Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

大分岐論争における歴史、政治、理論－カリフォルニア学派、世界システム分析、マルクス主義の比較分析－
Murphy, Olya, History, Politics and Theory in the Great Divergence Debate: A Comparative Analysis of the California School, World Systems Analysis and Marxism. 260 pp. 2023:12 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-291>
ISBN 978-3-11-124625-3 hard ¥25,881.- (税込) EUR 109.95 *

World history suffers from a paucity of clearly articulated, convincing explanations. While the rise of postmodernism and challenges to Eurocentrism did lead to some important correctives, the pendulum has swung too far the other direction, with a corresponding danger of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. We need careful, theoretically informed debates about ways of organizing world history. What constitutes a good historical explanation? What should guide historians to choose relevant facts? Which theoretical schools could be made useful, and to what ends? These questions are especially relevant to the main topic of this book: the ‘great divergence’ between the west and the rest of the world, and how this historical rupture is to be explained. The book provides extensive critical analyses of some of the key claims in world history, analyzing their strengths as well as their major weaknesses?too often rooted in insufficient familiarity of historians with theories they discard. It also historicizes the field and the debates to partly account for what caused some theories to become more influential and others to fall into oblivion?despite the fact that the more influential frameworks are seriously flawed and some of the more marginalized ideas are more coherent and plausible. The book offers insights regarding the theoretical and political relevance of older debates about the transition to capitalism and historical materialism. Three major schools of thought in world history are critically examined through an in-depth theoretical and comparative analysis that has not been undertaken elsewhere: the so-called ‘California School’, World Systems Analysis, and Marxist theories of history, capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Murphy argues that, despite some of the more recent criticisms of older approaches to world history, the older theories remain indispensable for the writing of world history and for coming to terms with issues of global poverty, inequality and eco-catastrophe.

歴史学における道具としての歴史的伝記と批判的プロソポグラフィー
Albrecht, Helmuth / Farrenkopf, Michael u. a. (Hrsg.), Historische Biographik und kritische Prosopographie als Instrumente in den Geschichtswissenschaften. (Schriften des Montanhistorischen Dokumentationszentrums 257) VI, 183 S. 2023:8 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1480>
ISBN 978-3-11-112288-5 hard ¥16,465.- (税込) EUR 69.95 *

Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten Beitraege dokumentieren den Ertrag des Workshops ?Historische Biographik und kritische Prosopographie als Instrumente in den Geschichtswissenschaften", der 2021 an der TU Bergakademie Freiberg durchgefuehrt wurde. Die Autorinnen und Autoren loten die komplexen Problemlagen der historischen Biographik und der prosopographischen Forschung im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities aus. Das Themenspektrum reicht dabei von der individual-biographischen Forschung und Oral History ueber Erfahrungsberichte prosopographischer (Gross-)Vorhaben bis hin zu den Herausforderungen bei der Entwicklung und Nutzung multifunktionaler Prosopographiedatenbanken und ihrer Verfuegbarmachung im Internet.

Armaselu, Florentina / Fickers, Andreas (eds.), Zoomland: Exploring Scale in Digital History and Humanities. (Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics 7) 500 pp. 2023:12 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1481>
ISBN 978-3-11-131752-6 hard ¥11,757.- (税込) EUR 49.95 *

Despite a variety of theoretical and practical undertakings, there is no coherent understanding of the concept of scale in digital history and humanities, and its potential is largely unexplored. A clearer picture of the whole spectrum is needed, from large to small, distant to close, global to local, general to specific, macro to micro, and the in-between levels. The book addresses these issues and sketches out the territory of Zoomland, at scale. Four regions and sixteenth chapters are conceptually and symbolically depicted through three perspectives: bird’s eye, overhead and ground view. The variable-scale representation allows for exploratory paths covering areas such as: theoretical and applicative reflections on scale combining a digital dimension with research in history, media studies, cultural heritage, literature, text analysis and map modelling; creative use of scale in new digital forms of analysis, data organisation, interfaces and argumentative or artistic expressions. Zoomland provides a systematic discussion on the epistemological dimensions, hermeneutic methods, empirical tools, and aesthetic logic pertaining to scale and its innovative possibilities residing in humanities-based approaches and digital technologies.

