WRITING HISTORY
You are invited to read a couple of books per week under each heading and be
prepared to give a 3-4 minute presentation on ONE of them. If you wish to present
books on the theme of the week that are not on the reading list, please feel free.
I Scholarship and Markets
How do historians reconcile the obligation to satisfy their academic peers with the
ambition to access a more general readership?
(i)
Week 1. monographs: first books (the thesis book) and second books (making a
reputation)
What characterises the scholarly monograph? Does it have to be boring? Do
breakthroughs in historical thinking require the monograph?
What is the difference between a historians’ first book and second book? Compare the
approach and presentation of any one historian’s first and second books
historical monographs
See websites for Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge. Here are
some examples of Oxford Historical Monographs.
Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France. Gender,
Sociability and the Uses of Emulation (1999)
Owen White, Children of the French Empire. Miscegenation and Colonial Society in
French West Africa, 1895-1960 (1999)
Josie McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany. Remembering the
International Brigades, 1945-1989 (2004)
Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the legacy of the Iron
Chancellor (Oxford, 2005)
Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust. Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettoes and
Camps (2005)
Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg. Power, Myth and the Rise of the Nazis (2009)
and from Cambridge
Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin in early modern Germany (2007)
first and second books
Eamon Duffy, Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John
Fisher (1989)
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 to
c.1580 (1992)
Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: women and morals in Reformation Augsburg
(1989)
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early
modern Europe (1994)
Linda Colley, In Defence of Oligarchy: the Tory Party, 1714-60 (1982)
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992)
Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-wing politics in France, 1830-1852
(1984)
Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (1992)
Ruth Harris, Murder and madness: medicine, law and society in the Fin de Siècle (1989)
Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (1999)
Kristin Ross, The Emergence of social space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
(1988)
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: decolonization and the reordering of French
culture (1995)
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration. A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (1989)
Daniel Pick, War Machine: the rationalization of slaughter in the modern age (1993)
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece. The Experience of Occupation 1941-44 (1993)
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998)
Nick Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: radical and socialist critics, 18661914 (1994)
Nick Stargardt, Witnesses of War: children’s lives under the Nazis (2005)
Orlando Figes, PeasantRussia, civil war: the Volga countryside in revolution, 191721 (1989)
Orlando Figes, A people’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996)
Week 2. conquering the market
What makes a successful history book as far as the wider market is concerned? Can
historians please their academic peers and a general readership at the same time? Is
there a danger that glitz and glamour can get the better of scholarship? Are there
differences of approach between academic and non-academic historians?
best-sellers by academic historians:
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)
James Sharpe, Dick Turpin. The Myth of the English Highwayman (2004)
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987)
Charles Tilly, Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons (1984)
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 900-1990 (1990)
Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989-90 (1991)
Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1998); new version, The
Duchess (2008)
Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (2000)
Timothy Garton Ash, The File: a personal history (1997)
Timothy Garton Ash, History of the present: essays, sketches and despatches from
Europe in the 1990s (2000)
Tony Judt, Postwar; a history of Europe since 1945 (2005)
Niall Ferguson, Empire: how Britain made the world (2003)
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: the Rise and fall of the American Empire (2004)
Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2003)
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in power, 1933-39 (2006)
best-sellers by non-academic historians
Not all history books are written by professional historians. Do non-professional
historians write books that are less boring, or just less scholarly?
Richard Marius, Martin Luther. The Christian between God and Death (1999) and
compare Heiko Oberman (distinguished academic historian)’s bestseller, Luther. Man
between God and the Devil (1989)
Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: the third Balkan War (1992)
Bunting, Madeleine, The model occupation : the Channel Islands under German rule,
1940-1945 (1995)
Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (1998)
Anthony Beevor, The Downfall of Berlin (2002)
Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation (1994)
Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: the journey (2001), or any other of her books
Carmen Callil, Bad Faith. A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland (2006)
II Microscopes and Telescopes
Week 3. zooming in: microhistory
what counts as microhistory? What does the microhistorical approach seek to
achieve? Has it been successful? Can the ‘micro’- stand for society in general?
