The notion of a personal self took centuries to evolve, reaching the pinnacle of autonomy with Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' in the 17th century. This 'personalisation' of identity thrived for another hundred years before it began to be questioned, subject to the emergence of broader, more inclusive forms of agency. Simulated Selves: The Undoing Personal Identity in the Modern World addresses the 'constructed' notion of personal identity in the West and how it has been eclipsed by the development of new technological, social, art historical and psychological infrastructures over the last two centuries. While the provisional nature of the self-sense has been increasingly accepted in recent years, Simulated Selves addresses it in a new way - not by challenging it directly, but by observing changes to the environments and cultural conventions that have traditionally supported it. By narrating both its dismantling and its incapacitation in this way, it records its undoing. Like The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (to which it forms a companion volume), Simulated Selves straddles cultural history and philosophy. Firstly, it identifies hitherto neglected forces that inform the course of cultural history. Secondly, it highlights how the self is not the self-authenticating abstraction, only accessible to introspection, that it seems to be; it is also a cultural and historical phenomenon. Arguing that it is by engaging in cultural conventions that we subscribe to the process of identity-formation, the book also suggests that it is in these conventions that we see our self-sense - and its transience - best reflected. By examining the traces that the trajectory of the self-sense has left in its environment, Simulated Selves offers a radically new approach to the question of personal identity, asking not only 'how and why is it under threat?' but also 'given that we understand the self-sense to be a constructed phenomenon, why do we cling to it?'.

Ruth Ross is hardly a household name, yet most New Zealanders today owe the way they understand the Treaty of Waitangi — or te Tiriti o Waitangi as Ross called it — to this remarkable woman' s path-breaking historical research.Taking us on a journey from small university classes and a lively government department in the nation' s war-time capital to an economically poor but culturally rich Maori community in the far north, and from tiny schools and cloistered university offices to parliamentary committees and a legal tribunal, Attwood enables us to grasp how and why the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand law, politics, society and culture has been transformed in the last seven decades.A frank and moving meditation on the making of history and its advantages and disadvantages for life in a democratic society, A Bloody Difficult Subject is a surprising story full of unforeseen circumstances, unexpected twists, unlikely turns and unanticipated outcomes.

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served as Provost of Princeton University, president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a variety of roles–teacher, mentor, colleague, administrator, writer, and friend–Sheldon Hackney has been a source of wisdom, empowerment, and wise counsel during more than four decades of historical and educational achievement. His life, both inside and outside the academy, has focused on issues closely related to civil rights, social justice, and the vagaries of race, class, regional culture, and national identity. Each of the essays in this volume touches upon one or more of these important issues–themes that have animated Sheldon Hackney’s scholarly and professional life.