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9781503640115

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"""Nothing Happened is a delightful romp through what is really meant when nothing is invoked to describe something. This is a remarkably original book that transforms how we see history. It is clever and funny and serious and illuminating. You won't want to put it down.""--Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero ""[Crane] does not crowd her book or overwhelm the reader. Her patience remains consistent throughout, ensuring the reader's arrival in the end regardless of their scholarly starting point. Nothing Happened takes time to digest and can be enjoyed a second time around....Crane teaches the reader a way to view history. What we do with it is up to us.""--Vesper North, Los Angeles Review of Books ""A startlingly original book: incisive, layered, punny and funny, politically sensitive and passionate, feisty, and thoroughly unimpressed with authority even when impressed with authority's insights.""--Peter Fritzsche, author of Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich ""Crane develops her imaginative argument in a conversational prose style that is filled with puns and references to her own life experiences. She is always present in her text, even when the complexity of Nothing becomes most mind-bending and when her stories move most deeply into the lives of others. This challenging book may push most historians beyond their usual epistemological assumptions, but its provocative themes and remarkable 'episodic' examples will also help them think about the possible significance in the sites of Nothingness they encounter in their own research. More generally, Nothing Happened should broaden the historical conversation among all those who believe that the past is never really dead and that everything has a history.""--Lloyd Kramer, Journal of Modern History ""Crane's book deserves attention because it deliberately changes the common point of view: Historians are usually aware of evolutionary processes, movements, acts of differentiation and thus of change in time. The author invites her readers to challenge such an 'action-based' approach to history by considering time as a continuum and by focusing not on events but on the 'gap' between them, when things seemingly remain the same.""--Anna Karla, International Network for the Theory of History ""Nothing's left? What does it mean to say that--of a page, of a photo, of a street, of a city, of a loved one? Susan A. Crane, in her invigorating and often funny study of Nothing, tells us vividly why saying Nothing reveals so much about its speaker and so little about history.""--Peter Toohey, author of Hold On: The Life, Science, and Art of Waiting ""Written with both wide-ranging intelligence and intellectual courage, Nothing Happened is a book of striking interest and originality. Susan A. Crane mobilizes a remarkable range of material and knowledge, creating her very idiosyncratic, and serially insightful discussion on a single unfathomable paradox.""--Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society"

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Susan A. Crane has been a professor of history at the University of Arizona since 1995. She is the author of Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (2000) and editor of Museums and Memory (2000) and The Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century (2020).

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