Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102248 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Well researched, readable, and comprehensive.
I completely disagree with the last two reviewers. This is possibly the finest and most thorough book ever written on the history of history in a single volume. Sure, the author's style of writing is not "on the edge of your seat" entertaining, but it is an academic book written for an academic audience or at least a more scholarly focused one. I found Breisach work readable and accessible unlike other works I have read such as Michael Bentley's, Modern Historiography, which is very difficult to read on a number of levels.

The whole idea that "this is a history of historiography for ideological conservatives, and religious reactionaries and not a sober and lucid book on the subject" is utter nonsense to say the least. Breisach's covers the different time periods where Christians wrote history and they wrote from a Christian worldview. The fact that because some of Breisach's work surveys Christian-based historiography somehow makes it a book written for conservatives and religious reactionaries is bogus. Breisach surveys plenty of non-Christian historiography as well which does not make this a work for unbelievers only.

This book is very well researched, readable, and comprehensive for anyone interested in the subject of Historiography. This book is also considered a standard and authoritative text on the subject matter in the academic world. Find me a University that has a historiography class where this book is not used? Need I say more?

Not even interesting to someone working towards a Master's in history
Breisach's long and detailed account of the history of the study of history reads like an uninspired textbook, except it isn't as exciting. This book spends the vast majority of its pages listing one historian after another and the particular work that they wrote. A good study of historiography should spend plenty of time explaining the ideology behind the various schools of thought in history, and then use a couple of particularly telling examples and excerpts to help the reader understand the movement. This book works to the opposite extreme, it gives thousands upon thousands of different examples, but you have to look long and hard for details about why any of it is relevant. In the end, the effect is to make this entire book nearly irrelevant.

I have to agree.
I do not like writing negative reviews at all, but with this book I am afraid it is unavoidable.

I have to agree with what the previous reviewer has stated in terms of the structure of the text, but I would add that the more disconcerting aspect of this book for me is the ideological bias which is subtly built into the interpretive content of the text.

I find the contradiction between what the author says about his objectivity and neutrality (letting the reader decide?!) in the introduction belied by the content of the text itself, which is anything but objective and neutral (anyone who reads the text carefully will realize that this is a history of historiography for ideological conservatives, and religious reactionaries and not a sober and lucid book on the subject).

This is an extremely troubling text because of the authors seeming obliviousness to his own rather obvious ideological prejudices (there is nothing inherently wrong with having ideological prejudices, indeed we all have them, but there is something wrong with bringing these ideological predispositions into a study of historiography; this book is anything but neutral and objective, and in this way the book fails pitifully).