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History Beyond the Text

A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources

Edited by Sarah Barber, Corinna Peniston-Bird

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About the Book

Over the past few years the question of 'what is a historical source' has become an increasingly prominent concern. In History Beyond the Text, Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird open up the discussion on sources beyond the 'traditional' ones.

Across ten chapters different historians look at a variety of alternative sources: visual - fine art, cartoons, photography, film and television; aural - music and oral histories; and physical - ephemera, architecture, and landscape, as well as virtual space. While the sources discussed are 'interdisciplinary', each contributor examines how the source can be approached from an historical perspective. Each chapter introduces the reader to the source, suggests the methodological and theoretical questions that historians should keep in mind when using it, and provides empirical examples of approaches to the source. Pulling these disparate sources together, the introduction discusses the nature of historical sources and those factors which are unique to, or shared by, the sources covered throughout the book.

Taking examples of sources from around the globe, this is the ideal companion for every student of history who wants to engage with a variety of sources.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird 2. Fine art: the creative image Sarah Barber 3. The Cartoon: the image as critique Frank Palmeri 4. The Photograph: the still image Derek Sayer 5. Film and Television: the moving image Jeffrey Richards 6. Music: the creative sound Burton W. Peretti 7. Oral testimony: the sound of memory Corinna Peniston-Bird 8. The Internet: virtual space Lisa Blenkinsop 9. Landscape: the configured space Tom Williamson 10. Architecture: the built object Christopher Long 11. Material Culture: the object Adrienne D. Hood

About the Author(s)

Sarah Barber co-teaches the Masters’ course which inspired this volume. Her two monographs on 17th-century republican theory and more recent work on identity (17th-century Caribbean, the Other in early-modern Europe, and folk identity), deploy image, oral testimony, material culture and the built and landscape environment.


A senior lecturer in the History Department at Lancaster University, Corinna Peniston-Bird is the co-convenor with Sarah Barber of the course that triggered this edited collection. She has recently completed a monograph with Penny Summerfield entitled Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007) which drew on a wide range of sources covered in this volume.