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30 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 2

Reparations and Redress for Historical Injustice

Reparations and Redress for Historical Injustice
  • Timothy Waligore
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • This Element introduces various justifications for reparations and redress for historical injustice discussed in political theory and philosophy. It examines multiple real-world cases to illustrate and test theories. It is accessible to students and scholars unfamiliar with the field, while providing new arguments for experts in the field, and organizing the debate around reparations in new ways. The Element is divided into four main sections. The first three sections examine different temporal orientations of justice: backward-looking, forward-looking, and structural injustice over time. The fourth section examines Indigenous perspectives and settler colonial theory, which complicate and problematize the temporal orientations and arguments from the other sections. The discussion in this Element is organized around two recurring theses. First, approaches relying on primarily forward-looking justifications could be made more plausible and compelling by incorporating backward-looking elements (and vice versa). Second, past injustice can change what should (publicly) count as justice.
The History of Contingency and Future-Oriented Thought

The History of Contingency and Future-Oriented Thought
  • Thomas Moynihan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • The future is contingent. It can unfold differently, hinging on chance or choice within the present. This Element tells the story of how these twin concepts have developed across human history. Arcing from our earliest ancestors, through al-Ghazālī, to S. J. Gould, the Element demonstrates how humans realised the future is an undecided, contingent place – at scales leading beyond the biographical, up to the planetary, and beyond. It pinpoints this realisation as an ongoing and unfinished intellectual revolution. Just as the telescope revealed Deep Space in the 1600s, and the geologists' hammer revealed Deep Time in the 1800s, contemporary developments in science are revealing what I call Deep Possibility. This is the realisation that there is far more possible than will ever be actual. It is this that makes history matter, and gives contingency its bite, insofar as it forces acknowledgement that not all outcomes will come to pass regardless.
Gender, Theory, and History

Gender, Theory, and History
  • On the Knowledge and Politics of Bodies
  • María Inés La Greca
  • Published online:
    19 December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
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  • The category of gender has a special relation to history as an academic practice, as a form of writing, and as a way of understanding humanity as such. This Element reconstructs the trajectory of debates over gender to trace its emergence as an analytical category through the work of feminist thinkers such as that by Joan W. Scott, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway. Situating the reader in a twenty-first century perspective, this Element shows that gender is still a key term in theoretical discussions not only within but also beyond academia, in current public debates related to women and LGBTQ+ human rights around the globe. 'Gender' is both a theoretical resource and a political tool to effect social change. Refiguring gender as a historical category, this Element provides a promising framework for historians, theorists of history, and everyone interested in reflecting on the relation between bodies, knowledge, and politics.
Myths, History Wars, and Indigenous-Settler Relations in Canada and Other Settler States

Myths, History Wars, and Indigenous-Settler Relations in Canada and Other Settler States
  • David Bruce Amichand MacDonald
  • Published online:
    15 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
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  • Many western settler states are undertaking processes to improve Indigenous-settler relations. The primary focus is Canada, with some discussion of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States of America. This Element highlights myths promoted by explorers, settlers, and the state about Indigenous Peoples and history. It engages with and attempts to correct a selection of the misperceptions that have developed over the many centuries. I argue that the first 'foundational history wars' were advanced by European explorers, travellers, and settlers through the promotion of negative myths about Indigenous Peoples, as an accompaniment to settler colonialism. I distinguish these from 'modern history wars' from the 1960s to the 1990s. The goal is to provide a fuller history which critically engages settler myths, privileges Indigenous perspectives, and offers a robust and informed critique of dominant historical narratives. The larger goal is to promote truth as a necessary accompaniment to reconciliation.
Knowledge and Narrative

Knowledge and Narrative
  • Chiel van den Akker
  • Published online:
    18 November 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025
  • This Element is concerned with narrative as a mode of knowing. It draws attention to the epistemic value of historical narrative qua narrative. This it does not only in an abstract sense, but also with the help of recent works of history. Special attention is given to narrative sentences and narrative theses. A narrative thesis redescribes the actions and events the historian is concerned with and allows for the temporal whole or unity we associate with narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end. A thesis, it is argued, is indispensable and qualifies the work of historians as narrative. The concern with narrative has not lost any of its relevance, for the simple reason that it informs us about history as an academic discipline and the knowledge it produces. For as long as historians decide what events are important in their past and for what reason, they will rely on narrative.
Race, Genetics, History

