Recommended Read: Thinking About History
Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History is a smart, accessible overview of some of the problems and promises of historical scholarship today
Sarah Maza’s brief volume, Thinking About History (U Chicago, 2017), is a serviceable overview of current practices and problems in historical scholarship. This work of historiography — that is, a historical account of some significant developments in how historical accounts are written — would make a useful and accessible introduction to the contemporary world(s) of historical scholarship. This is a clearly written, jargon free text that would work well in a college classroom but would be just as accessible to a thoughtful general reader who is interested in understanding the current state of historical research and writing in the United States.
Maza’s book, clocking in at a merciful and manageable 255 pages, consists of six chapters. The first three chapters address important changes in how historians have defined their objects of inquiry — from “great men” to everyone, from the nation-state to a global view, from transcendent ideas to immanent problems. The next three chapters discuss the relationship between historical methodology and the nature of historical knowledge: what “sources” do historians use to answer the…
