity but are rather due to the fact that the mass of our Sun bends the fabric of space-time itself. Imagine a region of space-time without any material objects. Such a region would be completely flat. What this means is that in such a space, light rays would travel along straight lines, and the geometry we learned in secondary school, Euclidean geometry, will hold exactly.

Now, let’s add a star to this region of space. According to general relativity, this star will curve the space-time around it, affecting the motion of all other material processes in its vicinity, including light rays. The space will no longer be exactly describable by Euclid’s geometry, but rather by a geometry developed by the German mathematician Herman Minkowski and incorporated by Einstein into his theory. This geometry treats time as a fourth dimension, perpendicular to the familiar three dimensions of length, width, and breadth, which is why we speak of space- time . Even physicists can’t really picture all this. They can represent the situation using mathematical equations and make predictions by solving them. They understand these mathematical models by using analogies that involve fewer dimensions. As an example of such an analogy, let’s imagine a stretched bedsheet with a basketball placed in the middle of it. The basketball will make a dip in the bedsheet. The two-dimensional bedsheet represents four-dimensional space-time. The dip in the bedsheet in the third dimension produced by the ball represents the curvature of four-dimensional space-time produced by an object with mass, like a star. Now, let’s roll a tennis ball across the bedsheet. Because the fabric of the bedsheet is curved by the basketball, the tennis ball will not move in a straight line, but rather will have a curved trajectory along the bedsheet. It will appear as though the tennis ball is attracted by the basketball, while in fact it is merely following the curvature of the bedsheet. According to general relativity, something like this happens when a region of space-time is curved by a massive object, such as a star, with the tennis ball being something like a planet moving on a curved trajectory through space near the star.

The same goes for any object with mass. The reason the Moon or a spacecraft continues to revolve around the Earth is that the Earth, as a massive object, bends the space-time around it to capture the Moon in a sort of dip in space-time. Similarly, the Sun, a significantly more massive object, bends a larger region of space-time than the Earth and captures the Earth, the planets, and many other celestial objects in its larger dip in space. The degree of curvature of space-time around an object depends on both the mass of an object and on how compressed that mass is into a small region of space. If any object is compressed within its Schwarzschild radius, named for the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild, the curvature of space will become so great that even light rays cannot escape it. It will become a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is 8.7 millimetres. If the Earth were somehow compressed to this tiny radius, it would become a black hole. Although in the 2009 Star Trek movie, malevolent aliens destroyed the planet Vulcan this way, astrophysicists don’t know of any natural process that would crush a planet to such densities. The only known natural process that can crush an object to within its Schwarzschild radius is the collapse of a massive star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel, and this is how astrophysicists suppose black holes form.

What this means is that the seeming attraction between two material objects is nothing but an inertial motion in a curved space. According to general relativity, there is no force of gravity; all material objects curve the space around them to a greater or lesser degree and this curvature affects the motion of other material objects which happen to be in the vicinity, just like the motion of the tennis ball on a suspended bedsheet. Note that physicists still use the word “gravity” as a shortcut for “motion in a curved space-time”. Yet, strictly speaking, in general relativity the seeming gravitational attraction among material objects is understood as merely a motion in a space-time which is not flat but curved by material objects. A planet’s elliptical orbit, therefore, is not because of gravity, but because of a combination of that planet’s own momentum and the shape of the space-time bent by the Sun’s mass.

In short, the best astronomical theories from different historical periods explained the motion of the planets in very different ways. But the scientific communities in any one of these periods didn’t just agree on astronomy! In addition to astronomical and physical theories, the scientific communities of each of these periods also accepted a variety of theories on different natural, social, formal, and artificial objects. Considered together, these individual theories from any one historical moment can be shown to make up a complex, interwoven tapestry of theories, constituting that historical community’s best available description of the world. Take, for instance, the theories that we accept nowadays. If we were to ask a scientist what theories best describe the world, they would probably mention several theories from natural science , such as general relativity, quantum physics, big bang cosmology, contemporary chemistry, the modern evolutionary synthesis in biology, etc. They would also likely mention some theories from social science , such as those from psychology, economics, or sociology. In addition, they would probably mention a few theories that pertain to formal science , including mathematics and logic. Here is a snapshot of some of the theories accepted these days:

This interlocking jigsaw puzzle represents many of this community’s best available descriptions of the world – their accepted theories . Taken together, we call this complete set of a community’s accepted theories its mosaic .

Mosaics change through time as scientific communities accept new theories and reject old ones. Here is a quick snapshot of a typical mid-18 th -century Newtonian mosaic:

Among other things, this mosaic included Newtonian physics with its three laws of mechanics and the law of gravity, the chemical theory of phlogiston, and even theology, the study of God and his works.

Finally, here are some of the theories of the Aristotelian-Medieval mosaic:

Notice the presence of Aristotelian natural philosophy with its theory of four terrestrial and one celestial element, theology, and, interestingly, astrology, the study of celestial influences on terrestrial affairs.

Mosaics and changes in them are the central focus of this textbook. For any point in history, a community’s mosaic showcases its best attempt to understand reality, in all its dynamism and complexity. This drive to understand reality is a human one, which means that individuals – in their social and institutional contexts – are important parts of the story of how certain theories come to be, and how those theories come to change. For instance, to better understand the theories of planetary motion we sketched earlier, we could trace the histories of institutions like the Royal Society in England, the University of Paris, or the Mauna Kea Observatories in the U.S.A., or of individual investigators at any one of those institutions. One can certainly come to appreciate science’s history by approaching it this way! But a different kind of appreciation for science can be gained by taking a step back and seeing these astronomical theories as one facet of the total set of the best theories accepted by the scientific community of the time. Focusing on the mosaics of general scientific communities allows us to get the “big picture” of how scientific knowledge – writ large – has changed through time, without necessarily excluding or sacrificing that particular data of who was producing that knowledge, where , and under what specific circumstances.

Considering science from this broad historical perspective sheds light on some of the perennial questions in the philosophy of science . Philosophy of science asks questions that attempt to clarify exactly what science is, how it is different from other human endeavours, and how it works. We will take the opportunity to engage with the following pivotal questions of the philosophy of science in the first half of this textbook, all the while drawing from the rich history of science:

  • Absolute Knowledge: Is there anything we can know with absolute certainty? That is, are there any theories in the mosaic that will never be replaced, that are established beyond any reasonable doubt? (Chapter 2)
  • Scientific method: How do scientists evaluate competing theories? What are the criteria they employ to assess theories? (Chapter 3)
  • Laws of Scientific Change: What is the mechanism of scientific change? How do mosaics and their elements change through time? Is there a pattern to those changes? (Chapter 4)
  • Scientific Progress: Are our theories becoming better descriptions of reality? Is there such thing as scientific progress? (Chapter 5)
  • Science and Non-science: What’s the difference between science and non-science? What differentiates scientific theories from unscientific theories and scientific changes from unscientific changes? (Chapter 6)

Our culture is saturated by scientific claims and the technological results of scientific investigations. We are used to hearing about scientific discoveries in popular news media. Careers increasingly require a level of scientific literacy, and you may even be pursuing a career as a practicing scientist. This is all to say that we talk about “science” all the time. But have we really taken the time to think about what science is, how scientific theories are accepted and rejected, and the degree of certainty we can have about scientific claims? Engaging with the aforementioned questions in the first chapters is an opportunity to do just that – to look at science from a new perspective, with fresh eyes.

After having done so, we will trace the genealogy of our contemporary scientific worldview by examining the mosaics of four key historical moments and addressing two key historical questions:

What was the content of the mosaic at each of these four moments?

How do these mosaics change over time?

That is, what theories did that community actually consider to be the best available in each scientific field/discipline (astronomy, physics, biology, etc.) in any given historical period and what led to the eventual replacement of those theories? In chapter 7, we will dive into the beautiful systematicity of the Aristotelian-Medieval worldview, shedding light on the theories which made up their cosmology, physics, and informed their medical practices. In chapter 8, we will turn to a lesser-known and underappreciated worldview in the history of science – the Cartesian worldview. We will turn to the Newtonian worldview in chapter 9, with a focus on how its mosaic eventually replaced the Cartesian worldview in Europe and represented the final shift away from the Aristotelian-Medieval worldview. Finally, in chapter 10, we will consider how the acceptance of a key set of new theories led to the shift from the Newtonian to the Contemporary scientific worldview, returning us to the present.

With a greater grasp of science’s history and philosophy under our belts, we will bring them both together in our concluding chapter 11. Here, we will discuss the metaphysics of science and how mosaics shape metaphysical assumptions and, concomitantly, worldviews. Additionally, chapter 11 will be an opportunity to consider the limitations of an introductory textbook to so vast a topic, but we will do so by directing you to fascinating avenues of further research.

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  • Section Summary
  • Introduction
  • 1.1 Developing a Global Perspective
  • 1.2 Primary Sources
  • 1.3 Causation and Interpretation in History
  • Review Questions
  • Check Your Understanding Questions
  • Application and Reflection Questions
  • 2.1 Early Human Evolution and Migration
  • 2.2 People in the Paleolithic Age
  • 2.3 The Neolithic Revolution
  • 3.1 Early Civilizations
  • 3.2 Ancient Mesopotamia
  • 3.3 Ancient Egypt
  • 3.4 The Indus Valley Civilization
  • 4.1 From Old Babylon to the Medes
  • 4.2 Egypt’s New Kingdom
  • 4.3 The Persian Empire
  • 4.4 The Hebrews
  • 5.1 Ancient China
  • 5.2 The Steppes
  • 5.3 Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia
  • 5.4 Vedic India to the Fall of the Maurya Empire
  • 6.1 Early Mediterranean Peoples
  • 6.2 Ancient Greece
  • 6.3 The Hellenistic Era
  • 6.4 The Roman Republic
  • 6.5 The Age of Augustus
  • 7.1 The Daily Life of a Roman Family
  • 7.2 Slavery in the Roman Empire
  • 7.3 The Roman Economy: Trade, Taxes, and Conquest
  • 7.4 Religion in the Roman Empire
  • 7.5 The Regions of Rome
  • 8.1 Populating and Settling the Americas
  • 8.2 Early Cultures and Civilizations in the Americas
  • 8.3 The Age of Empires in the Americas
  • 9.1 Africa’s Geography and Climate
  • 9.2 The Emergence of Farming and the Bantu Migrations
  • 9.3 The Kingdom of Kush
  • 9.4 North Africa’s Mediterranean and Trans-Saharan Connections
  • 10.1 The Eastward Shift
  • 10.2 The Byzantine Empire and Persia
  • 10.3 The Kingdoms of Aksum and Himyar
  • 10.4 The Margins of Empire
  • 11.1 The Rise and Message of Islam
  • 11.2 The Arab-Islamic Conquests and the First Islamic States
  • 11.3 Islamization and Religious Rule under Islam
  • 12.1 The Indian Ocean World in the Early Middle Ages
  • 12.2 East-West Interactions in the Early Middle Ages
  • 12.3 Border States: Sogdiana, Korea, and Japan
  • 13.1 The Post-Roman West in the Early Middle Ages
  • 13.2 The Seljuk Migration and the Call from the East
  • 13.3 Patriarch and Papacy: The Church and the Call to Crusade
  • 13.4 The Crusading Movement
  • 14.1 Song China and the Steppe Peoples
  • 14.2 Chinggis Khan and the Early Mongol Empire
  • 14.3 The Mongol Empire Fragments
  • 14.4 Christianity and Islam outside Central Asia
  • 15.1 Culture and Society in Medieval Africa
  • 15.2 Medieval Sub-Saharan Africa
  • 15.3 The People of the Sahel
  • 16.1 Asia, North Africa, and Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
  • 16.2 Famine, Climate Change, and Migration
  • 16.3 The Black Death from East to West
  • 16.4 The Long-Term Effects of Global Transformation
  • 17.1 The Ottomans and the Mongols
  • 17.2 From the Mamluks to Ming China
  • 17.3 Gunpowder and Nomads in a Transitional Age
  • A | Glossary
  • B | World History , Volume 1, to 1500: Maps and Timelines
  • C | World Maps
  • D | Recommended Resources for the Study of World History

Knowing the past, the human story, has long been considered a mark of civilization, and its study has never been more important. The study of world history provides the skills necessary to meet global workforce needs while at the same time developing a sense of self and place in our global community. You will gain critical-thinking and analysis skills that will help you fulfill the role of a global citizen in our interconnected world. This text will help you approach history with an open mind, and it will engage you in meaningful ways, often highlighting content that remains relevant in today’s society.

