Historiography of Modern History Research Paper

Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre in the article ‘History’ in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1932 identified two characteristics of the modern conception of history as basic to the modern historical outlook and practice: the commitment to establishing the ‘truth’ and to placing historical accounts within ‘universal history.’ A third is the transformation of historical studies into a professional discipline. The older ancient and humanistic historiography, they argued, saw history as a form of rhetoric in the service of politics and morality and as an art form. ‘History as it is conceived today,’ they noted, ‘may blossom into art, may be crowned with philosophy; but it is primarily and necessarily the solid establishment of facts’ (Berr, p. 358), however difficult this may be.

This formulation presupposes a sharp distinction between history as literature and as a scientific discipline, even if its approach to science takes into account the elements of contingency and particularity that distinguish history from the generalizing natural sciences; but it assumes that historical accounts based on a solid factual basis narrate a coherent development that reflects historical reality.

There is a good deal to be said for this description of the transformation which historical studies underwent in the eighteenth and particularly in the nineteenth century; but especially from the perspective of the late 1990s it seems one-sided and incomplete.

On two levels, historical thought and historiographical practice in the eighteenth century moved toward greater historical realism. On the one hand, an increasingly secular outlook insisted on the exclusion of the supernatural and held that historical explanation must not violate a common understanding of natural reality. This secular approach was relatively new in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, it coexisted often with a residual religiosity, as it still did even in the nineteenth century with a conception of a hidden divine plan, as in Leopold von Ranke’s trust in the ‘hand of God’ (1973, p. 138), or in a less hidden form in G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic. Thus Enlightenment historians such as J. C. Gatterer and A. L. Schloezer did not challenge the biblical chronology or the biblical account, although for the post biblical period, or for the non-Hebraic ancient peoples, they insisted on an approach in accord with natural reality.

Apart from the great works of synthesis in the eighteenth century, David Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, G. T. Raynal, and Adam Ferguson, there exists a tradition of erudition that introduced standards of source criticism, which went back to the humanist scholarship of the Renaissance and Reformation and to the erudition of seventeenth- century historical scholarship. The belief that great philosophic works of synthesis are not enough and that scholarly history cannot be written until the authenticity and veracity of the sources on which it rests have been established expressed itself in the great methodical collection of sources begun in the seventeenth century with the Jesuit Acta Sanctorum, published after 1643, to provide a firm basis for ecclesiastical history, and with Ludovico Muratori’s efforts in the Scriptores rerum italicarum (1723–51) to lay the foundation for an Italian national history. The German scholars at the universities, first J. L. Mosheim and J. S. Semler at Halle and then J. A. Ernesti and J. O. Michaelis at Gottingen, established a tradition of historical exegesis that laid the foundations for historical hermeneutics and the new discipline of historical philology which emerged in the latter part of the eighteenth century and became the key elements of the critical method of B. G. Niebuhr and Ranke in the nineteenth century.

A key concept of eighteenth-century thought was the linear character of history. History was no longer understood as a cumulation of events but as a continuous story possessing inner coherence. Reinhart Koselleck has suggested that between 1750 and 1850 the concept ‘history’ (Geschichte) replaced that of ‘histories’ (Geschichten). Each of the great historical works of the eighteenth century followed a continuous, coherent story whether in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume’s History of England, or Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs.

Yet the conception of world history that arose with the Enlightenment constituted not only an extension of the historical outlook but at the same time also a narrowing. And this conception dominated almost all of Western historical thought and historical writing until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The history of the world was identified with the history of civilization and the latter rather narrowly with that of the West. Two variations emerged in the conception of what constituted world history, one identified with Condorcet, centering around an idea of progress on a world scale, the other identified with Herder, which stressed the diversity of peoples and cultures. Yet on closer examination, these two conceptions shared many characteristics, specifically in their stress on development.

