Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

For centuries conquerors, missionaries, and political movements acting in the name of a single god, nation, or race have sought to remake human identities. Tracing the rise of exclusive forms of identity over the past 1500 years, this innovative book explores both the creation and destruction of exclusive identities, including those based on nationalism and monotheistic religion. Benjamin Lieberman focuses on two critical phases of world history: the age of holy war and conversion, and the age of nationalism and racism. His cases include the rise of Islam, the expansion of medieval Christianity, Spanish conquests in the Americas, Muslim expansion in India, settler expansion in North America, nationalist cleansing in modern Europe and Asia, and Nazi Germany’s efforts to build a racial empire. He convincingly shows that efforts to transplant and expand new identities have paradoxically generated long periods of both stability and explosive violence that remade the human landscape around the world.

An examination of Berlin's turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin's turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin's networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes.

The Remaking of the Medieval World, 1204 allows students to understand and experience one of the greatest medieval atrocities, the sack of the Constantinople by a crusader army, and the subsequent reshaping of the Byzantine Empire. The game includes debates on issues such as "just war" and the nature of crusading, feudalism, trade rights, and the relationship between secular and religious authority. It likewise explores the theological issues at the heart of the East-West Schism and the development of constitutional states in the era of Magna Carta. The game also includes a model siege and sack of Constantinople where individual students' actions shape the fate of the crusade for everyone.

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.” (George Santayana) Enquiries into the relationship between literature and history continue to stir up intense critical and scholarly debate. Alongside the new hybrid categories that have emerged out of this ferment―life-writing, ficto-criticism, “history from below”, and so on―there has been a welter of new literary histories, new ways of tracking the connections between the written word and the historically bound world. This has resulted in renewed discussion about distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, about dialogues taking place between different national literatures, and about ascertaining the relative status of the literary text in relation to other cultural forms. Remaking Literary History seeks to clarify the diversity of issues and positions that have arisen from these debates. Central to the book’s approach is a rigorous and constructive questioning of the past, across disciplinary boundaries. This is carried out through four detailed and engrossing sections that explore the relationship between memory and forgetting; what it means to be ‘subject’ to history; the upsurge of interest in trauma and redemption; and the question of historical reinvention, which demonstrates how the overwriting of history continues to reinvigorate the literary imagination. As well as readers of literature and history, Remaking Literary History will be of interest to students of literary theory, legal studies and cultural and media studies.

Science/Engineering "Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind." --Los Angeles Times From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Duke University's Henry Petroski focuses on the big: Malaysia's 1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cut through the continental divide that required the excavation of 311 million cubic yards of earth. Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wonders of the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam to the effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering community of 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlantic steamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the General Electric Company, whose office of preference was a battered twelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is a celebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women whose inspirations have immeasurably improved our world. "Petroski [is] America's poet laureate of technology. . . . Remaking the World is another fine book." --Houston Chronicle "Remaking the World really is an adventure in engineering." --San Diego Union-Tribune