Other pasts, different presents, alternative futures / Jeremy Black
Publication details: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.Description: xiii, 236 pISBN:- 9780253017048
- 900 Q5
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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Books | Mahatma Gandhi University Library General Stacks | 900 Q5 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 59334 |
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896.3 ACH 09 Q3 The novels of Chinua Achebe: | 896.3 ACH/T 111Q0 Things fall apart/ | 897.09 Q4 The Oxford handbook of indigenous American literature/ | 900 Q5 Other pasts, different presents, alternative futures / | 901 P71 History and memory / | 901 Q0 The uses and abuses of history / | 901 Q3 The Sage handbook of historical theory / |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-230) and index.
A personal note on life and times -- Types of history -- Power and the struggle for imperial mastery -- The West and the rest -- Britain and France, 1688-1815 -- Counterfactualism in military history -- Into the future -- Skepticism and the historian -- Conclusions -- Postscript.
"What if there had been no World War I or no Russian Revolution? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War? The questioning of apparent certainties or 'known knowns' can be fascinating and, indeed, 'What if?' books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited impact in academic histories, historiography, and the teaching of historical methods. In this book, Jeremy Black offers a short guide to the subject, one that is designed to argue its value as a tool for public and academe alike. Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future"--Provided by publisher.
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