The Enlightenment has too many aspects to permit one to reduce it to a simple formula. Two ideas were central to it, but neither was free of contradictions. The first assumed the essential equality of all human beings in all cultures; the second maintained that only human beings who had attained a high degree of culture and education deserved to be free and equal citizens. The latter view distinguished between societies that were in the vanguard of civilization, understood as Western civilization, and less-developed peoples. If G. W. Leibniz and Voltaire had still regarded China as a civilization equal and possibly superior to that of the West, Christoph Meiners considered the yellow peoples as inferior to Europeans, and the Blacks as barely different from animals. The notion emerged of a distinctive Western civilization with roots in classical Greece. J. J. Winckelmann’s rediscovery of Greek art in 1764 contributed to an idealization of Greek standards of beauty and personal culture which were adopted as models for a modern culture distinguishing the West from other cultures and giving it its superior standing. Meiners’ scientific racism represented an extreme position, but the idea of the unique position of the West and the relative inferiority of all non-Western cultures and peoples became a central assumption in Western historical consciousness.

2. Nineteenth-Century Conceptions Of History And Historical Science: Between Romantic Historism And Scientistic Positivism

This outlook was dominant well into the twentieth century. It reflected the changes that had taken place in the world in political and military strength, economic power, and scientific and technological development. The two divergent historical outlooks in the first half of the nineteenth century, one represented by Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history, the other by Ranke’s historism, shared this outlook despite their philosophic differences. Hegel’s perception of the world as an ongoing dialectical process by which, through progressive contradictions, the absolute mind, reason, fulfills itself and takes on concrete forms in the institutional life of the modern European world, and specifically in the Prussian political and social order after the French Revolution and Napoleon, reflects its origins in specifically German political and philosophical traditions. But it has parallels in less involuted intellectual currents of thought outside of Germany, from Turgot, Condorcet, and Thomas Paine in the late eighteenth century to Henri de Saint Simon, Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, Thomas H. Buckle, Herbert Spencer, and Benedetto Croce in the nineteenth century. For all of them world history is the history of the European world, a world which for some may include the United States but for all excludes the Slavic peoples. For Hegel only the West has a history. China, India, and Persia may have been the earliest civilizations but they have remained stagnant.

According to Hegel, Black Africans are incapable of cultural creativity. Karl Marx with his conception of static Asiatic modes of production took over much of Hegel’s conception of the inferiority of non-Western societies and he and Friedrich Engels used this to justify Western imperialism as the only way to bring the non-Western world into the realm of modern civilization.

Theoretically Ranke’s conception of the historical world represented the antithesis of Hegel’s. Ranke rejected the idea of progress as well as the schematization of historical development as it occurred in Hegel’s philosophy of history. History for him deals with the particular and the contingent and avoids generalizations and determinism. In fact, however, Ranke saw history as a linear process at the culmination of which stood the post-Napoleonic Western and Central European world. Ranke proclaimed that ‘every age is equally immediate to God’ (1973, p. 52), but at the same time denied that China or India had a true history. Except for his early work on the Serbs, his writings deal with the countries he defined early as the Latin and Germanic. His incomplete World History is a history of the West.

Whatever the philosophical and political differences, nineteenth-century thinkers as well as the educated public generally turned to history as the key to understanding things human that replaced traditional philosophy. The charges, often repeated, that the eighteenth century, particularly the Enlightenment, ignored history, generalized, and moralized, and did not recognize individuality and uniqueness of historical contexts is disproved when we look at the great historical works of the eighteenth century which we have already mentioned. Despite the impact of romanticism in the first part of the nineteenth century, with its stress on imagination and poetry, a cult of science dominated historical study and writing, which was not necessarily in conflict with a romantic outlook.

This search for a scientific approach to history took two different directions: one that has frequently been called positivism, the other historism, neither of which can easily be reduced to a common denominator.

