This book enables us to understand the current transformations in the experience of time that have been taking place in recent decades. Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira and Valdei Lopes de Araujo convincingly argue that we live in a time of 'Updatism', the temporal dimension that emerges in those societies imprisoned by the structures of infinite expansion, and that this Updatism has profound consequences for how we think about the past, the present and the future. Using the theoretical works of Lyotard and Heidegger as its foundation, 'Updatism' and the Understanding of Time and History analyses our digital modernity and the significance of key themes, such as updating, solitude, democracy, internet, exposure, postmodernism and historicism. It discusses aspects of our present time that reveal substantial differences between the historicist-modern time, usually located in the 19th century, and an emergent 'chronotope' or 'regime of historicity' understood and explained here as Updatism. The book is effective in mapping the ubiquity of Updatism and the anxiety-inducing insistence of being constantly updated, as well as exploring some searching questions: If our reality is constantly being updated, and its previous versions are deleted or inaccessible, what does this mean for memory and our understanding of history? And what does this tell us about the world we live in today and the one we may update to in the future?

This book enables us to understand the current transformations in the experience of time that have been taking place in recent decades. Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira and Valdei Lopes de Araujo convincingly argue that we live in a time of 'Updatism', the temporal dimension that emerges in those societies imprisoned by the structures of infinite expansion, and that this Updatism has profound consequences for how we think about the past, the present and the future. Using the theoretical works of Lyotard and Heidegger as its foundation, 'Updatism' and the Understanding of Time and History analyses our digital modernity and the significance of key themes, such as updating, solitude, democracy, internet, exposure, postmodernism and historicism. It discusses aspects of our present time that reveal substantial differences between the historicist-modern time, usually located in the 19th century, and an emergent 'chronotope' or 'regime of historicity' understood and explained here as Updatism. The book is effective in mapping the ubiquity of Updatism and the anxiety-inducing insistence of being constantly updated, as well as exploring some searching questions: If our reality is constantly being updated, and its previous versions are deleted or inaccessible, what does this mean for memory and our understanding of history? And what does this tell us about the world we live in today and the one we may update to in the future?

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is natural and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history. This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of histories. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einsteins Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our common-sense notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.

Is time out of joint? For the past two centuries, the dominant Western time regime has been future-oriented and based on the linear, progressive and homogeneous concept of time. Over the last few decades, there has been a shift towards a new, present-oriented regime or 'presentism', made up of multiple and percolating temporalities. Rethinking Historical Time engages with this change of paradigm, providing a timely overview of cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to this new temporal condition. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier have brought together an international team of scholars working in history, anthropology, archaeology, geography, philosophy, literature and visual studies to rethink the epistemological consequences of presentism for the study of past and to discuss critically the traditional assumptions that underpin research on historical time. Beginning with an analysis of presentism, the contributors move on to explore in historical and critical terms the idea of multiple temporalities, before presenting a series of case studies on the variability of different forms of time in contemporary material culture.

This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time.

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology). What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume’s contributors describe how they relate phenomena in the past and their observations of the present, revealing intellectual resonances and opportunities for dialogue across subjects that are too often walled off from one another. By engaging scholars in a conversation about a first principle of their work, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary consideration of a timeless question, with implications for knowledge about both past and present. Engaging with the Past and Present is full of insights and ideas for anyone seeking to understand the past or employ it as evidence for understanding present realities.