Primary sources are the first-hand evidence with which historians form a foundation of knowledge of the past. Interpreting them requires attention to four key areas: the author, the audience, the intent, and the context. Secondary sources offer valuable starting points for inquiry and context, but students must be aware of any bias they contain. Despite the efforts of generations of historians, there are still people and regions we do not know much about. We must hope that new generations of historians will continue to hone our interpretation of the past.

The historian’s main job is to discover why history happened as it did. What caused the events that have shaped our shared human past? To answer this question, historians apply rigorous interpretative methodology rooted in the search for causation. They study events for both immediate causation and contributing factors, while avoiding judgment and remaining open to revision. You now have the tools you need to fully engage with the material in this text and begin your journey into the human past.

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  • Authors: Ann Kordas, Ryan J. Lynch, Brooke Nelson, Julie Tatlock
  • Publisher/website: OpenStax
  • Book title: World History Volume 1, to 1500
  • Publication date: Apr 19, 2023
  • Location: Houston, Texas
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Chapter 1: Introduction and History

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Figure 1.1 Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior.

Introduction

Clive Wearing is an accomplished musician who lost his ability to form new memories when he became sick at the age of 46. While he can remember how to play the piano perfectly, he cannot remember what he ate for breakfast just an hour ago (Sacks, 2007). James Wannerton experiences a taste sensation that is associated with the sound of words. His former girlfriend’s name tastes like rhubarb (Mundasad, 2013). John Nash is a brilliant mathematician and Nobel Prize winner. However, while he was a professor at MIT, he would tell people that the New York Times contained coded messages from extraterrestrial beings that were intended for him. He also began to hear voices and became suspicious of the people around him. Soon thereafter, Nash was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a state-run mental institution (O’Connor & Robertson, 2002). Nash was the subject of the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind . Why did these people have these experiences? How does the human brain work? And what is the connection between the brain’s internal processes and people’s external behaviors? This textbook will introduce you to various ways that the field of psychology has explored these questions.

What Is Psychology?

Learning objectives.

  • Understand the etymology of the word “psychology”
  • Define psychology
  • Understand the merits of an education in psychology

Psyche comes to represent the human soul’s triumph over the misfortunes of life in the pursuit of true happiness (Bulfinch, 1855); in fact, the Greek word psyche means soul, and it is often represented as a butterfly. The word psychology was coined at a time when the concepts of soul and mind were not as clearly distinguished (Green, 2001). The root ology denotes scientific study of, and psychology refers to the scientific study of the mind. Since science studies only observable phenomena and the mind is not directly observable, we expand this definition to the scientific study of mind and behavior.

The scientific study of any aspect of the world uses the scientific method to acquire knowledge. To apply the scientific method, a researcher with a question about how or why something happens will propose a tentative explanation, called a hypothesis, to explain the phenomenon. A hypothesis is not just any explanation; it should fit into the context of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is a broad explanation or group of explanations for some aspect of the natural world that is consistently supported by evidence over time. A theory is the best understanding that we have of that part of the natural world. Armed with the hypothesis, the researcher then makes observations or, better still, carries out an experiment to test the validity of the hypothesis. That test and its results are then published so that others can check the results or build on them. It is necessary that any explanation in science be testable, which means that the phenomenon must be perceivable and measurable. For example, that a bird sings because it is happy is not a testable hypothesis, since we have no way to measure the happiness of a bird. We must ask a different question, perhaps about the brain state of the bird, since this can be measured. In general, science deals only with matter and energy, that is, those things that can be measured, and it cannot arrive at knowledge about values and morality. This is one reason why our scientific understanding of the mind is so limited, since thoughts, at least as we experience them, are neither matter nor energy. The scientific method is also a form of empiricism. An empirical method for acquiring knowledge is one based on observation, including experimentation, rather than a method based only on forms of logical argument or previous authorities.

It was not until the late 1800s that psychology became accepted as its own academic discipline. Before this time, the workings of the mind were considered under the auspices of philosophy. Given that any behavior is, at its roots, biological, some areas of psychology take on aspects of a natural science like biology. No biological organism exists in isolation, and our behavior is influenced by our interactions with others. Therefore, psychology is also a social science.

History of Psychology

  • Understand the importance of Wundt and James in the development of psychology
  • Appreciate Freud’s influence on psychology
  • Appreciate the important role that behaviorism played in psychology’s history
  • Understand basic tenets of humanism
  • Understand how the cognitive revolution shifted psychology’s focus back to the mind

Psychology is a relatively young science with its experimental roots in the 19th century, compared, for example, to human physiology, which dates much earlier. As mentioned, anyone interested in exploring issues related to the mind generally did so in a philosophical context prior to the 19th century. Two men, working in the 19th century, are generally credited as being the founders of psychology as a science and academic discipline that was distinct from philosophy. Their names were Wilhelm Wundt and William James. This section will provide an overview of the shifts in paradigms that have influenced psychology from Wundt and James through today.

WUNDT AND STRUCTURALISM

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German scientist who was the first person to be referred to as a psychologist. His famous book entitled Principles of Physiological Psychology was published in 1873. Wundt viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to identify components of consciousness and how those components combined to result in our conscious experience. Wundt used introspection (he called it “internal perception”), a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed. Wundt’s version of introspection used only very specific experimental conditions in which an external stimulus was designed to produce a scientifically observable (repeatable) experience of the mind (Danziger, 1980). The first stringent requirement was the use of “trained” or practiced observers, who could immediately observe and report a reaction. The second requirement was the use of repeatable stimuli that always produced the same experience in the subject and allowed the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to the inner reaction. These experimental requirements were put in place to eliminate “interpretation” in the reporting of internal experiences and to counter the argument that there is no way to know that an individual is observing their mind or consciousness accurately, since it cannot be seen by any other person. This attempt to understand the structure or characteristics of the mind was known as structuralism . Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the University at Leipzig in 1879 ( Figure 1.3 ). In this laboratory, Wundt and his students conducted experiments on, for example, reaction times. A subject, sometimes in a room isolated from the scientist, would receive a stimulus such as a light, image, or sound. The subject’s reaction to the stimulus would be to push a button, and an apparatus would record the time to reaction. Wundt could measure reaction time to one-thousandth of a second (Nicolas & Ferrand, 1999).

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Figure 1.3 (a) Wilhelm Wundt is credited as one of the founders of psychology. He created the first laboratory for psychological research. (b) This photo shows him seated and surrounded by fellow researchers and equipment in his laboratory in Germany.

JAMES AND FUNCTIONALISM

William James (1842–1910) was the first American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate ( Figure 1.4 ). James was introduced to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and accepted it as an explanation of an organism’s characteristics. Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior. Adaptation means that a trait of an organism has a function for the survival and reproduction of the individual, because it has been naturally selected. As James saw it, psychology’s purpose was to study the function of behavior in the world, and as such, his perspective was known as functionalism . Functionalism focused on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment. Functionalism has a second, more subtle meaning in that functionalists were more interested in the operation of the whole mind rather than of its individual parts, which were the focus of structuralism. Like Wundt, James believed that introspection could serve as one means by which someone might study mental activities, but James also relied on more objective measures, including the use of various recording devices, and examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology (Gordon, 1995).

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Figure 1.4 William James, shown here in a self-portrait, was the first American psychologist.

FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Perhaps one of the most influential and well-known figures in psychology’s history was Sigmund Freud ( Figure 1.5 ). Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist who was fascinated by patients suffering from “hysteria” and neurosis. Hysteria was an ancient diagnosis for disorders, primarily of women with a wide variety of symptoms, including physical symptoms and emotional disturbances, none of which had an apparent physical cause. Freud theorized that many of his patients’ problems arose from the unconscious mind. In Freud’s view, the unconscious mind was a repository of feelings and urges of which we have no awareness. Gaining access to the unconscious, then, was crucial to the successful resolution of the patient’s problems. According to Freud, the unconscious mind could be accessed through dream analysis, by examinations of the first words that came to people’s minds, and through seemingly innocent slips of the tongue. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences, and this particular perspective dominated clinical psychology for several decades (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

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Figure 1.5 (a) Sigmund Freud was a highly influential figure in the history of psychology. (b) One of his many books, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis , shared his ideas about psychoanalytical therapy; it was published in 1922.

PAVLOV, WATSON, SKINNER, AND BEHAVIORISM

Early work in the field of behavior was conducted by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936). Pavlov studied a form of learning behavior called a conditioned reflex , in which an animal or human produced a reflex (unconscious) response to a stimulus and, over time, was conditioned to produce the response to a different stimulus that the experimenter associated with the original stimulus. The reflex Pavlov worked with was salivation in response to the presence of food. The salivation reflex could be elicited using a second stimulus, such as a specific sound, that was presented in association with the initial food stimulus several times. Once the response to the second stimulus was “learned,” the food stimulus could be omitted. Pavlov’s “ classical conditioning ” is only one form of learning behavior studied by behaviorists.

John B. Watson (1878–1958) was an influential American psychologist whose most famous work occurred during the early 20th century at Johns Hopkins University ( Figure 1.6 ). While Wundt and James were concerned with understanding conscious experience, Watson thought that the study of consciousness was flawed. Because he believed that objective analysis of the mind was impossible, Watson preferred to focus directly on observable behavior and try to bring that behavior under control. Watson was a major proponent of shifting the focus of psychology from the mind to behavior, and this approach of observing and controlling behavior came to be known as behaviorism . A major object of study by behaviorists was learned behavior and its interaction with inborn qualities of the organism. Behaviorism commonly used animals in experiments under the assumption that what was learned using animal models could, to some degree, be applied to human behavior.

