Making History How Great Historians Interpret the Past

Making History:

How Great Historians Interpret the Past

Parts I & II

Professor Allen C. Guelzo

EACHING

OMPANY

Allen C. Guelzo, Ph.D.

Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era

and Director, Civil War Era Studies, Gettysburg College

Allen C. Guelzo, Ph.D., is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director, Civil War Era Studies at
Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of
Pennsylvania, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Bruce Kuklick, Alan C. Kors, and Richard S. Dunn. Dr.
Guelzo previously taught at both Drexel University and Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. At Eastern
University, he was the Grace Ferguson Kea Professor of American History and, from 1998 to 2004, the founding dean of the
Templeton Honors College.

Dr. Guelzo is the author of numerous books on American intellectual history and on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era,
beginning with his first work, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Wesleyan University Press,
1989; reprint, Wipf and Stock, 2008). His second book, For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the
Reformed Episcopalians (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), won the Albert C. Outler Prize for Ecumenical Church
History of the American Society of Church History. He wrote The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil
War and Reconstruction Era for the St. Martin’s Press American History series in 1995 and followed that with a new edition
of Josiah G. Holland’s 1866 biography, Life of Abraham Lincoln, in 1998 for the Bison Books series of classic Lincoln
biography reprints from the University of Nebraska Press.

Dr. Guelzo’s book Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999) won both the Lincoln Prize and the
Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000. In 2003, his article “Defending Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling
Letter, 1863” won Civil War History’s John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article of that year. Dr. Guelzo’s book Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) also won the Lincoln Institute Prize
and the Lincoln Prize for 2005, making him the first double Lincoln laureate in the history of both prizes. His article “Houses
Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of Illinois, 1858” was featured in the September 2007 issue of the
Journal of American History. His book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that
Defined America, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.

Dr. Guelzo has written for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, the
Claremont Review of Books, and Books & Culture and has been featured on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition
Sunday, Brian Lamb’s Booknotes, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is a member of the board of directors of the
Abraham Lincoln Association, the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church; a member
of the advisory council of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission; a research associate for the McNeil Center for
Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and a member of the American Historical Association, the
Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Society of Civil War
Historians, and the Union League of Philadelphia.

Dr. Guelzo has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1991–1992), the McNeil Center for Early
American Studies (1992–1993), the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University (1994–1995), and the
James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (2002–2003).

Among his other honors, Dr. Guelzo has earned the Lincoln Award of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, the
Lincoln Medal of the Union League Club of New York City, and the Medal of Honor of the Daughters of the American
Revolution. In 2005, he was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate as a member of the
National Council on the Humanities.

Professor Guelzo’s other Teaching Company courses include The American Mind; Mr. Lincoln: The Life of Abraham
Lincoln; The American Revolution; and The History of the United States, 2

Edition, which he team-taught with Professor

Patrick N. Allitt and Professor Gary W. Gallagher.

Dr. Guelzo lives in Paoli and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Debra.

Table of Contents

Making History: How Great Historians Interpret the Past

Professor Biography ...................................................................................................................................................................i
Course Scope ..............................................................................................................................................................................1
Lecture One

History as the Second Question............................................................................3

Lecture Two

Homer and Herodotus ..........................................................................................5

Lecture Three

Marching with Xenophon.....................................................................................7

Lecture Four

The Unhappy Thucydides ....................................................................................9

Lecture Five

Men of Mixed Motives—Polybius and Sallust ..................................................10

Lecture Six

The Grandeur That Was Livy.............................................................................12

Lecture Seven

Tacitus—Chronicler of Chaos............................................................................13

Lecture Eight

The Christian Claim to Continuity .....................................................................14

Lecture Nine

Augustine’s City—Struggle for the Future ........................................................15

Lecture Ten

Faith and the End of Time..................................................................................17

Lecture Eleven

The Birth of Criticism ........................................................................................18

Lecture Twelve

The Reformation—The Disruption of History ...................................................20

Lecture Thirteen The

Reformation—Continuity or Apocalypse?..................................................22

Lecture Fourteen

Enlightening History ..........................................................................................23

Lecture Fifteen

The Rise and Triumph of Edward Gibbon .........................................................24

Lecture Sixteen

History as Science—Kant, Ranke, and Comte ...................................................25

Lecture Seventeen

The Whig Interpretation of History....................................................................27

Lecture Eighteen

Romantic History ...............................................................................................28

Lecture Nineteen

The Apocalypse of Karl Marx............................................................................29

Lecture Twenty

Culture and History ............................................................................................31

Lecture Twenty-One

Civilization as History........................................................................................32

Lecture Twenty-Two

The American History Lesson............................................................................33

Lecture Twenty-Three

Closing the Frontier............................................................................................35

Lecture Twenty-Four

The Value of History..........................................................................................37

Timeline ....................................................................................................................................................................................39
Glossary ....................................................................................................................................................................................42
Biographical Notes...................................................................................................................................................................45
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................................49

Making History: How Great Historians Interpret the Past

Scope:

Like broccoli and Wagner, there are some things that you either love or hate … and history, as I have learned from many
years as a teacher, is one of them. This Teaching Company course, surprisingly, is for people who love it and for those who
hate it.

For those who love it, it will be a way of understanding how complicated love can be. History is more than merely a pileup of
facts or a chronicle of the past; it is an art, and a very literary one at that. And like the other arts, it has techniques and
perspectives, some of them old and long-since retired, some of them in violent conflict with each other. History never
presents itself to us simply or singly, like a package on the doorstep. It’s too vast for that. People who write history are
compelled by that vastness to choose what (and what not) to write about, and the greatest of history writers usually have a
particular agenda or message that governs their choosing. This involves a good deal more in the way of creativity than it
sometimes seems, but it is a creativity necessarily hemmed in by what actually happened in the past, rather than (as for a
writer of fiction) ranging loose to pursue the imagination. Historians may wrangle over what the standards of accountability
are, but at the end of the day, there is an accountability to which the creativity must bend.

For those who hate history, these lectures would very much like to dispel the notion, credited to Henry Ford, that history is
“just one damned thing after another.” They speak to the history-loathing constituency who doubt whether history has any
creativity to it at all, for which reason they find it onerous and boring. What they will find in this course is that history looks
like nothing so much as great painting—the assembling of the right brushes and colors, the careful eye that knows just what
to include, the inner spirit that knows how to make a countryside into a landscape and a face into a story. And so we’ll focus
on three questions that, either from curiosity or irritation, people like to ask about history.

1. What is history, exactly? Unhappily, we use the same word—“history”—to speak about the past and also about the

writing we do about the past. “You’re history” means that someone is part of the past; the “history section” in the
local bookstore, however, is full of books about events of the past, which we call history. Or we say that event
happened “in history,” but then we go to college and “major in history.” These are obviously two different things—
the events and the writing about the events—but we use the same word for both, to our enormous self-confusion.
We’ll be concentrating in this series on the work of the “great historians”—which is to say, how great historians
have done history writing.

2. How have these great historians gone about the task of choosing what to write about the past? What are the literary

genres they have adopted (or invented) in which to cast their history writing? What philosophical problems have
they encountered? What ideological points are they trying to make?

3. Can we ever get at the “truth” of history? Or is our vision so limited, or so rooted in our own times, that we can

never fully understand the motives, actions, and ideas of the past?

The principal tool we’ll use in this exploration is a biographical one, in the sense that we’ll focus on the lives and writings of
the greatest of the world’s historians and examine how they handled and developed their craft. We’ll begin in the first lecture
with building a definition of history writing in terms of both what it is and what it isn’t. We’ll then proceed in Lectures Two
through Seven to examine the beginnings of history writing with the “first” historians—the Greeks—and the shapers of the
classical historical tradition—the Romans. Lectures Eight through Ten show how sharp a break the early Christians made
with that classical tradition, introducing a notion of historical purposes guided by a purposeful divine hand. Lectures Eleven
through Thirteen herald the fracturing of Christian history, first through a revival of classical historical models and then
through the struggle of each half of a divided Christendom to justify their own side of the division through historical writing.

Lectures Fourteen through Sixteen bring us to the doorstep of modern history making. Just as the Enlightenment turned
Europeans decisively away from both the classical and Christian understanding of science and politics, it created a new
historical understanding as well, based on reason and a determination to rid Europeans of the dead hand of authority. But,
like the Enlightenment as a whole, the worship of reason produced its own reaction, first in the realization of what reason’s
limits might actually turn out to be and then in the form of the Romantic revolt of the 19

century, which overthrew rational

explanations of the past in favor of “organic” ones, based on the nonrational factors of race, ethnicity, culture, class, and
language (as we will see in Lectures Seventeen through Nineteen). Among those “organic” causes, none generated a longer-
lasting debate than the historians of culture, from Jacob Burckhardt to Samuel P. Huntington (featured in Lectures Twenty
and Twenty-One).

Thus far we will have operated largely within a narrow geographical zone between Asia Minor and the western fringes of
Europe. For Lectures Twenty-Two through Twenty-Three, we’ll venture across the Atlantic to see what history has meant to
Americans. Although Americans pride themselves on being a future-oriented people, they have developed a much more
sophisticated and in-depth paper trail of history writing than we might at first assume, coming almost full circle from the first

anxious narratives of colonial settlement and conquest, through the celebratory narratives of American democracy in the 19

century, and to the gloomy and disappointment-laden writing of the Progressives and their modern heirs.

Finally, in Lecture Twenty-Four, we’ll take some examples of present-day history writing under our microscope and see how,
in an age of multiculturalism, relativity, and anxiety, the very notion of history itself seems to have used its own tools to
question its own existence. It will not be a pretty story, but it will be a necessary one.

You should be forewarned that the historians in these lectures are not at all the collection of dusty academics you might
imagine. Among their number we will encounter Moses, leading the Children of Israel not only to a “promised land” but to a
promised historical identity; Julius Caesar, swashbuckling his way through Gaul; Augustine of Hippo, trying to make sense
of a world that was collapsing around his ears; the savage-tongued Edward Gibbon, deliberately insulting the present by
tweaking the nose of the past; Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing some of the most sonorous historical prose ever penned;
Karl Marx, railing against capitalism; Francis Parkman, the Harvard Brahmin roughing it on the Oregon Trail; and Sigmund
Freud, turning from the analysis of discontented patients to the discontents of civilization. There will be in this assembly
many individuals whom you will not have thought of as historians (like Freud or Marx) and many historians who have
shaped your own thinking more than you thought (like Hegel or Frederick Jackson Turner).

Above all, we will come back, over and over again, to our three questions—What is history? How do historians choose?
What actually happened in the past? Like great painters, the great historians drip and ooze as they write. Like Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment, their work will sometimes amaze you, not just for what it is but for how it was done. Like the Mona Lisa, it
will always have that faint smile which says, “And you thought this was bunk. …”

Lecture One

History as the Second Question

Scope: There is an ambiguity in the way we use the word “history.” It is used to describe both the past and the way we write

about the past. This means that the past and what we write about it are two different things and in fact must be
different. We cannot choose what events we want to have happen to us in the past, but we do choose what events we
record when we write history. That choosing needs to be done according to certain standards, based on evidence, a
fact that distinguishes history writing from earlier, prehistorical forms of writing about the past.

Outline

I. What do we mean when we use the word “history”?

A. History is what happened in the past. History is also what we read about the past.
B. In some cases, it’s a vaguely romantic desire for vicarious participation in spectacle.

1. It becomes similar to Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy.”
2. But that suggests that history is a form of literary infatuation.
3. Do we find history in our experience or in the reading?

C. Literary style can be very attractive.

1. But style has nothing to do with how past events occurred.
2. Most contemporaries of great events didn’t recognize them as such.

D. History writing enjoys no prearranged focus.

1. By what mechanism do we determine importance?
2. Unlike experiencing history, which we receive passively, writing history leaves us with no alternative

but choosing.

3. A certain amount of choice has already been made for you by records or evidence.
4. Writing history is more like feast than famine: too many answers and not enough questions.
5. This course is about how historians in the past have managed this feast—how conscious they have been of the

temptations to color and adjust, of the need to sort and choose, and of the inevitability of interpretation.

II. History writing is a humanistic prose narrative of events based on systematic inquiry into words, deeds, ideas, conflicts,

and sufferings that occurred in the past and that have left verifiable evidentiary trails in the present.
A. What is “humanistic”?

1. It is something that focuses on what has happened to and between human beings.
2. It does not, and cannot, concern itself with divine providence, not because history is antireligious but because

the material and methods of religion and history are different.

B. What is a “prose narrative”?

1. History is not poetry or an oral performance.
2. Its purpose is informing, rather than entertaining or edifying.

C. What is “based on systematic inquiry”?

1. History cannot be confected from the historian’s imagination.
2. The word “history” itself simply derives from the Greek word for “inquiry.”

D. What are “verifiable evidentiary trails”?

1. History wants to use evidence that can be verified, returned to and examined by others, or recognized by others

as having validity.

2. History writing wants to function on the kind of evidence that one would find in a court of law, rather than in a

novel.

III. History is an answer to the “second question.”

A. The first question any curious human mind is apt to ask about anything is, “What is that?”
B. The next question is the historians’ question: “Where did it come from?”

IV. Ways of answering this second question existed before history writing was conceived.

A. The epic poem was the first (as in The Epic of Gilgamesh).
B. Organizing societies bureaucratically forced the creation of lists.
C. Kings and rulers who wished to have their deeds remembered had annals written.
D. The Old Testament relied on chronicles to give shape to its beliefs.

Suggested Reading:
Bauer, History of the Ancient World, chap. 10.
Burrow, A History of Histories, Introduction.
Gilderhus, History and Historians, chap. 1.

Questions to Consider:
1. What is the difference between history as experienced and history as written?
2. Why is an act of choosing on the part of the historian inevitable?

Lecture Two

Homer and Herodotus

Scope: Homer’s great epic poem the Iliad cannot be considered true history writing based on our definition from Lecture

One. Instead, the first great work that consciously embodies the definition of history writing comes from Herodotus
and describes the Persian invasions of Greece. What he describes is really a clash of civilizations, with the Greeks
acting out of devotion to freedom. Herodotus also has an eye for great storytelling and is attentive to how geography
shapes nations.

Outline

I. Much of our mental image of ancient Greece is based on Homer’s Iliad.

A. The Iliad is the story of how Greece rose as a single unit to strike down Troy.

1. There really was a Troy, but it certainly had little importance.
2. The Greek assault on Troy was probably a retaliatory raid.
3. The Greeks who populate the Iliad were small kingdoms organized under the rule of Mycenae.
4. After 1100 B.C., Mycenaean Greece went into a sudden downward spiral, the causes of which can only be

conjectured.

B. The Iliad is an epic, not history.

1. It is cast in poetry.
2. The gods make routine appearances.
3. The cause of this war is personal—the kidnapping of Helen.
4. There is no sense of inquiry in the Iliad.

C. By the mid-500s B.C., the Greeks were experiencing a second wind.

1. They acquired a new written language from the Phoenicians.
2. They reestablished their merchant classes.
3. They began to plant commercial colonies around the Aegean.
4. They took the first steps toward re-creating some sense of Greek unity.

D. In 539, the Persians overthrew the Babylonian empire, then turned to Greece.

1. Darius launched a full-scale invasion of Greece in 490, but the Greeks handed him a major defeat at Marathon.
2. Ten years later, Xerxes attempted a second invasion of Greece, but his advance was stymied by the defense

of Thermopylae.

3. This event inaugurated a “Golden Age” of Greek literature, arts, and politics.

II. In 431 B.C., Athens and Sparta began 30 years of civil war, known collectively as the Peloponnesian War.

A. It was from these wars, starting with the Persian invasions, that we meet the first examples of what finally deserves

to be called history.