Race, Genetics, History
  • New Practices, New Approaches
  • Alexandra P. Alberda, Njabulo Chipangura, Lara Choksey, Jerome de Groot, Maya Sharma
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • This Element, about historical practice and genetics, seeks to understand what is at stake in presenting, preserving, and articulating the past in the present. Historical practice is both conceptual and material, a consonance of approach which is reflected in the innovative and non-traditional format of the Element itself – not simply in its length, but its constitution. The Element was created collaboratively with contributions from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and areas of professional expertise. It consists of a series of interventions which are then discussed by the contributors and is foundationally multi-voiced and discursive. The Element attempts to be non-extractive, ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and constantly ongoing and provisional in its representation. The Element strives to contribute to ongoing attempts to rethink, reconfigure, reassess, and entirely change the object of study and the practice of history.
Things of the Past

Things of the Past
  • A Modern Yearning
  • Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen
  • Published online:
    27 October 2025
    Print publication:
    27 November 2025
  • This Element explores the yearning for things of the past, from early modern antiquarianism to the contemporary art market. It tells a global story about scholars who, driven by this yearning, roamed the world and amassed many of its historical artefacts. Their motivation was not just pleasure or profit. They longed for a past that had been lost and strived to reconstruct world history anew. This rewriting of history unleashed heated debates, all over the world and raging for centuries. The debates concerned not only the past but also the present and the future. Many believed that, by revealing a strange and foreign past, the material remains opened a path to modernity. So, the Element investigates not only the history of historical scholarship, and its obsession with things, but also our relationship to the past as modern human beings.
Contested Public Monuments

Contested Public Monuments
  • Global perspectives on landscapes of memory
  • Maria Grever
  • Published online:
    22 October 2025
    Print publication:
    13 November 2025
  • In the new millennium, many public monuments around the world have become the target of protests as part of social movements' struggles against inequality and discrimination. Despite research into the significance of toppled statues or damaged monuments and the motives of activists, little attention has been paid to the extent to which iconoclastic activism changes the narratives of public spaces or landscapes of memory. This Element approaches current conflicts over public monuments as an attempt to transform the mnemonic regime of public spaces. It examines global cases involving colonialism, Black slavery, world wars, and women's oppression. Using theoretical concepts, such as monumental narrativity, necropolitical space, white innocence, and the implicated subject, four current contexts of contestations will be highlighted: the fabric of landscapes of memory; the relationship between the living and the dead of a community; the power of visual language, iconography, and multiplication; the importance of dialogical monuments.
Testimony and Historical Knowledge

Testimony and Historical Knowledge
  • Authority, Evidence and Ethics in Historiography
  • Jonas Ahlskog
  • Published online:
    29 July 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
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  • This Element explores the relation between historiography and testimony as a question about what it means to know and understand the past historically. In contrast with the recent rapprochement between memory accounts and history in historical theory, the Element argues for the importance of attending to conceptually distinct relations to past actions and events in historical thinking compared with testimony. The conceptual distinctiveness of history is elucidated by placing historical theory in dialogue with the epistemology of testimony and classical philosophy of history. By clarifying the rejection of testimony inherent in the evidential paradigm of modern historical research, this Element provides a thoroughgoing account of the ways in which historical knowledge and understanding relates to testimony. The argument is that the role of testimony in historiography is fundamentally shaped by the questioning-activity at the core of critical historical research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
History and Hermeneutics

