Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Small addition, if you're diving a bit deeper into certain fields, some less well-known presses become important. I own as many books from U. Indiana than Yale, just because of what I happened to ended up studying.
Nothing in here seems obviously applicable to history, so this needs more explanation.
Example?
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sophie
Break My Heart
A shift towards more of a focus on the context behind words an author chooses to use and less of an emphasis on taking a text at face value. To take an example: treating Bede less as an ultimate authority on what happened in Dark Ages England and more as a reflection of the political dynamics of the Church and the broader 9th century Ango-Saxon Aristocracy. It's an understanding that Bede didn't exist in a vacuum: he was writing for an audience, and that audience would have a specific context and expectation from him the author. So rather than looking literally at what Bede says, you look at what the things Bede says say about his own political climate. The turn was also characterized by a shift towards more interdisciplinary and transnational historical research.
Especially in research of the Classical World this was a key shift. So looking at, say, Tacitus or Caesar less as authoritative accounts of the goings-ons of the Late Republic/Early Empire and more as political texts crafted to satisfy a specific purpose. So as a historian you'd look at things like their use of literary devices, who the intended audience was, and intertextual comparisons (e.g. I attended a talk where a Classics professor was doing intertextual research on the use of single combat over a bridge between a Roman and a Barbarian, looking at its use as a literary device in Livy and Tacitus). If you've ever read Halsall, he talks a lot about the use of demographies (such as Tacitus's or those in Caesar's De Bello Gallico) as a didactic tool to admonish the Roman society they were writing for for perceived failings. This is a very post-turn way of approaching a text.
Reformation Germany is a great example. There was a shift in the 80s away from analyses of Luther and his theological arguments, and more towards the broader cultural/intellectual/societal environment of 16th century Germany. Luther was re-contextualized as one firebrand reformer among dozens, and his success was interpreted more discretely; looking at the individual political motivations behind each of the various free cities, princes, etc. that sided with him within their own specific context.
Strachan's history of WWI is another good example of post-turn history. It looks less at the memoirs used to construct the traditional WWI narrative as objective, factual accounts of what happened, so much as it focuses on the context driving those memoirs. Who was writing them, who was their audience, why were they writing them? The result is that the narrative "it was all von Molke's fault" comes as a result of reading memoirs by German generals looking for a way to deflect blame from themselves, and von Moltke was conveniently too dead to defend himself. A large motivating factor for Strachan's new history was to synthesize the various German, French, British, and Russian histories of the past, which largely ignored the histories of each other. So, rather than pinning "blame for the war" on one individual actor, treating all actors as more or less equally conscious, and having particular and individual motivations for opting into the war.
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Arakhor's is an excellent recommendation. H.H. Scullard has From the Gracchi to Nero, which isn't perfectly lined up with your time period but sounds a lot like what you're talking about, and I've rarely found a book as knowledgeable about the nitty-gritty facts of Classical history and as willing to talk about them with the reader. Unfortunately, the Roman empire post Nero wasn't particularly well served by historians, and that remains true until not long before the reign of Constantine.
Ferocitus
Deity
In South Australia that was used as a textbook for final year high school
(12th year of school) for many years. It was also used and for a small part
of the 1st year university Classics subject, especially recommended for those
who hadn't taken the subject in school.
Was it also used as a text in England at some stage?
Gen.Mannerheim
Grand Moff
My grad advisor would be freaking out if he read this comment
He consistently argues that academia today, while producing great modern work, is systematically indoctrinating its post-grads into doubting the veracity and utility of older works.
This is one of my biggest criteria. Though I rarely buy history titles from the store anymore, the times that I do peruse the history/bio/current events sections I can be found with my phone in hand looking for peer-reviews on the authors. I don't mind getting books from authors unknown to me, and indeed love to run into new historians or works. However, nothing turns me off quicker from a work than finding out that the authors qualifications to write on the Tudors is their "15-20 years writing for the Times" or an "indepth" military history of (insert war or battle here) who's author's historical career consisted of being a (ret) Cpt. or Col. Though I should add that a military history of a battle written by an officer who was actually there can be interesting, but should be picked up knowing the large cup of survivors bias the author is drinking from.
Also something to avoid: Authors whose titles are all over the place. A historians work history should have some kind of natural progression or theme which fits into their strengths and wheelhouse. Some pop-history writers have works out on everything from the crusades, the Borgias, and the American Revolution from the same author.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
While older sources of course aren't any less valid for being older, they have to be re-contextualised and, in general, newer books will be more up to date with whatever are the most recent developments in the field. Say, if you were interested in gender studies, you'll want something from the last 20 years at most for the bulk of your sources. Why? Queer studies popped up.
I'm with Mannerhiem. In some of the stuff I'm interested in there might not have been any books published in English since 1980. And to be honest, a big problem I have with a lot of modern scholarship is how little it actually says.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I mean if there's nothing published since 1960 it's not just acceptable, it's necessary. I had to do an essay on Ibsen and women at La Trobe and had to rely on a contemporary proto-psychological critical essay. Contemporary to Ibsen, that is centennial. Would I have much preferred to also rely on more modern scholarship? Sure, but it's all I could get that was relevant to me.
In any generation there are good and bad scholars. The "Newer is Better" thinking is only somewhat true. For instance, some modern academics confuse their politically correct opinions with fact. Similarly, some older scholarship may be overly jingoist or ethnocentric. I find that reading as many books on a subject as possible - getting the widest variety of information - allows me to decide for myself what happened. So, don't read one highly recommended book on the French Revolution ("The Frev"), but that one and nine others.
