Book description
This unprecedented book, by one of Britain's leading intellectual
historians, describes the intellectual impact that the study and
consideration of the past has had in the western world over the past
2500 years, treating the practise of history not as an isolated
pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the
cultural history of Europe and America. It magnificently brings to
life the work of historians from the Greeks to the present, including
Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet,
Prescott and Parkman, explaining their distinctive qualities and
allowing the modern reader to appreciate and enjoy them. But is also
examines subjects as diverse as the new perspectives brought about by
the rise of Rome, the interests of medieval chroniclers, the
introduction into historical narratives of what the eighteenth century
called 'sentiment', the effects of Romanticism and the emergence
towards the end of the nineteenth century of an historical profession.
It sets out to be not the history of an academic discipline, but a
history of choice: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been
demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as
they have changed according to political, religious, cultural and
(often most importantly) patriotic circumstances.
The book also aims to change our perceptions of the main turning
points in the history of history. It dispels persistent myths, such as
that the ancient historians wrote only contemporary history and had a
purely cyclical view of time, that the eighteenth century lacked
understanding of the past and that the critical study of sources began
only with Ranke in the nineteenth century. The ideas that historians
have had about both their own times and their civilization emerge
freshly and often unexpectedly.
Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the
most interesting ways we can try to understand the past. Nothing on
the scale of or with the ambition of his book has yet been attempted
in English.
JOHN BURROW was professor of Intellectual History at the University
of Sussex from 1981 to 1995 and Professor of European Thought at Oxford
from 1995 to 2000. His earlier books include Evolution and Society: a
study in Victorian Social Theory (1966), A Liberal Descent: four
Victorian Historians (1981), which won the Wolfson Prize for History,
Gibbon (1984) and The Crisis of Reason: European Thought 1848-1914
(2000). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Emeritus Fellow of
Balliol College, Oxford, and in 2008 will be Distinguished Visiting
Fellow at Williams College, Massachusetts.
