The Making of Psychohistory is the first volume dedicated to the history of psychohistory, an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences. Dr. Paul Elovitz, a participant since the early days of the organized field, recounts the origins and development of this interdisciplinary area of study, as well as the contributions of influential individuals working within the intersection of historical and psychological thinking and methodologies. This is an essential, thorough reflection on the rich and varied scholarship within psychohistory’s subfields of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychobiography.

While children are a relatively unchanging fact of life, childhood is a constantly shifting concept. Throughout the millennia, the age at which a child becomes a youth and a youth becomes an adult has varied by gender, class, religion, ethnicity, place, and economic need. As author James Marten explores in this Very Short Introduction, so too have the realities of childhood, each life shaped by factors such as education, expectation, and conflict (or lack thereof). Indeed, ancient Roman children lived very differently than those born of today's Generation Z. Experiences of childhood have been shaped in classrooms and on factory floors, in family homes and orphanages, and on battlefields and in front of television sets. In addressing this diversity, The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction takes a global, expansive view of the features of childhood that have shaped childhood throughout history and continue to shape it now. From the rules of Confucian childrearing in twelfth-century China to the struggles of children living as slaves in the Americas or as cotton mill workers in Industrial Age Britain, Marten takes his inspiration from the idea that the lives of children reveal important and sometimes uncomfortable truths about civilization. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Political leaders in Britain are consistently drawn from a class born to be educated away from their families in institutions - elite boarding schools. This has a direct effect on their ability to love, to relate, to make good judgments and to develop the necessary leadership qualities for today's world. In this controversial and highly acclaimed book, the author guides the reader along the elite path through boarding school and Oxbridge to government, unpacking what he calls the Entitlement Illusion. Central to the Illusion is a uniquely British phenomenon, an industrialised process for turning out servants of the Empire that has been unwilling to change with the times. It was deified in the Victorian Rational Man Project and normalised by the British public, who still buy into the trance. Up to date evidence from Neuroscience shows what a poor training for leadership this actually is.

How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question in A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries by exploring “meta-framing:” our ever-increasing capability to “step back” from the environment, search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar, and generate “as if” forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. This book demonstrates how analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective capabilities and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances.

A survey of childhood that reveals startling views of life in Europe and America during the past 2000 years. This book documents the lives of former children who were abused. It places child abuse today into the context of what was routinely inflicted upon

What kind of psychology should be used in historical interpretation? How should it be used, and on what range of historical problems? These are some of the basic questions addressed by the distinguished contributors.