Artful History: A Practical Anthology (New Directions in Narrative History)

Description

A collection of memorable, stirring, and eloquent historical essays, designed to help any historian write more artfully Is there any reason serious historical scholarship cannot receive literary expression? Even the most committed empiricists and postmodernists might achieve better results by thinking of writing as a craft, rather than a means of packaging research. This book gathers some of the most compelling efforts to make history writing eloquent, stirring, and memorable, demonstrating that even the most rigorous scholarship can take on a wide range of creative forms.   With selections from: Jonathan Spence, Simon Schama, Saidiya Hartman, Wendy Warren, Jill Lepore, Louis Masur, Jane Kamensky, and John Demos, among others.   Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART 1 PRACTICE: EXAMPLES OF ARTFUL HISTORY Jonathan Spence, from The Death of Woman Wang (1978) Robert Rosenstone, from Mirror in the Shrine (1988) Simon Schama, from Dead Certainties (1991) Stella Tillyard, from Aristocrats (1994) Saidiya Hartman, “Lose Your Mother” (2007) Wendy Warren, “ 'The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England” (2007) Stephen Berry, “The Historian as Death Investigator” (2011) Paul A. Kramer, “The Importance of Being Turbaned” (2011) Craig Harline, from Conversions (2011) Amy Reading, “Benjamin Franklin’s Disciples” (2012) Jill Lepore, “All About Erections” (2012) Jonathan Holloway, from Jim Crow Wisdom (2013) PART 2 THEORY: MAKING THE CASE FOR ARTFUL HISTORY James Goodman, “For the Love of Stories” (1998) Louis P. Masur, “What It Will Take to Turn Historians into Writers” (2001) Aaron Sachs, “Letters to a Tenured Historian: History as Creative Nonfiction—or Maybe Even Poetry” (2010) Jane Kamensky, “Novelties: A Historian’s Field Notes from Fiction” (2011) John Demos, “History in the Head, History from the Heart: A Personal Minifesto” (2016) Contributors Credits