So far histories of historiography have concentrated almost exclusively on the West. This is the first book to offer a history of modern historiography from a global perspective. Tracing the transformation of historical writings over the past two and half centuries, the book portrays the transformation of historical writings under the effect of professionalization, which served as a model not only for Western but also for much of non-Western historical studies. At the same time it critically examines the reactions in post-modern and post-colonial thought to established conceptions of scientific historiography. A main theme of the book is how historians in the non-Western world not only adopted or adapted Western ideas, but also explored different approaches rooted in their own cultures.

Governments throughout the Western world are increasingly concerned about national identity and the transmission of historical knowledge. Beyond the Canon tackles these issues and their possible effects for historical culture in a globalizing and postcolonial world. The editors have tied the various contributions together in a fascinating volume about the philosophical grounding of (de-)canonization processes and its consequences for the construction of narratives and the teaching of history in multicultural class rooms and museums. The authors reconfigure the different historical narratives and moral perspectives generated in the sometimes difficult processes of coming to terms with the pasts of Germany, South Africa and postcolonial Western nations. What happens when foundational concepts, such as the Enlightenment, the nation or gender, are subjected to critique and revision? Introducing English-speaking readers to scholars whose previous work has been in other languages, this volume is a valuable contribution to studies in International History.

La escritura de la memoria is a vibrant journey through twentieth century historiography that admirably combines the development of theory with the exposure of specific authors and works. It reviews trends that have historically dominated the discipline over the past century: the inherited positivism, the interwar historicism, hatching and the development of the Annales school; marxisms and the long post-war period associated with a history of socioeconomic status; the emergence of postmodernism and the linguistic and anthropological turns of the seventies, the crisis of the eighties; the recovery of old themes and methodologies through the new stories, the cultural turn of the nineties; and finally what the author calls the resort to third-ways, which seems to dominate the current historiographical landscape.

Our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the present and the future: this is historical consciousness. Historical consciousness has serious implications for international relations, reparations claims, fiscal initiatives, immigration, and indeed, almost every contentious arena of public policy, collective identity, and personal experience.While academic history, public history, and the study of collective memory are thriving enterprises, there has been only sparse investigation of historical consciousness itself, in a way that relates it to the policy questions it raises in the present. With Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Peter Seixas has brought together a diverse group of international scholars to address the problem of historical consciousness from the disciplinary perspectives of history, historiography, philosophy, collective memory, psychology, and history education.