The first of these orientations took the natural sciences as its model. Building on Turgot and Condorcet, Auguste Comte sought to formulate laws of development by which societies moved from simpler to more complex forms of organization. The driving force was the transformation of knowledge from theological and then metaphysical stages to positive science that would provide the means for the scientific organization of society. But positivism remained largely grand theory with little empirical application to historical inquiry. More significant was Karl Marx’s approach to history. Marx saw the driving force of history in the lawful development of economic forces, which constituted the basis of historical transformation, and the revolt of this basis against the social, political, and intellectual superstructure. In the course of this conflict the contradictions within the social order, which involved inequality, would be overcome in a classless society. Marx thus intended to replace Hegel’s idealist dialectic with a materialistic one.

If positivism both in its Comtean and in its Marxist form in its search for a scientific history envisaged a utopia at the end of history, the main currents of historical scholarship sought to avoid a speculative approach to history but nevertheless did not free themselves from metaphysical and even theological presuppositions which they refused to acknowledge. Ranke may perhaps serve as the most influential representative of this orientation. He too was committed to a strictly scientific approach to history. For him, however, this approach must recognize that general laws have no application to history that deals with the particular and the contingent. For him the task of the historian was to recapture the past as ‘it actually was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen), free of any bias, requiring the application of philological methods to the critical analysis of the sources as F. A. Wolf and Niebuhr had applied them. But for him history was more than the reconstruction of the past. It involved interpretation and synthesis, as it did for J. G. Droysen. Ranke was convinced that the particular event contained the general, and that the general became apparent to the researcher who immersed himself in the sources, because—and here we return from the realm of strict science to that of metaphysics—the historian can observe the general tendencies that manifest themselves in history, tendencies which do not represent God’s direct intervention in the world, but nevertheless reflected divine purpose.

3. Professionalization Of Historical Studies

The stress on the scientific character of historical studies led to the formation of a professional discipline of history. Professionalization was not restricted to history but was part of a process in which scholarly studies in all fields, in the liberal arts as well as the natural sciences, were institutionalized at centers of higher learning, primarily the universities and research institutes. The German model was imitated elsewhere, relatively early in France with the introduction of the German seminar method at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1868 and in the United States with the introduction of a research oriented graduate program at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the 1870s leading to a Ph.D. With some delay the German model was adopted in Japan, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, Greece, Romania, Latin America, and elsewhere, each time, it must be stressed, with major modifications that reflected different scholarly traditions. Thus, the sharp distinction between the cultural and the natural sciences which dominated German thought played less of a roLevelsewhere.

A basic tenet of professional historians was the total objectivity or what Ranke called the ‘impartiality’ of the historian. In fact, however, the new discipline was highly politicized everywhere. This intensified interest in archival research went hand in hand with the wave of nationalism that gripped all Western countries and also modernizing non-Western countries such as Japan. The broad cosmopolitan view of many historians in the eighteenth century gave way to a new focus on national history. Ranke still wrote the histories of a variety of European states, Serbia, England, France, Prussia, and also the Reformation in Germany, and the Papacy. Later historians, who took him as a model for their own scholarship, in most cases concentrated on their own nation.

However, the development of modern historical scholarship was not a German monopoly. The opening of archives and the collection of documents, primarily those of the Middle Ages, became a prerequisite for scholarly national history. In Paris the Ecole des Chartes was founded in 1821 to train scholars in the critical use of documents. Muratori’s collection of Italian documents in the eighteenth century has already been mentioned; this was followed by the Monumenta Germaniae historica launched in Germany in 1819 and by similar undertakings in France, Great Britain, Spain, Poland, Bohemia, Greece, and elsewhere.

The Rankean belief that immersion into the sources guarantees an impartial view of the interrelation among historical events turned out to be an illusion, something which was openly recognized by the scholars of the Prussian school such as Heinrich von Sybel, J. G. Droysen, and Heinrich von Treitschke who frankly saw historical scholarship as a tool for the legitimation and propagation of the German national cause under Hohenzollern rule. Moreover, the process by which scholars were recruited guaranteed a high degree of homogeneity in social composition and political outlook.

