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Applying the definition of "historiography" is a little murky to me, but the single book that I would recommend for the assignment as quoted is The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. See http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/t...ry.single.html
I am having a hard time selecting a book for the final essay of my first year of university. The brief is:
I am really unsure what book to focus on. I was considering The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan but I don't know if that had enough of an impact on historiography to fulfil the brief and I would rather write something on a topic that interests me more, such as political history.
I was wondering if you could give me some suggestions of books that changed/influenced historical debate. Some topics I am interested in are the Cold War, JFK's assassination, and the Vietnam War, but I would like suggestions outside of these areas too.
Thanks!
I suggest Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American History." This book had a huge impact on the study and understanding of American history. If you're not interested in the topic, look for other books that significantly changed the study and interpretation of history by historians.
Historiography has more to do with how historians have studied a certain topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. It's more about the methodology rather than the actual history itself. Maybe that's what he means, if that's not it then no clue.
I am having a hard time selecting a book for the final essay of my first year of university. The brief is:
I am really unsure what book to focus on. I was considering The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan but I don't know if that had enough of an impact on historiography to fulfil the brief and I would rather write something on a topic that interests me more, such as political history.
I was wondering if you could give me some suggestions of books that changed/influenced historical debate. Some topics I am interested in are the Cold War, JFK's assassination, and the Vietnam War, but I would like suggestions outside of these areas too.
Thanks!
"The People's History of the United States", by Howard Zinn, is a good place to begin.
Historiography has more to do with how historians have studied a certain topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. It's more about the methodology rather than the actual history itself. Maybe that's what he means, if that's not it then no clue.
I know what historiography means. I was wondering what was meant by the book not being allowed to be "actually part of history." Historiography is the history of history, thus certainly part of history.
You could take any of the books I listed in my first post and give them a historiographical treatment, as in comparing "Uncle Tom's Cabin's" portrayal of slave life to other documents on the same subject which were published in the same era. You could then examine works which followed Stowe's novel to search for its possible influence on the ways slavery was now being described. That sort of thing.
I don't think that the assignment is to find a book already devoted to historiography and work up the historiography of that book. That wouldn't make much sense.
I teach history at a college, so I know what you're talking about.
Here are some historiographically significant titles that I can think of off the top of my head:
American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan. (a classic and still the current interpretation of the transition from servitude to slavery) Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner (now a classic in the re-interpretation of Reconstruction) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood (both this and the above are still titans in the Revolutionary era historiography) Changes in the Land by William Cronon (essentially started environmental history)
There are others and I know I'm leaving out female authors which is going to bother me now since I can't think of any off the top of my head. Maybe something by Linda Kerber.
You mentioned the Cold War. Search for The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. I recall he basically claimed to have discovered the only true interpretation or something like that.
The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell The Best And The Brightest by David Halberstam Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Excellent choices.
I'd add The Death of a President by William Manchester
I'd add The Death of a President by William Manchester
I'd put Manchester's book into the category of "Historical fiction." It's a big book. It sold a lot of copies. It added almost nothing significant to the knowledge of the events it described.
The OP is giving a "big picture" reply. From the standpoint of American history, at least, one would take a narrow viewpoint and look at seminal works that reflected fundamental changes in "schools of thought" in certain sub-fields of American history. For example, the "conflict school of thought" which is closely associated with Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (1913) was attacked in the '60s by historians, such as Richard Hofstadter in his book, The Progressive Historians (1968). This new school of historians were were called Consensus Historians. That view was attacked from the left in many sub-fields by "New Left" Historians, such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein. My own favorite is the entire body of work by Bernard Bailyn and his students who showed how slow, tortuous and ironic a path the American colonists followed in both word and deed in breaking lose from their English roots and creating a unique American political tradition.
But the best book of American history I have ever read is Anne Hyde's, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (2011), who did away with the romantic story of the pre-Civil War settlement of the American West by focusing on a small number of entrepreneurs and how they adapted their economic objectives (for a while) to the complex situation on the ground and the Native American cultures which surrounded them.
I'd put Manchester's book into the category of "Historical fiction." It's a big book. It sold a lot of copies. It added almost nothing significant to the knowledge of the events it described.
Manchester was the first, and only, author who interviewed Jackie Kennedy about the events in Dallas for a book. Manchester had access to Bobby Kennedy, the doctors at Parkland, the pilot of Air Force one and the head of the Arlington burial detail. It was the fist extensively researched book that covered the assassination. It was ground-breaking.
Why do you consider it historical fiction?
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Manchester was the first, and only, author who interviewed Jackie Kennedy about the events in Dallas for a book. Manchester had access to Bobby Kennedy, the doctors at Parkland, the pilot of Air Force one and the head of the Arlington burial detail. It was the fist extensively researched book that covered the assassination. It was ground-breaking.
