Doing History bridges the gap between the way history is studied in school or as represented in the media and the way it is studied at university level. History as an academic discipline has dramatically changed in recent decades and has been enhanced by ideas from other disciplines, the influence of postmodernism and historians' incorporation of their own reflections into their work. Doing History presents the ideas and debates that shape how we 'do' history today, covering arguments about t...

Key Issues in Historical Theory is a fresh, clear and well-grounded introduction to this vibrant field of inquiry, incorporating many examples from novels, paintings, music, and political debates. The book expertly engages the reader in discussions of what history is, how people relate to the past and how they are formed by the past. Over 11 thematically-based chapters, Herman Paul discusses subjects such as:history, memory and traumahistorical experience and narrativemoral and political dime...

The gold standard of texts on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict

Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict provides a comprehensive, balanced, and accessible narrative of a complex historical topic. The narrative is supported by more than 40 primary documents that highlight perspectives from all sides of the struggle. Throughout the book, the author examines how underlying issues, group motives, religious and cross-cultural clashes, diplomacy and imperialism, and the arrival of the modern...

'Wry, readable and often astonishing... A provocative and absorbing history of the United States' New York TimesThe United States denies having dreams of empire. We know America has spread its money, language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans either side.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the story of the United States outside the United States – from nineteenth-century conquests l...

There are many stories we can tell about the past, and we are not, perhaps, as free as we might imagine in our choice of which stories to tell, or where those stories end. John Arnold's Very Short Introduction is a stimulating essay about how we study and understand history. The book 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, a...

Herodotus is not only known as the `father of history', as Cicero called him, but also the father of ethnography; as well as charting the historical background to the Persian Wars, his curiosity also prompts frequent digression on the cultures of the peoples he introduces. While much of the information he gives has proved to be astonishingly accurate, he also entertains us with delightful tales of one-eyed men and gold-digging ants. This readable new translation is supplemented with expansive...

For a thousand years an extraordinary empire made possible Europe’s transition to the modern world: Byzantium. An audacious and resilient but now little known society, it combined orthodox Christianity with paganism, classical Greek learning with Roman power, to produce a great and creative civilization which for centuries held in check the armies of Islam. Judith Herrin’s concise and compelling book replaces the standard chronological approach of most histories of Byzantium.

Instead, eac...

Geographies of Developing Areas is a thought provoking and accessible introductory text, presenting a fresh view of the Global South that challenges students' pre-conceptions and promotes lively debate. Rather than presenting the Global South as a set of problems, from rapid urbanization to poverty, this book focuses on the diversity of life in the South, and looks at the role the South plays in shaping and responding to current global change. The core contents of the book integrate 'traditio...

In this newly revised and updated 2nd edition of Voices of Early Modern Japan, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis offers an accessible collection of annotated historical documents of an extraordinary period in Japanese history, ranging from the unification of warring states under Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early seventeenth century to the overthrow of the shogunate just after the opening of Japan by the West in the mid- nineteenth century. Through close examination of primary sources from "The Great Pea...