Encounters: Cultural Histories – serie

In this witty, engaging and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced a highly original and sometimes irreverent investigation into the development of modern history writing. Dust is about the practice and writing of history. Dust considers the immutable, stubborn set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern history writing attempts to grapple. Drawing on over five years worth of her own published and unpublished writing, the author has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.Steedman begins by looking at the attention paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, what has become known as the practice of ‘archivisation’. By definition, the archive is the repository of 'that which will not go away', and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the ‘matter of history’ can never go away or be erased. Historians who want to think about what it is they do will find this work enlightening, and this book is essential reading for all undergraduates and postgraduates studying historiography, and history and theory.

God is dead. Thanks to the decoding of the human genome, the ‘word’ has been rendered into ‘flesh’ and ‘we can all be proud of our species as it closes in on this summit of self-knowledge’. Yet, the very architects of its decoding have also warned that ‘t. Provides a history of genetics in Britain from its inception as a science in the early years of the twentieth century. Seeks to examine the roots of these two paradoxical assessments of the decoding of the human genome. Explores the intersection of historiography, critical theory, and science and technology studies, aiming to reaffirm the inescapable presence and necessity of the 'Absolute.

This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates the testimony which was solicited, selected and published by key women activists within Boer proto-nationalist circles. Using detailed archival evidence, she shows that much of the history of the camps results from a deliberate imposition of ‘post/memory’ - a process by which what was ‘remembered’ was shaped and reshaped to support the development of a racialised nationalist framework. Many of the camps’ occupants died from successive epidemics of measles, typhoid, enteritis and pneumonia rather than deliberate ill-treatment, yet the book shows how mourning for those who died was overridden by state commemorative activities concerned with promoting pan-Boer nationalist aspirations. The innovative and groundbreaking approach of the author invites the reader to step into and explore with her the commemorative sites passed by nationalist land acts, which still powerfully mark the South African landscape.

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamin’s Arcades: an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness, carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian, this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century.Benjamin’s Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed 'convoluted' index. Some of the entries confront Benjamin with a different reading of his own historical sources (Blanqui, Marx, Giedion), others look intensively at key themes, obsessions, and images (the gambler, commodity fetishism, the Angel of History, magic). Throughout there is discussion of the relationship of Benjamin’s work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity, Judaism, fascism, and psychoanalysis. Benjamin’s Arcades opens up Benjamin’s texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work.

This important new book, which focuses on the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but which looks back to the earlier decades of the century and has a conclusion dealing with the 1970s to 1990s, maps the world of those known as ‘trade’ – ostensibly straight men who would engage in homosexual sex – and hustlers – those who were paid for it. It was a milieu that was central to the sexual histories of several generations of twentieth-century American men and also influenced American literary and visual culture; the ‘trade aesthetic’ informed the work of a variety of artists, filmmakers, and writers. This sexual culture, though compelling in itself, also allows us to explore some key aspects of modern sexual history.This pioneering work, which draws on a wide range of visual and literary sources, including previously unpublished material from the Kinsey archives, will appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in the histories of sex, the city, masculinity, and American culture.

This important new book, which focuses on the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but which looks back to the earlier decades of the century and has a conclusion dealing with the 1970s to 1990s, maps the world of those known as ‘trade’ – ostensibly straight men who would engage in homosexual sex – and hustlers – those who were paid for it. It was a milieu that was central to the sexual histories of several generations of twentieth-century American men and also influenced American literary and visual culture; the ‘trade aesthetic’ informed the work of a variety of artists, filmmakers, and writers. This sexual culture, though compelling in itself, also allows us to explore some key aspects of modern sexual history.This pioneering work, which draws on a wide range of visual and literary sources, including previously unpublished material from the Kinsey archives, will appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in the histories of sex, the city, masculinity, and American culture.

This fascinating book looks at the phenomenon of murder and poisoning in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the case of William Palmer, a medical doctor who in 1856 was convicted of murder by poisoning, it examines how his case baffled toxicologists, doctors, detectives and judges. The investigation commences with an overview of the practice of toxicology in the Victorian era, and goes on to explore the demands imposed by legal testimony on scientific work to convict criminals. In addressing Palmer's trial, Burney focuses on the testimony of Alfred Swaine Taylor, a leading expert on poisons, and integrates the medical, legal and literary evidence to make sense of the trial itself and the sinister place of poison in wider Victorian society. Ian Burney has produced an exemplary work of cultural history, mixing a keen understanding of the contemporary social and cultural landscape with the scientific and medical history of the period.