Thinking About History

Thinking about History is a general introduction to historical studies that explores what’s special about history as a discipline. Sarah Maza revels in history’s eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and regular controversies that shape it. With the classroom in mind, she organized her text around a series of big questions through which she discusses various themes, works, and schools of history. She asks, for example, whose history do we write, and how does writing about different people affect what stories get told, and how they are told? Her questions gather together topics for discussion but no definitive answers, and she enlivens her writing with plenty of concrete examples drawn from the work of historians in a wide variety of fields. Based on the premise that much of the excitement about history comes from the controversies, substantive and methodological, that it ignites, this book is designed as a contribution to the urgent task of keeping those arguments alive.