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Figure 1.6 John B. Watson is known as the father of behaviorism within psychology.

Behaviorism dominated experimental psychology for several decades, and its influence can still be felt today (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Behaviorism is largely responsible for establishing psychology as a scientific discipline through its objective methods and especially experimentation. In addition, it is used in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Behavior modification is commonly used in classroom settings. Behaviorism has also led to research on environmental influences on human behavior.

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) was an American psychologist ( Figure 1.7 ). Like Watson, Skinner was a behaviorist, and he concentrated on how behavior was affected by its consequences. Therefore, Skinner spoke of reinforcement and punishment as major factors in driving behavior. As a part of his research, Skinner developed a chamber that allowed the careful study of the principles of modifying behavior through reinforcement and punishment. This device, known as an operant conditioning chamber (or more familiarly, a Skinner box), has remained a crucial resource for researchers studying behavior (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

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Figure 1.7 (a) B. F. Skinner is famous for his research on operant conditioning. (b) Modified versions of the operant conditioning chamber, or Skinner box, are still widely used in research settings today.

The Skinner box is a chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button. When the animal pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as a noise) or a token conditioner (such as a light) that is correlated with either the positive reinforcement or punishment.

Skinner’s focus on positive and negative reinforcement of learned behaviors had a lasting influence in psychology that has waned somewhat since the growth of research in cognitive psychology. Despite this, conditioned learning is still used in human behavioral modification. Skinner’s two widely read and controversial popular science books about the value of operant conditioning for creating happier lives remain as thought-provoking arguments for his approach (Greengrass, 2004).

MASLOW, ROGERS, AND HUMANISM

During the early 20th century, American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and psychoanalysis. However, some psychologists were uncomfortable with what they viewed as limited perspectives being so influential to the field. They objected to the pessimism and determinism (all actions driven by the unconscious) of Freud. They also disliked the reductionism, or simplifying nature, of behaviorism. Behaviorism is also deterministic at its core, because it sees human behavior as entirely determined by a combination of genetics and environment. Some psychologists began to form their own ideas that emphasized personal control, intentionality, and a true predisposition for “good” as important for our self- concept and our behavior. Thus, humanism emerged. Humanism is a perspective within psychology that emphasizes the potential for good that is innate to all humans. Two of the most well-known proponents of humanistic psychology are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (O’Hara, n.d.).

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist who is best known for proposing a hierarchy of human needs in motivating behavior ( Figure 1.8 ). Maslow asserted that so long as basic needs necessary for survival were met (e.g., food, water, shelter), higher-level needs (e.g., social needs) would begin to motivate behavior. According to Maslow, the highest-level needs relate to self-actualization, a process by which we achieve our full potential. Obviously, the focus on the positive aspects of human nature that are characteristic of the humanistic perspective is evident (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Humanistic psychologists rejected, on principle, the research approach based on reductionist experimentation in the tradition of the physical and biological sciences, because it missed the “whole” human being.

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Figure 1.8 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is shown.

Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was also an American psychologist who, like Maslow, emphasized the potential for good that exists within all people ( Figure 1.9 ). Rogers used a therapeutic technique known as client- centered therapy in helping his clients deal with problematic issues that resulted in their seeking psychotherapy. Client-centered therapy involves the patient taking a lead role in the therapy session. Rogers believed that a therapist needed to display three features to maximize the effectiveness of this particular approach: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy. Unconditional positive regard refers to the fact that the therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what he or she might say.

image

Figure 1.9 Carl Rogers, shown in this portrait, developed a client-centered therapy method that has been influential in clinical settings.

THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

Behaviorism’s emphasis on objectivity and focus on external behavior had pulled psychologists’ attention away from the mind for a prolonged period of time. The early work of the humanistic psychologists redirected attention to the individual human as a whole, and as a conscious and self-aware being. By the 1950s, new disciplinary perspectives in linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science were emerging, and these areas revived interest in the mind as a focus of scientific inquiry. This particular perspective has come to be known as the cognitive revolution (Miller, 2003). By 1967, Ulric Neisser published the first textbook entitled Cognitive Psychology , which served as a core text in cognitive psychology courses around the country (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Although no one person is entirely responsible for starting the cognitive revolution, Noam Chomsky was very influential in the early days of this movement ( Figure 1.10 ). Chomsky (1928–), an American linguist, was dissatisfied with the influence that behaviorism had had on psychology. He believed that psychology’s focus on behavior was short-sighted and that the field had to re-incorporate mental functioning into its purview if it were to offer any meaningful contributions to understanding behavior (Miller, 2003).

image

Figure 1.10 Noam Chomsky was very influential in beginning the cognitive revolution. In 2010, this mural honoring him was put up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Contemporary Psychology

  • Appreciate the diversity of interests and foci within psychology
  • Understand basic interests and applications in each of the described areas of psychology
  • Demonstrate familiarity with some of the major concepts or important figures in each of the described areas of psychology

Contemporary psychology is a diverse field that is influenced by all of the historical perspectives described in the preceding section. Reflective of the discipline’s diversity is the diversity seen within the American Psychological Association (APA) . The APA is a professional organization representing psychologists in the United States. The APA is the largest organization of psychologists in the world, and its mission is to advance and disseminate psychological knowledge for the betterment of people. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) was founded in 1988 and seeks to advance the scientific orientation of psychology. The APS publishes five research journals and engages in education and advocacy with funding agencies. A significant proportion of its members are international, although the majority is located in the United States.

BIOPSYCHOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

As the name suggests, biopsychology explores how our biology influences our behavior. While biological psychology is a broad field, many biological psychologists want to understand how the structure and function of the nervous system is related to behavior ( Figure 1.11 ). As such, they often combine the research strategies of both psychologists and physiologists to accomplish this goal (as discussed in Carlson, 2013).

image

Figure 1.11 Biological psychologists study how the structure and function of the nervous system generate behavior.

The research interests of biological psychologists span a number of domains, including but not limited to, sensory and motor systems, sleep, drug use and abuse, ingestive behavior, reproductive behavior, neurodevelopment, plasticity of the nervous system, and biological correlates of psychological disorders. Given the broad areas of interest falling under the purview of biological psychology, it will probably come as no surprise that individuals from all sorts of backgrounds are involved in this research, including biologists, medical professionals, physiologists, and chemists. This interdisciplinary approach is often referred to as neuroscience, of which biological psychology is a component (Carlson, 2013).

While biopsychology typically focuses on the immediate causes of behavior based in the physiology of a human or other animal, evolutionary psychology seeks to study the ultimate biological causes of behavior. To the extent that a behavior is impacted by genetics, a behavior, like any anatomical characteristic of a human or animal, will demonstrate adaption to its surroundings. These surroundings include the physical environment and, since interactions between organisms can be important to survival and reproduction, the social environment.

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

Scientists interested in both physiological aspects of sensory systems as well as in the psychological experience of sensory information work within the area of sensation and perception ( Figure 1.12 ). As such, sensation and perception research is also quite interdisciplinary. Imagine walking between buildings as you move from one class to another. You are inundated with sights, sounds, touch sensations, and smells. You also experience the temperature of the air around you and maintain your balance as you make your way. These are all factors of interest to someone working in the domain of sensation and perception.

image

Figure 1.12 When you look at this image, you may see a duck or a rabbit. The sensory information remains the same, but your perception can vary dramatically.

As described in a later chapter that focuses on the results of studies in sensation and perception, our experience of our world is not as simple as the sum total of all of the sensory information (or sensations) together. Rather, our experience (or perception) is complex and is influenced by where we focus our attention, our previous experiences, and even our cultural backgrounds.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

As mentioned in the previous section, the cognitive revolution created an impetus for psychologists to focus their attention on better understanding the mind and mental processes that underlie behavior. Thus, cognitive psychology is the area of psychology that focuses on studying cognitions, or thoughts, and their relationship to our experiences and our actions. Like biological psychology, cognitive psychology is broad in its scope and often involves collaborations among people from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds. This has led some to coin the term cognitive science to describe the interdisciplinary nature of this area of research (Miller, 2003).

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of development across a lifespan. Developmental psychologists are interested in processes related to physical maturation. However, their focus is not limited to the physical changes associated with aging, as they also focus on changes in cognitive skills, moral reasoning, social behavior, and other psychological attributes.

Early developmental psychologists focused primarily on changes that occurred through reaching adulthood, providing enormous insight into the differences in physical, cognitive, and social capacities that exist between very young children and adults. For instance, research by Jean Piaget ( Figure 1.13 ) demonstrated that very young children do not demonstrate object permanence. Object permanence refers to the understanding that physical things continue to exist, even if they are hidden from us. If you were to show an adult a toy, and then hide it behind a curtain, the adult knows that the toy still exists. However, very young infants act as if a hidden object no longer exists. The age at which object permanence is achieved is somewhat controversial (Munakata, McClelland, Johnson, and Siegler, 1997).

image

Figure 1.13 Jean Piaget is famous for his theories regarding changes in cognitive ability that occur as we move from infancy to adulthood.

PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY

Personality psychology focuses on patterns of thoughts and behaviors that make each individual unique. Several individuals (e.g., Freud and Maslow) that we have already discussed in our historical overview of psychology, and the American psychologist Gordon Allport, contributed to early theories of personality. These early theorists attempted to explain how an individual’s personality develops from his or her given perspective. For example, Freud proposed that personality arose as conflicts between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind were carried out over the lifespan. Specifically, Freud theorized that an individual went through various psychosexual stages of development. According to Freud, adult personality would result from the resolution of various conflicts that centered on the migration of erogenous (or sexual pleasure-producing) zones from the oral (mouth) to the anus to the phallus to the genitals. Like many of Freud’s theories, this particular idea was controversial and did not lend itself to experimental tests (Person, 1980).

More recently, the study of personality has taken on a more quantitative approach. Rather than explaining how personality arises, research is focused on identifying personality traits , measuring these traits, and determining how these traits interact in a particular context to determine how a person will behave in any given situation.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Social psychology focuses on how we interact with and relate to others. Social psychologists conduct research on a wide variety of topics that include differences in how we explain our own behavior versus how we explain the behaviors of others, prejudice, and attraction, and how we resolve interpersonal conflicts. Social psychologists have also sought to determine how being among other people changes our own behavior and patterns of thinking.

There are many interesting examples of social psychological research, and you will read about many of these in a later chapter of this textbook. Until then, you will be introduced to one of the most controversial psychological studies ever conducted. Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist who is most famous for research that he conducted on obedience. At the time, most psychologists agreed that few people would be willing to inflict such extraordinary pain and suffering, simply because they were obeying orders. Milgram decided to conduct research to determine whether or not this was true ( Figure 1.15 ). As you will read later in the text, Milgram found that nearly two-thirds of his participants were willing to deliver what they believed to be lethal shocks to another person, simply because they were instructed to do so by an authority figure (in this case, a man dressed in a lab coat). This was in spite of the fact that participants received payment for simply showing up for the research study and could have chosen not to inflict pain or more serious consequences on another person by withdrawing from the study. No one was actually hurt or harmed in any way, Milgram’s experiment was a clever ruse that took advantage of research confederates, those who pretend to be participants in a research study who are actually working for the researcher and have clear, specific directions on how to behave during the research study (Hock, 2009). Milgram’s and others’ studies that involved deception and potential emotional harm to study participants catalyzed the development of ethical guidelines for conducting psychological research that discourage the use of deception of research subjects, unless it can be argued not to cause harm and, in general, requiring informed consent of participants.

HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY

Health psychology focuses on how health is affected by the interaction of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. This particular approach is known as the biopsychosocial model ( Figure 1.16 ). Health psychologists are interested in helping individuals achieve better health through public policy, education, intervention, and research. Health psychologists might conduct research that explores the relationship between one’s genetic makeup, patterns of behavior, relationships, psychological stress, and health. They may research effective ways to motivate people to address patterns of behavior that contribute to poorer health (MacDonald, 2013).

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Figure 1.16 The biopsychosocial model suggests that health/illness is determined by an interaction of these three factors.

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Clinical psychology is the area of psychology that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders and other problematic patterns of behavior. As such, it is generally considered to be a more applied area within psychology; however, some clinicians are also actively engaged in scientific research. Counseling psychology is a similar discipline that focuses on emotional, social, vocational, and health- related outcomes in individuals who are considered psychologically healthy.

Issues related to the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders and problematic patterns of behavior will be discussed in detail in later chapters of this textbook.

image

Figure 1.17 Cognitive-behavioral therapists take cognitive processes and behaviors into account when providing psychotherapy. This is one of several strategies that may be used by practicing clinical psychologists.

Introductory Psychology (PSYCH 100) Copyright © by Vivian Hsu. All Rights Reserved.

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Chapter 1 ~ Introduction

A field crew uses backpack electrofishing gear to stun fish for sorting and evaluation in a small stream.

Environmental hazards, biodiversity, biotic factors, abiotic factors, pollution, lithosphere, hydrosphere, population growth, nutrient cycles, global warming, climate change, sustainability, environmental justice, renewable energy, and non-renewable energy.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to:

  • Trace the history of environmental science at local and global levels, the role of environmental science as an interdisciplinary subject, and its interrelationships with other Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
  • Define characteristics of all living beings (biota) based on the six kingdoms, their role in ecosystems, and their interaction with non-living (abiotic) factors, including the hydrologic cycle and the biogeochemical cycle of major elements (carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and sulfur (S)).
  • Describe renewable and non-renewable energy resources.
  • Identify environmental hazards and describe their toxic effects.
  • Differentiate between biological, physical, and chemical stressors in the environment and their effects on biodiversity and natural resources.
  • Explain the role of human beings in modifying ecosystems and human impacts on global warming, agriculture, food, nutrition, starvation, and environmental justice.

Chapter Overview

Introduction, the history of environmental science, interdisciplinary nature of environmental science.

Biosphere: Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, and Atmosphere

Preserving Biodiversity and the Six Kingdoms of Life

Demographics, non-renewable and renewable energy sources, nutrient cycles, environmental hazards.

  • Global Warming

Environmental Agriculture

Environmental ethics, quality, and justice, chapter summary.

Environmental science is a broad, important subject that encompasses all life forms (from microbial organisms to elephants and blue whales), as well as inanimate objects (water, air, soil, rocks, volcanoes) and their interactions. This chapter introduces basic environmental science concepts and perspectives that will be expanded in the remaining ten chapters. This chapter begins with a brief history of environmental science followed by the interdisciplinary nature of environmental science, the biosphere, biodiversity, demographics, environmental hazards, energy sources, nutrient cycling, global warming, environmental impact on agriculture, environmental ethics, quality, and justice and ends with a chapter summary.

The history of environmental science can be traced back to ancient civilizations where people had to develop techniques for adapting to their environment to survive. However, the modern field of environmental science emerged in the mid-20th century, as concerns over pollution and environmental degradation became more prominent. One of the key milestones in the history of environmental science was the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. This book highlighted the negative effects of pesticides and other chemicals on the environment and helped to spur the environmental movement in the United States and around the world.

During the 1970s, there was a growing recognition of the need for environmental regulation, and many countries passed laws to protect their air, water, and land resources. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established on December 2, 1970. In 1970, the United States passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act of 1972, which set standards for air and water quality and established regulatory agencies to enforce these standards.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a growing focus on global environmental issues, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. The United Nations (UN) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to study the causes and impacts of climate change, and in 1992, the UN held the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where countries pledged to take action to address environmental problems.

Today, environmental science is a multidisciplinary field focused on understanding the interactions between humans and the natural environment and developing solutions to environmental problems.

Dive Deeper into the History of Environmental Science

The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were foundational pieces of legislation. Follow the links to read a summary of these laws.

The field has been shaped by many scientists. Read about famous environmental scientists in Top 18 Famous Environmental Scientists You Should Know (2023) .

This documentary, 50 Years of Earth Day , describes the impact of Carson’s work in launching the environmental movement in the US.

This figure shows imaging from an Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+) of southern Louisiana, specifically Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, southern portion of the Northshore region, and New Orleans.

As an interdisciplinary field, environmental science involves the study of interactions between humans and the natural environment. It draws upon knowledge and techniques from a variety of scientific disciplines, including biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and ecology, among others. For example, environmental scientists may use their knowledge of biology to study the effects of pollution on plant and animal populations, or they may use chemistry to analyze the composition of air, water, and soil samples. Geology is also important in understanding how natural processes like erosion and volcanic activity impact the environment, and physics is used to study climate change and its effects on the environment.

In addition to the natural sciences, environmental science also incorporates knowledge from social sciences such as economics, politics, and sociology. Environmental economists, for example, study the costs and benefits of different environmental policies, while environmental sociologists may investigate how social factors influence people’s attitudes toward the environment.

This interdisciplinary approach is necessary because environmental problems are often complex and interconnected and require a holistic understanding of the underlying causes and potential solutions. By bringing together knowledge from multiple disciplines, environmental scientists are better able to identify and address these complex problems. Figure 1.2 displays a broader list of academic disciplines that can contribute to environmental studies, a field like environmental science that looks at human interactions and the natural environment.

Graphic showing the interdisciplinary nature of Environmental Studies by making many disciplines a petal on a flower that has environmental studies at the center.

The biosphere is the region of the earth that encompasses all living organisms: plants, animals, and bacteria. It is a feature that distinguishes the Earth from the other planets in the solar system. “Bio” means life, and the term biosphere was first coined by a Russian scientist (Vladimir Vernadsky) in the 1920s. Another term sometimes used is ecosphere (“eco” meaning home). The biosphere includes the outer region of the earth (the lithosphere) and the lower region of the atmosphere (the troposphere). It also includes the hydrosphere, the region of lakes, oceans, streams, ice, and clouds comprising the earth’s water resources.

Lithosphere

The lithosphere is the outer crust of the Earth, which is composed of the upper mantle and crust and arranged in concentric layers like an onion. Below the lithosphere are three layers: the lower mantle, outer core, and inner core.

The massive core has a diameter of about 3,500 km and is composed of hot, molten metals, particularly iron and nickel. The internal heat of Earth is thought to be generated by the slow, radioactive decay of unstable isotopes of certain elements, such as uranium.

The mantle is a less dense region that encloses the core. It is about 2,800 kilometers thick and composed of minerals in a plastic, semi-liquid state known as magma. The mantle contains relatively light elements, notably silicon, oxygen, and magnesium, occurring as various mineral compounds. Magma from the upper mantle sometimes erupts to the surface at mountainous vents known as volcanoes and is usually spewed to the surface as lava, which cools to form basaltic rock.

The lithosphere is only about 80 kilometers thick. It is composed of rigid, relatively light rocks, especially basaltic, granitic, and sedimentary ones. These rocks contain elements found in the mantle as well as enriched quantities of aluminum, carbon, calcium, potassium, sodium, sulfur, and other lighter elements, because of weathering and other forces. Living organisms change the lithosphere slowly by using non-biodegradable substances.

The outermost layer is known as the crust. The oceanic crust is relatively thin, averaging 10–15 kilometers, while the continental crust is 20–60 kilometers thick.

Hydrosphere

The hydrosphere is the portion of Earth that contains water (H 2 O), including in the oceans, atmosphere, land surface, and underground. The hydrologic cycle (or water cycle) refers to the rates of movement (fluxes) of water among these various reservoirs (compartments). The hydrologic cycle functions at all scales, ranging from local to global. The major elements of the global hydrologic cycle are illustrated in Figure 1.4.

history introduction chapter 1

The atmosphere is an envelope of gasses that surrounds the Earth and is held in place by the attractive forces of gravity. The density of the atmospheric mass is much greater close to the surface and decreases rapidly with increasing altitude. The atmosphere consists of four layers, whose boundaries are inexact because they may vary over time and space:

  • The troposphere (or lower atmosphere) contains 85-90% of the atmospheric mass and extends from the surface to an altitude of 8-20 kilometers. It is thinner at high latitudes, and thicker at equatorial latitudes, but also varies seasonally, at any place being thicker during the summer than in the winter. It is typical for air temperature to decrease with increasing altitude within the troposphere, and convective air currents (winds) are common. Consequently, the troposphere is sometimes referred to as the “weather layer.”
  • The stratosphere extends from the troposphere to as high as about 50 kilometers above the earth, depending on the season and latitude. Air temperature varies little with altitude within the stratosphere, and there are few convective air currents.
  • The mesosphere extends beyond the stratosphere to about 75 kilometers.
  • The thermosphere extends to 450 kilometers or more.

Preserving the b iodiversity of life forms within each of the six kingdoms of life is essential to maintaining the health and ecological balance of our planet and its inhabitants.

This figure shows six organisms. The first image shows a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park that contain thermophilic bacteria. The second image shows a bacterium diagram. The third image shows a paramecium. The fourth image shows fungi. The fifth image shows a plant. The sixth image shows different types of animals.

The six kingdoms of life are separated into two groups: prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Prokaryotic organisms lack a true nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles and include Domains Archaea and Bacteria. Archaea includes one kingdom, archaebacteria. Archaea is a group of single-celled microorganisms that are distinct from both bacteria and eukaryotes. Archaea are found in a wide range of environments, including extreme environments such as hot springs, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and highly saline lakes.

Kingdom Bacteria is also known as Eubacteria, which means “true bacteria.” This kingdom includes a diverse group of prokaryotic organisms that are found in virtually every habitat on Earth. They are characterized by their generally small size (usually ranging from 0.2 to 5 micrometers). Eubacteria are responsible for many important processes, such as nitrogen fixation (the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen into a form usable by plants), decomposition, and fermentation.

Eukaryotic organisms have a true nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles and include the Domain Eukarya. Domain Eukarya includes four kingdoms: Protista, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. Protista is a biological kingdom that includes a diverse group of eukaryotic microorganisms. The classification of Protista is somewhat outdated and is no longer recognized as a formal taxonomic group in many modern classifications. Protista are typically unicellular or simple multicellular organisms, and they exhibit a wide range of characteristics and lifestyles.

