Book review: Presenting history

Presenting history: past and present by Peter Beck has recently arrived in the Library.

 A907.2 / 735803

Read the review by the Institute of Historical Research's Dr Ian Phillpott on the IHR's Reviews in History, followed by the author's response

This book takes a look at how "popular" presentations of history in the media "influence our understanding of and interest in the past and whether academic history (both in the teaching of and research in) fails to ignite interest in its subject matter due to practices and standardisations of presentations in the field" 

There are chapters on "popular" historians such as A.J.P. Taylor, Eric Hobsbawn and Simon Schama and on the "Hollywoodisation" of history through the glossy inaccuracies of TV series such as The Tudors and films such as Mel Gibson's take on the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace in Braveheart. Beck also looks at the surge in popularity for historical fiction through the work of Philippa Gregory (The other Boleyn girl, The white Queen etc) and how Terry Deary has fired children s' interest in the past through his Horrible Histories series

CLICK HERE TO LINK TO THE LIBRARY CATALOGUE

Russian Orientalism: 2 new studies

Read Rachel Polonsky's article "The paradoxes of Russian Orientalism" from the online Times Literary Supplement which examines the Russian view of "the East" and outlines the connections between the nomads of the Asian steppes and the European Slavs.
The article looks at how these issues are explored in two recent books - David Schimelpenninck van der Oye's Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration (2010) - in SOAS Library at A303.48247 / 733376 - and Vera Tolz's Russia's own Orient: the politics of identity and Oriental studies in the late imperial and early Soviet periods (2011) - on order

A new title to look out for !

Oxford University Press has just brought out "A concise companion to history", edited by Ulinka Rublack.
The book contains a selection of essays on the writing and interpretation of history, and on the treatment of cross-cultural thematic issues such as commerce, population and ethnicity, including a chapter on the merging discipline of environmental history.

SOAS Library has a couple of copies on order ...

Click HERE to read the review by Alix Green (University of Herfordshire) in the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History
Alix is Head of Policy at the University and a part-time PhD student researching how "historical thinking can contribute to public policy development"

Book review: Witnesses to a world crisis

Anthony Kaldelis of Ohio State University reviews James Howard-Johnston's "Witnesses to a world crisis: historians and histories of the Middle East in the 7th century" in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review
The book was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

Read the book in SOAS Library at N907.2 / 736514