ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

Practice and theory

chapter |4 pages

PART I Self-reflexive

chapter 1|13 pages

When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation

Concepción González and a past that would not stay put

chapter 2|26 pages

Writing, rewriting the beach

An essay

chapter 3|21 pages

Reconditioning history

Adapting knowledge from the past into realities of the present

chapter 4|8 pages

Not a “Kodak moment”

Picturing Asian Americans

chapter |4 pages

PART II New voices

chapter 5|35 pages

Impressions of the Somme

An experiment

chapter 7|27 pages

Narrating a southern tragedy

Historical facts and historical fictions

chapter 8|12 pages

Reconstructing the voice of a noblewoman of the time of Peter the Great: Daria Mikhailovna Menshikova

An exercise in (pseudo)autobiographical writing

chapter 9|14 pages

A prologue for La Dame d’Esprit

The biography of the marquise Du Châtelet

chapter 10|14 pages

Blackout

part |2 pages

PART III Miniatures

chapter 11|3 pages

Dictator in a dumpster

Thoughts on history and garbage

chapter 13|3 pages

Liberace

Behind the music

chapter 14|5 pages

Rethinking Charles Atlas