What's the point of spending an entire weekend writing if you don't have anybody to read it? So I'm going to place my graduate work here for you guys to read.
So if to read it is a chore, and it's a bore....feel free to snore.
Herr Maxwell
9-2-03
History 600
Michael Bentley. Modern Historiography: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 182.
Professor Michael Bentley’s Modern Historiography: An Introduction is exactly that: an introduction. Bentley manages to squeeze together roughly three hundred years of historiographical thought in fewer than two hundred pages of text. Bentley makes it perfectly clear in his preface that this work is meant as a small companion guide; he recommends the much larger Companion to Historiography, which he helped edit, for those desiring extreme detail about the subject.
Still, Modern Historiography provides a thorough introduction in its own right. Bentley takes the most important aspects of historiography in the time period and divides them into fourteen chapters. His major topics include: the Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, German historian Leopold von Ranke, the emergence of science in historical thought, the emergence of culture in historical thought, English “Whigs”, the development of history as a profession, the methodological crisis near the turn of the twentieth century, American historiography also near the twentieth century, the French school called Annales, the repression and exile that war forced upon historians, the moods of the post-war period, and finally historiography in the present day.
To answer the question of why he concentrated on this period in particular, Bentley says that “during these years its practitioners acquired the rationale, the techniques and the self-awareness that would lead to their displaying the characteristics that we think of as ‘modern’ attributes in historiography.”
As one studies the ordering of the chapters, one finds that although the ordering is roughly in a chronological order; it hardly ever stays in one region from chapter to chapter. For instance, the second chapter is set in Germany, as is the fourth and sixth, with different countries highlighted in between. Bentley justifies the ordering and form of his book by arguing that the telling of the history of historiography should not be read in narrative form. Instead, Bentley offers that it should be told as a string of different moods and doctrines that often overlap and often come into conflict with each other. Told as a narrative, the story might wind up as nothing more than a long list of names and books, without a clear understanding of why those names are important and why those books were written the way they were. Also, it might be difficult to see how early historians influenced later ones. By concentrating on the ideas of these historians and their works, Bentley adds depth to his account.
A good instance of this is when Bentley explains how German historians in the eighteenth century classified history as a human discipline; later on in the book one sees how this influenced later German historians to write about cultural history. And conversely one can see how social histories written in France in the late nineteenth century were influenced by the Enlightenment, which classified history as a social science. This allows much more understanding about the subject rather than, again, a list of names and books.
Also, if Bentley had written only about one section of Europe completely before moving on to the next, his book would have been highly confusing; different modes of thinking moved from one section to another, such as when French historians became influenced by Karl Marx. He basically would have had to explain the thoughts and ideas of a German in the French section.
Michael Bentley succeeds in trying to fulfill his object by providing beginning students with a clear and compact guide to modern historiography; however, there are numerous places within the work where Bentley does not translate large excerpts from French and German writers. To make matters more confusing, he uses some of these excerpts not as simple anecdotes, but actually to make points of his. A translation somewhere in the book, perhaps as an appendix, would have been helpful.
In any event, his accounts of the various historians and their ideas of history are brief, but full of importance. If one understands all the concepts of historiography in this book, reading the more detailed Companion of Historiography or another work on the subject will be not only easier, but more enjoyable.
Go Maxwell, go Maxwell, go Maxwell! *dances*
meister mackswell, e is cleevur no?
Well, I don't normally brag, but I have a gift for this type of thing. Just you folks wait until I finish some of my research papers....:lol:
Thanks, Moki Moki. Do you like to write?
