After History

In the euphoric aftermath of 1989's history-making events, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union, reviewers heralded Francis Fukuyama's national bestseller The End of History and the Last Man as 'the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world.' In After History?, 13 critics from across the political spectrum offer provocative responses to Fukuyama's bold declaration that democracy and capitalism have triumphed over totalitarianism and socialism. Fukuyama responds directly to his critics in a concluding chapter.

Intimate access to the mind of Francis Fukuyama and his reflections on world politics, his life and career, and the evolution of his thought

In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

Praise for the first edition: "To give a sense of immediacy and vividness to the long period in such a short space is a major achievement." --History "Huppert's book is a little masterpiece every teacher should welcome." --Renaissance Quarterly A work of genuine social history, After the Black Death leads the reader into the real villages and cities of European society. For this second edition, George Huppert has added a new chapter on the incessant warfare of the age and thoroughly updated the bibliographical essay.

Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.

What if, living in the past and for the past was no longer tenable - no longer acceptable? What if, being stuck in the past became a force for alienation, breaking down and coming to seem like a false consciousness divorced from the present and from all true human happiness? What if history were dead? Would that matter...? After History: On the Death of History, and the New Culture by Dr. Piotr Stolarski, gets to grip with the pretensions and soul-destroying irrelevance of academic history - arguing that a new existential historiography abandoning a Man-centred Englightenment vision (and now allied to philosophy and theology) is possible and necessary. Analysing the significance, practices and characteristics of History in detail, the author argues for the abandonment of a History dead to and disdainful of the present, and sketches the possibilities left to historians after the "Death of History" - embodied in a Neo-Renaissance eclecticism allying faith to a reformed historiography.

During the late 1770s, Boston's townspeople were struggling to rebuild a community devastated by British occupation, the ensuing siege by the Continental Army, and the Revolutionary war years. After the British attacked Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Boston's population plummeted from 15,000 civilians to less than 3,000, property was destroyed and plundered, and the economy was on the verge of collapse. How the once thriving colonial seaport and its demoralized inhabitants recovered in the wake of such demographic, physical, and economic ruin is the subject of this compelling and well-researched work. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including ward tax assessors' Taking Books, church records, census records, birth and marriage records, newspaper accounts, and town directories, Jacqueline Barbara Carr brings to life Boston's remarkable rebirth as a flourishing cosmopolitan city at the dawn of the nineteenth century. She examines this watershed period in the city's social and cultural history from the perspective of the town's ordinary men and women, both white and African American, re-creating the determined community of laborers, artisans, tradesmen, mechanics, and seamen who demonstrated an incredible perseverance in reshaping their shattered town and lives. Filled with fascinating and dramatic stories of hardship, conflict, continuity, and change, the engaging narrative describes how Boston rebounded in less than twenty-five years through the efforts of inhabitants who survived the ordeal of the siege, those who fled British occupation and returned after the war, and the influx of citizens from many different places seeking new opportunities in the growing city. Carr explores the complex forces that drove Boston's transformation, taking into consideration such topics as the built environment and the town's neighborhoods, the impact of town government on peoples' lives, the day-to-day trials of restoring and managing the community, the effect of the postwar economy on work and daily life, and forms of leisure and theater entertainment.

Following a clear timeline, the author highlights key movements of modern art, giving careful attention to the artists' political and cultural worlds. Styles include Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and performance art. 65 color illustrations. 65 halftones.

Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

Lacan was not an ahistorical post-structuralist. Starting from this controversial premiss, Teresa Brennan tells the story of a social psychosis. She begins by recovering Lacan's neglected theory of history which argued that we are in the grip of a psychotic's era which began in the seventeenth century and climaxes in the present. By extending and elaborating Lacan's theory, Brennan develops a general theory of modernity. Contrary to postmodern assumptions, she argues, we need general historical explanation. An understanding of historical dynamics is essential if we are to make the connections between the outstanding facts of modernity - ethnocentrism, the relationship between the sexes and ecological catastrophe.