Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 THE HISTORY OF WHOM? 10
History from Above: “Great Men” and a Few Women 10
Social History and Quantification 14
E. P. Thompson’s Historical Revolution 23
Resistance and Agency 28
Power and the Private Sphere 34
2 THE HISTORY OF WHERE? 45
How National History Became Unnatural 45
Oceans, Middle Grounds, Borderlands 57
The Rise of Global History 71
Displacing Euro-America 77
3 THE HISTORY OF WHAT? 83
From Ideas to Things 83
The Changing History of Ideas 86 Thomas Kuhn’s Scientific Revolution 91
Science in Historical Context 96
The New History of Things 101
Nature and Other Nonhuman Actors 108
4 HOW IS HISTORY PRODUCED? 118
From Chroniclers to Academics 118
Popular and Public History 124
Orthodoxy and Revisionism: How Debate Shapes History 137
Do Sources and Archives Make History? 146
5 CAUSES OR MEANINGS? 157
Causality and History 157
In Search of Laws and Patterns: Social Science History and Comparison 161
Marxism and the Annales School 166
Multicausal History and the Return of the Event 171
In Search of Meaning: Microhistory 178
Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and the “New Cultural History” 185
6 FACTS OR FICTIONS? 199
The Rise and Fall of Objectivity 199
Postmodernism and History: Radical Skepticism and New Methods 209
Everything Is Constructed 216
Barbarians at the Gate 220
Distortion or Imagination: Where Do We Draw the Line? 225
Conclusion 235
Acknowledgments 239
Index 241