History, Historiography, Uses of the Past

03 Oct 1994 12:01

Cf. Archaeology; Historical Materialism; Nationalism; Scientific Method

Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher
Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness
Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel [The only genuinely scientific approach to history I've ever seen. Brilliant and utterly convincing. Doesn't so much put forward a theory of historiography as exemplify an implicit one.]
David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method [Interesting, with much food for thought, but not fully convincing. His discussion of "clues", for instance, (a) doesn't mention the hypothetico-deductive method at all, which is intensely puzzling since that's basically what he's talking about; (b) doesn't mention Helmholtz; (c) draws the untenable distinction he does between generalizing, "Galilean" sciences, e.g. astronomy, and particularizing, historical sciences --- since the diagnoses in the particular case depends on general principles (e.g., each artist has a certain, stable, distinct way of drawing hands), and generalizing sciences attempt to explain and deal with particular cases (why did this reaction-vessel turn red, the cause of that supernova); and (d) claims that the intellectual changes he describes were somehow motivated by the class struggles, claims he doesn't even begin to support. Nonetheless, his discussion of "clues" has a lot of interesting material and obervations.]
E. J. Hobsbawm, On History
Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam [The Introduction to vol. I has a very fine methodological disscussion]
ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
David Stannard, Shrinking History [Review: A Strange Delusion of the Recent Past]
E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity
Peter Bearman, James Moody and Robert Faris, "Networks and History" Complexity 8 (2002): 61--71
Collingwood, The Idea of History
Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History
Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models [Review by Danny Yee]
Carlo Ginzburg
- History, Rhetoric and Proof
Goeffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences [blurb]
Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History [Blurb]
Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography
G. Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History
Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion [blurb]
White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge
Rosalind Williams, Retooling