Fungi are a diverse group of organisms that include yeasts, molds, and mushrooms.  Fungi play important roles in nutrient cycling and the decomposition of organic matter. To preserve biodiversity in this kingdom, we can protect forests and other habitats where fungi are abundant, limit the use of fungicides, and promote pollution able farming practices that incorporate the use of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance soil health.

Plants are critical to the survival of many animal species and play a key role in maintaining the health of ecosystems. To preserve biodiversity in this kingdom, we can work to protect and restore natural habitats, reduce deforestation and habitat destruction, and promote the use of sustainable agricultural practices.

Animals play vital roles in maintaining ecological balance and are also important sources of food and medicine for humans. To preserve biodiversity in this kingdom, we can work to protect and restore natural habitats, reduce overfishing and hunting, and promote sustainable tourism practices that do not harm wildlife.

Human Demography

Demography applies the principles of population ecology to the human population. Demographers study how human populations grow, shrink, and change in terms of age and gender composition using vital statistics about people such as births, deaths, population size, and where people live. Demographers also compare populations in different countries or regions. Currently, there are two disparate demographic worlds. On one end is an old, rich, and relatively stable world often referred to as an “ industrialized ” or “ developed ” world and includes many European nations, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Australia among others. On the other end is a young, poor, and rapidly growing world often referred to as “ less-industrialized ,” “ less-developed ,” or “ developing ” and includes many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In between these two extremes are countries such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Russia, and many others that have not quite attained the developed status but have outpaced the so-called developing countries. These nations are sometimes referred to as “ newly industrialized ” or “ emerging market economies .”

Geographical distribution of habitats

The geographical distribution of habitats is determined by the global habitable environment. This distribution affects the natural habitats and their biota. The major population growth remains constant in the areas based on habitable environments from which human populations can acquire food.

This color-coded map shows the percent growth in population globally. The legend shows the corresponding percents and colors.

Human Population and Interference

Humans can alter their environment to increase their carrying capacity sometimes to the detriment of other species (e.g., via artificial selection for crops that have a higher yield). Earth’s human population is growing rapidly, to the extent that some worry about the ability of the earth’s environment to sustain this population, as long-term exponential growth carries the potential risks of famine, disease, and large-scale death. Although humans have increased the carrying capacity of their environment, the technologies used to achieve this transformation have caused unprecedented changes to Earth’s environment, altering ecosystems to the point where some may be in danger of collapse. The depletion of the ozone layer, erosion due to acid rain, and damage from global climate change are caused by human activities. The ultimate effect of these changes on our carrying capacity is unknown. As some point out, it is likely that the negative effects of increasing carrying capacity will outweigh the positive ones—the carrying capacity of the world for human beings might decrease. The world’s human population is currently experiencing exponential growth even though human reproduction is far below its biotic potential. To reach its biotic potential, all females would have to become pregnant every nine months or so during their reproductive years. Also, resources would have to be such that the environment would support such growth. Neither of these two conditions exists. Despite this fact, the human population is still growing exponentially.

This figure shows two graphs that display the total population over time. The larger graph includes a longer time period while the smaller graph focuses on the start of the industrial revolution forward.

Non-renewable Energy Sources

Two pieces of coal are pictured here.

Non-renewable energy resources are those that cannot be easily replenished in a short time, making them finite and unsustainable in the long run. Fossil fuels are generally the remains of plants and animals that died millions of years ago and are found deep underground. These fuels may include coal, oil, and natural gas. Tar sands and shale gas are also considered non-renewable energy resources.

Nuclear energy produced by splitting atoms of uranium or plutonium is a process called nuclear fission. From such an exothermic process, the liberated heat is used to generate electricity. Figure 1.9 shows examples of non-renewable energy sources.

This image shows four pictures. Part A shows an offshore semi-submersible oil drilling rig in the Port of Galveston, Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico. Part B shows the nuclear power plant, River Bend Station, Unit 1, near St. Francisville, Louisiana. Part C shows the Syncrude Mildred Lake Plant in Fort McMurray, Alberta Canada. This plant uses tar sands, soil, and wood debris to produce oil. Part D shows an unconventional shale gas well in Tioga County, Pennsylvania.

Today, non-renewable energy sources are still widely used despite the environmental, climate change and social impacts associated with their extraction, production, refining, and final use and applications. As we move toward a more sustainable and environmentally viable and preserving energy future, there is a growing need by energy consumers to shift toward cleaner, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric power.

Renewable Energy Sources

history introduction chapter 1

Renewable energy sources are those that can be refilled naturally and in a relatively short time or at continuous bases (solar, wind). These energy resources are sustainable and reusable, environmentally friendly, and carbon footprint-reducing agents. They may be used as alternatives to non-renewable energy sources.

Solar energy is generated by capturing solar radiation from the sun using solar panels. This can be used to generate electricity, water heating, or provide energy for various other applications. Wind turbines generate electricity by harnessing the power of the wind. This is a widely used form of renewable energy that is growing rapidly around the world. Hydroelectric power is generated by capturing the energy of falling water to turn turbines and generate electricity. This can be done using large-scale dams or smaller-scale run-of-the-river systems. Geothermal energy is generated by capturing the heat of the Earth’s interior to generate electricity or heat buildings. This can be done by using geothermal power plants or ground-source heat pumps. Biomass energy is generated by burning organic materials such as wood, agricultural waste, and other plant-based substances. This technology can be used to generate heat or electricity or to produce biofuels for transportation.

This figure illustrates the renewable energy sources: (a) solar energy, (b) geothermal energy, (c) wind power, (d) hydroelectric energy, and (e) biomass energy.

Renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly important to humanity, as we seek to transition to a more sustainable, replenishable energy future wit h fewer emissions. I n addition to being less harmful to the environment than non-renewable energy sources, renewable energy also offers a range of economic and social benefits, including job creation, energy independence, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Chapter 4 concentrates more on the effects of energy and sustainability across the nation and the state of Louisiana. The chapter will also address best practices of energy preservation within our environment.

The existence of organisms in the environment depends on recycling valuable nutrients including nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen, and carbon, which are all necessary for life. Nutrients are vital for the metabolism of living things and the survival of ecosystems.

Yet, these nutrients can travel from the Hawaiian Islands to Louisiana’s Gulf of Mexico. This happens as nutrients cyclically move through the environment and travel through the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.

The movement of nutrients through the environment is known as nutrient cycles or biogeochemical cycles as seen in Figure 1.12. Carbon is recycled and moves through the environment when animals release CO 2 into the atmosphere to be absorbed by plant leaves. This occurrence is seen in aquatic and terrestrial plants that capture CO 2 from the atmosphere to use in the production of food through photosynthesis. The atmosphere contains 78% of gaseous nitrogen (N 2 ). However, nitrogen changes into various forms when it enters the soil from the atmosphere. Soil bacteria must convert N 2 to usable forms for plant uptake. This process is known as nitrogen fixation. After this process, N 2 is released from the soil into the atmosphere, and the nitrogen cycle starts again.

A limited amount of phosphorus can be found in the atmosphere as aerosol particles from the ocean and wind-blown dust particulates. However, the majority of the phosphorus in the environment is bonded to subterranean rocks and is only released during weathering processes. Plants can absorb phosphorus through their root systems when phosphate is dissolved in water. Organisms referred to as decomposers recycle phosphorus back into the soil. Decomposers also recycle nutrients in the ecosystem by dissolving decayed organic materials.

The existence of water dates back millions of years. Water is constantly being recycled through the hydrologic cycle, also known as the water cycle. The recycling of water involves four major processes: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and infiltration. Evaporation occurs when water is heated by the ambient temperature (temperature in the environment) and turns into a gaseous vapor. When the warm water vapor rises and meets the cold air in the atmosphere, condensation occurs, and clouds are formed. Clouds are composed of water droplets from the condensation. The cycle is repeated when the water droplets get too heavy and fall out of the cloud back to the Earth as precipitation. Precipitation may exist in the form of ice, rain, sleet, and snow.

This image shows the nutrient cycle.

A wide range of environmental hazards come across in almost all habitats and public and private properties including, but not limited to, the workplace, construction areas, parks and recreational areas, industries, and living beings.

  • Biological hazards are caused by a variety of organisms belonging to the six kingdoms of life. The effect of biological hazards such as physiological changes, responses to stimuli, reproductive behavior, and diseases, could cause short (acute) and or long-term (chronic) damage to life forms. Their environmental abiotic factors are also affected depending on the causative agent, dose, length of interaction or exposure, and geographical distribution of the hazard.
  • Chemical hazards are mainly two kinds—inorganic such as toxic metals (Lead, Pb; Copper, Cu; Iron, Fe; Mercury, Hg; Aluminum, Al; Cadmium, Cd, etc.) and organic chemicals such as Methyl Mercury (CH 3 Hg); Polychlorinated biphenyls; Benzene; Poly aromatic hydrocarbons, etc. The chemical hazards are toxic, which affects the living organisms and their habitats, including the water, air, and soil quality. They will have long-term consequences for living beings. Radiation will have devastating long-term and generational consequences in life forms due to its mutagenic and carcinogenic properties.
  • Physical hazards ranging from a wet floor in buildings, foul odor in the air, depth in water bodies, and extreme temperatures cause thermal pollution. War zones, heavy machinery use in construction areas, and ball games in indoor stadiums cause noise pollution. Excessive rainfall and flooding cause loss of property and life especially in low-lying areas and flood-prone zones. Forest fires cause loss of life, biomass of ecosystems, and toxic gas release.
  • Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions, cause loss of life and biodiversity, disrupt the harmony in ecosystems, reduce the productivity of food chains and food webs, and damage the environmental quality.

The details of various hazards and their impact on humans and biodiversity will be presented in chapters 5 and 6.

In general, the types of hazards and levels of their toxic intensity and interaction with species in diversified habitats could cause the following changes in life forms (biota):

  • Anthropogenic : Toxins and their distribution in the environment and among the biota are due to human activities, which eventually damage the natural resources and human health. Most commonly, anthropogenic (man-made) toxins are associated with numerous activities. One example is the accidental emissions of chemicals into the environment. Another example is the release of substances that react in the environment to synthesize chemicals of greater toxicity. The release of excessive heat from factories and industrial sites into the nearby water bodies increases the water temperature. The discharges of nutrient-rich sewage or fertilizer into water bodies cause eutrophication.

Environmental hazards and toxins may have serious effects:

  • Human illness, diseases, and death due to the excessive release of toxic gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), carbon monoxide (CO), and sulfur dioxide (SO 2 )
  • Loss of habitats, life forms, and biodiversity
  • Chronic respiratory and heart diseases
  • Auto exhaust fumes, smoking, secondhand smoke, laboratory solvents, and particulate matter released into the air from the mining industry will cause health severe and chronic problems to humans.
  • Indoor pollution and toxins released from space heaters, furnaces, fireplaces burning wood, kerosene, nitric oxide, and organic vapors cause health problems and loss of man-hours and productivity.
  • Smog causes a significant number of problems and toxicity to vegetation, erodes building surfaces and metal sculptures due to acid rain, and causes heart and lung problems such as asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema, in vulnerable populations.