Example: When I was reading up on World War I a couple of years ago, I picked up recent works by Hew Strachan, Max Hastings and others. But I also went to Gutenberg.org and downloaded some older works. Francis Andrew March's (Brother to Peyton March, CoS-USA) History of the World War: An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War was a treasure trove of contemporary information that has been weeded out by more modern writers.
Example: When I was reading up on World War I a couple of years ago, I picked up recent works by Hew Strachan, Max Hastings and others. But I also went to Gutenberg.org and downloaded some older works. Francis Andrew March's (Brother to Peyton March, CoS-USA) History of the World War: An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War was a treasure trove of contemporary information that has been weeded out by more modern writers.
My grad advisor would be freaking out if he read this comment
He consistently argues that academia today, while producing great modern work, is systematically indoctrinating its post-grads into doubting the veracity and utility of older works.
Well, it probably is. And there are good reasons for that. It's particularly clear in Classical history, where if you read something like Gibbon's Decline and Fall, you'll find that he knows the primary sources at least as well as any modern academic. The problem is twofold. Firstly, he disagrees profoundly with modern thinking about the sort of statements that can be proved by the evidence, and the sort of things that make any remote sense. You end up with howlers like:
It's not easy to describe this as wrong, exactly - you wouldn't say 'actually, Mr. Gibbon, I think barbarians really go to war in order to get hold of plunder'. The basic frame of reference is just skewed. Making mass generalisations about how people think based on their political system is flat-out rubbish. Honestly, I've been in the army of a monarchy, and know plenty of people who signed up for all of those reasons. If you want to know that the Romans lost the Battle of Adrianople, and to know when it was, a book of just about any age will tell you. When it comes to the interesting questions, though - why did the Romans lose at Adrianople, and what was the significance of that? - he's not a lot of help. His take on Adrianople boils down as follows:
Which is fair enough (though most historians today put the stress on the Gothic infantry rather than the cavalry), but misses the basic point - how did it come to that? He misses that the rift between the Western and Eastern emperors slowed down Gratian's supporting troops, and that Valens decided to attack partly because he didn't want to have to rely on the colleague that he disliked. It also misses the major long-term structural reasons behind the decline of the Roman army. It's a bit like saying that England beat Wales in the rugby because they played better. People like Gibbon don't ask a lot of questions that are now considered important. Most older historical works focus almost entirely on politics, warfare and so on, while more recent ones will include things like social history, the development of culture and religion, and so on - they try to look at history from the point of view of people who weren't necessarily at the top. You miss that in older works.
I recognise that this is a little bit of a straw man - we're really talking about books from the 1970s rather than the 1770s. But I've noticed the same basic point in recent books. From about the 1980s, there's a shift in the sort of questions people ask and the sort of things that they consider good answers. If you don't recognise that that's happening and have some other frame of reference, you'll end up with a very different understanding of what history is and what historians should be doing to that of most of them working today.
I agree with this. Another thing I've found is the language of the reviews on the cover. They're obviously all going to be good, but if the praise they want to sell the book by is entirely that it's 'gripping', a 'page-turner' or something along those lines, you're probably not holding up the most scholarly volume.
That doesn't mean all their work is subpar; Tom Holland wrote an excellent book on the Persian Wars and an incoherent one on the early years of Islam. I think the key to knowing what subject suits them is whether they produce hard scholarship on it (Holland has his own translation of Herodotus).
Why does everybody seem to have read Decline and Fall, then?
Lexicus
Deity
As well it should be since the veracity and utility of older works is generally doubtful.
Does the word historiography mean anything to you by chance? Interest in Decline and Fall is mainly historiographical in nature, rather than historical.
I mean reading it by itself. I can understand reading a commentary, but going through a gigantic scholarly book that you know isn't even proper history? Where do they find the endurance?
Lexicus
Deity
*shrug* Gotta read them primary sources mayne.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
They build it. It's endurance.
It becomes a classic in its own right. Few people read it because they want to find out about the Roman empire (those who want to do that usually go somewhere else). Instead, people read it because they want to have read Decline and Fall. From another angle, works like that set the agenda for scholarship, so later writers have to read and engage with them even if they end up disagreeing. As to why people read classics that they don't enjoy, that's a much bigger question
Gen.Mannerheim
Grand Moff
I don't think its fair to say that Gibbon isn't "proper history" just because many of his main points agreed upon in modern academia.
The Model-T is still a car even though its outmoded and comes from a design philosophy the industry doesn't follow anymore.
As for why people read it, think of it from another angle. Imagine you're having a discussion on the Late Roman Empire with other academics or even well read enthusiasts and it comes up that you're the only one who hasn't read Decline and Fall. Anything you say henceforth would immediately be clouded by the subconscious opinion by the others that you are under-informed notwithstanding the quality of the points you are making.
A personal, real world example of this: A few years ago I was at a symposium in Mississippi. During a breakaway session I got into a discussion with some other post-grads and academics about Early Modern Europe. One of the more outspoken members of the group, and who was also close on the docket to present next, let it slip that she had never actually read Geoffrey Parker's General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. The expressions of the rest of the group's faces were beyond obvious and I felt rather embarrassed for the young lady. As much as I'm not a fan of most of Geoffrey Parker's work, not having read a seminal work on the subject us just unacceptable to many.
I was unaware industry abandoned mass production or the assembly line.
Now let's talk cannibalism:
Bill Schutt
Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History
Yes well, that particular revolution happened to coincide with widespread famine which is estimated to have cost tens of millions of Chinese their lives.
Hm.
For those so inclined, this must be reassuring.
Gen.Mannerheim
Grand Moff
Since you obviously don't understand the comparison...
The comparison is over the technology that is in the car and the automotive design philosophies, not the means of production. That comparison would be on the medium in which historians produce work, and last I checked historians still write books and articles.
In other words, its a debate over what should be in a car, not how its made.
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