Skip to main content
Lever PressLever Press
  • About
  • Books
  • Series
  • Publish With Us
  • Join Us
  • Impact
  • News
  • Events

Share the story of what Open Access means to you

a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access

University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.

  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. History without Chronology
Icon depicting manuscript as partly closed (single blind) peer review
The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a partly closed ("single blind") review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.

History without Chronology

Stefan Tanaka 2019 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license
Open Access Open Access
Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.
Read Book
  • EPUB (479 KB)
  • PDF (2.91 MB)
Buy Book
ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-64315-003-1 (paper)
  • 978-1-64315-004-8 (open access)
Subject
  • History
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Member Institution Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
    • Digital Humanities
    • Occlusions and Inversions
    • Beginning: Histories without Chronology
  • Chapter One: Time Has a History
    • Nonmodern Times
    • “Absolute, True, and Mathematical Time”
    • Clock Time
    • Classing of Time and Space
    • Twentieth-Century Times and Classical Time
  • Chapter Two: History Has a History
    • Discovery of the Past
    • Performativity of History
      • Occlusion of Chronology
      • Particulars
      • Gesture of Exclusion
      • Tombs of Data
    • History as Myth
  • Interlude
  • Chapter Three: Heterogeneous Pasts
    • Inversion to Times
      • Internal Times
      • Duration
      • Units of Analysis
    • Appropriation: Observers, Information, and Stories
    • Uncertainty?
  • Chapter Four: Change and History
    • Twentieth-Century Times
      • Entropy
      • Circular Causality
    • Turbulent, Crumpled, Tattered Times
      • Layers of Time: Toward Turbulence
      • Crumpled Times
      • Tattered Times
    • Beginnings, Again
  • Coda
    • The Pasts They Are a-Changin’
    • Humility
  • Works Cited
  • Notes
  • Index
1,931 views since May 02, 2019
Lever PressAmherst, MAinfo@leverpress.org

FacebookTwitter

Our Partners
  • Amherst College Press
  • Oberlin Group
  • Michigan Publishing
Peer Review
  • Our Commitments and Guidelines
© 2020 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license · Accessibility · Preservation
Powered by Fulcrum logo · Log In
x This site requires cookies to function correctly.