The English and Their History

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Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 - 1024 頁
A New York Times 2016 Notable Book

Robert Tombs's momentous The English and Their History is both a startlingly fresh and a uniquely inclusive account of the people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.

The English have come a long way from those first precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity.

Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly embarking on a new chapter. The English and Their History, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division and also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.
 

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內容

List of Figures
3
The Dreamtime
9
This Earth This Realm c 6001066
27
The Conquerors Kingdom
49
Five Centuries After Bede
80
A Well Good Land
89
The world is changed and overthrown
119
Shakespeare and Lesser Historians
153
PART
599
The TwentyYear Truce
652
The Edge of the Abyss 193945
694
Memory History and Myth
759
PART SEVEN
765
Postwar
771
Englands Cultural Revolutions
792
Storm and Stress
810

25
175
85
198
Revolution
239
The Civil War and Whig History
264
The English Century
419
Dickensian England c 1815c 1850
425
Victorian England
462
Imperial England 18151918
540
Englishness in the English Century
590
Things Can Only Get Better 1997c 2014
838
The English and Their History
881
Notes
901
A Free Country?
924
The First Industrial Nation
930
Further Reading
983
Acknowledgements
1001
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關於作者 (2014)

ROBERT TOMBS is professor of history at the University of Cambridge and a leading scholar of Anglo-French relations. His most recent book, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, co-authored with his wife, Isabelle Tombs, is the first large-scale study of the relationship between the French and the British over the last three centuries.

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