B. The first historian was Herodotus.

1. He was born in Halicarnassus some time in the mid-480s.
2. Herodotus grew up with a multicultural, cosmopolitan outlook.
3. He believed that human differences were shaped by geography.
4. He prized the passionate Greek desire for eleutheria (liberty).

III. Unlike Homer, Herodotus decided to write in prose and called his work istorieis.

A. The gods have no measurable or visible role to play.
B. He went to great lengths to dig up the truth about the past.

1. When he could not find records about something, he did not write about it.
2. When he could find such records, he often used them in his History to write long digressions about the Persian

Empire, his travels, and Greek history.

C. The key to these digressions goes back to Herodotus’s belief that human societies are shaped by their geography into

distinct cultures.
1. He wanted us to be impressed with this fact: Those people are not like us.
2. The Persian invasions were more than a military incident; they were a clash of civilizations.

Suggested Reading:
Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, chap. 64.
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 1.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chaps. 1–3.

Questions to Consider:
1. From what did the Greek passion for freedom develop?
2. How does Herodotus fulfill the definition of history writing?

Lecture Three

Marching with Xenophon

Scope: Xenophon’s Anabasis is a great example of storytelling and celebrates the accomplishments and resourcefulness of

the Greeks. On the other hand, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, is less confident of the Greeks,
writing an account of the civil war that called into question the Greek values that Herodotus celebrated. He believed
that the Greeks, once they had defeated the Persians, only turned around and imitated the Persians’ follies
themselves.

Outline

I. What induces someone to write history?

A. Herodotus’s answer is so past accomplishments may not be forgotten and so great deeds may not go uncelebrated.

1. Herodotus is trying to escape from the fact that we don’t remember very easily or accurately.
2. History writing beats the physical limitations of our own brains.

B. This remembering is important to “celebration.”

1. A nation cannot do without some measure of historical celebration.
2. The first instinct of tyrants is to take away a conquered people’s history.

II. The most famous imitator of Herodotus was Xenophon in the Anabasis.

A. Xenophon was born around 430 B.C. in Athens.

1. He joined a mercenary company in the service of Cyrus the Younger, who wanted to overthrow his brother, the

Persian king Artaxerxes.

2. Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa, and his Greek captains were murdered.

B. The leaderless Greeks selected new commanders, including Xenophon.

1. The Greeks turned northwest, hacking their way to the coast of the Black Sea. The joy with which the Greeks

encountered the sea is one of the most famous passages in the Anabasis.

2. Most of those who survived immediately hired themselves out to another needy prince in Asia Minor.

Xenophon, however, had had enough and went home.

C. The Anabasis is the forefather of all action-and-adventure stories.

1. It is a celebration of the spirit of eleutheria.
2. The Greeks in Xenophon’s writing are willful yet self-disciplined, resourceful, and undismayed by

any situation.

III. Thucydides, born in Thrace around 460 B.C., shows history written in a different pattern, as analysis rather than

celebration.
A. Once it became clear that the Persian threat had receded, Athens and Sparta became rivals.

1. Athens was a commercial giant and developed a navy that ruled the Aegean Sea as firmly as the Spartan army

could rule the land.

2. Athens had adopted rule by the demos, the citizens (what we call democracy).
3. Rule by the demos finally came down to a one-party rule, led by Pericles.
4. The Spartans created the Peloponnesian League.
5. Athens organized its own Delian League.

B. In 431 B.C., it all came to blows after the Athenians enraged the Spartans by accepting into their Delian League the

city of Corcyra, a member of the Peloponnesian League. Sparta responded by an invasion of the Athenian homeland
of Attica, thus beginning the Peloponnesian War.
1. Thucydides probably began writing his history of the Peloponnesian War in 410.
2. The Spartan victory that he did not live to record was a hollow one: Spartan dominance of occupied Athens was

soon overthrown, and within 40 years all of Greece would be facing a new threat from the north—Philip
of Macedon.

IV. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides was a player in the history he describes. Unlike Xenophon, also a player, it was not a role

that gave him much satisfaction.
A. He had commanded the Athenian outpost on the island of Thasos, and he had been summoned to the relief of the

Athenian colonists in the Thracian town of Amphipolis, only to arrive too late.

B. As a result, Thucydides was sentenced to 20 years in exile.

C. His was a very personal account of the Peloponnesian War, including none of the heroic glow of Xenophon and

calling into question all of the Greek values Herodotus celebrated.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 3.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chap. 8.
Higgins, Xenophon the Athenian, chap. 3.

Questions to Consider:
1. What are the characteristics of the Greek mercenaries that Xenophon believes make them so successful?
2. How are the attitudes of Thucydides and Herodotus different?

Lecture Four

The Unhappy Thucydides

Scope: Thucydides is anxious to find meaning in history by using it as a series of illustrative lessons or as a critical

explanation of causes and effects. He appears in many cases to be a cynic and is more apt to find hypocrisy than
cause for celebration in human events. He is suspicious of Athenian democracy because he believes it is vulnerable
to demagogues such as Cleon, and he withholds admiration from all except strong, hard-headed leaders like Pericles.

Outline

I. Thucydides is the first great historian of suspicion.

A. History is supposed to yield understanding we can use in the present.

1. He has small use for personal stories.
2. He has no use for digressions.
3. He gives little value to environment.
4. He is interested in models of individual human nature.

B. For Thucydides, the lack of true understanding, especially self-understanding, is what caused the Peloponnesian

War.
1. The Athenians freed Greece and then tried to enslave it themselves.
2. The saddest example of this is what happened to the Melians, small-scale Spartan allies who suffered greatly

when they refused to submit to Athens.

II. Thucydides is particularly suspicious of Athenian democracy.

A. Democracy is vulnerable to demagogues.

1. The worst example was the popular Athenian politician Cleon.
2. Cleon tried to whip up popular frenzy against Mytilene, a colony that renounced its alliance with Athens.
3. He proposed that the assembly impose on them the same fate as the Melians suffered.
4. Luckily, the assembly rescinded the order.

B. He seems to have the highest regard for authoritarian regimes that know how to keep the popular impulses of the

people in check.
1. The Athenian he clearly admires most is Pericles.
2. Pericles is cultured, philosophical, cunning, and eloquent (as in the funeral oration for the Athenian dead).
3. Pericles also knew his limits.

C. But Thucydides is not an antidemocratic cynic.

1. Behind his criticisms of Athenian democracy is a profound respect for the idea of democracy.
2. His skepticism is the reflex of a disappointed idealist.
3. What Thucydides deplores is not democracy but democracy’s vulnerabilities.

D. Thucydides showed that history writing has more choices than just celebration: History can teach lessons about

human nature.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 2.
Hanson, The Landmark Thucydides, Introduction.
Meier, Athens, chap. 8.

Questions to Consider:
1. What are the most egregious examples Thucydides can summon of Athenian hypocrisy?
2. If history were a matter of inculcating present-day lessons, what ones would Thucydides hope we would learn?

Lecture Five

Men of Mixed Motives—Polybius and Sallust

Scope: The political wrongheadedness that Thucydides described in the Peloponnesian conflict eventually made Greece

prey to the ambitions of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, then to the Romans. Polybius, although a Greek, wrote
the history of Rome’s rise as a warning to his fellow Greeks not to resist Roman dominance. The Romans
themselves, however, were much less sure of what their triumph represented, and Sallust became the first historian
to write about the past as a story of declension and corruption.

Outline

I. In the heyday of classical Greece, the Greeks were known as a warrior nation rather than for their literature, philosophy,

or politics.
A. The inability of the Greeks to manage their politics plunged them into the Peloponnesian War, from which everyone

in Greece came out the loser.
1. This rendered them vulnerable to Philip II, king of Macedon.
2. Philip, in turn, was succeeded by his son, Alexander the Great, who amassed a huge Greek empire.

B. Even then, after Alexander’s death, his generals began partitioning his conquests into kingdoms for themselves.

1. One of them made the fatal mistake of allying himself with Carthage, which was involved in a series of wars

with Rome.

2. Rome then proceeded to swallow up Greece.

C. Callisthenes, who intended to write a full account of Alexander’s conquests, was accused of plotting against

Alexander and was executed, so we have no history of Alexander’s campaign.

II. In the heyday of Rome, the Romans were most esteemed for their politics.

A. In 510 B.C., the Romans overthrew their king and created a republic.

1. Government of the republic was by a senate of patrician aristocrats and two consuls elected annually by the

senate.

2. The ordinary citizenry of Rome were represented by the tribuni plebis.
3. Republican Rome prided itself on being a political miracle, although there was constant friction between the

patricians and the plebs.

4. Rome became the established power of the Italian peninsula and beyond, which brought it into conflict with

Carthage.

5. It won the Punic Wars, which ended with the destruction of Carthage.

B. The most important Greek historian writing in the age of Roman conquest was Polybius.

1. He was born to the Greek aristocracy.
2. He was selected as one of 1,000 aristocratic hostages to be transported into exile in Rome.
3. His time in exile persuaded him that Roman dominance of the Mediterranean was an inevitability.
4. Like Thucydides, he is preoccupied in a businesslike manner with a strict, unsentimental adherence to fact.
5. Polybius’s retreat into the facts is likely a dodge, done because the facts serve as a screen to his own life and his

own choice to collaborate with the Romans.

6. He believed that the Roman form of governance was the best of all possible methods.

III. Roman historians were less optimistic about the prospect of Roman history.

A. As Rome stretched its imperial reach, its rich grew richer.

1. The plebs declined into hardship and resentment.
2. The assassination of Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, was a signal for civil conflict.

B. Roman historian Sallust was convinced that politics had become exactly what Romans had the most to be ashamed

of.
1. Roman politics degenerated into a mad scramble for riches and power.
2. According to Sallust, the reason for Rome’s decline is simple moral rot.
3. Yet Sallust himself openly sided with Julius Caesar, the man many held responsible for the degeneration of

Roman morality.

4. Just as Polybius had hidden from his inverted loyalties to Rome behind a rampart of objectivity, Sallust hid

from his past behind a barricade of indignation.

5. Sallust formulated “declension” as a framework for understanding Roman history.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chaps. 4–5.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chaps. 10 and 13.
Prevas, Envy of the Gods, chap. 4.

Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways did Polybius and Sallust use their history writing to distract attention from their own failings?
2. What were the elements that, according to Sallust, clearly signaled the decline of Roman virtue?

Lecture Six

The Grandeur That Was Livy

Scope: Livy was the most ambitious and voluminous of the ancient historians, chronicling the long history of Rome’s rise to

power. Livy finds much to celebrate in Rome’s history, but he shares Sallust’s discomfort about the decline of
Roman morals, especially with the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire. There is, however, nothing
he can do about it, and he prefers to dwell on the past glories of Rome as a means of escape from the decay he sees
in the present.

Outline

I. The assassination of Caesar was supposed to restore the virtuous rule of the republic.

A. The actual result was civil war.

1. Caesar’s nephew and heir, Octavius, joined forces with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus.
2. Octavius then turned on Antony, defeating him, and then sidelined Lepidus.
3. Octavius took for himself the titles princeps, imperator, and Augustus.

B. Rome now became an empire.

1. It stretched from the Pillars of Hercules to the far boundaries of Persia.
2. All the practical political powers were concentrated in the imperator.

II. Titus Livius reverses Sallust’s message of declension.

A. Livy is the most voluminous of the Roman historians.

1. His great 142-volume history of Rome is the most ambitious piece of history writing since Herodotus.
2. The subject is the celebration of the achievements of Rome, although he also gives a nod in the direction

of declension.

B. Livy seems to have had no political or military career.

1. Nevertheless, Livy’s History won him something close to bestseller status in the ancient world.
2. He was a great writer and a great romancer who knew how to manage great subjects.
3. Livy’s remarkable historical narratives have long influenced European art and literature.

C. The centerpiece of Livy’s History is the Second Punic War.

1. He is able to reach back that far because of his access to the Roman annals.
2. He is also able to expand his geographical focus to “universal” dimensions.

D. Livy believes it was the moral seriousness of the Romans that explained their success.

1. He did not underestimate the importance of the Roman constitution.
2. Rome’s triumph was a product of a complex and intense interaction between the institutions and the national

character.

E. It is this interaction that produces the potent mix of admiration and disapproval in Livy.

1. He regrets that his contemporaries will not understand how important traditional religion was.
2. In Livy is the first glimmer of history writing as an escape from the unpleasantness of the present.

F. We might wonder if history writing has been linked to such escapism for other historians since Livy.
G. Perhaps the greatest of historians are those who, like Livy, can sense what is the most potent mix of the

unsentimental thrust of inquiry and the self-absorbed play of the imagination.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 6.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chap. 14.
Miles, Livy, chap. 1.

Questions to Consider:
1. Is history writing a science or an art?
2. How did Livy overcome his lack of experience and immersion in the events he writes about?

Lecture Seven

Tacitus—Chronicler of Chaos

Scope: Tacitus is an extension of Livy and shares Livy’s horror at the chaos that descended on Rome under the reign of

Caligula, Nero, and the four “emperors” who rose and fell in the year A.D. 69. His criticism of Roman corruption
takes the form of inversion, in which the Romans behave like barbarians and the barbarians behave like Romans.
Curiously, Roman biography, especially in Caesar, is much more optimistic, although even Suetonius does not
hesitate to describe in detail the moral failures of the emperors.

Outline

I. If Livy thought that the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire marked the nadir of Roman

character, it is just as well that he died in A.D. 17 and was spared the imperial disasters that ensued.
A. Augustus was succeeded by a number of saturnine and sociopathic emperors.

1. Tiberius alternated between periods of inaction and fury.
2. His grandson Caligula descended into a nightmare of extravagance and terrorism.
3. Caligula’s uncle, Claudius, met death by poisoning.
4. Nero, Claudius’s grand-nephew, was deposed and murdered.
5. The year A.D. 69 became the Year of the Four Emperors, at the end of which Vespasian was emperor.

B. Vespasian and his sons managed to stabilize the imperium.

1. They were followed by the “Five Good Emperors.”
2. It was during this period that Cornelius Tacitus composed his Histories and his Annals.

C. Tacitus mourned the passing of the republic.

1. He detailed how slaves and barbarians outshone the Romans in the Roman virtues.
2. He wrote that the Germans are ruled by real leaders, not sycophants or power seekers.
3. Tacitus is the historian of “inversion,” of a world turned upside down.

II. This raises a question for Tacitus: How did things get to be so bad?

A. He becomes one of the first historians to speculate on the role of fate and free will.

1. Fate had shown up in Herodotus as little more than a rhetorical device.
2. Thucydides came down fairly strongly on the side of chance, not the control of the gods or the Fates.
3. Livy used fate as a description of likelihood or probability.

B. Tacitus believes there is no overarching, guiding pattern in life to ensure that justice will be done.

1. At best there may be a kind of cycle in history.
2. Tacitus acknowledges that this is a minority opinion.

III. A related genre of history writing among the Romans is biography.

A. Caesar’s Commentaries are the prime example of autobiography or memoir.

1. The Commentaries are a shameless bid by Caesar to establish himself in the public mind as a great

military hero.

2. Caesar never loses an opportunity to show himself to glorious effect.

B. Suetonius is the model Roman biographer.

1. He reflects Tacitus’s conviction that the beginnings of the empire were the rock bottom of Roman integrity.
2. He regards Augustus and Vespasian as the best of the emperors.
3. He is unsparing, however, in his contempt for the other emperors.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 8.
Everett, Augustus, chaps. 18–19.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chaps. 12 and 16–18.

