Experiments in Rethinking History

From two of the world’s leading postmodern historians, this thoroughly original collection of articles allows students and researchers to understand and learn important new ways of thinking and writing about the past.

This book includes a thorough two-part introduction on theory and practice as well as introductory material in each section that allows the reader to fully engage with the theoretical aspects of the book. It provides a deeper understanding of how to engage with the past today.

Fourteen thought-provoking experimental pieces of historical writing tackle subjects as diverse as lynching in South Carolina, the life of an eighteenth-century Marquise, and a journey to a string of Pacific islands, and demonstrates how little-considered factors such as the impact of emotions, authorial subjectivity, the confining character of boundaries, and even a sense of boredom with conventional historical writing practices, can intrude on historical practice

This text works as a Reader companion alongside the Routledge best-seller Rethinking History and provides students with an innovative, engaging and easy-to-read research tool to enhance all history-related course studies.

Alun Munslow is Professor of History and Historical Theory at Staffordshire University. He is the author of Deconstructing History, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies and most recently The New History and is the UK editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.

Robert A. Rosenstone, Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology, is author of six books, including Romantic Revolutionary: A Biogrpahy of John Reed, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History and King of Odessa. Currently he serves as Founding Editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.