Thinking about history / Sarah Maza.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maza, Sarah C., 1953- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

History--Methodology.

Historiography.

Physical Description:

255 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Summary:

What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the question animating Sarah Maza's Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it. Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History 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. The result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives. Book jacket.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226109169

022610916X

9780226109336

022610933X

OCLC:

965154171