This chapter characterizes History as an interpretive discipline, one in which conclusions are drawn by applying critical thinking to the available evidence, rather than one that aims to achieve actionable results from experimental or observational results. It points out that History aims not at reproducible and definitive outcomes but at broadening and deepening inquiry. It seeks to define what kinds of questions historians most value, questions that contribute to and enable such deepening and widening inquiry. Finally, this chapter discusses in greater depth the methodological and epistemological division introduced in the Introduction, between those more attracted to the historicist tradition examined in Chapter 1 and those more attracted to the methods, aims, and epistemological assumptions of social-science theory and of critical social theory. The chapter discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of these competing traditions and the pedagogical benefit of introducing students to both – the unique intellectual flexibility that the study of the discipline of History can cultivate.

This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

As the largest publicly funded, nonformal education system in the United States, Cooperative Extension (a.k.a. “Extension”) has played a critical role in how technologies and innovations generated through state agricultural experiment stations (AES) and land-grant universities (LGUs) in the United States have been translated and shared directly to its constituents for over a century. Extension has served as a unique and robust system to collaborate, generate, and disseminate research, as well as to engage in mission-oriented work to support communities in optimizing their current and future circumstances and through collaborative partnerships shaping the ways in which we cultivate and preserve food, how we educate and care for our children, manage our finances, work with communities, and support populations disproportionality affected by structural inequities. The current volume brings together leading scholars to discuss Extension’s contributions to the well-being of children, youth, families, and communities; and to critically reflect on Extension’s future directions in light of significant shifts in the context in which it now operates.

In this chapter, Michael McKinnie explores how methods drawn from the social sciences can help theatre scholars formulate different, and more systematic, ways to think about theatre and its place in the world. Social scientists make ‘moves’ with their material that theatre scholars are unlikely to make with theirs. When transposed to analysis of theatre, these moves suggest different, sometimes counter-intuitive, approaches. ‘Tricks’, an idea taken from sociologist Howard S. Becker, are formal procedures that help draw out theatre’s relationality at subsequent stages of the research process. Thinking about theatre’s place in the world poses a wide variety of problems that TaPS is not always equipped to tackle. Theatre scholars need to make different moves, and formulate new tricks, to begin to address them.

Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

The Arctic is a region that has been understood very much through its environment. Issues of nature and environment have been central themes investigated by both anthropologists and geographers. Much canonical work by geographers and anthropologists has focused on investigating environmental and cultural interactions, using concepts such as landscape, site, or place. The academic disciplines of geography and anthropology have therefore contributed to the process of making Arctics. This chapter examines these contentions.

This chapter discusses cognitive social simulation, which lies at the intersection of cognitive modeling and social simulation – two forms of computational modeling. Cognitive modeling focuses on producing precise computational models of individual mental processes, while social simulation centers on models of social processes (such as interaction of individuals or collective decision making). By combining cognitive and social models, cognitive social simulation is poised to address issues concerning both individuals and society. Detailed simulation enables precise analysis of possible scenarios and outcomes (social or individual). A number of examples of cognitive social simulation are sketched in this chapter. Issues involved are discussed. Some promising directions are outlined.

This chapter has two purposes. First, to offer a vision of environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary endeavour that involves the core disciplines of the humanities, as well as their connections with other disciplines and ways of working within the academy and beyond. Second, to draw some conclusions from that vision for the kinds of issues of politics, dialogue and ethics that arise from the real-world problems on which environmental humanities bear. In other words, the chapter attempts to operationalise some of the key messages that the environmental humanities might have to propose in the real-world situation of today. This is a matter first of characterising that situation. Environmental humanities can help us make sense of the challenges that arise, albeit not in isolation. The point of the exercise is to seek appropriate forms of integration between a realm of humanities or humanistic thinking about environmental challenges with a scientific mode of thinking. Second, the chapter considers how humanities thinking can bear on action issues that arise from the situation as thus characterised. What kind of action? How can it be justified? Through which practical mechanisms can it be pursued?

Chapter 1 traces the ideological and practical origins of the inter-Allied denazification campaign and the unorthodox questionnaire program that it proposed. It surveys the wartime planning landscape in 1943 and 1944 and introduces the individuals and institutions that created the Fragebogen. Hundreds of civilian experts, including college professors, police officers, lawyers, and Jewish refugees, were employed to build denazification policy and to overhaul military civil affairs programs. This army of academics brought with them innovative social scientific approaches and instruments, as well as new perspectives and concepts regarding ideological, sociological, and political transformation. This was the rich civilian-engaged environment that permitted the adoption of an experimental political questionnaire. However, the civilian planners were continuously challenged by an inherent contradiction in all strands of occupation policy: the pursuit of both punitive and restorative goals. The result was that a practical strategy for the occupation was never produced by the Allied powers, nor was there a shared consensus on political screening.

This book explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, it examines the role of historical study in eight distinct subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches withing these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, this dependence was reduced under the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences. Statistical, analytical and scientistic approaches secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. Functionalism, structuralism, logical positivism, formalist criticism, behaviourism and economic formalism challenged context-specific forms of inquiry. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.