This book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection – an archive – that belonged to the author’s grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source – an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc. – is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.

Using the Icelandic context, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon examines egodocuments as distinct and fascinating manifestations of microhistory, reflecting on their nature, the circumstances in which they originated, and their strengths and weaknesses for scholarly research. Autobiographical Traditions in Egodocuments successfully makes the case for egodocuments being an intriguing part of the material culture of their time, with ample consideration given to the role of the book within individual households and the impact a source such as autobiography has had on people's daily lives. Magnússon also provides an insightful historiographical account of how the egodocument has been used in historical works both in Iceland and elsewhere in the world since the 19th century.

The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World brings together a diverse array of scholars to offer an overview of the current and emerging scholarship of emotions in the modern world. Across thirty-six chapters, this work enters the field of emotion from a range of angles. Named emotions – love, anger, fear – highlight how particular categories have been deployed to make sense of feeling and their evolution over time. Geographical perspectives provide access to the historiographies of regions that are less well-covered by English-language sources, opening up global perspectives and new literatures. Key thematic sections are designed to intersect with critical historiographies, demonstrating the value of an emotions perspective to a range of areas. Topical sections direct attention to the role of emotions in relations of power, to intimate lives and histories of place, as products of exchanges across groups, and as deployed by new technologies and medias. The concepts of globalisation and modernity run through the volume, acting as foils for comparison and analytical tools. The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of emotions across the world from 1700.

Using the Icelandic context, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon examines egodocuments as distinct and fascinating manifestations of microhistory, reflecting on their nature, the circumstances in which they originated, and their strengths and weaknesses for scholarly research. Autobiographical Traditions in Egodocuments successfully makes the case for egodocuments being an intriguing part of the material culture of their time, with ample consideration given to the role of the book within individual households and the impact a source such as autobiography has had on people's daily lives. Magnússon also provides an insightful historiographical account of how the egodocument has been used in historical works both in Iceland and elsewhere in the world since the 19th century.

Spatial and identity research operates with differentiations and relations. These are particularly useful heuristic tools when examining border regions where social and geopolitical demarcations diverge. Applying this approach, the authors of this volume investigate spatial and identity constructions in cross-border contexts as they appear in everyday, institutional and media practices. The results are discussed with a keen eye for obliquely aligned spaces and identities and relinked to governmental issues of normalization and subjectivation. The studies base upon empirical surveys conducted in Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The authors in this volume seek to treat the modern history of the Balkans from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings.

Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.

We are now entering a new phase in the establishment of historical organization studies as a distinctive methodological paradigm within the broad field of organization studies. This book serves both as a landmark in the development of the field and as a key reference tool for researchers and students. For two decades, organization theorists have emphasized the need for more and better research recognizing the importance of the past in shaping the present and future. By historicizing organizational research, the contexts and forces bearing upon organizations will be more fully recognized, and analyses of organizational dynamics improved. But how, precisely, might a traditionally empirically oriented discipline such as history be incorporated into a theoretically oriented discipline such as organization studies? This book evaluates the current state of play, advances it and identifies the possibilities the new emergent field offers for the future. In addition to providing an important work of reference on the subject for researchers, the book can be used to introduce management and organizational history to a student audience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The book is a valuable source for wider reading, providing rich reference material in tutorials across organizational studies, or as recommended or required reading on courses with a connection to business or management history. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This unique and detailed analysis provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, methodology of microhistory – one of the most significant innovations in historical scholarship to have emerged in the last few decades. The introduction guides the reader through the best-known example of microstoria, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and explains the benefits of studying an event, place or person in microscopic detail. In Part I, István M. Szijártó examines the historiography of microhistory in the Italian, French, Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon traditions, shedding light on the roots of microhistory and asking where it is headed. In Part II, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon uses a carefully selected case study to show the important difference between the disciplines of macro- and microhistory and to offer practical instructions for those historians wishing to undertake micro-level analysis. These parts are tied together by a Postscript in which the status of microhistory within contemporary historiography is examined and its possibilities for the future evaluated. What is Microhistory? surveys the significant characteristics shared by large groups of microhistorians, and how these have now established an acknowledged place within any general discussion of the theory and methodology of history as an academic discipline.

Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wasteland with Words Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon presents a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the island’s history that examines the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture while investigating the literary and historical factors that created the rich cultural heritage enjoyed by Icelanders today. Magnússon explains how a nineteenth-century economy based on the industries of fishing and agriculture—one of the poorest in Europe—grew to become a disproportionately large economic power in the late twentieth century, while retaining its strong sense of cultural identity. Bringing the story up to the present, he assesses the recent economic and political collapse of the country and how Iceland has coped. Throughout Magnússon seeks to chart the vast changes in this country’s history through the impact and effect on the Icelandic people themselves. Up-to-date and fascinating, Wasteland with Words is a comprehensive study of the island’s cultural and historical development, from tiny fishing settlements to a global economic power.