History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century

John H. Arnold · Matthew Hilton · Jan Rüger

Oct 2017 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

What does it mean - and what might it yet come to mean - to write 'history' in the twenty-first century? History After Hobsbawm brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century's greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first-century society understand 'how we got here'. They present new work in their sub-fields but also point to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history - both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, introduce some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects from the medieval period to the present.

About the author

John H. Arnold studied at the University of York, and worked firstly at the University of East Anglia, and then for a number of years at Birkbeck, University of London, before taking up the chair of medieval history at Cambridge in 2016. He works on medieval culture and religion, and on various aspects of modern historiography. He is the author, among many other things, of History: A Very Short Introduction (2002). Matthew Hilton is Professor of Social History at Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely on the history of charities, social activism, consumption, and NGOs. His most recent books are Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalisation (2009) and The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain ( 2013). He has co-edited several collections of essays, including The Ages of Voluntarism (2011) and Transnationalism and Contemporary Global History (2013) and Cultural Studies Fifty Years On (2016). Jan Rüger is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (2007) and Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea (2017).