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

My recent reading, including Sarah Maza’s 2017 book, the subject of this review.

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 questions they pose of the past, how do historians find and frame their answers, and by what standards do they evaluate their own and their colleagues’ conclusions. (That last chapter, as you might guess, grapples with the history of “the objectivity question.”)

The whole book works well as an orientation to historical scholarship as current college students are encountering it within the classroom. It also works to gently (re)introduce and patiently explain an idea that many members of the public and (judging by recent internet controversies) not a few historians apparently find deeply confusing: the past that historians are able to bring into view changes with the questions we ask, and our questions reflect the issues and problems that are most pressing right now. We always see the past through the prism of the present; we have no other place to stand save where and when we are.