Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge UniversityThis jumped at me as worth thinking about. It's a question about processes and dynamics, instead of definitions and categories, right? Something about changing the way historians—and people more generally—think about historical events. Instead of labeling an "Enlightenment" and ascribing "the Enlightenment" with a set of motives and agenda, we sort out Englightenment qualities among people alive during Englightenment times, and maybe see whether those qualities inhere in people at other times, too. Theodore Zeldin wrote a book called An Intimate History of Humanity with something like this premise, but I didn't have a way to appreciate how weirdly different it was from other sorts of history when I read it, because it was one of the earliest histories in my reading. After reading other stuff, I wondered why it wasn't more like Zeldin's, and I guess I still wonder about that.
Is it worth studying the history of the nation-state any longer?
Historians are turning increasingly to the study of movements, developments and historical phenomena that cross conventional national boundaries and cultures. Globalisation, European integration and other factors have pushed cross-cultural history to the cutting edge of research. Our fates are all interconnected today, so might this also have been the case in the past?
« Older Support FONACON in their protest against the year ... | "U2, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Par... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by b1tr0t at 4:10 PM on December 30, 2006 [2 favorites]