Questions to Consider:
1. How different are biography, autobiography, and memoirs from history?
2. How did the classical historians deal with the problem of free will and determinism?

Lecture Eight

The Christian Claim to Continuity

Scope: The early Christians, in describing themselves, were caught between two differing historical narratives: continuity

and apocalyptic. In relation to Judaism, they at first struggled to establish continuity between themselves and the Old
Testament. The Romans declined to accept this view and persecuted the Christians, whereupon the Christians
adopted toward the Romans the narrative of apocalyptic, which used elements of the declension theme to predict
that Rome was a worthless state that would be destroyed by divine vengeance. Yet when Constantine extended state
sponsorship to Christianity, Eusebius of Caesarea promptly shifted the Christian narrative to emphasize
Christianity’s continuity with Rome’s successes.

Outline

I. The death of Jesus Christ involved many historical considerations for his followers.

A. Judaism taught that God’s messengers would have to endure suffering.

1. The death of Jesus actually tended to confirm that he was the Messiah.
2. His death was converted into a redemptive act by Paul of Tarsus.

B. The cultural flexibility of Paul expanded Christianity’s appeal.

1. Pliny the Younger encountered Christians while governor of Bithynia.
2. By that time, there may have been 50,000 Christians in the empire.

II. Christian growth was achieved despite two factors.

A. Judaism was not particularly eager to acknowledge a Messiah.

1. Christians argued that the religion of Jesus was not a departure from Judaism but its living fulfillment.
2. This was an argument from “continuity.”
3. Continuity means that present events conform to past patterns.
4. Paul argued that the ritual laws of Moses were only a training device.

B. The Romans saw Christianity as an illegal religion.

1. Roman persecutions of the Christians probably began in the mid-50s.
2. Christians responded by invoking “apocalyptic” history.
3. Apocalyptic disrupts history and renders it unpredictable.

C. In A.D. 312, all the rules changed as Constantine became sole emperor of Rome.

1. In 313 he elevated Christianity to most-favored-religion status in the empire.
2. Christians now established a new continuity with the Roman past.

D. According to Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Christianity was not the enemy of Rome but the means for

realizing Rome’s highest ambitions.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 13.
Frend, The Rise of Christianity, chap. 14.
Grant, The Ancient Historians, chap. 21.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did Paul of Tarsus describe Christianity’s continuity with Judaism?
2. What were the specific elements of Roman history that Eusebius claimed were foreshadowings of the coming of

Christianity?

Lecture Nine

Augustine’s City—Struggle for the Future

Scope: Augustine of Hippo was both a Roman and a Christian, and his theory of history worked to accommodate both

continuity and apocalyptic without yielding to the more extreme versions of either. He did this by emphasizing that
the “City of God” has a real place and a real history in the here-and-now flux of human events. But it has a divine
nature as well, which struggles throughout history with its earthly aspect. This struggle will continue throughout
time, until an apocalyptic deliverance finally eliminates and resolves both the internal struggle and the external
competition that the “City of God” suffers from the “City of Man.”

Outline

I. Augustine originally intended to become a Roman orator and lawyer.

A. He became the civic orator for the city of Milan.

1. He was responsible for composing and delivering public speeches.
2. He had the opportunity to mix with important figures in imperial politics.

B. But it was Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, who attracted Augustine’s attention.

1. Ambrose had real eloquence and broad classical learning.
2. Ambrose baptized Augustine in Milan in the spring of 387.

C. We know as much as we do about Augustine because of the Confessions.

1. Augustine’s Confessions are an intensely inward-looking work.
2. The interior world of the spirit was, in the 4

century, a much more interesting place than the exterior world.

II. After 224, every Roman frontier came under some form of attack from the barbarians.

A. To pagan Romans, the cause was the crumbling of the spirit of Roman tradition.

1. The empire’s renewed decline was really due to the Christians.
2. The Christians drew all the talents of the younger generation into the church instead of into public service.
3. The Christians angered the gods and brought down the Goths and Vandals as the instrument of their wrath.
4. Some Christians, like the Donatists, were glad to see Rome sacked.

B. Augustine found himself wedged between three competing attitudes.

1. Pagans believed that the fall of Rome was caused by the Christians.
2. Purists like the Donatists believed that Rome’s fall was only too well deserved.
3. Christians had embraced the idea of continuity and were now confused.

C. Augustine responded by writing De Civitate Dei (The City of God), a book about historical interpretation.

1. The church has one foot in the here-and-now, and it must put up with all the corruption, defeat, and failure.
2. The other foot is in the realm of the future, in an invisible city, composed of none but God’s chosen.
3. Blaming the Christians for the sack of Rome is “stupidity.” Had no disasters befallen Rome before Christ?

D. Augustine wrote that there are also two cities.

1. One is the City of Man, the other the City of God.
2. Between the two there exists unremitting struggle.
3. The City of Man will eventually be destroyed, and the City of God will be vindicated.

E. Augustine introduces three innovations in interpreting history.

1. Dynamism: Human history is a constantly moving drama, with all its acts and scenes linked and in motion.
2. Struggle: Conflict moves this drama.
3. Eschatology: The ultimate goal of history does not actually occur within history. It intersects with human

history through the descent of the heavenly city, bringing about an end to history as we know it.

Suggested Reading:
Brown, Augustine of Hippo, chaps. 26–27.
Butterfield, Origins of History, chap. 6.
Dawson, “St. Augustine and the City of God,” in The Dynamics of World History.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why was Augustine’s invocation of struggle as the temporary resolution between apocalyptic and continuity so novel in

his day?

2. What makes Augustine’s description of history “dynamic,” in ways that the earlier classical historians were not?

Lecture Ten

Faith and the End of Time

Scope: Like other forms of literary art, history writing went into eclipse after the fall of Rome (or at least the western

portion of the Roman Empire) in 476. This did nothing to prevent the flourishing of prehistorical genres such as
chronicles and annals. The Dark Ages were a great age of biography, particularly in the form of the lives of saints.
The few examples of history writing that do survive the Dark Ages are fumbling affairs and are frequently
dominated by a populist brand of radical apocalyptic.

Outline

I. The sack of Rome was a terrific blow to the prestige of the empire.

A. From the 400s on, the empire was divided into eastern and western halves, each with its own emperor.

1. Of the two, the Western Empire was by far in the more perilous situation.
2. In 476, a coup by the barbarian Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus as the western emperor.

B. The Christian churches were left standing as the only working institutions to survive the barbarian conquests.

1. Roman missionaries were adept at converting barbarians into Christians.
2. However, this effort diverted energies from literature.
3. Latin-speaking Christians of the west still retained a profound suspicion of the continuity between Christianity

and the Roman Empire.

II. The Dark Ages saw a regression from history writing into the prehistorical genres.

A. The British Isles held some of the richest collections of annals and chronicles, the most ambitious of which was the

History of the English Church and People by the Saxon monk Baeda (or Bede).

B. The Dark Ages were a great age of biography.

1. The portraits of bishops and monks were a genre called “the lives of the saints.”
2. Biographers of secular rulers were not greeted with the same interest. Einhard, a German member of the court

of Charlemagne who tried to write a biography of the ruler, expected to get little thanks for it.

C. Some history writing in the early Middle Ages did manage to get done.

1. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) in the first half of

the 1100s.

2. William of Malmesbury’s Historia Novella is a history of the civil war in England between King Stephen and

the Empress Matilda.

D. Apocalyptic history also had a following in the Dark Ages.

1. Joachim of Fiore thought history was a tale of three distinct periods, pertaining to the three persons of the

Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2. The age of the Father was the age of the Old Testament. The age of the Son brought in grace and forgiveness.

The age of the Spirit, in which everyone would be enlightened by the Spirit of God, would be brought about by
a violent final insurgency ending with the annihilation of the forces of evil.

E. Apocalyptic is a puzzling genre for historians, because it is both historical and antihistorical at the same time.

Suggested Reading:
Kelley, Faces of History, chap. 5.
Southern, “The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth,” in History and Historians.

Questions to Consider:
1. What was the general purpose served by the writing of “lives of the saints”?
2. How did Joachim describe the three historical eras of the Trinity?

Lecture Eleven

The Birth of Criticism

Scope: The Renaissance saw, along with the other humanities, a revival of interest in history writing, based on the examples

of classical history writing, which Renaissance scholarship did so much to recover and disseminate. But it was
exactly the textual and critical skills that Renaissance historians honed on the ancient texts that propelled them
toward criticism of spurious texts (the Donation of Constantine being the prime example) and engendered a larger
attitude of criticism toward even the classical historians. The result would be a search for new and more critical
methodologies for writing history.

Outline

I. The late Middle Ages began with a deceptive period of calm.

A. The calm was illusory.

1. In 1271 the last of the Crusader beachheads in Palestine was wiped out.
2. Poor weather conditions heralded the beginning of the “Little Ice Age.”
3. In 1347 trading vessels from the Black Sea brought the bubonic plague (the Black Death) to Europe.
4. England and France began the Hundred Years’ War.

B. A radical skepticism corroded everything that had passed for truth.

1. John Wyclif and John Hus sprang up to question the church.
2. They were joined by others across Europe who turned away in disgust and disillusion from the church and

the monasteries.

3. Literature, particularly classical literature of the ancient world, replaced theology as a focus of study.

II. The critics’ term for the times has stuck with it: rebirth, or “Renaissance.”

A. The man who stands at the head of this group is Petrarch.

1. He insisted it was the study of man and not the study of theology that would best help us understand

human nature.

2. The best place in which to find human nature revealed was in the writings of men who had acted in the past.

B. Petrarch found many imitators.

1. These included Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, and Lorenzo Valla.
2. Their revival of interest in history was almost exclusively a revival of classical history.
3. They were spurred by the fact that Byzantine scholars had already been migrating to the safety of Italy and the

west to escape the resurgence of Muslim militancy that ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

C. Petrarch was primarily a poet and wrote no history.

1. However, Livy and Suetonius were the source for his epic poem Africa.
2. He also wrote a collection called Lives of the Illustrious Romans.

D. Leonardo Bruni set out to write The New Cicero.

1. Bruni espoused the revival of the civic-minded man of learning.
2. Bruni also wrote a history of the First Punic War.

E. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy in 1519.

1. These are a series of essays on political theory, using Livy’s history of Rome as starting points.
2. Machiavelli had little use for religion beyond the opportunities it gave to a ruler to consolidate control and

impose stability.

3. Machiavelli’s far more famous book of advice on government is The Prince.

F. Lorenzo Valla gave the first inkling of how reappropriation and imitation could lead to criticism.

1. He wrote De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione (On the Famous but False Donation of

Constantine). The Donation, purportedly from Constantine I, was said to have granted Pope Sylvester I and his
successors spiritual and temporal dominion over Italy and all the “western regions.”

2. Using his knowledge of Latin style and grammar, Valla proved that the Donation was a fraud. The exposure

was a tour-de-force of the use of historical criticism and analysis of an ancient text.

3. If history was really to be a reasoned, humanistic inquiry, it was going to have to give up credulous stories.

G. Jean Bodin codified a critical method in Method for the Easy Comprehension of History in 1566.

1. Concentrate on politics.
2. Forget beautiful, rolling style.
3. Begin with geography.

4. Establish a working chronology.
5. Pay attention to culture, and especially language.
6. Common to all of these recommendations was the spirit of criticism—the refusal to accept merely on the

authority of the ancients any account of what had happened in the past.

Suggested Reading:
Grafton, What Was History? chap. 1.
Kelley, Faces of History, chap. 6.

Questions to Consider:
1. Describe the relationship between imitation and criticism in Renaissance history writing.
2. Harking back to Herodotus and Thucydides, are Bodin’s recommendations for a new method all that new? Explain.

Lecture Twelve

The Reformation—The Disruption of History

Scope: Like early Christianity, the Protestant Reformation was caught between an impulse to claim continuity between

itself and ancient Christian practice and an impulse to denounce the intervening centuries of the church’s history as
the basis for seeing the Reformation as an apocalyptic intervention. Luther struggled to embrace both; the English
Reformation, for political reasons, came down hard on the side of continuity, although the debate over whether
continuity or apocalyptic was the better historical framework continued over the course of the next century.

Outline

I. The classical historians experienced little in the sense of distance from their subjects.

A. They felt no need for method in writing history because their own experience was their method.
B. But the critical attitude did require a method to guide it.

1. This requirement elevated the essential task of the historian—that of choosing what to include in a written

history—to the level of being an active choosing, rather than passive.

2. The method, not one’s personal experience, must become the basis for choosing.

C. The development of a critical method for writing history did not necessarily eliminate the other interpretive concepts

we have seen: history as celebration, declension, continuity, escapism, inversion, apocalyptic, and so forth.

D. As well, the critical method did not preclude the use of other prehistorical genres.

1. In England alone, the century between 1480 and 1580 saw the creation of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles,

William Camden’s Britain, and Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of
Lancastre and Yorke, to name a few.

2. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia of 1534 was a near-history. In its final version, Vergil had to deal with a

most vexing issue: the Lutheran doctrine.

II. Although Martin Luther intended his movement to be a religious reformation, it was tightly bound up with history.

A. The dominant method of that historical connection would be that of criticism, as borrowed from the Humanists.
B. European thinking of Luther’s time was marked by two contradictory streams.

1. One was a radical upsurge of popular piety and devotion that grew dissatisfied with the conventional

consolations of the church.

2. The other was a radical skepticism, which questioned the authority of the universities and the church to

formulate religious truth.

III. The Reformation borrowed the Humanist method to write its histories.

A. Erasmus cultivated the same reverence for the Latin and Greek of the church fathers.

1. He concluded that the mere performance of church ceremonies does not secure salvation.
2. God rewards a person according to the works they do by faith.

B. Luther turned this into a political collision with the church.

1. When he was declared an outlaw of the empire, many of the German princes took Luther under their protection

and reconstructed the church in their lands on Luther’s recommendations.

2. Lutheran ideas spread throughout most of Europe, triggering a series of religious wars.

C. Luther’s ideas also triggered a war of historical interpretation that has never really ceased.

1. Luther sometimes used apocalyptic history to justify his Reformation.
2. Luther also subverted the Catholic argument from continuity by turning continuity on the pope and asserting

that the Protestants, and not the Catholics, were the ones enjoying real continuity with the church.

D. This latter strategy was especially popular in England.

1. Henry VIII asserted that England was an empire and owed no fealty to the pope.
2. Over the course of the next century, English Protestants would carry on an intense debate on whether continuity

or apocalyptic was the better historical framework for understanding their Reformation.

Suggested Reading:
Dickens, The English Reformation, chap. 14.
Kelley, Faces of History, chap. 7.

Questions to Consider:
1. What considerations inclined the Protestant Reformers to claim that their movement was really a recovery of the original

ideas of Christianity?

2. Why did Henry VIII’s insistence that England was an “empire” force the English reformers away from apocalyptic

treatments of the church’s past?

Lecture Thirteen

The Reformation—Continuity or Apocalypse?

Scope: Even though the “official” story of the Protestant Church of England was supposed to be one of continuity, the

wrenching back-and-forth caused by the rapid succession of monarchs Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I allowed
Protestant radicals to introduce an element of apocalyptic into their Reformation history narratives. John Foxe
preached continuity, but it was the continuity of the English Reformers with the martyrs; John Knox, in Scotland,
wasted no time on establishing continuity but proceeded with a radical break with the past. Edward Hyde concluded
that natural law, not divine law, explained the vagaries of history.

