I am a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College and the author ofThe Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860. What has always fascinated me about history is how differently it can be interpreted by different people, even when looking at the exact same subject. While I write and teach on a variety of topics, ranging from the American Revolution to historiography, all of my courses and research deal in some way with the conflicts over how to represent the past that have divided both historians and the general public throughout the long history of history as a subject.
"What is historiography?" asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline.
An old book, but still one of the best accounts of 19th-century American historical writing, showing how Romantic historians like William Prescott and Francis Parkman viewed history as a literary art. As Levin elegantly and lucidly demonstrates, these historians did not view themselves as mere chroniclers of fact but considered themselves artists whose purpose was to bring the past to life through the use of their own imagination. This was one of the first works of historiography that I read, and it is still a model to me of how to approach the subject.
This masterful examination of the style of 4 classic historians – Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt – shows how style was not just a matter of form for these historians but an expression of who they were and the world in which they lived. At the same time, as Gay emphasizes, style was also a tool these historians used to illuminate their subject, making it much more than simply a reflection of their time. Beautifully written, the book demonstrates that Gay was as much a master of style as the historians he discusses.
What does an historian's style reveal? In this original and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt-great historians who were also great stylists-Peter Gay demonstrates that, style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight. Thus, for Peter Gay, style is the key to culture, and the "truth" of history-as it helps to define that culture-can only be fully understood through an objective and thorough analysis of all its elements.
Grafton shows how something we often take for granted as part of scholarly history writing – the footnote – itself has a history. There is no historian today who is better at making the history of erudition accessible and engaging to general readers, and The Footnote is a case in point. Wittily and elegantly written, Grafton’s book turns what might seem to be an esoteric topic – the story of how footnotes came to be a sine qua non of historical scholarship – into the story of how historians dealt with their uncertainties about the foundations for historical knowledge and truth.
The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bete noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In Anthony Grafton's engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.
Grafton treats the development of the footnote-the one form of proof normally supplied by historians in support of their assertions-as writers…
Ostensibly an account of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, Jane Franklin, Lepore’s book is also a meditation on the construction of history, exploring the question of why some stories get told and others don’t. Why is Benjamin Franklin now a household name, when most people don’t even know that he even had a sister? If you want to know the answer to this question, read Lepore’s book.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR • Time Magazine • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Boston Globe
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians—a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.
Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore…
A collection of essays about “classic” works of history by (mostly) European historians ranging from Edward Gibbon to Jacob Burckhardt, Clive’s book brings these works to life even for readers unfamiliar with them. Clive’s short but rich essays on these historians provide a wonderful introduction to both their writings and to the study of historiography more generally, showing the value of these classic texts as works of literature and as gateways into the worlds of their authors.
In this collection of essays, the author demonstrates that while reading the great historians of the past, such as Gibbon, de Tocqueville, Carlyle, Macaulay, Michelet, Halevy, Marx and Burckhardt, is part of a complete education, history can also be great literature.
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart McLean, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gzowski, and more. And it's for people who want to know how to make radio.
Crafted with gentle humour and thoughtfulness, this is more than just a glimpse into the internal workings of CBC Radio. It's also a prose ode to the people and shows that make CBC Radio great.
"In dozens of amiable, frequently humorous vignettes... Mahoney fondly recalls his career as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio technician in this memoir... amusing and highly informative." — Kirkus Reviews
"What a wonderful book! If you love CBC Radio, you'll love Adventures in the Radio Trade. Joe Mahoney's honest, wise, and funny stories from his three decades in broadcasting make for absolutely delightful reading! — Robert J. Sawyer, author of The Oppenheimer Alternative''
"No other book makes me love the CBC more." — Gary Dunford, Page Six *** Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's…
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