Varieties of History and Their Porous Frontiers
Properly understood, social history, local history and historiography are closely interconnected and benefit from the dialectical relationships which help bind them together. The actual topics and individual chapters gathered together in this book are chronologically wide-ranging, but are demonstrably linked by methodological common denominators and common threads in their northern and southern settings. All the essays are squarely based on new research and all reach outwards, as well as inwards. All are problem solving and all display a vigorous methodology at work. Some re-visit well-known historians and subjects such as W.G. Hoskins and Joan Thirsk and the Oxford English Dictionary. Others, like the essays on John Milner and G.H. Tupling make a convincing case for resurrecting the neglected or forgotten.
R.C. Richardson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Winchester, UK, where he taught for much of his working life. He has held visiting professorships at a number of American universities, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. He was co-editor of the international journal Literature and History for over three decades, and has served as General Editor for Manchester University Press for two highly successful series. He is himself the author and editor of a large number of books, including Puritanism in Northwest England (1972), The Debate on the English Revolution (3rd ed., 1998), Images of Oliver Cromwell (reprinted 2015), The Changing Face of English Local History (reprinted 2018), and Household Servants in Early Modern England (2010). Two earlier volumes of his collected essays, Social History, Local History and Historiography and Receptions and Re-visitings, were published in 2011.
“Every chapter intrigues the reader with its surprising but penetrating approach. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the final chapter, a ‘cultural mapping’ achieved through a reading of the Festival of Britain (1951) regional guidebooks, a new lens through which to consider post-war optimism. This collection instructs and delights in equal measures.”
Philip Martin
Emeritus Professor of Literature, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Times Higher Education, 6 January 2022
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