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This third edition explores the emergence and development of history as a discipline and the major theoretical developments that have informed historical writing. It consists of five parts. Part One explores the establishment of history as a specific university discipline in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Parts Two, Three, and Four explore the major methodological shifts within professional history- the social turn, the cultural turn, and the eclecticism of contemporary historical writing. Part Five examines the impact of all these methodological shifts within some specific fields- political history, social history, cultural history, economic history, and the history of ideas.
This book introduces the major theoretical approaches employed by historians. The first chapter outlines four questions designed to assist readers in eliciting and understanding the theorization underlying a work of history: authorial context, temporal framework, drivers of change, and subjectivities. Subsequent chapters focus on a particular theory each. Altogether fourteen schools of theory are examined, from the empiricist to the postcolonial, including chapters on Marxist history, Freud and psychohistory, the Annales, historical sociology, quantitative history, anthropology and ethnohistorians, narrative, gender, poststructuralism, public history, oral history, and history of the emotions.
