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The subject of ‘film and history’ has come a long way since the publication of the pioneering The Historian and Film in 1976. In the 1970s historians were preoccupied with the value of film as a primary source for the study of contemporary history, for which reason much of the early work focused on newsreels and documentary films.
This volume, dedicated to the historian Lawrence W. Levine, was, in the words of its authors, ‘born of our belief that the time is ripe for a broad assessment of U.S. cultural history’.
The first principle of understanding history, I was taught, is to sympathize with the historical actors, to immerse oneself in their context and perspective.(1) Otherwise, history becomes a fabricated reconstruction – more about the writer's ideology than the events of the past.
‘Earth, earth, do not cover our blood and do not keep silent’.
Reading an edited collection of articles can be likened to dining out on a tasting menu: you’re afforded the opportunity to sample broadly but portions can sometimes be relatively puny. A standard serving, like a monograph, provides bulk whereas essays may fire up your appetite yet fail to satiate your hunger.
‘We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’: Gregory Bateson’s observation summarizes what motivates Keith Jenkins’s latest book.(1) In this collection of essays written and published over the last 15 years (including not only a foreword by Hayden White and an afterword by Alun Munslow, but also responses from Perez Zagorin and Michael C.
Eric Hobsbawm has recently raised the question ‘Can wewrite the history of the Russian revolution?’. Coming from someone who has written a history of the twentieth century, of which the Russian revolution comprises a rather distant component, the question is somewhat unexpected.
Edward Hallett Carr's contribution to the study of Soviet history is widely regarded as highly distinguished. In all probability very few would argue against this assessment of his multi-volume history of Soviet Russia. For the majority of historians he pretty much got the story straight.
Russell, Conrad Sebastian Robert, Fifth Earl Russell (1937–2004)
In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Pacific History in 1966 Jim Davidson, the first Professor of Pacific History at Australian National University, considered the historiography of the island groups of the Pacific Ocean and called for innovative methodologies to interpret the ‘multi-cultural situations’ of island communities.(1) His manifesto appeared as