History and Hermeneutics
  • Paul Fairfield
  • Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Philosophical hermeneutics has shed a good deal of light both upon the methodological underpinnings of the humanities and social sciences generally and in particular upon some fundamental issues in the philosophy of history and history proper. The aim in this Element is to analyze those of its arguments that bear directly upon the latter fields. The principal topics taken up are Dilthey's distinction between understanding and explanation, the accent on meaning and experience, and the sense in which we may be said to belong to history. Heidegger's account of historicity and being-in-the-world, Gadamer's conceptions of historical understanding and belonging, and Ricoeur's view of historians as storytellers also come in for analysis. Other themes include the sense in which we may speak of a dialogue with the past, the notion of historical truth, and the problem of constructivism.
Pragmatism and Historical Representation

Pragmatism and Historical Representation
  • Serge Grigoriev
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • No prominent pragmatist philosopher to date has offered us a fully developed theory of history or historical interpretation. Nevertheless, a number of pivotal arguments and suggestions made by the pragmatists appeared to many both insightful and pertinent enough to offer a distinctive promise of a cohesive and distinctive general pragmatist perspective in historical theory. The present contribution is intended to secure some advances in this direction, focusing on the relationships between objectivity and perspective; between representation as an accurate correspondence to reality and the social, cultural sense of representation as being represented and being representative; as well as the relationship between individualizing comprehension and generalizing abstraction in historical contexts.
Historiographic Reasoning

Historiographic Reasoning
  • Aviezer Tucker
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. The book applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A history of historiographic reasoning since the late 18th century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific revolution across the historical sciences in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The underdetermination of historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and historiography.
Historians' Autobiographies as Historiographical Inquiry

Historians' Autobiographies as Historiographical Inquiry
  • A Global Perspective
  • Jaume Aurell
  • Published online:
    06 January 2025
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • This Element analyses the autobiographies of historians from a global perspective and looks at all eras, from antiquity to the present day. It includes twenty autobiographies: Caesar's and Lucian of Samosata's memories in antiquity; an autobiography of a medieval king such as Peter IV of Aragon; Vico's, Gibbon's and Adams' intellectual self-accounting in modernity; autobiographical revelations and social activism of twentieth century women historians such as Carolyn Steedman, Jill Conway and Gerda Lerner; classical Chinese and Islamic traditions through the autobiographies of Sima Quian and Ibn Khaldun; the perplexities inherent in the modernisation of Japan (Fukuzawa Yukichi), China (Gu Jiegang), India (Nirad Chaudhuri) and Egypt (Taha Hussein); postmodernists such as Rosenstone; and traumatic postcolonial experiences in Africa (Bethwell Ogot), Latin America (Carlos Eire) and Southeast Asia (Wang Gungwu). This Element proposes a literary and historical approach to these autobiographies, emphasising its historiographical dimension and value.
A Human Rights View of the Past

A Human Rights View of the Past
  • Antoon De Baets
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The idea of human rights has been much criticized from a historical perspective but curiously enough its theoretical and practical contributions to the study of time, memory, and history have never been systematically explored. How is it to look at the past from a human rights perspective? How can historical writing benefit from applying a human rights logic? In tackling these questions, the Element first clarifies what a human rights view of the past is. The constituent dimensions of the past – time, memory, and history – are then reviewed, indicating what a human rights perspective can add to the study of each. Finally, the benefits accruing froma human rights view of the past to historical theory and practice are highlighted.
Dealing with Dark Pasts

Dealing with Dark Pasts
  • A European History of Auto-Critical Memory in Global Perspective
  • Itay Lotem
  • Published online:
    04 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Since the end of the Second World War, the political rationale to remember the past has shifted from previous focus on states' victories, as these began commemorating their own historical crimes. This Element follows the rise of 'auto-critical memory', or the politics of remembrance of a country's own dark past. The Element explores the idea's gestation in West Germany after the Second World War, its globalisation through initiatives of 'transitional justice' in the 1990s, and present-day debates about how to remember the colonial past. It follows different case studies that span the European continent – including Germany, France, Britain, Poland and Serbia – and places these in a global context that traces the circulation of ideas of auto-critical memory. Ultimately, as it follows the emergence of demands for social and racial justice, the Element questions the usefulness of memory to achieve the goals many political actors ascribe to it.
Writing the History of the African Diaspora

Writing the History of the African Diaspora
  • Toyin Falola
  • Published online:
    14 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element is an analysis of the African Diaspora. It will define the African Diaspora and how the concepts behind the term came to be socially and historically engineered. The African diaspora is then placed into a broader historical context where the diverse, global, and overlapping histories of Africa's ancient-ongoing diasporas will be explored. In particular, themes of injustice, agency, resistance, and diversity (regarding people, diasporas, and experiences) will feature heavily. Through this exploration, this Element will interrogate dominating narratives regarding African diaspora-related discourse, seeking to address prevailing ideas that inadequately capture the true complexity and nuance of the subject. It does so to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter while lining out a more holistic approach to thinking about the very nature of 'diaspora.' Finally, this Element will analyze the present circumstances of the African diaspora, bringing into conversation a progressively global and connected world.
Conceptualizing the History of the Present Time

Conceptualizing the History of the Present Time
  • María Inés Mudrovcic
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • In this work, I explore four meanings of 'contemporary,' emphasizing its designation as a historical field. I argue that disagreements about when the presento or the contemporary era begins stem from historians assuming a linear, chronological, and absolute conception of time. Following scholars like L. Descombes, L. Hölscher, B. Latour, D. J. Wilcox and S. Tanaka, I propose conceiving relational historical time without chronology, emphasizing the original sense of “sharing the same time” that 'contemporary' acquired for the first time. This perspective mitigates issues concerning the 'beginnings' or 'meaning' of the present. Emphasizing relationships within a relational time framework aids in overcoming ontological challenges like 'so many presents' or 'distance in time,' along with the corresponding epistemological issue of 'objectivity.' This exploration aims to reevaluate and enrich our understanding of the multifaceted concept of the 'present' in the context of history.
The History of Knowledge

The History of Knowledge
  • Johan Östling, David Larsson Heidenblad
  • Translated by Lena Olsson
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
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  • This Element provides a pedagogical overview of the history of knowledge, including its main currents, distinguishing ideas, and key concepts. However, it is not primarily a state-of-the-art overview but rather an argumentative contribution that seeks to push the field in a certain direction – towards studying knowledge in society and knowledge in people's lives. Hence, the history of knowledge envisioned by the authors is not a rebranding of the history of science and intellectual history, but rather a reinvigoration of social and cultural history. This implies that many different forms of knowledge should be objects of study. By drawing on ongoing research from all across the world dealing with different time periods and problems, the authors demonstrate that the history of knowledge can enrich our understanding of past societies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Plural Pasts

Plural Pasts
  • Historiography between Events and Structures
  • Arthur Alfaix Assis
  • Published online:
    04 December 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • What is history about? This Element shows that answers centred on the keyword 'past events' are incomplete, even if they are not simply wrong. Interweaving theoretical and historical perspectives, it provides an abstract overview of the thematic plurality that characterizes contemporary academic historiography. The reflection on different sorts of pasts that can be at focus in historical research and writing encompasses events as well as non-events, especially recursive social structures and cultural webs. Some consequences of such plurality for discussions concerning historical methodology, explanation, exemplification, and representation are also outlined. The basic message, reinforced throughout, is that the great relevance of non-event-centred approaches should prompt us to talk more about “histories” in the plural and less about “history” in the singular.
Writing the History of Global Slavery

Writing the History of Global Slavery
  • Trevor Burnard
  • Published online:
    27 November 2023
    Print publication:
    07 December 2023
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  • This Element shows that existing models of global slavery derived from sociology and modelled closely on antebellum American slavery being normative should be replaced a global slavery that is less American and more global. It argues that we can understand the global history of slavery if we connect it more closely to another important world institution – empires in ways that historicise the study of history as an institution with a history that changes over time and space. Moreover, we can learn from scholars of modern slavery and use more than we do the enormous proliferation of usable sources about the lives, experiences and thoughts of the enslaved, from ancient to modern times, to make these voices of the enslaved crucial drivers of how we conceptualise and describe the varied kinds of global slavery in world history. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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