Thinking About History
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

1 The History of Whom?
History from Above: “Great Men” and a Few Women
Social History and Quantification
E. P. Thompson’s Historical Revolution
Resistance and Agency
Power and the Private Sphere
2 The History of Where?
How National History Became Unnatural
Oceans, Middle Grounds, Borderlands
The Rise of Global History
Displacing Euro-America
3 The History of What?
From Ideas to Things
The Changing History of Ideas
Thomas Kuhn’s Scientific Revolution
Science in Historical Context
The New History of Things
Nature and Other Nonhuman Actors
4 How Is History Produced?
From Chroniclers to Academics
Popular and Public History
Orthodoxy and Revisionism: How Debate Shapes History
Do Sources and Archives Make History?
5 Causes or Meanings?
Causality and History
In Search of Laws and Patterns: Social Science History and Comparison
Marxism and the Annales School
Multicausal History and the Return of the Event
In Search of Meaning: Microhistory
Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and the “New Cultural History”
6 Facts or Fictions?
The Rise and Fall of Objectivity
Postmodernism and History: Radical Skepticism and New Methods
Everything Is Constructed
Barbarians at the Gate
Distortion or Imagination: Where Do We Draw the Line?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Index
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
Won
History: General History
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.