Peter Burke, History and Social History (1992), ch on microhistory, 38-43
Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (1975, 1980)
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other episodes in French Cultural
History (1985), 79-104
Norbert Schindler, ‘The Mill at Bluntau: a family of poachers in the late eighteenthcentury Salzburg countryside, German History 17/1 (1999)
Merry Wiesner-Hanks, The Marvelous Hairy Girls: the Gonzales sisters and their
world (2009)
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: a woman in world history (2007)
Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British
Nation’, Past & Present 102 (1984)
Tim Tackett, When the King took flight (2003)
Alain Corbin, TheLife of an Unknown: the Rediscovered life of a clog-maker in
nineteenth-century France (2001)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police battalion 101 and the Final
Solution (1992)
Jan Gross, Neighbours. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,
Poland, 1941 (2003)
Week 4. zooming out: macrohistory
What does the macrohistorical approach seek to achieve? Can it say anything new?
Are there risks of over-generalisation?
Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1650 (2009)
H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reorientation of European Social
Thought, 1890-1930 (1959)
Theda Skocpol, States and social revolutions; a comparative analysis of France,
Russia and China (1979)
Charles Tilly, Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons (1984)
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 900-1990 (1990)
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (2004)
John Darwin, After Tamerlane. The rise and fall of Global Empires (2007)
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2007)
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1979)
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties. Cultural Revolution in France, Italy and the United
States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998)
III People and Causes
How do historians relate human agency/the biographical approach to the wider
context and deep-seated causes when explaining historical events?
Week 5. individual biography
Is there a difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ biography? How do they construct the
individual and relate them to their historical context?
Jo Burr Margadant ed., The New Biography. Performing Femininity in NineteenthCentury France (2000), 1-32
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World. How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (2004)
Robert J.W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: a Study in Intellectual History, 15761612 (1984)
Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds (1996)
Lucy Riall, Garibaldi. Invention of a Hero 2007)
Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self (2002
Michel Foucault ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and
my brother (1978)
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2009)
Roy Foster, Yeats: a life (1997, 2003)
Kershaw, Hitler (2 vols, 1998, 2000)
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes (1983, 2004)
Catherine Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986)
Alexander Masters, Stuart: a life backwards (2005)
Week 6. collective biography/prosopography
How have historians written about groups of individuals? What kind of groups, and in
what way?
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930, 1961)
R.R Palmer, Twelve who ruled: the year of the Terror in the French Revolution
(1941;2005)
George Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows who cut the hay (1956)
Tim Tackett, Becoming a revolutionary. The deputies of the French National
Assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture (1996)
Natalie Zemon Davis, Women at the Margins. Three seventeenth-century lives (1995)
Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation. Italy 1968 (1996)
IV Plots and Problems
Some history writing tries to solve problems – why did this happen? whereas
other history tells a story – how did this happen? Look at ways in which historians
have tried to do this. Is narrative history ‘old hat’ or has it been revived in
different ways? What narrative techniques have historians used?Is the distinction
between problem and plot a valid one?
Week 7. problems
Mark Roseman, The Past in Hiding (2000)
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (2001)
Robert Gildea, Marianne in chains: in search of the German occupation, 1940-1945
(2002)
Charles Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies. The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer
and psychopath (2007)
Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (2007)
John House and Neil McMaster, Paris 1961. Algerians, state terror and memory
(2006)
the books by Jan Gross and Christopher Browning (above) may also be read in this
way
Week 8. plots/narrative techniques
Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat. The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global
World (2008)
Richard Price, Alabi’s World (1990)
Simon Schama, Citizens (1989)
Simon Schama, Dead certainties (1991)
John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (London, 1926, 1932, 1961)
William Shirer, The Rise and fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany
(1960)
Alistair Horne, To lose a battle. France. 1940 (1969)
Niall Ferguson, Virtual History (1997)