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A history of histories : epics, chronicles, romances, and inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the twentieth century / John Burrow.

By: Language: English Publisher: New York : Knopf, 2008Edition: 1. United States edDescription: xviii, 517 p. 25 cmISBN:
  • 9780375413117
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 907.2 22
LOC classification:
  • D13
Other classification:
  • K:k
Summary: An analysis of the study of the past and its implications in the Western world, from ancient times to the present day, looks at the work of individual historians and how they presented the past in terms of their perspectives, beliefs, and historical periods.
Holdings
Item type Current library Shelving location Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Dayloan Biblioteket HKR Biblioteket 907.2 Burrow Available 11156000192676
Book Biblioteket HKR Biblioteket 907.2 Burrow Available 11156000165579
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This unprecedented book by one of Britain's 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.

An analysis of the study of the past and its implications in the Western world, from ancient times to the present day, looks at the work of individual historians and how they presented the past in terms of their perspectives, beliefs, and historical periods.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Acknowledgements (p. xi)
  • Introduction: A History of Histories? (p. xiii)
  • Prologue: Keeping Records and Making Accounts: Egypt and Babylon (p. 3)
  • Part I Greece
  • 1 Herodotus: The Great Invasion and the Historian's Task (p. 13)
  • 2 Thucydides: The Polis-the Use and Abuse of Power (p. 30)
  • 3 The Greeks in Asia (p. 51)
  • Xenophon: The Persian Expedition (p. 51)
  • The Alexander Historians: Arrian and Curtius Rufus (p. 57)
  • Part II Rome
  • 4 Polybius: Universal History, Pragmatic History and the Rise of Rome (p. 65)
  • 5 Sallust: A City for Sale (p. 80)
  • 6 Livy: From the Foundation of the City (p. 90)
  • 7 Civil War and the Road to Autocracy: Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio (p. 111)
  • 8 Tacitus: "Men fit to be slaves" (p. 122)
  • 9 A Provincial Perspective: Josephus on the Jewish Revolt (p. 141)
  • 10 Ammianus Marcellinus: The Last Pagan Historian (p. 149)
  • 11 General Characteristics of Ancient Historiography (p. 158)
  • Part III Christendom
  • 12 The Bible and History: The People of God (p. 169)
  • 13 Eusebius: The Making of Orthodoxy and the Church Triumphant (p. 178)
  • 14 Gregory of Tours: Kings, Bishops and Others (p. 187)
  • 15 Bede: The English Church and the English People (p. 202)
  • Part IV The Revival of Secular History
  • 16 Annals, Chronicles and History (p. 217)
  • Annals and Chronicles (p. 217)
  • Pseudo-History: Geoffrey of Monmouth (p. 220)
  • Secular History and Chronicle: William of Malmesbury's Modern History and the Scurrilities of Matthew Paris (p. 226)
  • Two Abbey Chronicles: St. Albans and Bury St. Edmunds (p. 235)
  • 17 Crusader History and Chivalric History: Villehardouin and Froissart (p. 244)
  • Villehardouin's The Conquest of Constantinople (p. 244)
  • Froissart: "Matters of great renown" (p. 249)
  • 18 From Civic Chronicle to Humanist History: Villani, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (p. 259)
  • Part V Studying the Past
  • 19 Antiquarianism, Legal History and the Discovery of Feudalism (p. 283)
  • 20 Clarendon's History of the Rebellion: The Wilfulness of Particular Men (p. 302)
  • 12 Philosophic History (p. 313)
  • Hume: Enthusiasm and Regicide (p. 313)
  • Robertson: "The State of Society" and the Idea of Europe (p. 320)
  • Gibbon: Rome, Barbarism and Civilization (p. 332)
  • 22 Revolutions: England and France (p. 345)
  • Macaulay: The Glorious Revolution (p. 345)
  • Carlyle's French Revolution: History with a Hundred Tongues (p. 354)
  • Michelet and Taine: The People and the Mob (p. 365)
  • 23 History as the Story of Freedom: Constitutional Liberty and Individual Autonomy (p. 380)
  • Stubbs's Constitutional History: From Township to Parliament (p. 380)
  • Modernity's First-born Son: Burckhardt's Renaissance Man (p. 388)
  • 24 A New World: American Experiences (p. 397)
  • The Halls of Montezuma: Diaz, Prescott and the Conquest of New Spain (p. 397)
  • Outposts in the Wilderness: Parkman's History of the Great West (p. 406)
  • Henry Adams: From Republic to Nation (p. 414)
  • 25 A Professional Consensus: The German Influence (p. 425)
  • Professionalization (p. 425)
  • German Historicism: Ranke, God and Machiavelli (p. 428)
  • Not Quite a Copernican Revolution (p. 433)
  • 26 The Twentieth Century (p. 438)
  • Professionalism and the Critique of "Whig History": History as a Science and History as an Art (p. 438)
  • "Structures": Cultural History and the Annales School (p. 448)
  • Marxism: The Last Grand Narrative? (p. 455)
  • Anthropology and History: Languages and Paradigms (p. 462)
  • Suppressed Identities and Global Perspectives: World History and Micro-History (p. 468)
  • Select Bibliography (p. 487)
  • Index (p. 501)