The New History and the Old

by Himmelfarb, Gertrude

• ISBN13: 9780674013841
• ISBN10: 0674013840
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-30
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

For this updated edition of her acclaimed work on historians and the writing of history, Gertrude Himmelfarb adds four insightful and provocative essays dealing with changes in the discipline over the past twenty years. In examining the effects of postmodernism, the illusions of cosmopolitanism, A. J. P. Taylor and revisionism, and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history," Himmelfarb enriches her illuminating exploration of the myriad ways--new and old--in which historians make sense of the past.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Revised Edition	1	(2)
Introduction to the First Edition	3	(175)
1 The New New History: Postmodernism	15	(16)
2 The Old New History: "History with the Politics Left Out"	31	(20)
3 Psychohistory and Quantohistory	51	(14)
4 The Historian as Sociologist: Two Nations or Five Classes	65	(23)
5 The Historian as Marxist: The "Group"	88	(24)
6 The Historian as Psychoanalyst	112	(14)
Edmund Burke: An Ambivalent Conservative	113	(5)
James and john Stuart Mill: Ambivalent Rebels	118	(8)
7 Social History in Retrospect	126	(13)
Reflections of a Chastened Father	127	(6)
Recovering a Lost World	133	(6)
8 Is National History Obsolete?	139	(27)
The Frenchness of France	140	(10)
The Englishness of England	150	(10)
The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism	160	(6)
9 Who Now Reads Macaulay?	166	(12)
10 Revisionism Revisited: Taylor-Made History	178	(17)
11 History and the Idea of Progress	195	(16)
12 Does History Talk Sense?	211	(15)
13 The End of History?	226	(5)
Postscript 1999	231	(4)
Notes	235	(26)
Acknowledgments	261	(2)
Index of Names	263