Thinking About History

If wanting to know where to start in understanding historiography, this is the book for you! Providing a great reading list and overview of major works in the academic historical field…makes you want to just read everything mentioned!

This book should be required reading for all graduate students or upper-level history majors who intend to continue on to grad school. Maza offers a clear, insightful, and witty overview of historiography and historical methodologies, from the emergence of history as a field in the 19th century through the present. All the major paradigm shifts, the development of different schools, and all key debates are given consideration. I also appreciate her even-handedness -- she explores controversial topics with enough critical distance to make her interpretations fair. Perhaps the only criticism worth mentioning (and it's one that Maza acknowledges repeatedly): she is by training a Europeanist, and while she does engage African, Asian, Eastern European, and Latin American scholarship, she does so a bit less than she engages scholarship from the so-called "Atlantic World." This is not to say she ignores these fields -- she most certainly does not. I enjoyed in particular her reading of sub-altern studies in India and the debates around Tim Snyder's Bloodlands. However, the examples she draws tend to be more from her areas of specialization. Perhaps this is unavoidable -- who can truly become an expert of all sub-fields of an academic discipline in this day and age? The age of Diderot this is not. Notwithstanding, I think this is an excellent book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. She also draws heavily upon colleagues (current and former) from Northwestern University, where she teaches. As a result, I think, the book stands as an excellent statement of departmental philosophy. Disclaimer: I graduated from the NU History Department, so I'd know :)

Well worth a read. Every chapter is concise and illustrate how perceptions of history have altered. My favourite was chapter 3 The History of What?

As a professional historian, this is one of the very best books I've read in many years about historiography and the theories and craft involved in the reconstruction of the past. The book is very well-written with excellent prose, and accessible to general readers as well as academically relevant for historians, undergrad students, and graduate students.

This book was insightful. However, my copy from about page 220 onward was falling apart despite buying it new. The whole chunk between 220 and the acknowledgements on 239 came out, and the acknowledgements section onwards was on its way to falling out.