Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Encounters: Cultural Histories)

In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.

Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences; she calls this practice "archivization." By definition, the archive is the repository of "that which will not go away," and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the "matter of history" can never go away or be erased.

This unique work will be welcomed by all historians who want to think about what it is they do.

• Processing the Past: Contesting Authority In History And The Archives (Oxford Series on History and Archives)
• Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition
• On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
• Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
• Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, And The Writing Of History
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism)
• The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language
• In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale