LIVING BOOKS ABOUT HISTORY

This Living Book shows the fruitfulness of research on an object, television, still in search of academic and institutional legitimacy. It lays the foundations for an expanded history of the medium while presenting emblematic texts from its historiography.

Literature is never isolated from the social world, and there has been no shortage of works written to develop, intensify or illustrate that statement. The present anthology retraces the history of sociological and sociocritical approaches to literature, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

Fools teem in the initials, miniatures, and illuminated margins of medieval manuscripts. Variously portrayed next to King David, forming farandoles and dances of death, or taking part in the Feast of Fools, the fools represent, with extraordinary cultural continuity, a brilliant and scholarly model of the world, that of the mundus inversus.

Medieval wonders can be divided into two main groups: miracles (religious wonders performed by God after the invocation of saints) and marvels (natural wonders), which also included monsters. Both phenomena open our eyes to a multiply entangled history, in which medieval people expressed the order of divinely created nature.

International comparison shows a diversity among welfare states, which also exists within individual welfare systems where private and public actors collide. In order to better account for this plurality a new comprehension of Statism is needed.

This anthology of the Swiss Federal Archives outlines the history of modern administration using selected sources of the Swiss Federal Archives: the development of a federal administration, measures of professionalization, excerpts from debates on expansion, rationalization, efficiency increase, and privatization.

This contribution is about North-South-relations in the 20th century. It focuses on a paper by the French anthropologist Georges Balandier. The argument is that assuming a dichotomy between the West and the rest of the world prevents scholars from understanding global change.

This anthology is a brief introduction to the field of Digital Humanities, covering its history, how its practitioners define it, and how an interested newcomer might get involved.

By means of a selection of sources and research essays, this anthology seeks to provide an extended panorama of the variety of actors, trajectories, perspectives, methods and writings of Internet and Web history.