Thinking About History

Description

The history of whom? History from above: "Great men" and a few women ; Social history and quantification ; E.P. Thompson's historical revolution ; Resistance and agency ; Power and the private sphere -- The history of where? How national history became unnatural ; Oceans, middle grounds, borderlands ; The rise of global history ; Displacing Euro-America -- The history of what? From ideas to things ; The changing history of ideas ; Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolution ; Science in historical context ; The new history of things ; Nature and other nonhuman actors -- How is history produced? From chroniclers to academics ; Popular and public history ; Orthodoxy and revisionism: how debate shapes history ; Do sources and archives make history? -- Causes or meanings? Causality and history ; In search of laws and patterns: social science history and comparison ; Marxism and the Annales school ; Multicausal history and the return of the event ; In search of meaning: microhistory -- Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and the "new cultural history"--Facts or fictions? The rise and fall of objectivity ; Postmodernism and history: radical skepticism and new methods ; Everything is constructed ; Barbarians at the gate ; Distortion or imagination: where do we draw the line? ; Conclusion