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On Violence in History
Edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Stephen Micale
150 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78920-464-3 $120.00/£89.00 Hb Published (January 2020)
ISBN 978-1-78920-465-0 $27.95/£22.95 Pb Published (January 2020)
eISBN 978-1-78920-466-7 eBook
Description
Is global violence on the decline? Steven Pinker’s highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse among academics and the general public alike. In this provocative volume, a cast of eminent historians interrogate Pinker’s thesis by exposing the realities of violence throughout human history. In doing so, they reveal the history of human violence to be richer, more thought-provoking, and considerably more complicated than Pinker claims.
Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has written on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, memoirs, violence, and colonialism, and is the general editor (with Joy Damousi) of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Mark S. Micale is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where for many years he taught Modern European history and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of several books, including Beyond the Unconscious, Discovering the History of Psychiatry, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, Traumatic Pasts, The Mind of Modernism, and Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness.
Subject: History (General) Sociology
Contents
Preface
Mark S. Micale and Philip Dwyer
Introduction: History, Violence, and Steven Pinker
Mark S. Micale and Philip Dwyer
Chapter 1. The Past as a Foreign Country Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Pinker’s “Prehistoric Anarchy”
Linda Fibiger
Chapter 2. Were There Better Angels of a Classical Greek Nature? Violence in Classical Athens
Matthew Trundle
Chapter 3. Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker Violence and Medieval England
Sara M. Butler
Chapter 4. The Complexity of History Russia and Steven Pinker’s Thesis
Nancy Shields Kollmann
Chapter 5. Whitewashing History Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
Philip Dwyer
Chapter 6. Assessing Violence in the Modern World
Richard Bessel
Chapter 7. The “Moral Effect” of Legalized Lawlessness Violence in Britain’s Twentieth-Century Empire
Caroline Elkins
Chapter 8. Does Better Angels of Our Nature Hold Up as History?
Randolph Roth
Chapter 9. The Rise and Rise of Sexual Violence
Joanna Bourke
Chapter 10. The Inner Demons of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Daniel Lord Smail
Chapter 11. What Pinker Leaves Out
Mark S. Micale