Thinking About History

Price: Rs. 699

AuthorSarah Maza
Pages:vi+255
Published Date:16.10.2021
ISBN:978-9937-594-25-9

Chautari Book Series - 104

What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That’s the question animating Sarah Maza’s , a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.

This book is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark discussion and offer its readers a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.

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SARAH MAZA is professor of history and the Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, US. She specializes in the history of France and is the author of several books including Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (2011) and The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (2003).

Introduction - 1

THE HISTORY OF WHOM? - 10
- History from Above: “Great Men” and a Few Women - 10
- Social History and Quantiﬁcation - 14
- E. P. Thompson’s Historical Revolution - 23
- Resistance and Agency - 28
- Power and the Private Sphere - 34
THE HISTORY OF WHERE? - 45
- How National History Became Unnatural - 45
- Oceans, Middle Grounds, Borderlands - 57
- The Rise of Global History - 71
- Displacing Euro-America - 77
THE HISTORY OF WHAT? - 83
- From Ideas to Things - 83
- The Changing History of Ideas - 86
- Thomas Kuhn’s Scientiﬁc Revolution - 91
- Science in Historical Context - 96
- The New History of Things - 101
- Nature and Other Nonhuman Actors - 108
HOW IS HISTORY PRODUCED? - 118
- From Chroniclers to Academics - 118
- Popular and Public History - 124
- Orthodoxy and Revisionism: How Debate Shapes History - 137
- Do Sources and Archives Make History? - 146
CAUSES OR MEANINGS? - 157
- Causality and History - 157
- In Search of Laws and Patterns: Social Science History and Comparison - 161
- Marxism and the Annales School - 166
- Multicausal History and the Return of the Event - 171
- In Search of Meaning: Microhistory - 178
- Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and the “New Cultural History” - 185
FACTS OR FICTIONS? - 199
- The Rise and Fall of Objectivity - 199
- Postmodernism and History: Radical Skepticism and New Methods - 209
- Everything Is Constructed - 216
- Barbarians at the Gate - 220
- Distortion or Imagination: Where Do We Draw the Line? - 225