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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Art of Historiography, February 7, 2004
This review is from: The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (Paperback)
Fritz Stern has compiled a wide-ranging collection of original source materials written by historians, ancient and modern, that illuminate the nature of history as a discipline and a process. Beginning with Voltaire and Barthold Niebuhr and progressing through Macaulay, Jaures, Turner, Trevelyan, Beard, Barzun, and ending with C. Vann Woodward, Stern focuses on different roles history has assumed over a period of thousands of years as well as the various genres and subtopics in which history has made itself a home. These topics include cultural history, economic history, literature, positivism, materialism, scientific history, relativism and others. Stern opens each chapter and discussion of a new historian with insightful preliminary and background information that helps to set the historian in a better context than if it were not to appear. Other than this, his presence is undetectable, which speaks to his ability as a historian himself to remain detached from his work.
Any university level historiography course needs this work either as a main text or as a supplementary text given its survey-like nature. Stern opens each chapter and discussion of a new historian with insightful preliminary and background information that helps to set the historian in a better context than if it were not to appear. Each featured historian presents or engages a new variety of history, as the title enunciates, and provides further evidence of the depth and breadth of history as a scholarly subject as well as a process spread out over time.
The intense and quite complex nature of the selections make this book a perfect fit for an upper level university or graduate level historiography course. Furthermore, any reader who wishes to supplement any knowledge of history would be well served by this work. High school students intending to pursue history as a major might also read this as a prelude to what lies ahead.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Big Name Historians, January 3, 2012
This review is from: The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (Paperback)
This book is not for the casual reader, but for the intellectually oriented enthusiast who may want to make a career writing history. This person is usually, but not always, the university student who wants to study the technique or method of writing history. Every person who writes history has to decide how the story, the narrative or the analysis should be presented. In this anthology famous historians give their views.
Some of the big names are Niebuhr, Ranke, Macauley, Carlyle, Marx, Engels, Turner, Trevelyan, Lord Acton, Meinecke, Beard, Namier and Barzun. The editor is confident that these selections "will convey to the reader a sense of what historians at their best should strive to do." This is not a textbook or a survey, but a sampling of the classics from Voltaire (1694- 1778) onwards. There could easily have been several more volumes given the many schools of history and national and ideological differences. Published in 1956, revised in 1973 and now available on Kindle to download, this book is still relevant. Heavy reading.
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