Stunkel - Fifty key works of history and historiography

FIFTY KEY WORKS OF HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Fifty Key Works of History and Historiography introduces some of the most important works ever written by those who have sought to understand, capture, query and interpret the past. The works covered include texts from ancient times to the present day and from different cultural traditions ensuring a wide variety of schools, methods and ideas are introduced. Each of the fifty texts represents at least one of six broad categories:

Early examples of historiography (e.g. Herodotus and Augustine)

Non-western works (e.g. Shaddad and Fukuzawa)

Critical historiography (e.g. Mabillon and Ranke)

History of minorities, neglected groups or subjects (e.g. Said and Needham)

Broad sweeps of history (e.g. Mumford and Hofstadter)

Problematic or unconventional historiography (e.g. Foucault and White)

Each of the key works is introduced in a short essay written in a lively and engaging style which provides the ideal preparation for reading the text itself. Complete with a substantial introduction to the field, this book is the perfect starting point for anyone new to the study of history or historiography.

Kenneth R. Stunkel is Professor of History at Monmouth University, New Jersey, USA. His Ph.D in history is from the University of Maryland. Teaching and publication include classical civilization, South Asia (India), East Asia (China, and Japan), and European intellectual and cultural history. His recent books are Ideas and Art in Asian Civilizations: India, China, and Japan (2011), and Understanding Lewis Mumford: A Guide for the Perplexed (2004).

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FIFTY KEY WORKS OF HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Kenneth R. Stunkel

First published 2011
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Kenneth R. Stunkel

The right of Kenneth R. Stunkel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stunkel, Kenneth R.

Fifty key works of history and historiography / by Kenneth R. Stunkel.

p. cm.

1. Historiography. 2. HistoryBibliography. 3. Historiography Bibliography. I. Title.

D13.2.S88 2011

016.909dc22

2010046798

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-57331-3 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-57332-0 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-203-81665-3 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Introduction to Fifty Key Works of History and Historiography

Most societies have preferred, with more or less success, to avoid being swallowed by Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. For the human animal, it seems anything is preferable to complete amnesia, which accounts for early devices on behalf of remembrance like myth, legend, and oral tradition. Better a myth than nothing at all. Greek myths are not merely convenient vehicles to explain natural events; they also provide markers into the past, accessible stories about how things came to be what they are. While useful for understanding literature, art, and religion, however, such devices do not qualify as history.

For our purposes, history refers to human thought and activity in past time, their settings and consequences, and what can be known about them from surviving traces. Historiography refers to distinct bodies of historical inquiry and writing, for example, Greek. Medieval, Chinese, Islamic, and how such works have been researched, written, used, and passed on in different times and places. Any discussion of historical works and their authors cannot avoid how and why the work was done, justified, and disseminated. These fifty essays afford a glimpse of how the past has been queried, recovered, interpreted, understood, and explained from ancient times to the present. The emphasis is on works, what they say, and on what principles they were written, with supporting remarks as needed about careers and views of their authors.

This slender volume on such a big subject rests on three assumptions. The first is that historical knowledge has been achieved in a plurality of cultural settings. These include the West since the ancient world as well as several non-Western societies. The second is that whatever knowledge there is has authority because credible sources Innumerable past events, persons, objects, and settings have left traces inviting some form of historical study, which has been done from many theoretical and methodological perspectives. Varieties of historical inquiry have been increasing without a sign of leveling off.

FiftyKeyWorksWhat and Why

The practice of history has its own history (another meaning of historiography) with many players and points of view. Any attempt to cover that ground is a huge undertaking. Such an overview is not the task of this volume, which must not be confused with histories of historiography. A second caution is about audiences, which for this volume are students, undergraduate and graduate, and possibly a slice of the general public endowed with curiosity, but not specialists or professionals in search of heavily footnoted scholarship, this introduction being an exception.

Since it is improbable that ten historians from various fields would agree on the key status of many works in a list of 50, why attempt the enterprise at all? A foremost reason is to explain and illustrate in one slim volume some variations of method, purpose, and style in major traditions of historiography. Clear perspectives are needed, however daunting the task, in an ocean of subject matter and a rainforest of historians and their works. A second reason is to survey in 50 works how objectivity and truth in history have been pursued, defended, and neglected from the ancient world to the present in several cultural traditions, which is a principal aim of this volume.

Because of so much historical literature within a diversity of interests, the scope of this book is limited by necessity. One limitation is the essays, for each must stay within range of 2000 words to keep the length of the book manageable and economical.available in accessible editions. The search, on balance, worked out, but influenced the choice of works.

The 50 works selected are described as key because they represent and illustrate, more or less, a rationale of six themes. Justification for each lies in plausible connections with the themes. They are: (1) early examples of method and style in historiography (e.g., Herodotus, Sallust, Augustine, Anglo-Saxon Chronicles); (2) select non-Western works for contrast with Western works (e.g., Shaddad, Fukuzawa, Pannikar, Chien Mu); (3) issues of evidence, and the emergence and practice of critical historiography, by which is meant a self-conscious search for believable evidence needed to support generalizations about the past, and the exploitation of new kinds of evidence (e.g., Mabillon, Ranke, Mommsen, Thomas); (4) the expansion of historical subject matter, or genres of historywomen, minorities, science, technology, ideas, broad interpretations (e.g., Pirenne, Lerner, Needham, Said); (5) works that take on generous chunks of the past (e.g., Lovejoy, Aris, Mumford, Hofstadter); (6) problematic historiography, or eccentric works that rest uneasily in the familiar domain of history (e.g., Procopius, Herder, Foucault, White). Themes overlap in a number of works.