Outline

I. When Henry VIII declared his Church of England independent of the pope’s jurisdiction, he had no intention of

replacing the pope’s authority with any but his own.
A. But his lieutenants set about remodeling the Church of England on Protestant lines.

1. They took care to ensure that Henry’s son, Edward, was raised as a Protestant.
2. Henry VIII died in 1547, and Edward became King Edward VI.

B. Edward died in 1553, and the throne passed next to his older sister Mary.

1. She set about wrenching England back into submission to the pope.
2. Mary was responsible for the execution of hundreds of Protestants.
3. When Mary herself died in 1558, few mourned her.

II. Mary was succeeded by her sister, Elizabeth, a Protestant.

A. Every instinct of Elizabeth’s was conservative.

1. That conservatism was in favor of the continuity of the Church of England with the ancient fathers of

the church.

2. The most colorful and longest-lived historical argument for the continuity was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

B. Much of John Foxe’s book dwells on the pure and holy examples of English Christianity.

1. The purpose was to demonstrate that England had always had a church life independent of Rome.
2. Foxe claims that in the “golden age,” national churches were autonomous and bowed to the wishes of pious

monarchs.

C. But the genius of Foxe was to rest his case for the legitimacy of the Church of England on the parallels between the

martyrdoms of the early church and those suffered by Protestants under “Bloody Mary.”
1. Foxe delights in showing them faithful to the end.
2. Foxe was not trying to justify Protestantism in general but English Protestantism specifically.

III. Far more radical than Foxe was John Knox.

A. Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland is a remarkably well-crafted and literate account of the

Scottish Reformation.
1. He has no time to waste on establishing long-range contacts with the Christian past.
2. He hoped for more apocalyptic kinds of reform than Elizabeth favored, as did Oliver Cromwell.

B. But the implementation of those apocalyptic hopes under Oliver Cromwell was a great disappointment.

1. Edward Hyde’s History of the Great Rebellion and Civil Wars in England was a weary admission that natural

law, not divine law, explained the ups and downs of history.

2. Continuity and apocalyptic yielded not to persuasion but to criticism.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 19.
Elton, Reform and Reformation, chap. 17.
Pennington, “Cromwell and the Historians,” in Cromwell.

Questions to Consider:
1. How does Foxe establish continuity between the early church and the English Reformation?
2. How does Hyde demonstrate that apocalyptic and continuity often yield to criticism?

Lecture Fourteen

Enlightening History

Scope: The Enlightenment enthroned skepticism and criticism toward authority as the favored intellectual attitude. In

history writing, this took the shape of David Hume’s History of England, which wrote English history as a story of
ever-increasing progress toward economic, political, and intellectual freedom from hierarchy and authority. Hume’s
idea that commerce and history were related was novel, but even more novel was Hume’s idea that commerce had a
greater shaping power than politics on history.

Outline

I. Galileo’s attack on Aristotle inaugurated a new era in understanding the physical universe.

A. Not only is the earth not the center of the solar system, but there is no hierarchy in the universe.

1. Substances do not move themselves around like occult beings.
2. Substances are moved by other objects or by certain forces, such as gravity.

B. Having found in the new physics a new rule for understanding the motion of physical bodies, it was an irresistible

conclusion that there must also exist similar laws in other intellectual domains.
1. Hence arose the new religion of Deism.
2. Hence also arose a more reasonable politics, based on natural rights and restraining or even rejecting such relics

of the past as kings and bishops.

II. It was not clear that history was capable of being reasonable.

A. Descartes doubted whether history could be reduced to “clear and distinct ideas.”

1. He was afraid that history would fall over on the side of escapism.
2. He objected mostly to the old problem of choosing.

B. But if history could not be reduced to a certainty, that did not mean that it was reduced to nothing.

1. John Locke lampooned Descartes’s method for achieving certainty.
2. We had a reasonable probability that our senses were telling us about real objects.

III. Skepticism did not prevent David Hume from writing The History of England.

A. He did not have much confidence in the purity of the motives that moved people to action.

1. He was convinced that “power naturally follows property.”
2. He doubted whether history served as a moral lesson book.
3. He did not devote much time to the celebration of British history.

B. But he was a cosmic optimist about history’s long-term trajectory, which was toward freedom.

1. Commerce and prosperity aided the republican spirit and diminished the powers of the nobility.
2. The idea that commerce might be an agent of change was a miracle of historical inversion.
3. Economic freedom pried open the door to political freedom.
4. The next step was into an even larger and better universe of thought.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 21.
Kelley, Faces of History, chap. 9.
Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, chap. 15.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did discoveries in physics lead to new ways of thinking about politics?
2. Why was Hume’s connection of economics and history so novel?

Lecture Fifteen

The Rise and Triumph of Edward Gibbon

Scope: Religion was one of the larger targets in the sights of the Enlightenment and of Hume’s History. But Edward Gibbon

was religion’s most scorching Enlightenment historical critic, and he portrayed the role of religion in The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire as not merely unhelpful but straightforwardly pernicious. Oddly, neither Hume nor
Gibbon promoted any sort of “scientific” methodology for writing history; that effort was left to Giambattista Vico.

Outline

I. History writers of the Enlightenment had confidence in the power of progress.

A. However, there was an edginess to the Enlightenment’s view of human nature.

1. Hume pegged himself philosophically as a skeptic.
2. Although he could wax eloquent over the rise of freedom and liberty, in his philosophical writings he is a

constant determinist.

B. Hume never loses an opportunity to excoriate the role of religion in the English past.

1. The medieval church was dominated by the demon of “superstition.”
2. The Reformation was dominated by the demon of “enthusiasm.”

II. Even the faintest suggestion that religion might beat tyranny disappeared in the hands of Edward Gibbon.

A. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins with the era of the Five Good Emperors and proceeds to the

hammer blows that fell thereafter.
1. The causes for this disastrous decline began with the evaporation of military masculinity.
2. The middle classes had been obliterated by land policies that allowed great landowners to annex large amounts

of land.

3. Once the empire’s capital was removed to Constantinople, the emperor became an oriental despot.

B. Gibbon singles out Christianity’s role in destroying the empire.

1. Christians disrupted the inclusiveness with which Rome had treated all the religions of the empire.
2. Christians’ belief in an afterlife induced “a contempt for their present existence.”
3. Christians’ belief in immortality made them useless in either reviving or defending the empire.

III. Italian historian Giambattista Vico attempted to construct a more scientific structure for understanding “decline and fall.”

A. In his New Science, Vico believed that history moved in a certain predictable cycle (or ricorso).

1. This cycle begins with the “age of the gods,” in which people superstitiously believe that their lives are directed

by supernatural beings.

2. This cycle continues with the “age of the heroes,” in which kings and princes take over the roles of rulers

and lawgivers.

3. It concludes with the “age of men,” in which people come of age and human governments are human creations.

B. Each of these periods is marked by a distinct style of literature and law.

1. In an age of the gods, people use metaphors, signs, and physical objects to communicate, and laws are set out by

wise men in the form of proverbs and oracles.

2. An age of the heroes features a literature made up of comparisons and similes, and heroic law is about the

enforcement of the letter of the law as given by the heroes.

3. In an age of men, literature is about the people’s own experience, and their law is one of fairness.

C. Vico is the great pioneer of “historicism.”

1. This term is so slippery as to be almost useless.
2. Let it stand here for the conviction that history contains a rational system of stages or evolutions.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 21.
Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon, chaps. 4–8.
Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, chap. 12.

Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways did Gibbon believe that Christianity actually caused the downfall of the Roman Empire?
2. How are Vico’s stages of historical development linked to developments in culture?

Lecture Sixteen

History as Science—Kant, Ranke, and Comte

Scope: A much more ambitious effort to design a “scientific” methodology for history writing came from the philosopher

Immanuel Kant. Kant’s design for a “comprehensive history” became the pursuit of the German universities, which
were the first to put the study of history on an academic footing. Creating a comprehensive history involved a
ferocious and concentrated dedication to primary research rather than mere literary elegance, and the most
successful example of this historicism was Leopold von Ranke. Yet another scientific methodology came from
Auguste Comte as a by-product of Comte’s Social Positivism.

Outline

I. Vico’s attempt to sort out history as a scientific ladder of stages was only the tip of the Enlightenment’s love affair with

history.
A. Hume and Gibbon were much more literary models than scientific ones.

1. For Gibbon in particular, literary style was indispensable.
2. His style is both grand and ironic.

B. Immanuel Kant picked up Vico’s historicism and laid out a series of “propositions” for discovering allgemeinen

Geschichte (comprehensive history).
1. All the natural capacities of a creature will have an opportunity for development.
2. A genuine history has to be shaped around the history of the entire race.
3. Everything humanity has is a product of its own initiative.
4. People experience a simultaneous pull toward living in community and toward pursuing their own self-interest.
5. The most important historical problem is how to establish “a civil society.”
6. What are needed are a constitution and a good will prepared for it.
7. States must then enter a “federation of nations.”
8. Rulers will then become enlightened, war will disappear, and a “universal cosmopolitan institution” will

emerge.

9. Kant’s plan combined the optimism of Hume with Vico’s sense of pattern.

II. Writing history as a scientific pattern became one of the preoccupations of the German universities.

A. Johann Christoph Gatterer at Göttingen became the pioneer of comprehensive history.

1. Gatterer aimed at publishing all the major source materials on German history.
2. Gatterer began publishing the results of his editing in two journals.

B. The greatest of the German scientific historians was Leopold von Ranke.

1. His History of the German and Italian Peoples made him a scholarly sensation.
2. Ranke was an admirer of Kant.
3. Ranke wanted to master every detail of a given time period so that he could tell that period’s story wie es

eigentlich gewesen (how it actually was).

4. This mastery is what would lead the historian to a recognition (Ahnen) of the metaphysical structure of events.

III. Ranke’s passion for intuitively recognizing the hand of the divine in history was suspect in the eyes of Auguste Comte.

A. Comte was in pursuit of a historicism that would serve not merely to research the past but to make it both secular

and structured.
1. Comte had no ambitions to become a historian; he was, instead, the pioneer of sociology.
2. What he wanted was a radical reorganization of European society.
3. He hoped a repositioning of history would impart a certain inevitability to socialism.

B. In his Course of Positive Philosophy, he taught that history passes through three different theoretical conditions.

1. The “theological era,” which believed “all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of

supernatural beings.”

2. The “metaphysical era” “in which the mind supposes … abstract forces … capable of producing all

phenomena.”

3. The “final … positive state,” where the mind gives up the vain search after absolutes.

C. This was an arbitrary, not to say oversimplified, vision of history.

1. The three stages of Comte’s positive philosophy and the three cycles of Vico’s New Science all managed to

erect their great outlines in inverse proportion to the amount of on-the-ground historical detail they deployed.

2. The scientific history identified with von Ranke unearthed mountains of material but in the service of a Kantian

ideal, whose outlines seem to grow vaguer and vaguer in the face of greater and greater detail.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 25.
Butterfield, Man on His Past, chaps. 2–4.
Kelley, Fortunes of History, chap. 5.

Questions to Consider:
1. How genuinely “scientific” were the versions of scientific history espoused by Ranke and Comte?
2. In what ways do Vico’s cycles and Comte’s stages differ?

Lecture Seventeen

The Whig Interpretation of History

Scope: Britain’s constitutional monarchy had long been hailed as the near-perfect model of an enlightened government. The

watchdogs of that constitution’s balance were the English Whigs, and they developed a historical outlook of their
own that, especially in the hands of Thomas Macaulay, frankly celebrated the innate genius of the English for liberty
and the cooperative role played by religion in sustaining it.

Outline

I. The British Enlightenment cheered on the American Revolution but stopped short at the prospect of the French

Revolution.
A. England had always built upon a solid base of tradition.

1. Edmund Burke assumed that there really was an “ancient constitution,” dedicated to liberty and requiring only

adaptation and reorganization.

2. The French Revolution was actually about the destruction of history.

B. This became what Sir Herbert Butterfield called the “Whig interpretation of history.”

1. “It studies the past with reference to the present.”
2. It indulges an “over-dramatization of the story.”
3. It “particularly lends itself to generalization and to vague philosophizing.”

C. One is more likely to discover Whig history emerging from nonprofessional or nonacademic history writers.

1. Whig history writing tends to glorify rather than examine.
2. Yet no nation or society can survive without having some measure of history of its own to celebrate.

II. The greatest of the Whig historians was Thomas Babington Macaulay.

A. For Macaulay, the great story of English political life was the solid foundation of its so-called ancient constitution.

1. There has always been in England a presumption on the part of liberty and freedom.
2. Political change has always been achieved as a gradual development of the basic principles of the

English constitution.

3. Even the overthrows of kings were blows on behalf of traditional English liberties.

B. Macaulay regarded religion as a force for promoting Whig liberty.

1. Medieval Catholicism was a service open to merit and equality.
2. The Puritans were heroes of liberty.

C. But Macaulay’s description of the Puritans is nothing if not generalized.

1. There is not a single citation of a source in it.
2. Macaulay wrote as if he were a cheerleader or a sightseer.
3. His weakness for parallelism hints at a mind that saw history in radically bipolar terms.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 22.
Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History.
Gay, Style in History, chap. 3.

Questions to Consider:
1. How important is style to the writing of history?
2. How different are Macaulay’s and Hume’s ideas on the progress of liberty in English history?

Lecture Eighteen

Romantic History

Scope: Romanticism bitterly criticized the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with reason and balance and hailed instead

whatever made for passion, excitement, and the “sublime.” The Romantics regarded history as a story not of
competing rationalities but of nonrational, organic growths. This translated into a focus on nonrational qualities—
race, blood, and the Volk—as the movers in history and pushed Johann Herder and Georg Hegel into theories of
history that stressed development, synthesis, and dialectical evolution rather than scientific measurement or logic.

Outline

I. Finding an easy way to define the Romantics has bedeviled the minds of historians.

A. The best definition may be in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Idea of the Sublime

and Beautiful.
1. Romanticism was the pursuit of the “sublime.”
2. The Romantics spurned reason and order in favor of passion, conflict, and the sublime.
3. The archetypal Enlightenment historian was Thomas Carlyle’s character Dryasdust.

B. The Romantics’ hope to overturn the dead organism of Enlightenment history was forged from three basic principles

in the Romantic mind.
1. When the Romantics spoke of nature, they usually meant the rural and the rustic.
2. The preference for emotion was the most obvious point of difference between the Romantics and the classicists.
3. The Romantics saw the Enlightenment as an obsession with measurement, control, and manipulation. The

Romantics instead strove to discover the real springs of human identity in personal experience, in the bonds of
tradition, in the spirit of nations and races, and in religion.

II. The first voices that we hear from Romantic history writing are Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm

Hegel.
A. Herder believed that time and place, along with national character, were the elements that governed the events of

human history.
1. The history of a nation must be a history of its “Volk”—its people.
2. Herder’s image was that of a plant, obeying its own unplanned logic.
3. Constitutions and governments only make states; race and culture make nations.

B. Hegel instead sought to discover dynamism, movement, and system.

1. Hegel linked the various non-Christian and pre-Christian religions in a dialectical string that eventually

culminated in Christianity.

2. All of religious history is the story of a movement toward world reconciliation under the eye of the Weltgeist.
3. This culminated in the creation of a national and racial will—a Volksgeist—whose concrete reality is the state,

or Reich.

C. How does one write such a history? Hegel responds by dividing history writing into three categories.

1. Original history is simply a description of “actions, events, and conditions.”
2. Reflective history is history in the long view—a survey.
3. Philosophical history discerns great patterns in historical events.

