Book Description
A broad perspective on historical thought and writing by one of the world's foremost historiographers.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German


From the Publisher
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 trim. LC 96-24058


About the Author
GEORGE G. IGGERS is an internationally recognized authority on intellectual history, and European historiography. He is the author of New Directions in Historiography (1975, 1985) and The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (1968, 1983), both published by Wesleyan University Press. Currently, Iggers is Distinguished Professor of History at State University of New York at Buffalo.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A preeminent intellectual historian here examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based since history's emergence as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline's greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and called into question the very possibility of objective history. Iggers sees the contemporary discipline as a hybrid, moving away from a classical, macro-historical approach toward microhistory, cultural history, and the history of everyday life. Still, while the postmodern critique of traditional historiography offers important correctives to historical thought and practice, it "has not destroyed the historian's commitment to recapturing reality or his or her belief in a logic of inquiry."

SYNOPSIS