Global warming

An increase in the Earth’s surface temperature is referred to as global warming , also known as climate change . To be more precise, global warming is the cause of the Earth’s climate change. Natural occurrences on the Earth and anthropogenic activities are responsible for increased surface temperatures. Rising sea levels, sporadic flooding, melting glaciers, wildfires, storms, and the loss of wildlife habitats are just a few of the damaging effects of heightened warming trends. The culprit for extreme weather and climate events can be traced to greenhouse gas emissions in the environment. Greenhouse gases are a product of man-made activities such as agricultural activities, combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial manufacturing of products.

This image shows the greenhouse effect.

Major greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, and water vapor as shown in Figure 1.13. The greenhouse effect occurs when a layer of greenhouse gasses from man-made activities hovers in the Earth’s atmosphere. Because of this, solar radiation strikes the surface of the Earth and bounces back into the atmosphere. The rays from the sunlight are blocked by the layer of greenhouse gasses. The surface temperature of the Earth increases as a result of this activity. It is important to note that without greenhouses, the Earth would be too cold for life to exist. Nonetheless, the amount of emissions caused by human activity is excessive and has become globally problematic. Once in the atmosphere, greenhouse gasses can linger there for a few years to thousands of years.

This image shows protestors against animal agriculture.

The persistent altering of Earth’s climate and weather patterns is evidence of the unsettling impacts of global warming. About 2% of global warming is caused by natural events such as variations in solar radiation levels, tectonic shifts, and the suspension of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. However, on a larger scale, global warming is caused by the human usage of petroleum-based fuels, coal, electricity, fertilizers, and industrial manufactured products. The intensity of storms, the rise in sea levels, and the expansion of the ocean are all signs of climate change.

All around the world, but notably at the Earth’s poles, ice is melting. This global imbalance has affected various wildlife species and their habitats. In some cases, the melting ice has led to the collapse of sections of the landscape because rising sea levels often flood coastal regions. Unusual warm temperatures in the ocean can damage aquatic species, fuel tropical cyclones and hurricanes, and cause the ocean to expand.

Most of the extra heat from global warming is absorbed in the upper crust of the ocean, which is about 700 meters down. Unfortunately, this area of the ocean is home to a diverse population of aquatic species such as fish, plankton, and whales. Scientists believe that increased temperatures cause stress in marine environments. Due to their extreme sensitivity, corals will expel their internal algae in the presence of heated temperatures. This event is known as bleaching in which corals frequently fail to recover as shown in Figure 1.15.

This image shows a bleached coral reef.

To support healthy ecosystems, we must engage in sustainable practices, as these actions can reduce the effects of global warming. Using renewable energy sources, consuming less water, walking instead of driving, and recycling plastic and aluminum products, among other things, are some practical ways to lessen the impact of global warming and climate change. Advocates for local initiatives addressing global warming have grown in popularity, and many of the environmental projects they support have an impactful transformation on the environment and our planet. On a larger scale, some environmental groups support projects that protect our forest landscape. This is a notable effort because CO 2 is a key greenhouse gas. Protecting our forest ecosystems will sequester significant amounts of CO 2 .

Agriculture can be defined as the science, and art, of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and raising livestock. Even relatively simple agricultural practices can greatly increase food production compared with the hunting and gathering of wild animals and plants. Before the development of agriculture, which first appeared around 10,500 years ago, perhaps 5–10 million people were able to subsist through a hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle.

Today, the world supports an enormous population (more than 7.3 billion in 2015 and 7.9 billion in 2023), and almost all depend on the agricultural production of food (fishing and hunting also provide some food). The development of agricultural practices and technologies, and their improvements over time, are among the most crucial of the “revolutions” that have marked the socio-cultural evolution of Homo sapiens .

In any event, beginning with the cultivation and then domestication of a few useful plants and animals, agricultural technology has advanced to the point where it can support enormous populations of humans and our mutualist species.

Modern agriculture involves several distinct management practices that impact crop plants, production of crops, cultivation practices, and livestock, to name a few. In the case of crop plants, they include selective breeding, tillage, the use of fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation, and reaping. Each practice helps to increase the yield of biomass that can be harvested for food or other uses. The practices are typically used in various combinations, which are undertaken as an integrated system of the ecosystem and species management to achieve a large production of crops. However, the management practices also cause important environmental damage.

Chapter 10 will investigate environmental damages associated with agriculture, with particular attention to effects that occur in the United States.

This image shows a corn crop in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana.

Environmental impacts on agriculture include declining site capability, nutrient loss, organic matter, soil erosion, compaction, salinization, and desertification.

Agricultural site capability (or site quality) refers to the ability of an ecosystem to sustain the productivity of crops. As plants grow, they take up nutrients from the soil. When a crop is harvested, the nutrients contained in its biomass are removed from the site, resulting in nutrient loss. Soil organic matter is a crucial factor that affects fertility and site capability, since the organic matter has a strong influence on the capacity of soil to hold water and nutrients and on its aeration, drainage, and tilth. Soil is eroded by wind and by the runoff of rain and melted snow. Although erosion is a natural process, its rate can be greatly increased by agricultural practices, and this may be a serious environmental problem. Compaction occurs when the air spaces in the soil are compressed, resulting in waterlogging, oxygen-poor conditions, impaired nutrient cycling, poor root growth, and decreased crop productivity. Salinization is a buildup of soluble minerals in the surface soil that can be a major problem in drier regions. Desertification, the increasing aridity of drylands, is a complex problem, caused by both climate change and other anthropogenic influences. Ultimately, these aforementioned environmental factors interweave and can negatively impact agricultural outcomes.

This image shows three cattle in Loranger, Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.

Pollution caused by agriculture includes groundwater and surface waters, which can become polluted by runoff containing fertilizer, pesticides, and livestock sewage. Inputs of nutrients and organic matter from fertilizer and sewage can cause severe ecological damage to surface waters through eutrophication and oxygen depletion. These changes, coupled with the presence of pathogenic and parasitic organisms, can result in waters becoming unsuitable for drinking by people, perhaps even by livestock, or for use in irrigation. Chapter 10 will explore these impacts on human behaviors.

Environmental Impact of Human Behavior

Human behaviors can positively or negatively impact environmental outcomes. For instance, food supply and nutrition, malnutrition, and starvation. In 2014, more than 7.3 billion people were alive, and almost all were reliant on crops as their prime source of food. There are also relatively minor amounts of food that are harvested from the wild, such as by fisheries, but agricultural production is responsible for the great bulk of the modern human diet. Staple food crops are the main source of dietary energy in the human diet and include rice, wheat, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava.

However, food security plagues one in nine individuals in the world with more individuals living in poverty, which is defined as living on less than $1.25 per day. Poverty is the major driver of food insecurity. The lack of social and physical economic access to food at national and household levels and inadequate nutrition (or hidden hunger) are major issues for impoverished communities. Food security is built on four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability. Individuals lacking food stability may suffer from a lack of essential nutrients or malnutrition.

As a means to counteract crop loss, which could further impact food security, plant physiologists have genetically engineered crops through agricultural biotechnology. The field of agricultural biotechnology uses a range of tools that include both traditional breeding and modernized lab-based methods, which include genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and transgenic crops. Creating GMOs introduces new traits to crops that can allow protection from pests, enhanced nutrition to humans and animals, reduced costs to farmers, and more manageable production. However, there are factors to consider with the cultivation of GMOs such as hybridization with native species, ecological impacts on the pollinating organisms, and human health.

Another recent innovation in agriculture is the use of transgenic crops, which have been genetically modified by the introduction of genetic material (DNA or RNA) from another species. This bioengineering intends to confer some advantage to the crop that cannot be developed through selective breeding, which relies only on the intrinsic genetic information (the genome) that is naturally present in the species. Chapter 10 will further investigate the impacts of the four pillars of food security along with the impacts of agricultural biotechnology on human health.

Environmental Ethics

The choices that people make can influence environmental quality in many ways—by affecting the availability of resources, causing pollution, and causing species and natural ecosystems to become endangered. Decisions influencing environmental quality are influenced by two types of considerations: knowledge and ethics.

In this context, knowledge refers to information and understanding about the natural world, and ethics refers to the perception of right and wrong and the appropriate behavior of people toward each other, other species, and nature. Ethical behaviors are typically associated with social interactions with other members of society. Environmental ethics centers around the responsibility of our society to make ethical and moral decisions in response to the world around us. Of course, people may choose to interact with the environment and ecosystems in various ways. On the one hand, knowledge guides the consequences of choices, including damage that might be caused and actions that could be taken to avoid that effect. On the other hand, ethics provides guidance about which alternative actions should be favored or even allowed to occur.

Because modern humans have enormous power to utilize and damage the environment, the influence of knowledge and ethics on choices is a vital consideration. And we can choose among various alternatives. For example, individual people can decide whether to have children, purchase an automobile, or eat meat, while society can choose whether to allow the hunting of whales, clear-cutting of forests, or construction of nuclear power plants. All of these options have implications for environmental quality.

Perceptions of value (of merit or importance) also profoundly influence how the consequences of human actions are interpreted. Environmental values can be divided into two broad classes: utilitarian and intrinsic.

Utilitarian value (also known as instrumental value) is based on the known importance of something to the welfare of people (see also the discussion of the anthropocentric world view, below).

Intrinsic value is based on the belief that components of the natural environment (such as species and natural ecosystems) have inherent value and a right to exist, regardless of any positive, negative, or neutral relationships with humans.

The environmental values described above underlie this system of ethics. Applying environmental ethics often means analyzing and balancing standards that may conflict, because aesthetic, ecological, intrinsic, and utilitarian values rarely coincide.

Values and ethics, in turn, support larger systems known as worldviews. A worldview is a comprehensive philosophy of human life and the universe and of the relationship between people and the natural world. World views include traditional religions, philosophies, and science, as well as other belief systems. In an environmental context, generally important worldviews are known as anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric, while the frontier and sustainability worldviews are more related to the use of resources. These worldviews will be further explored in chapter 11.

Environmental Quality

Environmental quality deals with anthropogenic pollution and disturbances and their effects on people, their economies, other species, and natural ecosystems. Pollution may be caused by gases emitted by power plants and vehicles, pesticides, or heated water discharged into lakes. Examples of disturbance include clear-cutting, fishing, and forest fires. The consequences of pollution and disturbance for biodiversity, climate change, resource availability, risks to human health, and other aspects of environmental quality are examined in chapters 3, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

In a general sense, the cumulative impact of humans on the biosphere is a function of two major factors: (1) the size of the population and (2) the per-capita (per-person) environmental impact. The human population varies greatly among and within countries, as does the per-capita impact, which depends on the kind and degree of economic development that has occurred. Sustainable economic development requires meeting and sustaining the needs of the current generation without inhibiting future generations from meeting and sustaining their needs. Meeting goals for environmental quality, specifically sustainable economic development, can be measured by applying the IPAT Equation.

This figure shows the parts of the IPAT equation, which demonstrates the total environmental impact of a population by assessing population size, estimated per capita affluence of the population, and degree of technological development of the economy.