Suggested Reading:
Collingwood, The Idea of History, chap. 3.
Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, chap. 12.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did R. G. Collingwood believe that there was a direct line between Herder and the Nazis?
2. How did Hegel describe the dialectical operation of history?

Lecture Nineteen

The Apocalypse of Karl Marx

Scope: To the extent that the Enlightenment praised commerce and the bourgeoisie for undermining traditional social

authorities and substituting the rational spirit of the counting house, the Romantics condemned them for poisoning
the organic naturalness of class, racial, and national unity. Karl Marx used class, in particular, as a stick with which
to beat the bourgeoisie, arguing that the working class, as a class, were the victims of the bourgeoisie and capitalism.
Marx adapted Hegel’s dialectical theory of history to reconstruct history as an evolutionary struggle between
economic classes, with the working class finally triumphing over the bourgeoisie and creating an apocalyptic
Communist society.

Outline

I. The Enlightenment was convinced that commerce and merchants were the real agents of historical change.

A. Merchants undermined the privileges of aristocracy.

1. Commerce installed a natural social order based on merit and accomplishment.
2. This made sense only so long as “the great merchant” was intelligent and scientifically curious.

B. The Romantics discovered that trade did not always follow the path of prudence.

1. The Industrial Revolution turned trade into an assembly of massive steam-powered factories.
2. Men of ingenious mind were also often men of appalling manners and scheming motives.
3. Those who possessed capital would become rich to an almost unlimited degree.
4. Those who lacked capital had no choice but to surrender themselves to the factories as workers.
5. The work they did was only one part of a regimented system.
6. The industrialist, by paying his workers less than the value of their labor, expropriates the surplus value

for himself.

II. Karl Marx was an unlikely spokesman for this working class.

A. He aspired to be a philosopher and especially a follower of Hegel.

1. A branch of the Young Hegelians turned Hegelian philosophy into an engine for atheism.
2. The most sensational of the Young Hegelians was Ludwig Feuerbach.
3. Feuerbach argued that the dialectical interplay of ideas is a purely human process.

B. Marx would attempt to apply secular and Hegelian solutions to human society.

1. The real truth of history was to be found in the relationship of material substance to material substance.
2. Whatever we call human nature really depends on material conditions.
3. Material conditions followed a dialectic, which was powered by struggle.
4. Capitalism will force yet another historical antithesis in the form of a revolutionary uprising of the proletariat.

C. Marx believed that industrial capitalism is built on an economic paradox.

1. Labor is what imparts value to a commodity.
2. Capitalism rewards laborers not with value but only with a wage.
3. This is really an act of theft from the laborer.
4. At length the worker begins to realize that he is the sucker.
5. The workers rise up and destroy the bourgeois order.

D. The proletariat will construct a new society by restoring a real connection between the worker and the product of

his work.
1. This is accomplished by putting an end to private property.
2. There will no longer be a need for a historical dialectic.

E. Marx’s ideas accomplished two goals.

1. They converted Hegel’s dynamism into a dialectical materialism.
2. They attached an Augustinian apocalyptic to the end of history.

F. But Marx’s concerns were a typically Romantic pursuit.

1. The concept of class is yet another replacement of the definable and the rational with the organic and mystical.
2. Because he reached to explain everything, Marx was forced into reducing all noneconomic events to nothing.

Suggested Reading:
Dawson, “Karl Marx and the Dialectic of History,” in Dynamics of World History.
Hexter, Reappraisals in History, chap. 2.

Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways is Marx a typical Romantic?
2. Why, according to Marx, is a workers’ revolution made inevitable by capitalism?

Lecture Twenty

Culture and History

Scope: Scientific historicism suffered terribly at the hands of the Romantics. One way, however, of circumventing the rage

of the Romantics was through the pursuit of the history of culture, which took the heart of what the Romantics
prized as an innate, organic development and subjected it to close, logical scrutiny. Wilhelm Dilthey sought
historical patterns in culture rather than in politics or statecraft, and Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga developed
interpretations of the meaning of the Italian Renaissance and the late Middle Ages from cultural phenomena and
artifacts, rather than from state archives or diplomatic correspondence.

Outline

I. The most important methodological difference between Marx and Ranke was between deduction and induction.

A. It’s important to keep this methodological departure clearly in mind.

1. Induction builds from a broad base of data and only afterward permits itself to state a theory.
2. Deduction begins with an intuitive premise and only then sorts out the data that confirm it.

B. The Romantics in general practiced deduction as though it were a religion.

1. Deduction became the favored method of the 19

century in almost all disciplines.

2. Darwin’s Origin of Species was a parallel exercise in deduction.

II. Ranke’s successors struggled to hold on to inductive methods.

A. Like Ranke, Wilhelm Dilthey’s guiding star was Kant, not Hegel.

1. History was not Naturwissenschaften; it was a human science, a Geisteswissenschaften.
2. But he did respect the existence of uniformities in human experience.
3. What he was looking for, in other words, was culture.
4. Cultures are the place where general patterns of social life are created.
5. Dilthey swapped design in history for meaning in history.

B. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy epitomized Renaissance culture in the condottiere,

such as Francesco Sforza.
1. Their freebooting autonomy was the mark of the modern world.
2. Every other significant figure of the Italian Renaissance succeeded by adopting the cultural posture of

the condottiere.

3. The confidence that Burckhardt’s swashbucklers exhibited, however, did not stand up well to the cauldron that

was the First World War.

C. Among the heirs of Dilthey and Burckhardt, a new version of cultural history arose that focused on the symbols and

gestures that marked the death of cultures.
1. An example of this was Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, which could as easily have been a

description of his own world after the end of the Great War.

2. In Huizinga’s late Middle Ages, death was “macabre”—grisly and gruesome.
3. Culture had become a spider web of pessimism and decay.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 23.
Gay, Style in History, chap. 4 (on Burckhardt).
Kelley, Fortunes of History, chap. 7.

Questions to Consider:
1. Is deduction or induction a more desirable methodology in history?
2. Why did Burckhardt choose a mercenary like Sforza as his model of the Italian Renaissance?

Lecture Twenty-One

Civilization as History

Scope: The collapse of European confidence during the First World War turned the meaning that the culture historians were

looking for into the channels of cultural relativism, psychiatry, and religion. Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud, and
Arnold Toynbee all worked to unearth patterns of cultural development in the past, and all three were united by an
underlying conviction that these patterns presaged tension and decline in Western civilization. Samuel P. Huntington
takes an even harder-edged version of culture history when he states that the real struggle is not within civilizations
but between them.

Outline

I. Postwar history writing turned cultural historians into purveyors of sackcloth and ashes.

A. The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler’s attempt to write a vast cultural history of Western decline, was very

much a Romantic rant. In his view, each great culture (Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Arabic, Mexican,
classical, and modern Western) follows an arc similar to that of the seasons.
1. The vital cultural springtime becomes the summer of culture, when rationality and mathematics assume the

dominant role. The cultural autumn is characterized by abstraction, decadence, and fatalism, and in the cultural
winter philosophy turns uselessly academic, art becomes a pastiche of revivals, religion withers, and politics is
swamped by authoritarian “Caesarism.”

2. Each of these four-part cycles lasted about a thousand years.
3. Spengler conceded no sort of privileged position for Western culture.
4. All political cultures were destined for some form of Caesarism.

B. Sigmund Freud treated the history of culture as an ironic commentary on unresolved tensions, as he used the lessons

he had learned from his patients to psychoanalyze European cultures as well.
1. Human societies possess a collective “id” in the form of aggressive and sexual drives.
2. Human history is an account of how societies create cultural structures that restrain these drives.
3. Freud set off a chain reaction of attempts to apply psychoanalysis to historical groups.
4. But psychohistory fared substantially less well than psychobiography.

II. Arnold Joseph Toynbee was rare among the culture historians for being an academic historian.

A. Toynbee started with a similar premise to Spengler’s in A Study of History: to write a universal history based on the

genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration of civilizations.

B. But Toynbee had a much, much sturdier grasp on the history he was writing about.
C. Toynbee also had a much more flexible notion of how civilizations rise or fall.

1. Spengler’s cycles are rigid and deterministic.
2. In Toynbee, civilizations follow a rough-and-ready dialectic, constantly meeting challenges and struggling to

meet them.

3. But no breakdown is necessarily final, nor does it lead mechanically to disintegration.
4. Toynbee put religion as the ground from which civilizations emerged.

III. It is the harder-edged versions of culture history that are still with us.

A. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations argues that the real struggle is not within civilizations but

between them.

B. Future conflicts would not be based on social or economic differences but would be caused by differences between

people of differing religious and cultural backgrounds.

Suggested Reading:
Dawson, “Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations,” in The Dynamics of World History.
Gilderhus, History and Historians, chap. 7.
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, chap. 1.

Questions to Consider:
1. How was Freud’s analysis of civilization a development of his analysis of human psychology?
2. In what ways are Toynbee, Spengler, and Huntington all based on the same premise?

Lecture Twenty-Two

The American History Lesson

Scope: Americans tend to think that they have no need for elaborate histories of the past, since the American experiment is

designed to point to the future. But Americans have been involved in history writing since colonial times—although
in those times, much of it was written from the viewpoint of Protestant apocalyptic. Gradually, as the American
colonies developed cultural patterns of their own, the bias toward religious apocalyptic grudgingly yielded to
celebration. With the American Revolution, a narrative dedicated to celebration of the new republic became virtually
the only permissible narrative.

Outline

I. The American attitude toward history is that we haven’t got any and don’t need any.

A. Americans, however, have actually written a great deal of history about themselves.

1. Henry James thought a lack of history was an example of sterility.
2. Abraham Lincoln warned the United States would yield to despotism if the American Revolution was forgotten.

B. The historical record of the United States seems to be more or less about progress and liberation from the past.

1. But the American history lesson is dominated by the tellers of dark tales.
2. It is often full of anxiety and fear of conspiracy and frequently laced with guilt.

II. Most expeditions by English speakers to North America were propelled by the urge to locate and exploit resources.

A. Those who settled permanently were usually people with some overwhelming reason to be someplace other

than England.
1. They were convicts, slaves, and indentured servants who had no real alternative.
2. They were religious dissidents who wanted to wash their hands of English sin.

B. But their urge to write the histories of their colonies was surprisingly strong.

1. The most famous of the dissidents are the Pilgrims.
2. Their mode of writing was declension and apocalyptic.

C. The same sense of brooding infects the history writing of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.

1. America was a refuge from a cataclysm, not an end in itself.
2. America would be the place to build up models of millennial society.

D. Declension and apocalyptic were transformed subtly by New England’s history writers into something more

domestic.
1. In Magnalia Christi Americana (The Great Works of Christ in America), Cotton Mather warned that newer

generations of New Englanders were falling away from the mark of those who lived before them but that an
apocalyptic awakening that would cure that declension was just around the corner.

2. Jonathan Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption was a prophetic warning against backsliding, linked to a

prophecy of renewal.

III. Mather scolded his generation for falling short, but there is also pride that New Englanders are descended from great

founders.
A. John Winthrop was cast as “Nehemias Americanus” (the American Nehemiah).

1. But the biblical Nehemiah led his people out of an exile, not into one.
2. By Mather’s analogy, America was not a wilderness but the Promised Land.

B. Edwards’s apocalypse, while full of nasty events, is excited at the prospect that the millennium might begin in

America.
1. Declension was something that had to be fastened entirely onto the British.
2. Americans were the virtuous remnant, trying to free themselves from the British grasp.

C. David Ramsay, the first historian of the American Revolution, transformed America into an Arcadia of

political innocence.
1. American literature was liberated from its British restraints.
2. America would be the site of a new experiment in human society.
3. Americans would become the living embodiment of a Whig history.

Suggested Reading:
Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self, chap. 5.
Middlekauff, The Mathers, chap. 12.
Wilson, “History,” in The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did apocalyptic and declension become the first modes of historical expression in America?
2. How did the American Revolution change the direction of American history writing?

Lecture Twenty-Three

Closing the Frontier

Scope: American historians in the 19

century continued the theme of celebration, with the United States acting a role

similar to that found in Macaulay’s Whig history. But with the trauma of the Civil War and the closure of the
frontier, that celebration became more muted. And in tandem with the emergence of Progressivism, American
historians increasingly rewrote the American narrative as a tale of woe and oppression.

Outline

I. It took half a century after the revolution for American history writing to take flight again.

A. There was no shortage of small-scale and local historical writing.

1. A great deal of it was really biography.
2. Still more of it flowed in antiquarian directions, in the form of a string of newly founded historical societies.

B. There were some practical reasons for the modest profile of history writing.

1. Most of the primary sources on the colonial era were in Britain.
2. There were no endowed university positions in American history until 1839.

II. The first great trio of American history writers were not scientific historians but Boston Brahmins.

A. George Bancroft’s History of the United States won great success.

1. His History became a hymn of literary praise for the triumph of liberty.
2. Like Macaulay’s Puritans, the spirit of liberty never made for “political drunkenness.” Bancroft never let

himself be so carried away that the American rebellion could be mistaken for the uprising of the Parisian mob in
1789 or Marx’s overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

B. William Hickling Prescott believed that the American landscape almost automatically ennobled those who walked

on it.
1. In 1843, he made his American and Spanish interests meet in a History of the Conquest of Mexico.
2. The line between science and literature in Prescott is not always easy to discern.
3. In both Bancroft and Prescott, the obsession with declension and apocalyptic has disappeared.
4. What they present us with instead is celebration on the order of Herodotus and Xenophon.

C. There are darker brands of celebration, especially in Francis Parkman.

1. No single character dominates Parkman’s histories unless it is the forest.
2. The forest is a place of unbounded freedom.
3. As the American Indian becomes dependent on the whites, the colonist gains freedom and independence of

spirit from life in the forest.

III. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” seemed to confirm that freedom was indeed going to end.

A. In 1893, Turner wrote “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

1. With the closing of the frontier, there would be no more renewal of freedom.
2. Turner also symbolized the end of New England’s dominance of history writing.

B. Henry Adams, the last of the Brahmins—the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of another—was

himself a transitional figure.
1. Adams had seen the United States go into the Civil War and fumble victory away in the Reconstruction.
2. The cupidity of the Gilded Age had smothered the nobility of the founders.

C. The rising generation of American historians in the 1890s were Midwesterners and Progressives.

1. The sense that self-interested forces had poisoned American life was present in Charles A. Beard and Vernon

Louis Parrington.

2. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution thrust the blame for the betrayal of freedom back on

the founders.

3. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought pushed the corruption back to the Puritans.

D. In 20

-century historian Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition, all the icons of American liberty are

found wanting.

Suggested Reading:
Burrow, A History of Histories, chap. 24.
Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, chap. 1.
Novick, That Noble Dream, chap. 1.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did Bancroft and Prescott manage to conduct the research necessary for their histories?
2. How was Parkman’s celebration of the forest central to the disillusionment of the Progressive historians?

Lecture Twenty-Four

The Value of History

Scope: In this survey of the work of great historians, it has certainly become clear that history can be “done” in many

different ways, written about through the use of many different genres, and used for many different purposes. What
has remained constant, however, is the centrality of history writing and the unavoidable necessity of choosing as the
basic task within that writing. What has changed over the last century is the “academic captivity” of serious history
writing, the professionalization of history academics, the dominance of cultural history over political history, and a
radical antirationalism in the form of postmodernism.

Outline

I. History, not as events but as the narrative of past events, begins as writing.

A. Writing in turn involves choice, because every narration of a story requires separating out the vital from the trivial.
B. There are more ways of telling historical stories than just the writing of them in books.

