More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud's wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg places historical knowledge in a long tradition of cognitive practices and shows how a research strategy based on reading clues and traces embedded in the historical record reveals otherwise hidden information. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve these cultural and social dimensions. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on how easily we miss the context in which we read, write, and live. Only hindsight allows some understanding. He examines his own path in research during the 1970s and its relationship to the times, especially the political scenes of Italy and Germany. Was he influenced by the environment, he asks himself, and if so, how? Ginzburg uses his own experience to examine the elusive and constantly evolving nature of history and historical research. Book jacket.

"Drawn largely from keynote addresses presented at conferences all over the world, and informed by the experience of writing the Oxford History of Western Music, this book considers the perennial, insoluble yet unevadable problems that musical scholarship must address, among them: musical ontology, musical representation, the determination of musical meaning, the objectives of musical historiography, the ethics of musical performance and criticism, musical periodization, the question of aesthetic autonomy, the social impact of art and the need to control it, the proper source of that control, the relationship of art (and art scholarship) to its temporal and geographical environments, the desirability of historical performance practices, the value and purpose of musical analysis, the origin and value of musical traditions, the purposes and effects of the social dissemination of music. As suggested by the subtitle, the thrust is consistently anti-essentialist. Meaning and value are at all times seen in relational terms, as aspects of social transaction"--

Oscar Handlin is best known as America's leading historian of ethnicity and the immigrant experience in the new nation. In 1961 he produced what was perhaps the first critique of anti-Americanism as an ideological expression of Marxism-Leninismin the schools of higher learning. In his new opening essay to this second edition, he both tells how he was able to perceive the cancer of communist ideology early, and why this new edition is needed now. The Distortion of America is a handbook on avoiding error, a methodological primer on how historians gather evidence, presume witnesses to be reliable or not, and develop forms of verification in the conduct of analysis and research. As such this work is an introduction to the study of history, as well as an examination of specific instances of ideology and mindless passion as ruinous ways to look at America. Handlin shows how social history kept his vision close to the experiences of ordinary people, whose heritage of freedom and dedication to individual liberty was the necessary antidote to academic exaggeration. Six additional chapters supplement those gathered in the earlier collection. Two written in the 1950s describe the forces that later created the economic strength of the United States, while a third treats the problem of race which long contributed to the distortions of America. An account of Yugoslavia before its collapse describes the class divisions responsible for present troubles. By contrast, no inkling of the tensions that would erupt in bloody civil war caught the attention of hundreds of journalists who crowded Sarajevo in 1984. A brief article shows the relevance to China of democracy in the United States. The final new entry is a memorable piece on how the career of Arthur Koestler exemplifies the difficulties of the ex-communist in an unsympathetic environment. These essays illustrate Handlin's working philosophy: "the study of the human past persuades me that, despite the frequent risks of failure, man has the capacity to make order an find purpose in the world in which he lives when he uses the power of his reason to do so."

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.