Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga

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Yale University Press, Oct 1, 2008 - History - 448 pages
In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the “long nineteenth century”—the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings.

Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the “new histories” of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.

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Contents

1 Enlightened History
1
2 History between Research and Reason
26
3 Expanding Horizons
56
4 British Initiatives
81
5 German Impulses
112
6 French Novelties
141
7 German Ascendancy
173
8 French Visions
198
9 English Observances
225
10 Beyond the Canon
254
11 American Parallels
280
12 New Histories
304
Conclusion
339
Notes
347
Index
411
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About the author (2008)

Donald R. Kelley is James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at Rutgers University and executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

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