1. History teachers teach history in classrooms.
2. Public historians preserve and protect museum collections and historical sites.
3. Even historical reenactors “do history” in the way they physically re-create the look and feel of past lives

and events.

4. But at the end of the day, it is history writing that is the hub.

C. History writing has taken shape around major genres.

1. Few historians have ever been the captive of any single genre.
2. There are also a number of historical specialties that are not normally considered to be the property of history:

art history, music history, and the history of religions.

D. What should the standards of historical choosing look like?

1. Historical choosing is malleable to philosophy and ideology.
2. People understand the difficulty of discovering historical truth sufficiently to forgive a measure of ideological

coloring.

II. The most outstanding characteristic of history in the century just passed was its absorption into a university environment.

A. The great historians of the 19

century were men of independent wealth.

1. History academics in the English universities date back to the creation of the Regius professorships in the 18

century, but until the mid-to-late 19

century these professorships were mostly sinecures for antiquarians.

2. Not until 1886 did a flagship publication appear in the form of the English Historical Review.
3. In the United States, no college had anything like a history professor before 1839.
4. Charter members of the American Historical Association, founded in 1884, totaled little more than 200.

B. The academic professionalization of history writing freed historians from the need to possess private wealth or

public political position.
1. But academic professionalization could become a monastic withdrawal.
2. Nothing so marks academic history as the overthrow of the Whig interpretation of history—an optimistic belief

in movement toward democratic freedom—by the apocalyptic views of Marx.

3. The popularity of Marxist-inspired histories rests on the resentment by academics of the aimlessness of

capitalist society.

4. The key figure in Marxist history writing was Antonio Gramsci.

III. One did not have to be a Marxist to appreciate the power of cultural history.

A. Cultural history was represented by the journal Annales.

1. The Annales School was resistant to the assumption that politics and class explained everything.
2. They were enamored less of Marx and more of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who tried to interpret human societies in

terms of the relationships or structures they created to govern responses and actions.

B. The Annales School translated this “structuralism” into a search for long-term cultural structures in history (or la

longue durée).
1. The most famous pursuit of la longue durée was in the work of Fernand Braudel.
2. A “new historicism” was born, communicating how foreign the worlds of the past were to our own.
3. Historians of a “poststructuralist” or “postmodern” persuasion could bid farewell to Marx.
4. Even the study of cultural structures was prey to cultural relativism.
5. Historical reasoning yielded to “play” with the past.

IV. Seeing oppression lurking around every corner and in every gesture, one might well wonder whether history writing can

have any value.
A. In the mental universe of the postmodernists, history’s value lies primarily in its ability to surprise, to disorient, and

to overthrow the rational.
1. Postmodernism resembles yet another outburst of Romantic resentment at the Enlightenment.
2. The rules that govern the preponderance of history writing, however, remain much as they were developed by

the Enlightenment.

B. Academic history writing has continued to show a remarkable flexibility and diversity in what it writes and whom it

admits to the profession.
1. The most important example is the emergence of women in the historical profession.
2. Academic history writing has not achieved a monopoly over history writing in general or succeeded in driving

the independent or popular historian from the field.

Suggested Reading:
Kelley, Frontiers of History, chap. 6.
McLellan, Marxism After Marx, chap. 14.
Novick, That Noble Dream, chap. 2.

Questions to Consider:
1. What limitations has academic professionalization placed on history writing?
2. Why is postmodernism similar in intent to Romanticism?

Timeline

B.C.

c. 2700 .........................................................................Composition of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

c. 2500 .........................................................................Creation of the Vulture stela.

c. 1100 .........................................................................Collapse of the Mycenaean civilization.

c. 800–700 ...................................................................Composition of the Iliad.

539 ...............................................................................Capture of Babylon by Cyrus the Great.

490 ...............................................................................First Persian invasion of Greece.

480–479 .......................................................................Second Persian invasion of Greece.

c. 460 ...........................................................................Birth of Thucydides.

c. 425 ...........................................................................Death of Herodotus.

431–404 .......................................................................Peloponnesian War.

c. 430. ..........................................................................Birth of Xenophon.

429 ...............................................................................Death of Pericles.

401 ...............................................................................Battle of Cunaxa.

323 ...............................................................................Death of Alexander the Great.

264–146 .......................................................................Punic Wars.

168 ...............................................................................Polybius sent to Rome as a hostage.

111 ...............................................................................Beginning of the Jugurthine War.

63–62 ...........................................................................Catiline attempts to overthrow the Roman state.

March 15, 44................................................................Assassination of Julius Caesar.

c. 34 .............................................................................Death of Sallust.

September 2, 31 ...........................................................Octavian defeats Mark Antony at Actium.

A.D.

August 19, 14...............................................................Death of Caesar Augustus.

17 .................................................................................Death of Livy.

January 24, 41..............................................................Assassination of Caligula.

69 .................................................................................Year of the Four Emperors.

c. 112–117 ...................................................................Composition of Tacitus’s Annals.

October 28, 312 ...........................................................Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.

c. 324 ...........................................................................Completion of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History.

Spring 387....................................................................Baptism of Augustine.

August 24, 410.............................................................Sack of Rome by Alaric.

August 28, 430.............................................................Death of Augustine.

September 4, 476 .........................................................Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus.

830s..............................................................................Einhard writes his biography of Charlemagne.

July 15, 1099................................................................Capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders.

1347 .............................................................................First appearance in Italy of the bubonic plague.

May 29, 1453...............................................................Fall of Constantinople.

1474 .............................................................................Lorenzo Valla’s translation of Herodotus into Latin is published.

1517 .............................................................................Martin Luther begins the Protestant Reformation.

1519 .............................................................................Niccolò Machiavelli writes Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy.

January 15, 1559..........................................................Coronation of Elizabeth I as Queen of England.

1563 .............................................................................First English edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

1566 .............................................................................Jean Bodin writes Method for the Easy Comprehension of History;

John Knox writes History of the Reformation in Scotland.

1629 .............................................................................Arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay.

1637 .............................................................................Descartes publishes his Discourse on Method.

January 30, 1649..........................................................Execution of King Charles I.

1654 .............................................................................Publication in London of Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working

Providence of Sion’s Saviour.

September 3, 1658 .......................................................Death of Oliver Cromwell.

1660 .............................................................................Restoration of King Charles II.

1673 .............................................................................Edward Hyde (1

Earl of Clarendon) completes his History of the

Rebellion and Civil Wars in England.

1702 .............................................................................Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana published in London.

1754 .............................................................................Publication of the first volume of David Hume’s History of England.

October 15, 1764 .........................................................Edward Gibbon resolves to write a history of the city of Rome.

1774 .............................................................................Posthumous publication of the sermons that make up Jonathan

Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption.

April 19, 1775..............................................................Outbreak of the American Revolution.

1776 .............................................................................Publication of the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire.

1784 .............................................................................Immanuel Kant writes Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte.

1784–1791 ...................................................................Johann Gottfried von Herder writes Ideas for the Philosophy of History

of Humanity.

June 18, 1815...............................................................Defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.

1824 .............................................................................Leopold von Ranke publishes The History of the German and

Italian Peoples.

1834 .............................................................................George Bancroft begins the publication of his History of the United

States, from the Discovery of the American Continent.

January 27, 1838..........................................................Abraham Lincoln delivers his Lyceum address on “The Perpetuation of

our Political Institutions.”

1843 .............................................................................Publication of William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Conquest

of Mexico.

1846 .............................................................................Francis Parkman begins the western expedition that will become the

source for The Oregon Trail in 1849.

1848 .............................................................................Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the Communist Manifesto.

1851 .............................................................................Francis Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac published.

1860 .............................................................................Jakob Burckhardt publishes The Civilization of the Renaissance

in Italy.

1861 .............................................................................Final volume of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England

published posthumously.

1861–1865 ...................................................................The American Civil War.

1870–1871 ...................................................................The Franco-Prussian War and the Unification of Germany.

1884 .............................................................................Founding of the American Historical Association.

July 12, 1893................................................................Frederick Jackson Turner reads “The Significance of the Frontier in

American History” at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association.

1907 .............................................................................Founding of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (re-named

the Organization of American Historians).

1914–1918 ...................................................................The First World War.

July 1918......................................................................Publication of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

1919 .............................................................................Johan Huizinga publishes The Waning of the Middle Ages.

1929 .............................................................................Founding of Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations by Lucien

Febvre and Marc Bloch; Sigmund Freud writes Civilization and Its
Discontents (published 1930).

1934 .............................................................................The first three volumes of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History

are published.

1939–1945 ...................................................................The Second World War.

1996 .............................................................................Publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and

the Remaking of World Order.

Glossary

American Historical Association: A professional association for historians working in the United States, embracing all
periods of historical study and methodology. Founded in 1884, it publishes a scholarly journal, the American Historical
Review, and a members’ bulletin, Perspectives on History.

ancient constitution: The concept that asserted that England had always operated under a system of limited monarchy, based
on law and statute, dating at least from Magna Carta (1215) and, in practice, as early as the original Britons.

Annales maximi (Latin: the great records): An annual list of civic officials (consuls, praetors) and significant events in
Rome, kept on a public board by the pontifex maximus, then recorded and erased to permit the recording of new events.

Annales School: A connection of French historians formed around Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch and taking its name from
the scholarly journal Annales, which focused on long-term cultural shifts in early modern Europe. See also “la longue dureé.”

annals: A list or compilation, but not a narrative, of the activities of a ruler or nation.

apocalyptic: A type of historical writing that understands history as punctuated by violent interventions, whether in the form
of divine judgment (Augustine) or as revolutionary upheavals (Marx), coming from outside the normal course of history.

biography: Historical writing that concentrates on interpreting or narrating the life of a single individual or group of
individuals.

Black Death: Also known as bubonic plague, a pandemic spread by parasites that made its first entry into Europe in the mid-
14

century and resulted in horrific death rates, in some places as high as 50 percent, that destabilized the European economy

and European culture.

bourgeoisie (French: town dwellers): A term originally applied to merchants, as opposed to the aristocracy and peasants. In
the 19

century, the term came generally to be applied to the middle classes who used the accumulation of capital to unseat

the aristocrats but who also would provoke the working class (or proletariat) into a revolutionary uprising and the creation of
a Communist state.

celebration: A type of history writing undertaken to praise a people or nation, or some aspect of them, and preserve a record
of their deeds, either for emulation or because of the intrinsic worth of the deeds. See also “Whig interpretation of history.”

chronicle: A narrative of the divine interventions that guided the history of a people or nation.

Church of England: The Protestant state church that was separated from the Catholic church by Henry VIII, in which the
monarch of England acts as the “head” of the church and in which Protestant doctrine prevails, while the liturgy and
bureaucracy of the Catholic church are kept intact.

continuity: A type of history writing that seeks to establish clear links of succession between present and past events because
present events share a basic or organic similarity to the pattern of events in the past. See also “ancient constitution.”

criticism: The exposure of traditional historical falsehoods. A central characteristic of history writing in the Renaissance.

cultural history: A type of history writing that struggled to accommodate the single-theme historical interpretation of Marx
by transferring the historicist concentration on universal or political narratives to the history of culture (as in Burckhardt,
Huizinga, Spengler, and Toynbee) and by understanding history as the development or clash of cultural systems. See also
“historicism” and “struggle.”

declension: A type of history writing that examines past events with a view toward showing how present events have
declined in virtue or political or economic power or how they confirm the erosion of tradition.

deduction: A form of logical reasoning that begins with a large-scale thesis and then works down through data to find
confirmation of it. See also “induction.”

determinism: A philosophical position that asserts that all human behavior can be understood entirely in terms of its causes
and without reference to human free will or conscious autonomous decision making.

dialectic: A description of the relationship of ideas in which every philosophical thesis contains within itself an antithesis to
which it eventually swings; between the two, a new synthesis emerges.

Donatists: An early Christian movement that severely criticized the Catholic church for creating too easy an accommodation
with the Roman state and allowing too much toleration of moral failings in the church. See also “Puritan.”

dynamism: A viewpoint that argues that human history is not a collection of static moral lessons but rather possesses an
inherent forward movement, carrying it toward a particular goal.

eleutheria (Greek: freedom): Liberty or freedom; used by Herodotus to explain the motivation of the Greeks in resisting the
Persian invasions.

Enlightenment: The intellectual movement arising out of the scientific discoveries of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and
others in the 17

century; it spilled out into a general criticism of basing knowledge on authority rather than experience and

generated efforts to create scientific versions of politics, society, law, and literature.

epic: A large-scale poetic narrative that describes a great historical event but is primarily written with a view to satisfying
artistic goals rather than relying on research or producing an account conforming strictly to the development of past events
(as in Homer or The Epic of Gilgamesh).

escapism: A type of history writing that, in the spirit of entertainment or uplift, invites the reader to participate mentally in
events of the past without interpreting or analyzing them.

frontier thesis: Originally articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, this view argues that the American “frontier” is a
concept as well as geographical marker, because each time Americans have reached westward, they were allowed to re-create
the self-reliant independence that is supposed to be the dominant cultural identity Americans crave.

Golden Age: A term frequently applied to Greece, and especially to Athens, describing the interval between the last Persian
invasion under Xerxes (479 B.C.) and the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.), in which Greek literature, philosophy, and politics
flourished in the hands of Pericles, Socrates, and Aeschylus.

hagiography: A type of history writing, popularized in the Middle Ages, that narrates the life of a Christian saint as a model
for emulation by its readers.

hegemony: The Marxist concept of cultural dominance articulated by Antonio Gramsci that accounts for the inertness of the
proletariat in the 20

century through the success of the bourgeoisie not only in repressing working-class grievances but in

inducing the working class to accept and internalize bourgeois values. See also “bourgeoisie.”

hermeneutic: A term used to designate a method or style of interpreting texts.

historicism: The conviction that history contains a rational system of stages or evolutions. The task of the historian is to
discern and explain that system, based on the most exhaustive collection of data, so that it can be said that the historian is
able to describe an event, individual, nation, or period wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it actually was).

history writing: A humanistic prose narrative of events, based on systematic inquiry into words, deeds, ideas, conflicts, and
sufferings that occurred in the past and that have left verifiable evidentiary trails in the present.

imitation: An attempt to understand and reproduce classical Latin and Greek style. A central characteristic of history writing
in the Renaissance.

imperium: The authority exercised by a Roman official or by the Senate, but most often used after the end of the republic to
describe the authority of the emperor.

induction: A form of logical reasoning that begins by analyzing significant amounts of data and from there drawing out
general conclusions about the overall identity or purpose of events. See also “deduction.”

inversion: A type of history writing that stresses the ironic or unexpected in historical events, as when the immoral turn out
to possess greater virtue than the reputedly moral (as in Tacitus) or when those boasting noble motivations turn out to be
acting from baser ones.

jeremiad: In Puritan New England, a type of sermon, cast as a prophetic warning against backsliding but also linked to a
prophesy of renewal.

la longue dureé (French: long view): A history written about long-term changes or movements, usually perceptible only
below the conventional short-term history of political events. See “Annales School.”

Manichees: A religious movement in late antiquity, linked loosely to Christianity, that divided the world into a radically
bipolar universe of spiritualized good and fleshly evil.

memoir: An autobiographical writing about specific events or periods.

Milvian Bridge: A bridge in the city of Rome that crosses the Via Flamina over the Tiber River, where Constantine defeated
Maxentius in 312 in his bid for the imperium.

monasteries: Buildings or properties used by associations of monks who have withdrawn from interaction with everyday life
to concentrate on spiritual contemplation and worship; also used in the Middle Ages as centers of teaching, text transcription,
and book collecting.

