I don’t think the emergence of cultural history has removed the politics from social history. Instead of replacement, I see complementarity. If social history is concerned with the institutions and forces within a society and how people living within the society negotiate these structures, then cultural history is more concerned with the actual systems and …
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Defining the field of environmental history
To some extent, the definition and field of environmental history have reflected by the general arc of history in a larger sense over the course of the last forty-plus years, as well as the arc of the particular discipline of history. Important antecedents notwithstanding, Isenberg places the emergence of environmental history in 1976, with the …
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The contributions of environmental history
In a post I wrote in the first week of this course, I wrote about how I felt a key purpose of the study of history was understanding how we came to our current situation so we can correct mistakes and hopefully set forth a better future; in this case, I discussed the specific controversy …
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Environmental history: Growing pains and tensions
In looking over this week’s readings, I’ve identified two tensions that have emerged in the field of environmental history over the course of time. The first is obliquely addressed in the essay by William Cronon, when he writes that, while race, class, and gender are fundamental considerations of some historians, other historians (himself included) “ally …
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Gender as a category of analysis
There seem to be three key reservations that Jeanne Boydston enunciates in her essays. The first is what she refers to as the suggestion “that categories of analysis exist a priori in the sources and have merely to be revealed.”[1] The issue here is one of bringing a tool of analysis to a scenario and assuming that …
Why does gender matter?
It seems that me that there are two reasons why gender matters: one general and one more specific. The general idea is that, because half of humanity is female and because the male half of the species has traditionally wielded significant power over the other half, a fairer and truer accounting of the past in …
Pracitical considerations and nationalism
What limitations are there in writing a ‘national’ history? Are there any good examples of ‘national’ history that you have read? Last semester, I took a course in Russian imperial history and so studied the history of that country between 1721 (pronunciation of Peter as imperator) and 1917 (February revolution and abdication of the Tsar). What was …
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Review of “Imagined Communities”
In Chapter 3 of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson examines the role played by print capitalism – the term he coins to describe the phenomenon that emerged when printing press technology met a market economy – in the emergence of modern European nationalism. By prioritizing so-called administrative vernaculars over earlier languages of officialdom – principally Latin – …
Writing national histories
Can ‘national histories’ exist before ‘nations’ do? Whether national histories can exist before nations do depends to some extent on how one defines the term “national history.” If the term is meant in a generic sense, then don’t think national histories can exist before nations do. Rather, it seems to me that a national history …
Conceptualizing the nation
How is a nation different from other social groups, geographical units and political communities? This is a difficult question — not only for me personally but clearly for scholars as well. To determine the distinctions between and among different groupings when the overlaps can be substantial is a daunting task. In some ways, defining a …
Inevitable Historicity 