The Contemporary History Handbook

This guide should be useful to those studying and researching modern history. International and up to date, it covers sources and controversies in the subject area and includes a section of useful addresses. The volume is divided into three main sections which together comprise a reference work for contemporary historians. The first section comprises of a series of essays which cover issues as diverse as postmodernism, world security, the end of history, gender and multi-racialism. It opens with a defence of the role of the historian in the contemporary world by Eric Hobsbawm. This is followed by a section on global perspectives, analyzing the current debates among commentators and historians on Western and Eastern Europe, the USA, Latin America, Japan, China, Africa, Russia, the Middle-east and the Indian sub-continent. The final section, sources, covers the problems and possibilities of conventional sources used for understanding the contemporary period and examines the importance of uniquely contemporary sources such as television, computers, multimedia and living witnesses.
The handbook concludes with a series of diverse listings along with the names and addresses of sources of further information.