Mycenaean (or Achaean) Greeks: The term “Achaeans” was applied generally to the Greeks bordering on the Aegean Sea
who shared a common Mycenaean culture and acknowledged the overall headship of the kings of the city-state of Mycenae;
also applied to the Greeks who besieged Troy during the Trojan War.

patrician: The Roman upper classes, specifically those descended from the original Roman senate.

Peloponnesian League: The association of Greek city-states allied around Sparta that went to war with Athens and the
Delian League in 431 B.C.

Postmodernism: A historical and literary theory that criticizes the application of logic and reason to interpretation as a
species of hegemonic oppression and that instead explores the application of play, the fluidity of identity, and the denial of
the control of authors over texts, as seen in the history writing in White and Foucault.

Progressives: An American school of historical interpretation, frequently based on disillusion with post–Civil War
industrialism or early 20

-century culture, that repudiated celebration (in Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman) and criticized the

American founding and American expansion as inadequate forms of democracy. See also “celebration.”

Protestant Reformation: A movement begun by Martin Luther in 1517 that split off national churches from the control of
the pope and the Catholic church and that eventually developed its own distinctive systems of Christian doctrine, frequently
hesitating between an apocalyptic understanding of Christian history and an understanding based on continuity.

psychohistory: An attempt to use psychoanalysis, as developed by Sigmund Freud, as a tool in interpreting history (as in
Freud’s analysis of “civilization”) or, more often, for interpreting individuals in psychobiography.

Punic Wars: A series of wars fought between the city-state of Carthage and the Roman Republic between 264 and 146 B.C.,
ending in the final destruction of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus Africanus and leading to the subjugation of Carthage’s
Greek allies by Rome.

Puritans: Ultraprotestant English dissidents who criticized and resisted the settlement of the Church of England under
Elizabeth I and who subsequently either fled to New England or joined forces with Parliament in 1642 to overthrow the
English monarchy.

reappropriation: The use of classical forms and historical subjects. A central characteristic of history writing in the
Renaissance.

Renaissance: The “rebirth” of interest in the humanities, as opposed to the dominance of logic, in the universities of the late
Middle Ages, beginning in the late 14

century and stretching to the mid-16

century; its history writing was distinguished

by “reappropriation,” “imitation,” and “criticism” (see Glossary entries).

ricorso (Italian: recurrence or cycle): Giambattista Vico’s concept of history that saw all societies developing along a similar
pattern, typified by an age of the gods, an age of the heroes, and an age of men.

Romanticism: A movement of European thought that revolted against the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with scientific
method and reason and favored instead a valorization of emotion, the experience of the sublime, and the search for
authenticity.

struggle: The concept that historical change is the result of the clash of interests, whether between a city of man and a city of
God (as in Augustine) or between warring economic classes (as in Marx) or a clash of civilizations. See also “cultural
history.”

universal history: The goal of writing thoroughly comprehensive accounts of past events, either as exhaustively detailed
narratives of specific events or as broadly based general histories of entire nations or cultures, as in Kant’s Idee zu einer
allgemeinen Geschichte. See also “historicism.”

Volk (German: the people): A Romantic concept, espoused particularly by J. G. Herder, that insisted that the history of a
nation be written as the unfolding of a single racial and cultural organism and not in terms of class struggle or political
development.

Weltgeist: In the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the “world spirit” that guides religious history in a dialectical movement
toward Christianity and political history in a similar dialectical movement toward the nation-state. See also “dialectic.”

Whig interpretation of history: A type of history writing, closely identified with democratic liberalism in the 19

century,

that interpreted history as a gradual and inevitable movement of societies toward greater freedom and toward representative
political institutions.

Young Hegelians: A 19

-century philosophical movement that diverged from G. W. F. Hegel’s notion of history as a

dialectical movement guided by a Weltgeist and instead conceived of the dialectical movement of history as a purely human
and material process (as in Feuerbach and Marx).

Biographical Notes

Adams, Henry (1838–1918): Great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams. He served in the
American mission to Great Britain during the Civil War as secretary to his father, ambassador Charles Francis Adams. He
taught at Harvard from 1870 to 1877 and published histories of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
in 1889–1891.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430): Convert to Christianity and bishop of Hippo Regius from 396 to 430. His major historical
contribution was theoretical, but through his De Civitate Dei (City of God) he laid the basis for interpreting history on the
principles of struggle, dynamism, and eschatology.

Bancroft, George (1800–1891): Graduate of Harvard, with a doctorate from Gottingen in 1820. He began publication of his
multivolume History of the United States in 1834. He was secretary of the navy in the administration of James K. Polk and
served as the American minister to Great Britain in 1846–1849. He was the American minister to Berlin from 1867–1874.

Beard, Charles Austin (1874–1948): Graduate of Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. and taught from 1907 until
1917, when he became the director of the Training School for Public Service. His Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution was a major statement of Progressive suspicion of elite dominance of American democracy. His later interests
turned to foreign policy, where he became a bitter critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bede (a.k.a. The Venerable Bede; 672–735): English monk of the monastery at Jarrow and author of a major history of
English Christianity, from the first arrival of the Romans in Britain to the establishment of papal authority over the English
churches.

Bodin, Jean (1529–1596): French lawyer and political philosopher whose Method for the Easy Comprehension of History
was intended to lay the groundwork for studying the principles of law through historical investigation.

Bradford, William (1590–1657): Member of the Pilgrim dissenters and governor of the Plymouth colony 30 times between
1621 and 1656. He began writing a history of the Plymouth colony in 1830 and completed it around 1651, although it was not
published until 1856.

Braudel, Fernand (1902–1985): Graduate of the Sorbonne and a prisoner of war during the Second World War, his The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II was one of the principal examples of the Annales School,
with its attention on the longue durée rather than the immediate details of politics or economics.

Burckhardt, Jakob Christoph (1818–1897): Swiss art and cultural historian whose The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy was a stark departure from conventional histories of the Renaissance in its attempt to synthesize art, politics, and
philosophy into a single narrative. He began a second work on the history of Greek civilization and wrote further books and
essays on Renaissance art.

Caesar, Gaius Julius (100–44 B.C.): Roman politician and military commander who overthrew the Roman Republic and
established himself briefly as dictator. His autobiographical Commentaries on the conquest of Gaul are outstanding examples
of terse (although self-promoting) autobiography and set the standards by which much subsequent military history would be
written.

Comte, Auguste (1798–1857): French philosopher and founder of Positivism, he attempted to systematize the development
of history into stages, similar to the system designed by Giambattista Vico. He taught at the École Polytechnique, but his
aspirations for designing a socialist utopia brought him into conflict with his superiors. In the later years of his life and
writing, he was supported by French and English admirers.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (c. 1495–1584): Spanish conquistador who joined Hernando Cortés in conquering the Aztec
empire of Mexico. He composed his History of the Conquest of Mexico when he was 76 and was one of the last of Cortés’s
band left alive.

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911): Inspired by Kant, he attempted to naturalize the study of history by redirecting attention to
the “lived experience” of past generations in terms of language, literature, and institutions. He taught at the universities of
Basel, Kiel, Breslau, and Berlin.

Edwards, Jonathan (1703–1758): Minister of Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1729 to 1750 and president of Princeton
(then the College of New Jersey) from 1757 to 1758. Primarily a theologian, his principal work of history was a series of
sermons, called History of the Work of Redemption, published posthumously in 1774.

Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 264–c. 340): Bishop of Caesarea and major participant in the Council of Nicaea (325). He was the
first major historian of the Christian church, producing a general history of the church, a biography of Emperor Constantine,
and a history of the martyrs of Palestine.

Foucault, Michel (1926–1984): A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, he taught psychology, then completed a
doctorate in philosophy and taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He was elected to the College de France in 1970,
dabbled intermittently in radical left-wing politics, and published a series of high-profile books, beginning with Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), in which madness was treated as a social invention for the
purpose of social exclusion, and culminating in The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969.

Foxe, John (1516–1587): Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, he embraced the Protestant Reformation but fled abroad at
the accession of Mary I. He began writing a history of Christian persecution while in exile but expanded it to focus on the
martyrs executed by “Bloody Mary.” He published its first edition in 1563 as Acts and Monuments (more commonly known
as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) on his return to England.

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939): Best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, he was also interested in cultural criticism,
especially using psychoanalytical frames of reference, and in his later career he published psychoanalytical interpretations of
history and culture in Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism.

Gatterer, Johann Christoph (1727–1799): Pioneer of scientific history at the University of Göttingen who aimed at
systematizing historical materials and making possible the reconstruction of the atmosphere of historical events.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100–c. 1155): Bishop of St. Asaph and author of a history of Britain that, despite being largely
based on folktales, was an important source for the Arthurian legends.

Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794): Born into substantial wealth, he was attracted to history writing from his youth and began
writing a multivolume history called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was particularly notorious for his
scorching criticism of the role played by Christianity in the undermining of Rome.

Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937): Italian Communist philosopher who shifted the burden of Marxist interpretation of class
struggle away from pure economics to culture through his concept of “hegemony.”

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831): German philosopher who taught at the Universities of Jena, Heidelberg, and
Berlin. His occasional writings on history proposed to understand historical progress in terms of a dynamic dialectic, rather
than static stages, guided by an overarching Weltgeist.

Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803): One of the moving spirits of Romanticism, he exhorted Germans to rediscover
German history and language and to develop a spirit of the Volk as a guide to understanding German history.

Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 B.C.): Native of Halicarnassus and the “father” of history writing whose history of the Persian
invasions was the formative influence in creating a genre of prose narrative, based on evidence, to describe past events.

Huizinga, Johan (1872–1945): Dutch cultural historian whose The Waning of the Middle Ages became a classic in the
interpretation of history as the understanding of cultural signs and symbolic ways of representation. He taught at the
universities of Groningen and Leiden and also published a biography of the Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus.

Hume, David (1711–1776): Scottish philosopher and skeptic who turned to history writing for a living and published a
multivolume history of England that celebrated history as a progress toward greater and greater freedom in economics,
politics, and thought.

Hyde, Edward (a.k.a. 1

Earl of Clarendon; 1609–1674): English Parliamentarian loyal to both Charles I and Charles II.

He went into exile during the rule of Oliver Cromwell and returned with the restoration of Charles II. His history of the civil
wars even-handedly doled out praise and blame to both sides in the conflict.

Knox, John (c. 1514–1572): Protestant reformer of Scotland, exiled from there but released from captivity in 1549. He made
his way to England to join the Protestant Reformation under King Edward VI. He fled again at the accession of Mary I,
returning briefly to Scotland in 1555 and permanently in 1559 to promote the Reformation there and undermine the rule of
Mary Queen of Scots. Acerbic and single-minded, his history of the Scottish Reformation (first published in 1587) was
vigorously and ably written and promoted the view of the Reformation as an apocalyptic intervention rather than a
continuous growth from the Catholic past.

Livy (a.k.a. Titus Livius; c. 60 B.C.–A.D. 17): A tutor in the imperial household, his life’s work was really the composition
of a 142-volume history of Rome from the earliest founding of the republic to the reign of Augustus Caesar as emperor.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington (a.k.a. 1

Baron Macaulay; 1800–1859): English historian and Parliamentarian and

graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a proponent of the Reform Act of 1832 and the reform of the colonial
administration of India. Losing interest in politics, he turned to literature (publishing Lays of Ancient Rome in 1842) and to a
massive history of England that not only popularized the “Whig interpretation of history” as an ever-ascending progress
toward greater freedom and prosperity but became a monument of 19

-century style in history writing. He is buried in

Westminster Abbey.

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527): Florentine diplomat who turned to history writing—a commentary on Livy and a history
of the city-state of Florence—as an aside. Neither were published in his lifetime; both, like his most famous work, The
Prince, abounded with practical recommendations for concentrating and using political power.

Marx, Karl (1818–1883): German political philosopher and radical socialist who created the theoretical basis for modern
Communism. Although he wrote no history per se, his interpretation of historical eras as chapters in a dialectical struggle
(which he borrowed from Hegel) between classes deeply influenced much of 20

-century history writing.

Mather, Cotton (1663–1728): Graduate of Harvard and minister of the Second Church of Boston from 1685. A prolific
author, his major historical work was about the founding of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana.

Parkman, Francis (1823–1893): Graduate of Harvard and author of a great series of histories of the French and English
colonization of North America, beginning with Conspiracy of Pontiac and culminating in A Half-Century of Conflict.

Parrington, Vernon Louis (1871–1929): Graduate of Harvard, he taught literature at Emporia College, the University of
Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. His major work was a history of American literature, Main Currents in
American Thought.

Petrarch (a.k.a. Francesco Petrarca; 1304–1374): Italian Renaissance Humanist and poet who pioneered the revival of the
study of classical literature, including the classical historians, and wrote a series of short biographies modeled on Plutarch
and Suetonius.

Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120): Greek-born moral philosopher who is best known for his Lives of the Ancient Romans and Greeks,
which offered paired biographies in Greek (one Greek, one Roman) to emphasize the comparison of character traits between
similar Greek and Roman worthies (Alexander and Caesar, Cicero and Demosthenes, and so forth).

Polybius (c. 200–118 B.C.): Greek aristocrat who was exiled to Rome as a hostage (168–150 B.C.) and became convinced
that the Romans represented the wave of the future. His history of the Punic Wars counseled Greek accommodation to
Roman rule.

Prescott, William Hickling (1796–1859): Graduate of Harvard, he originally planned to be a lawyer but then turned to
literary journalism. His first historical work, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, was followed to two landmark
histories of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and of Peru. He was in the process of writing a multivolume history of the reign
of Philip II at the time of his death.

Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886): The most prominent German historian of the 19

century and a vigorous exponent of

“scientific” history writing, aiming to develop so complete a mastery of source materials that he could convey “how it really
was.” He was a critic of Hegel and Romantic methods. He taught at the University of Berlin for 50 years and was ennobled
by Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1865.

Sallust (a.k.a. Gaius Sallustius Crispus; c. 86–c. 34 B.C.): Roman politician, historian, and ally of Julius Caesar. His history
of the slow decay of the republic after the Punic Wars, along with his narrative of the Catiline conspiracy and the Jugurthine
War, are mordant expressions of pessimism over the degeneration of Roman virtue and made “declension” into a major
historical theme.

Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936): German historian and philosopher whose Decline of the West in 1918 brought him out of
obscurity into international prominence. Like Kant, Comte, and Vico, Spengler aimed to create a historical typology of how
civilizations begin, develop, and decay, devoting his particular attention to eight major civilizations, including that of
Western Europe.

Suetonius (a.k.a. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus; c. 69–c. 122): Roman biographer whose Lives of the Twelve Caesars and
Lives of Notable Men reinforced the dreary portrait of declension and decay so prominent in Sallust and Tacitus. A forceful
writer, he was a major source for Shakespeare and is the origin of many of the best-known descriptions of the Roman
emperors.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius (c. 56–120): Roman historian whose Annals and Histories document the upheavals of imperial
rule between the death of Augustus and the advent of Vespasian. He is particularly unsparing on the corruption of the Roman
upper classes and enjoys inverting the moral relationship between the feckless aristocrats and noble-spirited commoners and
barbarians.

Thucydides (c. 460–c. 404 B.C.): Historian of and firsthand participant in the Peloponnesian War. His history of the war
illustrates the folly of both the Athenians and the Spartans, first in betraying the freedoms they had protected from the Persian
invasion and then in exhausting each other in fruitless warfare.

Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975): Graduate of Oxford, professor of Byzantine and modern Greek at the University of
London, and later director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Like Spengler, he attempted to construct a
typology of the historical development of civilizations, but without Spengler’s rigidity.

