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What difference has global history made to non-national historical agendas such as regional studies and studies based on ecological zones? The methods of regional history have many parallels with global history. Both transcend questions of boundaries and engage in methods of connection and comparison. Conceiving a polycentric early modern world challenges us to cross mental boundaries.

This chapter explores the “clash of values” between academic and public historians. It defines the similarities and differences between them and the reasons for the formation of separate organizations for public historians and suggests that the American Historical Association responded more positively to the challenge from public historians than the Organization of American Historians has until recently.

The conclusion examines similarities and differences among the featured commissions and documentation centers and evaluates their importance for Holocaust studies. It argues that part of the reason why the early postwar documentation initiatives did not receive the attention of historians who were not survivors themselves was that their methods at the time were anathema to the rules of academic history writing which came to dominate the study of the Holocaust. For decades, the latter remained perpetrator-focused and regime-centered, taking a “top-down” perspective on the Jewish catastrophe. By contrast, the survivors’ popular and interdisciplinary approach relied on testimony and memory and focused on writing the history of everyday life and death of European Jews under Nazi rule from the bottom up. Only in the past two decades did similar approaches enter the academic study of the Holocaust and historians begin to consider both victim and perpetrator source to write an integrated history of the Holocaust.

This chapter analyzes the structure, logic, and political uses of the genealogical project as a most useful form of historical investigation of sexuality, first, to clarify why, in its various permutations, the genealogical project has been ineffective in persuading academic history generally of sexuality’s crucial importance as a category of historical analysis. A second aim is to articulate how the genealogical project differs from what some professional historians continue to regard tacitly as “proper history,” that is, a historical practice uninterested in finding the origins of identity or gauging how what is familiar to us now differ.

This chapter examines the sentimental mode in more popular forms of historical representation. It discusses the notion that an openly affective approach to the past is the sure mark of work written for a popular audience and suggest that one of the striking features of historical representation in the late decades of the twentieth century is the convergence of popular and academic histories on the ground of feeling. It also considers the interest of academic publishers in the so-called cross-over market of popular and academic histories.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to add to the academic history of surgical institutions, medicine in general, and of Scotland itself, as well as celebrating 500 years of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh' continuous existence. It then provides an overview of the history of the College, which falls into two main divisions: ‘The Incorporation’ and ‘The College’, and then turns to theories and professions.

Chapter 6 gives a rapid survey of existing literature on Leibniz as historian and examines the hitherto little-explored question of him as historian of the sacred. In fact Leibniz’s account of sacred and profane history in the early 1680s and later integrates perfectly into his philosophical system. Its importance and particularity lies in its accent on the high profile of history as truthful revelation of God’s design within Leibniz’s system as well as the close links that obtain between sacred and profane history and the essential role that (in Leibniz’s view) history plays in the concordance of academic disciplines. While this is partly an answer to historical skepticism of the time, it also shows that Leibniz, as opposed, for example, to Newton, is not a church historian but a historian of the sacred.

The conclusion begins by reviewing how family history can reveal the lives of immigrant families and their descendants as well as their identities and family strategies. It argues that collective family biography can bridge the gap between ‘academic’ social history and antiquarian family history, to the benefit of both. The distinctive and determinant features of long-term transient, integrating and terminal families are discussed. It is argued that for Irish migration studies the work offers new evidence on the diversity of migrant experiences and the forces promoting identity and ‘ethnic fade’. The significance of women’s roles is emphasised and the argument is in favour of the ‘active opportunist’ rather than the ‘passive exile’ perspective on Irish migrants. The book concludes with some implications for family studies. The family strategy concept is seen as valuable especially by focusing on the role of women. The evidence undermines simple views on the transition to the nuclear family. There is some sustenance to the Marxist feminist perspective of the family as an ideological construct whose role was to keep people functioning and reproducing in spite of stresses in the external environment.