Bevernage, Berber / Raphael, Lutz (eds.), Professional Historians in Public: Old and New Roles Revisited. (The Politics of Historical Thinking 5) 360 pp. 2023:9 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1482>
ISBN 978-3-11-118591-0 hard ¥18,819.- (税込) EUR 79.95 *

The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope. Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining their professional activities with an explicit political partisanship or social engagement. The second section focusses on the challenges historians are confronted with when entering the court room or more generally exposing their expertise to legal frameworks. The third section focuses on the effects of policy driven demands as well as direct political interventions and regulations on the historical profession. A fourth section looks at the challenges and opportunities related to the rise of new digital media. Finally several authors offer their view on normative standards that may help to better respond to new demands and to define role models for publicly engaged historians. This book aims at historians and other academics interested in public uses of history.

Blaudeau, Philippe / Sarrazin, Veronique (dir.), Faux et usage de faux: l'historien face a la question de la credibilite documentaire. (Histoire) 334 p. 2023:10 (Pr. U. de Rennes, FR) <715-1483>
ISBN 978-2-7535-9420-3 paper ¥5,885.- (税込) EUR 25.00

Fernandez-Sebastian, Javier, Key Metaphors for History: Concepts and Images in Time. (Routledge Approaches to History) 376 pp. 2024:4 (Routledge, UK) <715-1484>
ISBN 978-1-138-35446-3 hard ¥38,461.- (税込) GB￡ 135.00 *

This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture reflected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifies some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and journalists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modernity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition.The analysis of these and other pillars on which modern history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general.Key Metaphors for History offers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy, from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-reflection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history.

Kamel, Lorenzo, History Below the Global: On and Beyond the Coloniality of Power in Historical Research. 240 pp. 2024:4 (Routledge, UK) <715-1485>
ISBN 978-1-03-273086-8 hard ¥38,461.- (税込) GB￡ 135.00 *
ISBN 978-1-03-273087-5 paper ¥10,538.- (税込) GB￡ 36.99 *

History Below the Global aims to foster an entangled knowledge of global history, and to place "others" at the centre stage, to better understand the fluid world which we inhabit.Relying on primary sources in seven languages and books written by hundreds of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and South American scholars, Lorenzo Kamel examines the coloniality of power in historical research and sheds light on the largely neglected roles of the "others" and their modernities in history. The book provides three elements combined. Firstly, a thorough analysis of the process of accumulation ("knowledge piece by piece") which underpins some of the major achievements in human history. Secondly, a view on pre-colonial perspectives and the process through which the latter have been swallowed up by Eurocentric and solipsistic perceptions. Lastly, a study of the roots and outcomes of colonialisms and their echoes in our present. These three elements are addressed by combining multiple methodologies and approaches, in the awareness that the history analysed, as well as the historiographical trajectories that underlie it, are ultimately inter-penetrable, as well as themselves the result of a process of accumulation. History Below the Global challenges the view that, first and foremost, the "West", for bad and for good, is and was the centre: the proactive actor which did and undid.This volume will be of value to all those interested in global history, the history of colonialism, post-colonial studies, modern and contemporary history.

Kattan, Sarit / Kaye, Lynne (eds.), Interdisciplinary Conversations on Time. (Time and Periodization in History 1) 290 pp. 2023:8 (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, GW) <715-1486>
ISBN 978-3-11-068905-1 hard ¥25,881.- (税込) EUR 109.95 *

Historical timelines are predicated on current assumptions of linear time distinct from notions of cyclical time in earlier or non-Western societies and non-linear models of time in contemporary physics. Dividing time into distinct periods like centuries admittedly necessitates the acquisition of specific skills and methods in addition to familiarity with primary sources and subject-specific historiographical traditions.