Product Description

Modern Historiography is the essential introduction to the history of historical writing. It explains the broad philosophical background to the different historians and historical schools of the modern era.

In a unique overview of modern historiography, the book includes surveys on the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment; Romanticism; the voice of Science and the process of secularization within Western intellectual thought; the influence of, and broadening contact with, the New World; the Annales school in France; and the effects of the repression and exile of the inter-war years and the Post-War `moods.' Modern Historiography provides a clear and concise account of this modern period of historical writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88825 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Review
"...astonishing: a lucid, enlightening, often witty, convincing, and pithy survey of the field since the Enlightenment." -- Choice - July/August '99

"...stimulating to read...." -- Allan Megill, University of Virginia

...stimulating to read....
–Allan Megill, University of Virginia

This is a very well written work with some genuine originality, not only accessible to the undergraduate but a book professional historians can read with pleasure and profit.
–Canadian Journal of History

What [Bentley] accomplishes in a mere 160 pages is astonishing: a lucid, enlightening, often witty, convincing, and pithy survey of the field since the Enlightenment. This is an important book whose use will benefit a great majority of those, at every level, involved in investigating historical materials.
–Choice, July/August '99

What [Bentley] accomplishes in a mere 160 pages is astonishing: a lucid, enlightening, often witty, convincing, and pithy survey of the field since the Enlightenment. This is an important book whose use will benefit a great majority of those, at every level, involved in investigating historical materials.
–Choice, July/August 99

About the Author
Michael Bentley is Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the editor of the Companion to Historiography (1996).

Customer Reviews

a poorly written rough draft of a book
This is an awful book from start to finish. It contains little historiography and is poorly written. Bentley spends a lot of space on the universities attended by historians and other useless details and not enough space explaining their ideas.
Bentely uses foreign phrases and block quotes on EVERY single page. At times he combines both beasts by having block quotes in a foreign language WITHOUT giving a translation.
But the last item may be preferable since Bentley is at his worst in his own language. The students in my class are always complaining about the writing. The professor is constantly apologizing for it. Maybe Bentley will do the same someday by revising this book. While this book is not a first draft, it is not a final one either. Good bye and good luck - or as Bentley would say, au revior and in bocca al lupo