On "what is history?"

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Saul Friedlander

German memory, judicial interrogation, and historical reconstruction : writing perpetrator history from postwar testimony / Christopher R. Browning -- Historical emplotment and the problem of truth / Hayden White -- On emplotment : two kinds of ruin / Perry Anderson -- History, counterhistory, and narrative / Amos Funkenstein -- Just one witness / Carlo Ginzburg -- Of plots, witnesses, and judgments / Martin Jay -- Representing the Holocaust : reflections on the historians' debate / Dominick LaCapra -- Historical understanding and counterrationality : the Judenrat as epistemological vantage / Dan Diner -- History beyond the pleasure principle : some thoughts on the representation of trauma / Eric L. Santner -- Habermas, enlightenment, and antisemitism / Vincent P. Pecora -- Between image and phrase : progressive history and the "final solution" as dispossession / Sande Cohen.; Science, modernity, and the "final solution" / Mario Biagioli -- Holocaust and the end of history : postmodern historiography in cinema / Anton Kaes -- Whose story is it, anyway? : ideology and psychology in the representation of the Shoah in Israeli literature / Yael S. Feldman -- Translating Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" : rhythm and repetition as metaphor / John Felstiner -- "The grave in the air" : unbound metaphors in post-Holocaust poetry / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi -- The dialectics of unspeakability : language, silence, and the narratives of desubjectification / Peter Haidu -- The representation of limits / Berel Lang -- The book of the destruction / Geoffrey H. Hartman.

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Robert Southard

The Prussian School of History first predicted and advocated, then celebrated and defended, the unification of Germany by Prussia. Experts in German historiography and the history of German liberalism have often complained about the lack of a book, in any language, that traces the origins and explains the ideas of this school of history. Here is that book. Robert Southard finds that, for the Prussian School, history had an agenda. These historians generally expected history to complete its main tasks in their own time and country. The outcome of their politics was, really, an "end of history" - not a cessation to historical occurrences, but a cessation of onward historical movement because the historical process had already achieved its long-term, beneficient purposes. Leading us through the intricacies of important but untranslated works of J. G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Rudolph Hayn, and Heinrich von Sybel, Southard demonstrates their belief that the historical sequence was a continual unfolding of God's plan. Indispensable for those interested in the history of German historical writing, this book also has major implications for understanding the history of political liberalism.

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Marvin Perry

Arnold Toynbee was the most prolific historian of the twentieth century. In his massive A Study of History, Toynbee made a comparative study of all the world's civilizations, surviving and extinct, analyzing their rise, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. Arnold Toynbee and the Western Tradition summarizes and appraises Toynbee's understanding of the nature, evolution, and destiny of Western civilization, focusing on his critique of the liberal-rational tradition.

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Richard Waswo

"This book attempts to tell the history of a story, and to show how it is of central importance to western culture because it defines both what 'culture' is and who possesses it," Richard Waswo begins in this impassioned, humane, and compelling reinterpretation of western civilization. The story Waswo refers to is a legend commonly regarded as fact for two millenia: the descent of all European for peoples from emigrant Trojans. But this study, astonishing in its range and fascinating in its vision, does not merely trace the theme through history. Instead, Waswo examines the way the legend influenced western perception and behavior and became embodied in our literature, religion, law, philosophy, history, science, social theory, and film. Implicit in this legend of perpetual colonization, Waswo says, is a distinction between "culture," with its settled agricultural and urbanized communities, and the "savage," with its hunting, gathering, and nomadic pastoralism. Waswo examines the powerful influence of the legend from its first expression in the Aeneid itself to The Faerie Queene to the fiction of Conrad and Forster, and also considers such widely disparate manifestations as the films of John Ford, the defoliation of Vietnam, and the policies of the World Bank. Both polemical and thought-provoking, the book shows how "legendary images defining our civilization determine our conduct toward other cultures: the fictions are both enacted in history and at the same time used to justify such action morally."