Wed, 12 Aug 2009
John Burrow, A History of Histories
Not a history of history, but a history of historians.
This book serves as an introduction to the history books of the Penguin Classics series. It introduces historians from Herodotus to the present day. It looks at each historian on theor own terms, showing how their objectives varied widely. Earlier historians were principally concerned to record events that might otherwise be forgotten, to serve both as a commemoration of meritorious actions and as a warning of the bad.
Later historians, beginning in the nineteenth century, began to look back beyond their own days to reconstruct the past from archives and other sources, so changing the nature of the historian's task.
The past few years have shown a great increase in the range of subjects that historians consider appropriate to analyse.
John Burrow . A History of Histories Epics, Chronicles, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. 2009, Vintage, . paperback . 544 pages.
ISBN 0375727671 .