Turner, Frederick Jackson (1861–1932): Graduate of the University of Wisconsin with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins
University, he promoted the “frontier thesis,” which argued that the ever-westward movement of the frontier had always
offered Americans a chance to recapture the life of unrestricted freedom but was now coming to an end with the official
“closing” of the frontier in 1890.

Valla, Lorenzo (1407–1457): Italian Renaissance philologist and state official, he was best known for his sensational
application of his mastery of classical Latin to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery from the 8

century.

Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744): Italian lawyer and rhetorician, he devised a series of stages, based on literary and legal
usage, to form a historical typology of civilizations. He is a forerunner of both Kant and Comte in using certain cultural
benchmarks as a means for identifying historical periods.

William of Malmesbury (c. 1095–c. 1143): English monk whose Gesta Regum Anglorum, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, and
unfinished Historia Novella are the principal English historical narratives of the Middle Ages.

Xenophon (c. 430–c. 350 B.C.): Athenian aristocrat who joined a Greek mercenary company under Cyrus the Younger and
chronicled the lengthy retreat the Greeks executed to the Black Sea in order to extricate themselves from Asia Minor.

Bibliography

Primary Sources:
Loeb Classical Library

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1917. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1997.
Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Edited by A. D. Godley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. Reprint,
Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1999.
Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913.
Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1998.
Xenophon. Anabasis. Translated by Carleton L. Brownson. Revised by John Dillery. Cambridge, MA: Loeb
Classical Library, 1998.

Adams, Henry. The History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Jefferson and The History of the
United States of America during the Administrations of Madison. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 1986.
Augustine. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Classics, 1972.
Bodin, Jean. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Edited by Beatrice Reynolds. 1945. Reprint, New York: W. W.
Norton, 1969.
Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. London: Penguin
Classics, 1904.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Edited by J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1963.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society. Edited by H. P. Rickman. New York:
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Edwards, Jonathan. The History of the Work of Redemption. Edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press,
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Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments. In Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online.
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Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin Classics, 2001.
Griffiths, Gordon, James Hankins, and David Thompson. The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts. Binghamton,
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Hegel, G. W. F. Reason in History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. 1953. Reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979.
Herder, Johann. “Ideas toward a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.” In On World History: An Anthology. Edited by Hans
Adler and E. A. Menze. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Huizinga, Johann. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Doubleday, 1954.
Hume, David. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1983.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Oxford University Press,
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Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. New York: George Braziller, 1978.
Landmark Herodotus, The. Edited by Robert Strassler. New York: Pantheon, 2007.
Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War, The. Edited by Robert Strassler, introduction by
Victor Davis Hanson. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Livy. The History of Rome, Books 1–5. Translated by Valerie M. Warrior. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 2006.
———. Rome’s Mediterranean Empire: Books 41–45 and the Periochae. Translated by Jane D. Chaplin. New York: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2007.
———. The War With Hannibal: Books XXI–XXX of The History of Rome from its Foundation. Translated by Aubrey de
Selincourt. 1965. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 1972.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England. Edited by Thomas Robbins. 2
vols. Hartford, CT: S. Andrus, 1853–1855.
McLellan, David, ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail/The Conspiracy of Pontiac. Edited by William R. Taylor. New York: Library of
America, 1991.
Polybius. The Histories. Edited by W. R. Paton. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1922.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/home.html.
Sallust. “The Conspiracy of Catiline.” In Sallust, Florus, and Velleius Paterculus. Edited by John Selby Watson. London:
H. G. Bohn, 1852. http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/sallust/catilinae.html#15.
Tacitus. “The Annals” and “The History.” In The Complete Works of Tacitus. Translated by Alfred John Church and William
Jackson Brodribb. New York: Modern Library, 1942.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Walter Blanco. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. Abridged by D. C. Somervell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner:
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. Edited by John Mack Faragher. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999.
Xenophon. The March Up Country. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1974.
Anthologies:
Burns, Robert M. and Hugh Rayment-Pickard, eds. Philosophies of History: From Enlightenment to Postmodernity. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell, 2000. Short snippets from Hume to Fukuyama.
Gardiner, Patrick, ed. Theories of History. New York: Free Press, 1959. Still more short snippets, this time from Vico to
Collingwood (including Dilthey, Toynbee, Spengler, Comte, Hegel, and Herder).
Kelley, Donald R., ed. Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Short snippets from Homer to Condorcet.
Secondary Sources:
Arnold, John H. History: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A short and sometimes
awkward introduction to history writing that concentrates on illustrating how historians use a broad variety of sources. The
second chapter offers the quickest survey of major history writers.
Aron, Raymond. The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Yair
Reiner. New York: Basic Books, 2003. A series of reflections on 20

-century history by a distinguished French historian,

concluding with an essay on the formation of a universal history, as opposed to a “clash of civilizations.”
Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World, from the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2007. A bright and breezy survey of Near Eastern and Mediterranean history, from the first entries on the Sumerian
king lists to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. A literary historian’s
examination, largely through Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, of the persistent themes of American character originally laid down
in Mather’s pages.
Berdyaev, Nikolai. The Meaning of History. Translated by Geoffrey Reavey. 1936. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2006. A Russian Christian mystic’s understanding of history as a story of declension, symbolized by the free
choice of humanity of individualism and alienation.
Bloch, Marc. The Historians’ Craft. Translated by Peter Putnam. New York: Knopf, 1961. The manifesto of the Annales
School, written by its founder, who perished at the hands of the Nazis as a part of the French Underground.
Breisach, Ernst. Historiography, Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. A dull,
plodding, but at least thorough survey of history writing, useful in the way encyclopedias are useful for providing capsule
summaries about nearly everything but without much sense of where they’re all going.
Brown, David S. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. A fine, sturdy
“life” of Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter, which gives a good slice of what the life of an Ivy League history professor
looked like in the 1940s through the 1960s.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. The greatest of the
biographies of Saint Augustine, written with real literary flair and a profoundly detailed knowledge of the background of
North Africa in late antiquity.

Burke, Peter. History and Social Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. An outstanding primer on the writing of
social history, including quantitative methods, kinship, community, gender, identity, and social roles.
———, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1992. A basic introduction,
through a series of essays by leading practitioners, of history writing in the 1990s, with contributions on women’s history, the
history of reading, the history of the body, and microhistory.
Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the
Twentieth Century. New York: Knopf, 2008. A new and highly diverting excursion through the great history writers,
beginning with Herodotus and ending with Marxist history and the Annales School.
Butterfield, Herbert. Man On His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. A
study of German history writing, with a particular focus on Leopold von Ranke and his English counterpart, Lord Acton.
———. The Origins of History. New York: Basic Books, 1981. A magisterial survey of early history writing, concentrating
particularly on ancient Mesopotamia and the distinctiveness of Israelite history.
———. The Whig Interpretation of History. (New York: Scribner’s, 1951). This is Butterfield’s brief broadside against the
overconfident assumptions of the Whig penchant for seeing history as an ever-growing embrace of the rightness of British
theories of freedom.
Collingwood, Robin G. The Idea of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. A classic survey of history writing,
with three (out of five) sections devoted to classical history writing, Christianity, and the Enlightenment, plus “scientific
history” from Dilthey to Toynbee.
Craddock, Patricia B. Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. The
best biography of Gibbon in the years right up to his tour of Rome, which resulted in the epiphany that led to the writing of
The Decline and Fall.
Darnton, Robert. The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. A superb
collection of essays by a premier practitioner of cultural history. The “kiss” in question was the impulsive gesture of a
representative in the French revolutionary legislature to try to illustrate fraternity, just on the eve of the Reign of Terror.
Dawson, Christopher. The Dynamics of World History. Edited by John J. Mulloy. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956. A
collection of essays and reviews by the noted Catholic historian, ranging from the role of religion in civilization to reviews of
Toynbee, Spengler, and Saint Augustine.
Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. 2

ed. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1989. Surveys the history of the

English Reformation, with particular strengths on its theology, up to and including the Elizabethan settlement and the rise of
Puritanism.
Dillery, John. Xenophon and the History of His Times. New York: Routledge, 1995. A technical study of Xenophon; really, a
collection of essays on various aspects of Xenophon’s entire corpus of writings, although it began as the author’s doctoral
dissertation. The second section deals most directly with the Anabasis and the role of various Greek city-states in
encouraging and opposing the Ten Thousand in Asia Minor.
Elton, Geoffrey. The Practice of History. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002. An elegant how-to primer on history writing, from
reflections on the possibility of truth in history to the teaching of undergraduates.
———. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. A classic survey
of the Reformation in England under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and “Bloody Mary.”
Everett, Anthony. Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. New York: Random House, 2006. A fine popular biography
of Augustus, with a concluding chapter on Tacitus’s glorification of Augustus.
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. An immense, chunky, and highly literate survey
of early Christianity, from the 1

to the 7

centuries A.D.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A
noted Cold War historian’s Oxford lectures on history writing, using map making as a metaphor for the writing of history, so
that history can aspire to the accuracy of science while admitting its inability to reproduce laboratory-type results.
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism and The Enlightenment, An Interpretation:
The Science of Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1966–1969. Gay’s two-volume intellectual history of the Enlightenment is not
only a great work of connecting the dots of philosophy and how the Enlightenment freed Europeans from the restraints of
Christian thought but a literary masterwork containing long stretches on how Enlightenment thinkers wrote history.
———. Style in History: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, Burckhardt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Four long essays on the
stylistic peculiarities of four great history writers, which also serves as a splendid introduction to their overall importance and
methods.
Gilderhus, Mark T. History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction. 3

ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1996. A brief handbook on history writing, mostly devoted to quick overviews of philosophies of history.

Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. A highly focused commentary on Renaissance history writing, from Valla to Bodin. Not a light read, though in
its defense not intended to be one.
Grant, Michael. The Ancient Historians. 1970. Reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1994. This is the single most intensive
survey of the classical Greek and Roman historians in one volume, moving from Herodotus to Eusebius and the final revival
of paganism.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. A
vigorous defense of a “new historicism” based self-consciously on cultural relativism and diversity and the nonprivileging of
any detail over another, since there no longer exists a metanarrative that permits us to sort the important from the
unimportant. Here is Postmodernism with a bang, illustrated in six long essays.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
An examination of the lineaments of Postmodernism, with special attention to the argument that capitalism, by dissolving all
relationships into commodities, has helped create a culture with no restraints and no authorities.
Harvey, Van Austin. The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief. New York:
Macmillan, 1966. A “confrontation” between history’s inevitable concentration on the secular and material and the need to
inject meaning into history writing.
Hexter, J. H. Doing History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1971. Six large essays on historical writing style and
“social history” by the great Yale early Modernist, Jack Hexter.
———. Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe. 1961. Reprint, New York:
Harper & Row, 1963. Sometimes known as “reprisals in history,” this collection brings together Hexter’s witty essays on the
peccadilloes of modern historians and on several technical controversial problems in the interpretation of Tudor-Stuart
England.
Higgins, W. E. Xenophon the Athenian: The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1977. Technical study of Xenophon and the ideal of citizenship—individual and corporate—among the Greeks.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Vintage, 1970. Hofstadter pays
tribute to the giants of the Progressive school in disarmingly candid fashion. The first chapter can serve almost as a free-
standing history of American history writing before the 20

century.

Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. A wide-ranging survey
of the decade and a half between Waterloo and the first liberal democratic revolutions in Europe. Johnson moves through
American and European, artistic and political, personal and collective worlds, so that one scarcely notices the bulk of the
book. Particularly useful in understanding the full orb of Romantic thought.
Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Viking, 2003. The reigning historical narrative of the Peloponnesian
War by the famous Yale University classicist.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Travels With Herodotus. Translated by K. Glowczewska. New York: Knopf, 2007. A travelogue by
the great Polish journalist, patterned after the travels recorded in Herodotus’s famous “digressions.” One major problem: no
index.
Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. This and the
subsequent two volumes are the labor of Donald Kelley, former editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, to offer a survey
history of history writing from Herodotus to the 20

century. If there is a historian or historical school that Kelley does not

discuss—and in sharp, critical prose—then it probably won’t be worth your attention anyway.
———. Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
———. Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948. Lovejoy was the
principal exponent for many years of the “history of ideas” as a subdiscipline, and these essays collect his writings on a wide
spectrum of issues in 18

- and 19

-century attitudes and philosophy, with an especially useful essay on Herder.

McLellan, David. Marxism After Marx: An Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. The best survey of Marxist
thinkers, from Engels to the American New Left, with a particularly useful chapter on Gramsci’s notion of cultural
“hegemony.”
Meier, Christian. Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. A gracefully written survey
of the culture and politics in the age between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War (and after), with a fine chapter on
Pericles in Athens.
Middlekauff, Robert. The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1696–1728. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971. A generous multigenerational history of the Mathers, beginning with Richard Mather and concluding with
Cotton Mather.

Miles, Gary B. Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. A very useful but narrow
reconstruction of how Livy deployed historical sources and how he framed his narrative in terms of escapism, continuity, and
declension.
Nisbet, Robert. History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1980. A delightful and polemical survey, from
classical times to the present, of those who have endowed history with certain metaphysical goals to which progress in human
events is considered inexorable, and a lament that history now seems to have been rendered without any notion of progress or
any goal.
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988. Novick’s book was the source of a great deal of soul-searching in the American Historical
Association in the early 1990s—the association’s 1990 convention devoted an entire session to it—since it was read as
casting a deciding vote against the possibility that history could be written with any workable notion of “objectivity,”
something Novick essayed to show by writing a history of the failure of American historians to achieve it.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Reformation of Church and Dogma, 1300–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. The finest
survey on offer of the theology of the Protestant Reformation, including its own historical self-image.
Pennington, D. H. “Cromwell and the Historians.” In Cromwell: A Profile. Edited by Ivan Roots. New York: Hill & Wang,
1973. A short essay discussing historians’ views of Oliver Cromwell.
Pocock, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion, Volume One: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1999. An outstanding analysis of Gibbon and the Enlightenment, with a particularly good chapter on
Gibbon’s journey to Rome.
Prevas, John. Envy of the Gods: Alexander the Great’s Ill-Fated Journey across Asia. New York: Da Capo, 2004. A fast-
paced survey of Alexander’s great campaign from Persia into the borderlands of India, ending with Alexander’s death.
Southern, Richard William. History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern. Edited by R. J. Bartlett. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell, 2004. A collection of essays by the great English medievalist, partly from his own field of medieval European
history writing and partly more general essays on the writing of history.
Sowell, Thomas. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. New York: William Morrow, 1985. A hostile but thorough critique
of Marxist concepts of economics, materialism, and history by a distinguished conservative economist.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. This is
a collection of essays by White on the typology of “discourse”—which is to say, the varying methods of classification and
understanding as a means of deflating the competing claims of various ideologies to truth in history. Not for the faint of heart.
Wilson, John. “History.” In The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Edited by S. H. Lee. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005. Wilson, who also edited the volume in the works of Jonathan Edwards containing Edwards’s History
of Redemption, offers a concise analysis of Edwards’s sermon series and the circumstances surrounding it.
Websites:
BBC. Open University. http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/history/natureofhistory/index.html. Popularly written (and
illustrated) essays on the how-tos of history writing, from memory and research to varieties of interpretation and history in
the movies.
Fordham University. Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook01.html#Nature%20of%20Historiography. A terrific collection of essays (for
example, Clifford Geertz on anthropology and history, Roland Barthes on history and literary criticism) and documents
(excerpts from Thucydides, Herder, Hegel, Marx, Lord Acton, and others).

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