Professionalization was to guarantee objectivity, but also to provide a scientific or scholarly discourse distinct from that of literature. Ranke had stressed the scientific character of history, but at the same time he also recognized that history combines science with art. The great prestige which history enjoyed everywhere in the nineteenth century—a number of the leading French statesmen from Francois Guizot to Alexis de Tocqueville, Alphonse de Lamartine, Adolphe Thiers, and Jean Jaures were important historians—rested on the literary quality of their histories. History could not escape being literature, and imaginative literature at that. In fact there existed a close parallel between the great histories written by professional historians and the great realistic novels of the nineteenth century— Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Gottfried Keller, Gustav Freytag, Ivan S. Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and even Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1902). They all constructed a plot that followed a temporal line and involved individual subjects as agents. And the great historians of the century, Jules Michelet, Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Thomas B. Macaulay, and Theodor Mommsen, who in 1902 received the Nobel Prize for literature, were read as great literature, as was Ranke himself. Michelet is a striking example of the crossing of borders between critical scholarship and imaginative literature, the exhaustive mining of the archives for the purpose of creating a national memory and identity.

But the role professionalization played in nineteenth-century historical writing should not be overestimated as it often has been. A great deal of history did not follow the dominant paradigm of narrative national history such as three of the most important and lasting works of the mid-century, Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cite antique (The Ancient City), de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien regime et la Revolution Francaise (The Old Regime and the French Revolution), and Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy). Moreover, many leading writers of history such as Thomas Carlyle, Macaulay, John Green, George Bancroft, Lamartine, Louis Blanc, and, of course Tocqueville, were not professional historians.

The great literary histories of the eighteenth century, for example, those of Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire, were intended to entertain, educate, and edify a broad educated public. Professional historians wrote often for specialists. But in fact the division between literary and professional history and their audiences was not as deep as it may appear. Certainly Hume, Gibbon, and also William Robertson were serious scholars and the great professional historians of the nineteenth century, such as Ranke, Fustel de Coulanges, Theodor Mommsen, and Lord Acton were read avidly by a broad public for whom history had become the key science replacing philosophy as a guide to understanding the human world.

4. Twentieth-Century Reorientations Of Historical Thought And Scholarship: The Turn To The Social Sciences

Outside the discipline proper, critical methods were applied to many areas: the history of religion (F. D. Strauss, Ernest Renan), the history of law, the history of literature and art, and other fields. While the historians proper neglected the study of society and economics, an important group of economic historians, the so-called ‘Historical School of National Economy’ in Germany (Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, Wilhelm Roscher, and Gustav Schmoller) pursued a middle course between an empirical approach, seeking generalizations of economic behavior and development, reminiscent of positivism, and an intense regard for the particular historical setting of culture and society in which economic behavior occurred, which reflected historicist principles.

The late nineteenth and the turn to the twentieth century witnessed profound reexaminations of the historical outlook that had been dominant until then. On the one hand, there was a continued, even a heightened faith in science, technology, and the progress of Western civilization which largely survived the trauma of World War I. On the other hand, there was an increasing sense of discomfort with the quality of modern civilization. Darwinism, or rather Social Darwinism, played a fundamental role in both of these outlooks. The world was seen as a struggle for the survival of the fittest that could forecast the progressive victory of the white races over the rest of the world, which for Oswald Spengler was a desperate struggle for survival. At the turn to the twentieth century, some Europeans and Americans foresaw progress in terms of growing tolerance and democracy, while others preached racism and ultra nationalism.

As far as historical thought was concerned, both Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche voiced their discomfort with a modern industrial society with its concomitant social and cultural aspects, a mass civilization moving to commercialism and democracy, and extended this dismay to a critique of the modern faith in science. Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, and Georges Sorel in differing ways called for a restoration of the vital against the mechanical aspects of life and culture. Established patterns of historical scholarship, as practiced by the historical profession, were called into question simultaneously at the end of the nineteenth century from Russia and Poland to North America. Generally, however, the critics of the historical profession did not criticize the latter because it was too scientific but rather because it was insufficiently so and had not taken into consideration the tremendous changes in modern society and civilization in an industrial and democratic age.