Calculations based on this simple IPAT formula show that affluent, technological societies have a much larger per-capita environmental impact than poorer ones. This requires a look at ethical decision-making about the environment and principles, such as the Tragedy of the Commons and environmental justice.

The Tragedy of the Commons is an economic principle that focuses on individuals intentionally or unintentionally using resources in excess. This principle stems from the 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons” written by Garrett Hardin. The essay presents the following scenario:

Imagine a pasture open to all (the ‘commons’). It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. As rational beings, each herdsman seeks to maximize their gain. Adding more cattle increases their profit, and they do not suffer any immediate negative consequence because the commons are shared by all. The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course is to add another animal to their herd, and then another, and so forth. However, this same conclusion is reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing the commons. Therein lies the tragedy: each person is locked into a system that compels them to increase their herd, without limit, in a world that is limited. Eventually this leads to the ruination of the commons. In a society that believes in the freedom of the commons, freedom brings ruin to all because each person acts selfishly (Fisher, 23).

Hardin went on to apply the situation to modern commons: overgrazing of public lands, overuse of public forests and parks, depletion of fish populations in the ocean, use of rivers as a common dumping ground for sewage, and fouling the air with pollution.

Dive Deeper into Environmental Quality in Louisiana

Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is the fair treatment and inclusion of all individuals independent of their demographic characteristics (race, ethnicity, national origin, and socioeconomic status) in the “development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Therefore, environmental injustice stems from an imbalance in resource access and systemic issues plaguing society. Chapter 11 will further explore historical and modern instances of environmental injustices exhibited within the United States of America.

Environmental science crosses several academic disciplines including atmospheric science, biology, chemistry, ecology, geology, oceanography, physics, and many others. Each discipline can become more specialized and integrated with other disciplines to explain the science of “what is happening in the environment.” Historically, environmental science has been traced to ancient civilizations where people had to learn how to adapt to their environment for survival. Today, the survival of the human population depends on the sustainability and stewardship of natural resources. Environmental science is an interdisciplinary field of study because it allows for the integration of many perspectives on each issue into in-depth analyses of the topic. Anthropology, business, chemistry, law, medical sciences, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines can all make contributions to environmental science.

The biosphere is characterized by a substratum of layers that support all living things on the Earth. These layers include the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The lithosphere is the outer crust of the Earth and exists as one of the concentric layers (crust, core, and mantle) that is stacked in an onion-like pattern. The area of Earth that is covered by water (H2O), including the seas, atmosphere, the surface of the land, and subterranean, is known as the hydrosphere. The atmosphere consists of a layer of gasses that envelops the planet and is kept in place by the gravitational pull of the Earth.

The biosphere sustains six kingdoms, which greatly enhances the diversity of life on Earth. These kingdoms include Eubacteria, Archaea, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia .  The aquatic and terrestrial environments of the biosphere are home to a wide variety of organisms from the six kingdoms. Our understanding of the biosphere’s limitations has been saturated by the effects of human activity. The manufacturing of global products, agriculture, and new technologies have caused unprecedented changes to the Earth’s ecosystems to the point where some may be in danger of collapsing. However, it is unclear how these persistent changes will ultimately affect the carrying capacity of the planet.

A biological or non-biological substance that poses a risk to human life or health is referred to as a hazard. Human activities or natural processes cause hazards in the environment that exist as a combination of biological, chemical, or physical hazards. Bacteria, mold, fungi, viruses, and natural toxins are organic sources of biological hazards that can adversely affect animal and human health. There are two types of chemical hazards: inorganic and organic. Inorganic substances that contain no carbon are sources of chemical hazards. Organic substances come from chemicals that contain carbon and are sources of chemical hazards as well.

Energy plays a significant and impacting role in the preservation of the environment. Humanity should effectively, responsibly, and efficiently use these energy resources to support current global energy consumption needs. There are two types of energy sources for human consumption: renewable and non-renewable. Renewable energy sources can be replenished. Examples of typical renewable energy sources include wind, solar, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal energy. Non-renewable energy sources are limited and unsustainable over the long term, since they are difficult to quickly replace. Fossil fuels are found deep down in the Earth and are typically the skeletal remnants of plants and animals that perished millions of years ago. Coal, oil, and natural gas are just a few examples of fossil fuels.

Nutrient cycling is the movement of nutrients through a repeated pathway that occurs in the environment. The recycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen, and carbon is essential for life and allows organisms to exist in the environment. Carbon is recycled when animals release CO 2 into the atmosphere to be absorbed by plant leaves. When nitrogen is moved to the soil from the atmosphere, nitrogen fixation allows soil microorganisms to change N 2 into forms that plants can use. Weathering activities liberate most of the phosphorus that is bound to underground rocks so that plants can absorb it through their root systems. The availability of water for all organisms in the environment depends on the movement of water molecules from lakes, oceans, rivers, and streams to the atmosphere and back to the Earth.

Global warming, often known as climate change, is the term used to describe an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature. Evidence of the unsettling effects of global warming is the continual alteration of Earth’s climate and weather patterns. Greenhouse gas emissions are to blame for extreme weather and climatic occurrences. Major greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide ozone, and water vapor. Human activities including deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, agriculture, and industrial product manufacturing all produce greenhouse gases. Once in the atmosphere, greenhouse gasses can linger there for a few years to thousands of years, trapping radiation from the sun. The rise in the Earth’s surface temperature can be seen in the intensity of storms, the rise in sea levels, and the expansion of the ocean.

Agricultural production is responsible for dietary energy in the modern human diet that comes from staple food crops, such as rice, wheat, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava. Numerous management techniques are used in modern agriculture practices to influence animal and plant crop productivity, cultivation methods, and livestock production. Environmental issues that are associated with agricultural practices are reduced site capacity, nutrient loss, organic matter loss, soil erosion, compaction, salinization, and desertification. Food security is important and is built on four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability. Conversely, poor nutrition (or hidden hunger) and lack of social and economic access to food at the national and household levels are significant problems for impoverished communities. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and transgenic plants are two examples of modern lab-based techniques that are used in the field of agricultural biotechnology. Transgenic crops can resist diseases because of their genetic modification. This results in significant reductions in the application of chemical pesticides, which in turn reduces harmful effects on the environment.

The core idea of environmental ethics is that society must act morally and ethically concerning the environment. Although the perceptions of value are influenced by the consequences of human actions, environmental values are divided into two categories: utilitarian and intrinsic. The foundation of utilitarian value is based on the importance of something that is connected with the welfare of people. Intrinsic value is associated with the belief that components of the natural environment have inherent value and a right to exist independently of human perspectives.

The term “environmental quality” refers to the state of the environment, including anthropogenic pollution, disruptions, and their impact on people, their economies, other species, and natural ecosystems. An economic principle known as “The Tragedy of the Commons” focuses on people consuming resources excessively, whether on purpose or accidentally. This rule is applicable in cases when overgrazing, resource overuse, food supply depletion, water, air, and land pollution, as well as other factors that contribute to climate change, are present. Environmental justice is the equitable treatment and participation of all people, regardless of their racial, ethnic, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds, in the “development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Therefore, unequal access to resources and societal systemic problems are the root causes of environmental injustice.

Links to Discovery

  • Measuring Progress: Water-Related Ecosystems and the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals)
  • Restore a River Back to Life 
  • Solar Panels on Farms Make Sheep Happier and Healthier

Critical Thinking

  • How do water, air, and soil quality affect agriculture?
  • Explain the relationship between air quality and circular economy.
  • Explain the generation of electrical energy using wind turbines.
  • How does biodiversity impact energy resources?
  • Abiotic factors – Non-living factors present in or impacting the environment.
  • Biodiversity – The richness of biological variation, including genetic variability as well as species and community richness.
  • Biotic factors – living factors present in or impacting the environment.
  • Climate change – Long-term changes in air, soil, or water temperature; precipitation regimes; wind speed; or other climate-related factors.
  • Environmental hazard – A potential risk factor that negatively impacts the environment.
  • Environmental justice – The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income concerning the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.
  • Global warming – The heating of the earth’s surface is believed to be caused by human behaviors that emit fossil fuels and trap gas in the atmosphere.
  • Hydrosphere – The parts of the planet that contain water, including the oceans, atmosphere, land, surface water bodies, underground, and organisms.
  • Lithosphere – An approximately 80-km thick region of rigid, relatively light rocks that surround Earth’s plastic mantle.
  • Non-renewable energy – Energy sources that are present on Earth in finite quantities, so as it is used, its future stocks are diminished.
  • Nutrient cycles – The transfers, chemical transformations, and recycling of nutrients.
  • Pollution – The exposure of organisms to chemicals or energy in quantities that exceed their tolerance, causing toxicity or other ecological damages.
  • Population growth – When the birth rate plus immigration exceeds the death rate plus emigration.
  • Renewable energy – Energy sources that can regenerate after harvesting and potentially can be exploited forever.
  • Sustainability – Maintaining the current resources without diminishing the availability of resources for future generations.

González-González, R. B., Sharma, P., Pratap Singh, S., Pinê Américo-Pinheiro, J. H., Parra-Saldívar, R., Bilal, M., and H. Iqbal. (2022). Persistence, environmental hazards, and mitigation of pharmaceutically active residual contaminants from water matrices. Science of the Total Environment, 821 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.153329

Theis, T., and J. Tomkins (Eds.)  Environmental Science.  OpenStax. Available via Internet Archive.

Zehnder, C., Manoylov, K., Mutiti, S., Mutiti, C., VandeVoort, A., and D. Bennett. (2018). Introduction to Environmental Science (2nd ed.). University System of Georgia. Available via the Open Textbook Library .

Recommended Reading

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Diversity and Biological Balance

Energy and the Environment

Media Attributions

  • EPA in Stream © Eric Vance, EPA is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • 5637745193_718b4940e3_o
  • Environmental Studies Flower © Bill Freedman is licensed under a CC BY-NC (Attribution NonCommercial) license
  • 1200px-Earth-crust-cutaway-english.svg
  • Coal © Jeffrey Beall is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
  • Honda Fit EV at a public charging station in front of San Franci © Mario Duran-Ortiz is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
  • Animal_agriculture_is_the_leading_cause_of_global_warming._(23126879740) © Alisdare Hickson is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
  • Burgeoning corn crop, East Carroll Parish, LA © Billy Hathorn is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
  • Louisiana cattle © Jeremiah Wells is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license

Encompassing a wide diversity of kinds of knowledge.

An approximately 80-km thick region of rigid, relatively light rocks that surround Earth's plastic mantle.

The parts of the planet that contain water, including the oceans, atmosphere, land, surface waterbodies, underground, and organisms.

The exposure of organisms to chemicals or energy in quantities that exceed their tolerance, causing toxicity or other ecological damages.

When the birth rate plus immigration exceeds the death rate plus emigration.

Energy sources that are present on Earth in finite quantities, so as it is used, its future stocks are diminished.

Energy sources that can regenerate after harvesting, and potentially can be exploited forever.

Maintaining the current resources without diminishing the availability of resources for future generations.

