Historiography In The Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity To The Postmodern Challenge : With a New Epilogue by the author

by Iggers, Georg G.

• ISBN13: 9780819567666
• ISBN10: 0819567663
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-02-28
• Publisher: Hopkins Fulfillment Service

Summary

In this book, now published in 10 languages, a preeminent intellectual historian examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline's greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and questioned the very possibility of objective history. Iggers sees the contemporary discipline as a hybrid, moving away from a classical, macrohistorical approach toward microhistory, cultural history, and the history of everyday life. The new epilogue, by the author, examines the movement away from postmodernism towards new social science approaches that give greater attention to cultural factors and to the problems of globalization.

Author Biography

GEORG G. IGGERS is an internationally recognized authority on intellectual history and comparative international historiography. He is the author of New Directions in Historiography (1975, 1985) and The German Conception of History (1968, 1983), both published by Wesleyan University Press. Iggers is Distinguished Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(22)
I. The Early Phase: The Emergence of History as a Professional Discipline
Classical Historicism as a Model for Historical Scholarship	23	(8)
The Crisis of Classical Historicism	31	(5)
Economic and Social History in Germany and the Beginnings of Historical Sociology	36	(5)
American Traditions of Social History	41	(10)
II. The Middle Phase: The Challenge of the Social Sciences
France: The Annales	51	(14)
Critical Theory and Social History: ``Historical Social Science'' in the Federal Republic of Germany	65	(13)
Marxist Historical Science from Historical Materialism to Critical Anthropology	78	(19)
III. History and the Challenge of Postmodernism
Lawrence Stone and ``The Revival of Narrative''	97	(4)
From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of Everyday Life	101	(17)
The ``Linguistic Turn'': The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline?	118	(16)
From the Perspective of the 1990s	134	(27)
Concluding Remarks	141	(8)
Epilogue: A Retrospect at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century	149	(12)
Notes	161	(28)
Suggested Readings	189	(4)
Index	193