Synopses & Reviews
This unprecedented book by one of Britains most admired historians describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of history has had in the Western world over the past 2,500 years.
Treating the practice of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the culture of Europe and America, John Burrow magnificently brings to life and explains the distinctive qualities found in the work of historians from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the present, including Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and Parkman. The author sets out not to give us the history of academic discipline but a history of choices: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as they have changed according to political, religious, cultural, and (often most important) partisan and patriotic circumstances. Burrow aims, as well, to change our perceptions of the crucial turning points in the history of history, allowing the ideas that historians have had about both their own times and their founding civilizations to emerge with unexpected freshness.
Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the most interesting ways we have to understand the past. Certainly, this volume stands alone in its ambition, scale and fascination.
About the Author
John Burrow was Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex before becoming Professor of European Thought at Oxford. His earlier books include Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory; A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, which won the Wolfson Prize for History; Gibbon; and The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. He is a Fellow of the British Academy; an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; and in 2008 will be Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: A History of Histories?
PROLOGUE
Keeping Records and Making Accounts: Egypt and Babylon
PART I — Greece
1 Herodotus: The Great Invasion and the Historians Task
2 Thucydides: The Polis—the Use and Abuse of Power
3 The Greeks in Asia
—Xenophon: The Persian Expedition
—The Alexander Historians: Arrian and Curtius Rufus
PART II — Rome
4 Polybius: Universal History, Pragmatic History and the Rise of Rome
5 Sallust: A City for Sale
6 Livy: From the Foundation of the City
7 Civil War and the Road to Autocracy: Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio
8 Tacitus: “Men fit to be slaves”
9 A Provincial Perspective: Josephus on the Jewish Revolt
10 Ammianus Marcellinus: The Last Pagan Historian
11 General Characteristics of Ancient Historiography
PART III — Christendom
12 The Bible and History: The People of God
13 Eusebius: The Making of Orthodoxy and the Church Triumphant
14 Gregory of Tours: Kings, Bishops and Others
15 Bede: The English Church and the English People
PART IV — The Revival of Secular History
16 Annals, Chronicles and History
—Annals and Chronicles
—Pseudo-History: Geoffrey of Monmouth
—Secular History and Chronicle: William of Malmesburys Modern History and the Scurrilities of Matthew Paris
—Two Abbey Chronicles: St. Albans and Bury St. Edmunds
17 Crusader History and Chivalric History: Villehardouin and Froissart
—Villehardouins The Conquest of Constantinople
—Froissart: “Matters of great renown”
18 From Civic Chronicle to Human History: Villani, Machivavelli and Guicciardini
PART V — Studying the Past
19 Antiquarianism, Legal History and the Discovery of Feudalism
20 Clarendons History of the Rebellion: The Wilfulness of Particular Men
21 Philosophic History
—Hume: Enthusiasm and Regicide
—Robertson: “The State of Society” and the Idea of Europe
—Gibbon: Rome, Barbarism and Civilization
22 Revolutions: England and France
—Macaulay: The Glorious Revolution
—Carlyles French Revolution: History with a Hundred Tongues
—Michelet and Taine: The People and the Mob
23 History as the Story of Freedom: Constitutional Liberty and Individual Autonomy
—Stubbs Constitutional History: From Township Parliament
—Modernitys First-born Son: Burckhardts Renaissance Man
24 A New World: American Experiences
—The Halls of Montezuma: Diaz, Prescott and the Conquest of New Spain
—Outposts in the Wilderness: Parkmans History of the Great West
—Henry Adams: From Republic to Nation
25 A Professoional Consensus: The German Influence Professionalization
—German Historicism: Ranke, God and Machiavelli
—Not Quite a Copernican Revolution
26 The Twentieth Century
—Professionalism and the Critique of “Whig History”: History as a Science and History as an Art
—“Structures”: Cultural History and the Annales School
—Marxism: The Last Grand Narrative?
—Anthropology and History: Languages and Paradigms
—Suppressed Identities and Global Perspectives: World History and Micro-History
Select Bibliography
Index