In The Challenge of American History, Louis Masur brings together a sampling of recent scholarship to determine the key issues preoccupying historians of American history and to contemplate the discipline's direction for the future. The fifteen summary essays included in this volume allow professional historians, history teachers, and students to grasp in a convenient and accessible form what historians have been writing about.

In The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, Bruce A. VanSledright argues for a more inquiry-oriented approach to history teaching and learning that fosters a sense of citizenship through the critical skills of historical investigation.

The advent of the modern, historical, and critical methods of reading Scripture is one of the most significant events in the last five hundred years of Christian history and theology. New questions arose in the course of that history that led to new, sometimes troubling answers. New ways of considering Scripture were articulated. The crisis in which academic Christian theology has found itself for approximately two hundred years is directly related to the emergence of new ways of studying--and criticizing--the Bible. The Challenge of History traces the trajectory of these developments, presenting key readings from over thirty-five theologians--from Erasmus to Pannenberg--whose writings relate to the birth of modern historical and critical exegesis and, more broadly, to the emergence, among theologians and biblical scholars, of a certain historical consciousness that characterizes vast segments of modernity. How did the historical and critical methods arise? How did they impact the study of Scripture? What are their implications for Christian theology? Scripture is read--and needs to be read--differently in a parish, in a monastery, and in an academic setting. But the various ways of approaching Scripture should not be cordoned off from one another. This volume is an ideal textbook for in-depth study of one of the most important topics in modern theology.

"In this wide-ranging and masterly work, Ahmad Dallal examines the significance of scientific knowledge and situates the culture of science in relation to other cultural forces in Muslim societies. He traces the ways the realms of scientific knowledge and religious authority were delineated historically. For example, the emergence of new mathematical methods revealed that many mosques built in the early period of Islamic expansion were misaligned relative to the Ka'ba in Mecca; this misalignment was critical because Muslims must face Mecca during their five daily prayers. The realization of a discrepancy between tradition and science often led to demolition and rebuilding and, most important, to questioning whether scientific knowledge should take precedence over religious authority in a matter where their realms clearly overlapped"--Page 2 of cover.

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida’s work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida’s 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida’s writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967). Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography. The book raises a challenge for historians to think about both deconstruction and historiography, arguing that contemporary philosophy can provide a basis for thinking about history in the name of a deconstructive historiography that is not incompatible with rigorous historical scholarship.

There is a well-known conundrum concerning Jewish history: The conventional chronology of the Western world - and academia - is in direct conflict with traditional Jewish sources over the history of ... history. Incredibly, there is a gap of roughly 200 years: For instance, the Talmud says the Second Temple stood for roughly 400 years, while mainstream historians today conclude that it stood for almost 600 years.This conflict has major implications on what occurred to who, and when. It also seems to question the accuracy of the entire Jewish tradition as accepted dating methods seem to contradict core parts of the traditional Jewish narrative.In presenting fresh and startling astronomical, mathematical and archaeological evidence, Rabbi Alexander Hool has charted new ground in his quest to find the solution to this ancient problem. The Challenge of Jewish History is revolutionary: it questions all assumptions, dispels unfounded myths, and transports us back in time over 2,500 years.With a subject of great significance and fascination to all those interested in history, and a wealth of scholarship and sources to impress academics, this intriguing book gives us a new perspective on Jewish-and world - history.

As the story of the United States was recorded in pages written by white historians, early-nineteenth-century African American writers faced the task of piecing together a counterhistory: an approach to history that would present both the necessity of and