The most spectacular confrontation with the established profession occurred in Germany with the so-called Methodenstreit, occasioned by the publication of the first volume of Karl Lamprecht’s Deutsche Geschichte in 1891. Lamprecht criticized his colleagues for their narrow focus on the state and their neglect of broader cultural and social aspects of history. He also accused them of working with an outdated concept of science and historical science that restricted itself to events and personalities rather than taking into consideration the structural context of historical change. The German professoriate, reflecting the peculiar semi autocratic character of the Prussian German state, vociferously rejected Lamprecht’s initiative and saw in it a threat to the established social and political order. Lamprecht’s attempt to formulate laws of historical development was rejected internationally but his call for a broadening of historical perspective to encompass society, economics, and culture was generally welcomed outside of Germany. Historians in Russia (Paul Vinogradoff, Vasiliev Kliuchevskii, Paul Miljukov), Romania (Nikolae Iorga), Poland (Jan Bujak, Franticzek Rutkowski), Norway (Halvdan Koht), Belgium (Henri Pirenne), as well as the circle around the journal Re ue de synthese historique founded by the philosopher Henri Berr in 1900 as a forum for an international discussion, and the American ‘New Historians’ (F. J. Turner, J. H. Robinson, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, H. E. Barnes) called for an expansion of the scope of history and a closer cooperation with the empirical social sciences.

Two variations of a social science approach to history need to be mentioned. The first is Max Weber’s historical sociology that moves between the historistic emphasis on the recognition of the uniqueness of cultures and a historical social science working with clearly defined concepts and a rigorous logic of inquiry. Weber’s conception of social causation and historical development was in some ways indebted to Marx, but unlike Marx emphasized the interrelation between culture, including religion, and economics, and placed much greater weight on contingency. Weber recognized that societies constituted meaningful relationships that required an interpretive sociology but avoided the sharp distinction that idealistic philosophers such as Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm Dilthey made between the generalizing natural sciences and the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) that favored empathetic understanding (Verstehen).

A second approach to a history taking into account the social sciences was offered by the so-called ‘Annales school.’ It is difficult to reduce the Annales to a common denominator. The journal by this name, launched in France in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch with the support of Henri Pirenne, continued initiatives begun early in the century in Henri Berr’s already mentioned Re ue de synthese historique. A similar project was initiated in Poland in the journal Roczniki Dziejow Społecznych i Gospodarczych, the editors of which, Rutkowski and Bujak, were in close contact with the Annales. In the place of the concentration of the established historiography on events and great personalities, the Annales explored impersonal forces and structures.

The ‘human geography’ of Vidal de la Blache played an important role in the early works of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Human history had to be understood in the concrete context of space and time. But unlike the German Friedrich Ratzel, who saw soil and race (Volk) as determining factors in history, Paul Vidal de la Blache, as did Febvre, Bloch, and Fernand Braudel later, recognized the role which human agency and culture played in the formation of the geographic setting. The historians of the Annales attempted to pursue a ‘total history,’ generally limited to a restricted region, in which all aspects, geographic, economic, political, religious, and demographic, were to be included. Quite consciously the dividing line between the established disciplines were overcome and in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, opened in Paris in 1968, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics were housed with history as the integrating science.

In other ways too, the Annales represented a radical break with older historical conceptions. The nation no longer represented the basic unit of history; it was replaced by the region or by a broad comparative approach that extended beyond Europe (Braudel, Pierre Vilar). The concept of a linear time, so basic to all forms of nineteenth century historical thought, and with it the idea of progress, were abandoned and a historical epoch viewed in its own terms, not as part of a historical process. Burckhardt had already done something similar in 1860 in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, and had worked with a very broad concept of culture, as had also Jan Huizinga in Herfsttij der Middeleuwen (1919), but unlike the Annales historians they focused heavily on elites. In contrast the Annales dealt with the population at large, but ran the danger that at times their history became impersonal and void of concrete human beings.

