The INTH Bibliography is a digital tool for those interested in the field of Theory and Philosophy of History. Broadly understood, this field studies the ways we deal with the past. This can include reflections on the writing of history, substantial philosophies of history, and popular engagements with the past. The bibliography is composed of works that deal with these and other topics.
The bibliography is designed to serve a broad audience. The main users will probably be theoretically interested historians and philosophers of history. Yet, we hope this will also be a useful resource for scholars coming from other disciplines: sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc. More generally, this tool should be of interest to those interested in issues such as historical consciousness, theories of memory and forgetting, political uses of the past, ethics, historical time and substantial philosophy of history.
The INTH team composed the bibliography by searching online databases, looking through academic journals and following the bibliographies of scholarly works in the theory of history to track down references. In addition to this, several existing bibliographies were added to the collection. We owe a special thanks to Allan Megill and Jonathan Gorman for allowing us to add their bibliographies to our collection. The INTH also asked collaborators from around the globe to help in constructing the bibliography. We invited them to add works that we may have left out. We contacted scholars and asked them to add books and articles in their own language. We hope that the participation of this broad community of scholars from different regions will ensure that the bibliography reflects the development of the field internationally. The philosophy behind the construction of this bibliography, and indeed the INTH as a whole, is that it should be a collective project: this is not the property of the INTH but belongs to the international community of theorists of history. We ask that you help us to keep the bibliography growing and to make it a better research tool. You can find out how you can help us in the section “How to help” below.
The bibliography is an online tool, available for free. There are two ways to access its contents:
The bibliography contains works in many languages. However, English is its meta-language. This means that the navigation tools are in English, and all non-English works are displayed in their original titles, followed by a translation into English. Moreover, all publications are listed in their first edition of publication and if they have been translated into English, in their English translation. You will not find translations of texts into other languages in the INTH bibliography.
Yes, you can! We hope that the bibliography can be a collective effort. Only with the help of the international community of theorists of history it is possible to grow in size and become more comprehensive in quality. You can help out in different ways:
The bibliography includes a system of keywords: every entry has been labelled with one or more keywords that help to identify the main themes discussed in that work. This enables scholars to search the bibliography by theme or area of interest. For example, someone interested in “narrativism” can easily see a list of all the works in the bibliography that deal with that topic.
The process of adding keywords is a difficult and laborious task. First, the field of theory and philosophy of history is not easily grasped in a limited set of concepts. The keywords we have proposed are not comprehensive by any means, but we do believe that they reflect some of the most popular debates and areas of interest within this field of study. In order to offer a tool that is useful for both newcomers to the field and experts, a balance had to be struck between generalizations and specialist jargon. The selection of keywords reflects this ambition. Second, since we were clearly unable to read all the works in the bibliography (there are +18,000) we were at times obliged to ascribe keywords based on titles and abstracts.
To give a bit of insight in the way we have attributed keywords to the publicatoins, we have developed a glossary. This glossary has been designed solely with the purpose to explain the usage of terms. Also, the terms used in the bibliography are adapted, extended and changed on a regular basis. So this glossary will not explain all the keywords used in the bibliography. The INTH Bibliography consists of works that discuss, describe and analyze the following concepts in a metahistorical perspective:
1. Theory and Philosophy of Historiography
2. Substantial Philosophy of History [“Speculative”]
3. History outside academia
4. Histories and Geographies of Historiography & Historical Consciousness