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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Corfield, Penelope J., 1944-

Title Time and the shape of history / Penelope J. Corfield.

Publication Info. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2007]
©2007

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xx, 309 pages) : illustrations
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 290-296) and index.
Contents 1: History in time : Chapterlink 1-2: shaping history -- time travel -- 2: Deep continuities : Chapterlink 2-3: shaping history -- time cycles -- 3: Micro-change : Chapterlink 3-4: Shaping history -- time lines -- 4: Radical discontinuity : Chapterlink 4-5: Shaping history -- time ends -- 5: Mutable modernity : Chapterlink 5-6: Shaping history -- time names -- 6: Variable stages : Chapterlink 6-7: Shaping history -- time pieces -- 7: Multiple dimensions : Chapterlink 7-8: Shaping history -- time power -- 8: History past and future : Coda: Time frames and history.
Summary This ambitious book explores the relationship between time and history and shows how an appreciation of long-term time helps to make sense of the past. For the historian, time is not an unproblematic given but, as for the physicist or the philosopher, a means to understanding the changing patterns of life on earth. The book is devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of the way different societies have conceived and interpreted time, and it develops a theory of threefold roles of continuity, gradual change, and revolution that together form a 'braided' history. Linking the interpretative chapters are intriguing brief expositions on time travel, time cycles, time lines and time pieces, showing readers the different ways in which human history has been located in time. In its global approach the book is part of the new shift towards 'big history', in which traditional period divisions are challenged in favour of looking again at the entire past of the world from start to end. The approach is thematic. The result is a view of world history in which outcomes are shown to be explicable, once they happen, but not necessarily predictable before they do. This book will inform the work of historians of all periods and at all levels, and contributes to the current reconsideration of traditional period divisions (such as Modernity and Postmodernity), which the author finds outmoded.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Time.
Time.
History -- Philosophy.
History -- Philosophy.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Other Form: Print version: Corfield, P.J. Time and the shape of history. New Haven : Yale University Press, ©2007 030011558X 9780300115581 (DLC) 2006032506 (OCoLC)71947825
ISBN 9780300137941 (electronic book)
030013794X (electronic book)
030011558X (alkaline paper)
9780300115581 (alkaline paper)
1281735361
9781281735362