In retrospect, the racist historiography of German National Socialism of the period 1933–1945, although it built on widespread Social Darwinist ideas and ultra nationalism, remained an interlude, which even in Germany had limited influence. The Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union and its dependent states in its dogmatic forms, in many ways a perversion of Marxism, similarly represents an interlude. As early as 1956, historians in Poland and Hungary, and until the freeze after the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia, and even in the Soviet Union (Aaron Gurevich), participated in the broader historical discussions of the international community.

5. New Orientations After 1945: The Turn To A Cultural Dimension

A subsequent article will deal with trends in historical thought and study in the second half of the twentieth century. The victory of the Allies in World War II and the dominance of the United States in the postwar world revived older beliefs in progress and science. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a turn to the quantitative social sciences in historical studies.

The years since the late 1960s have seen a reorientation in historical outlook in the Western world generally, including to a lesser extent also Eastern Europe and Russia. The conflicts of the 1960s, the racial confrontation in the United States, the Vietnam War, the student revolts throughout Europe and North America, and the suppression of the Prague spring all contributed to a reorientation as did the fundamental technological changes which resulted in the transformation of an industrial society concentrated on production into an economy based on information technology, in which consumption and services play a key role and the old socioeconomic classes gave way to new ones. The confidence in science and economic growth was severely tested as a new generation became increasingly conscious of ecological concerns and called for the emancipation of subordinated segments of the population such as women and ethnic minorities at home and the peoples of the former colonies abroad. The very quality of the modern Western world, including its science, came under attack. All of this had consequences for historical studies after the 1960s.

Bibliography:

1. Bann S 1984 The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France. Cambridge University Press, New York
2. Barnes H 1962 A History of Historical Writing. Dover, New York
3. Barraclough G 1978 Trends in History. Holmes & Meier, New York
4. Bentley M 1999 Modern Historiography. Routledge, London
5. Berr H, Febvre, L 1932 History In: Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, Vol. 7, pp. 357–68
6. Blanke H W 1991 Historiographiegeschichte als Historik. Frommann-Holzbook, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, Germany
7. Breisach E 1983 Historiography. Ancient, Medie al, Modern. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
8. Butterfield E 1955 Man on His Past. The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
9. Cassirer E Philosophie der Aufklarung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment). Mohr, Tubingen, Germany
10. Chickering R 1993 Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915). Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ
11. Fueter E 1911 Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (History of Modern Historiography). Oldenbourg, Munich, Germany
12. Gazi E 2000 ‘Scientific’ History. The Greek Case in Comparative Perspective (1850–1920). Peter Lang, New York
13. Gooch G 1913 History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. Macmillan, London
14. Iggers G 1968 The German Conception of History. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CO
15. Kelley D 1998 Faces of History. From Herodotus to Herder. Yale University Press, New Haven, CI
16. Keylor W 1975 Academy and Community. The Foundation of the French Historical Profession. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
17. Koselleck R 1975 Geschichte, Historie. In: Brunner O, Conze W, Koselleck R (eds.) Geschichtliche Grundbegriff Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland Vol. 2. Klett, Stuttgart, Germany, pp. 593–717
18. Novick P 1988 That Noble Dream. The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
19. Ranke L von 1973 The theory and practice of history. In: Iggers G, von Moltke K (eds.) Bobbs Merill, Indianapolis, IN
20. Reill P H 1975 The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
21. Ringer F 1969 The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community 1890–1933. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
22. Thompson J W 1942 A History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. Macmillan, New York
23. White H 1973 Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
24. Woolf D R (ed.) 1998 A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. 2 vols. Garland Publishing, New York