Refers to the transfers, chemical transformations, and recycling of nutrients.

Pollution caused by chemical, physical, or biological agents in water, soil, and air causes acute or chronic diseases or harm to human health or even death of living beings including humans.

are nonliving factors present in or impacting the environment.

Occurring as a result of a human influence.

The heating of the earth's surface is believed to be caused by human behaviors that emit fossil fuels and trap gas in the atmosphere.

Long-term changes in air, soil, or water temperature; precipitation regimes; wind speed; or other climate-related factors.

Environmental Science Copyright © 2024 by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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HIST 794: History of Development (Spring 2024; Prof. Engerman): Citing Your Sources

  • Archival material used in February 28, 2024 session
  • Background Sources, Secondary Sources, and Databases
  • Citing Your Sources

Introduction

These guidelines are based on the 17th edition of  The Chicago Manual of Style  (CMOS17), which is a standard used in much academic writing in the various fields within the Humanities.  Members of the Yale community who are using a computer on campus or are logged in using the  Yale VPN  can access the CMOS17 online using  this link to the Orbis record . These guidelines are focused on using footnotes or endnotes and a bibliography to cite sources used, and are based on the guidance contained in  Chapter 14: Notes and Bibliography  of CMOS17. If you need assistance with other common academic citation styles, such as MLA Style (Modern Language Association) or APA Style (American Psychological Association), please consult the  Principles of Citing Sources  resource maintained by Yale's Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.

Note that when citing widely available publications, you typically do not cite the repository that holds the material.  One exception to this is when the analysis or argument in your work engages copy-specific features of a publication, such as hand-written annotations on, or materials tipped into a particular copy of the publication by someone who owned or used the publication. In these cases it is important to cite the repository holding the specific copy containing features that are central to your scholarly output. 

The CMOS17 guidelines below are organized in two sections and provide examples from Yale's collections.

  • Bibliography vs. Footnotes/Endnotes focuses on citation basics and uses published materials as examples.
  • Citing Sources from Archival Collections offers advice for a citing unpublished sources typically found in archival collections or licensed databases.

The following information is meant as a general guide. Remember, maintaining a consistent style in citations within a single work (that is, your intellectual output), and providing enough information for your readers to find and identify your sources, are the main goals.

1. Bibliography vs. Footnotes/Endnotes ("Notes" in CMOS17, Chapter 14)

Notes (both foot and end)  are typically numbered, corresponding to superscript numerical references in the text, and are similarly styled to the text itself, with elements separated by commas or parentheses and names given in normal order.  Bibliography citations  are listed alphabetically, so the name of a first author is inverted (last name first) and elements are separated by periods. Bibliography entries do not typically include specific page references for a published work (exception: the page range of an article or chapter in a larger work should be included), or physical location information within an archival collection (e.g., boxes and folders); specific page references and specific item locations should be included in footnotes. Note that CMOS17 discourages the older-style use of 3 em-dashes (———) in lieu of an author's name in bibliographies where two or more works by the same author are cited; for the sake of clarity repeat the author's name in each bibliography citation and sort the entries alphabetically, with all single-authored references for that author preceding those involving more than one author (CMOS17, 15.67). See CMOS17, 14.20 for more on the basic structure of a note, and 14.21 for more on the basic structure of a bibliography entry.

Note style example:  1. Brooks Mather Kelley,  Yale: A History  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 116-117.

Bibliography style example :  Kelley, Brooks Mather.  Yale: A History . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Most academic works include both a bibliography and either footnotes or endnotes. When this is the case, the full citation for a work referenced or quoted from should appear in the bibliography. A short form can be used in citations in the notes, because the notes do not need to duplicate the full citation in the bibliography (CMOS17, 14.19). Typically the short form includes the author's last name, a shortened title, and the page reference (CMOS17, 14.30). Only the last name of the author is used in the short form citation, unless additional initials are needed to distinguish between authors with the same last name; if there are two authors, use both last names; if there are three or more authors use the first author's last name followed by  et al.  (CMOS17, 14.32). Presentation of the title (e.g., in italics, in quotation marks) should mirror the presentation of the full title in the bibliography or prior note; if the full title is four words or less, use the entire title in the short form (CMOS17, 14.33). The short form citation used in the notes must include enough information so that a reader of your work can unambiguously identify the entry in the bibliography to which it corresponds. Note that CMOS17 discourages the use of the older-style Latin abbreviations  ibid.  and  op. cit.  in favor of the clarity of short-form citations.

Bibliography examples:  

Chauncey, Henry, Jr., John T. Hill, and Thomas Strong.  May Day at Yale, 1970: Recollections: the Trial of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers . Westport, CT: Perspecta Press, 2015.

Jeffers, Robinson.  Granite & Cypress: Rubbings from the Rock . Santa Cruz: Lime Kiln Press, 1975.

Robin, Corey, and Michelle Stephens. "Against the Grain: Organizing TAs at Yale."  Social Text  49, 14, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 43-73.

Note (short form) examples:  

1. Chauncey et al.,  May Day , 107. 

2. Robin and Stephens, "Against the Grain," 52.

3. Jeffers,  Granite & Cypress , 15.

If you are  not  including a bibliography in your work, and are relying solely on notes for your citations, you must fully cite a work referenced or quoted from in the first note related to it. Subsequent notes referencing it can then use a short-form citation (CMOS17, 14.19).

Notes only (no bibliography) examples:

1. Martha Lund Smalley, ed.,  American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938  (New Haven: Yale Divinity School Library, 1997), 23-24.

2. Smalley,  American Missionary Eyewitnesses , 32.

2. Citing Sources from Archival Collections

General Guidelines for Citing Materials from Archival Collections

Citation of documents in archival collections can be trickier than citations for publications, because you have to provide enough information about the document  and  the archival collection in which you found it  and  the repository where that collection can be found to allow someone reading your analysis to find that document if they wanted to. The following are some guidelines to assist you in citing your document:

For the document cite:

  • Author(s) of the document.
  • This might be on the document itself, such as a report or an essay.
  • If there is nothing resembling a title on the document, you will have to devise a title that is descriptive and meaningful ( examples:  Letter to Alice Jones, Notes on a meeting to discuss the partition of Eastern Europe).
  • A date the document was created. This might be an actual day, a month, or a year, and you may have to supply an approximate date based on context if there is no actual date on the document itself.
  • If there is a series number or an accession number these should be supplied as well, since they are often a critical part of returning to the correct box in an archival collection.

For each archival collection being used cite: 

  • Title of the collection.
  • Collection number or other identifier unique within the repository that identifies the collection. This information is frequently included in citations in parentheses following the collection title.

For the repository holding the archival collection being used cite (repositories often provide a preferred form of citation in access tools such as archival finding aids):

  • Name of the repository.
  • Name of the parent institution or geographic location of the repository if necessary to disambiguate the repository’s name from potentially similar institutional names.

For materials found online, whether on the open web or in locally licensed databases, providing a uniform identifier, such as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Digital Object Identifier (DOI), that will lead readers of your work to the resource cited is a key element of your citation. This is covered in much greater detail , with examples, in CMOS17, 14.6 through 14.18.

In Bibliographies vs. Notes (Foot or End)

If you are using a bibliography  and  footnotes or endnotes (hereafter referred to as notes) in your research output, cite the archival collection and repository only, not the individual documents from the collection, in the bibliography. In your notes cite individual documents and use a consistent short form reference to the archival collection. This will allow your notes to remain concise and document-focused, while still providing your readers with information regarding the name and location of the archival collection in which you found the documents.

Bibliography examples :

Baker, George Pierce, Pageants Collection (DRA 16). Special Collections, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University.

Johnson, James Weldon, and Grace Nail Johnson Papers (JWJ MSS 49). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Records (MS 1965). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Note (short form) examples:

1. Claude A. Barnett, letter to Grace Nail Johnson, 27 June 1942, Series I, Box 25, Folder 14, Johnson Papers.

2. The Oxford Historical Pageant Book of Words, 1907, Box 1, Folder 7, Baker Collection.

3. Executive Committee meeting minutes, 7 April 1988, Accession 2016-M-0061, Box 4, Folder 10, NRDC Records.

If using foot- or endnotes only (no bibliography) cite the archival collection fully in the first relevant note, using a consistent short-form reference to the archival collection citation in subsequent notes.

1. Letter from Rudolf C. Bertheau to Ellsworth Huntington, 29 August 1938, Series IV, Box 29, Folder 296, Ellsworth Huntington Papers (MS 1), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

2. Report to the Board of Directors of the Human Betterment Foundation, 12 February 1935, Series IV, Box 29, Folder 299, Huntington Papers.

Chicago Manual of Style

The following are useful links for assistance with using CMOS17:

►  Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide

►  A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers  (this is Kate L. Turabian's encapsulation of the Chicago Style)

►  Purdue University OWL  (Online Writing Lab) offers a helpful overview of the CMOS17

See the following sections of CMOS17 for additional guidance on specific portions or types of citations.

►  For formatting of author names:  Chapters 14.72 through 14.84.

►  For formatting of titles:  Chapters 14.85 through 14.99.

►  For citing a book:

• General guidance:  Chapters 14.100 through 14.102.

• With editors, translators, and other contributors:  Chapters 14.103 through 14.105.

• With chapter, edition, volume, or series information:  Chapters 14.106 through 14.126.

• Facts concerning publication:  Chapters 14.127 through 14.146.

• Citing ebooks:  Chapters 14.159 through 14.163.

Preferred Citations for Yale Special Collections Repositories

Use the following form of each repository's name in formulating your citations to materials from Yale's special collections:

Arts Library Special Collections  

► Special Collections, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library  

► Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

► Or in some cases credit a Beinecke collection before the library's citation - see the bottom of the Beinecke's  "Copyright Questions"  page for more information.

Divinity Special Collections

► Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library.

Law Library Rare Book Collection

► Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Lewis Walpole Library

► The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Manuscripts and Archives

► Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Medical Historical Library

► Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

Music Library Special Collections

► Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University.

Yale Center for British Art

► Yale Center for British Art, Institutional Archives.

► Yale Center for British Art, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Citation Management Tools

You may already have a software program or a system for keeping track of your sources, but, if not, you will want to think about what way of organizing your research will work best for you this coming year. The Yale University Library has licenses to certain citation management tools, and there are also free tools on the web for managing your citations. Probably the two most useful tools to consider are:

  • This is a free web tool used by many historians.
  • This is a resource licensed by the Yale Library; you will need to use your Yale e-mail address to create an account.

For more information and an overview of several of the resources that are available, see our citation management guide .

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IMAGES

  1. Chapter 1- Introduction TO History

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  2. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

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  4. Dissertation Chapter 1 Introduction

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  5. (PDF) Chapter 1. Introduction

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  6. chapter 1: introduction

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COMMENTS

  1. Ch. 1 Introduction

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  3. 1.1: Introduction

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    Introduction. These guidelines are ... the page range of an article or chapter in a larger work should be included), or physical location information within an archival collection (e.g., boxes and folders); specific page references and specific item locations should be included in footnotes. ... Note style example: 1. Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale ...