Conversations About History, Volume 1

This compendium includes the following 5 complete books featuring emiment historians David Cannadine, Michael Gordin, Margaret Jacob, Teofilo Ruiz and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. The books are explicitly designed to provide a unique window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be experienced through standard lectures and textbooks. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter:

I. Embracing Complexity - A conversation with David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History, Princeton University. This wide-ranging conversation includes an examination of different aspects of the societal role of both history and historians while rejecting the simplifying distortions of the historical record that we are regularly presented with.

II. Science and Pseudoscience - A conversation with Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Princeton University. This conversation provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of pseudoscience and examines as a specific example the strange case of Immanuel Velikovsky, author of the bestselling book "Worlds in Collision" that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth, as a way of probing the often-problematic boundary between science and pseudoscience.

III. Enlightened Entrepreneurialism - A conversation with Margaret Jacob, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. Topics examined, include: a comprehensive analysis of the history of the Industrial Revolution and interpretation of the major economic motivations on the ground; comparing daily life experiences in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands; how a sophisticated understanding of the past naturally involves a composite approach that marries economic motivations with associated cultural factors of educational trends, religious influences and scientific and technological awareness.

IV. The Consolations of History - A conversation with Teofilo Ruiz, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. Teofilo Ruiz is a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. This wide-ranging conversation dives deep into Ruiz's research and also provides captivating insights into his Cuban origins, how he became a professional historian, the challenges and excitement of teaching, and what the future of historical research might hold.

V. Herculaneum Uncovered - A conversation with Andrew Wallace-Hadril...