Style in History

by Peter Gay

In this original and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt--great historians who were also great stylists--Peter Gay demonstrates that style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight.

Genres: History

Hardcover

First published July 1, 1974

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book I ever bought at Yale. I picked up a remaindered copy for $1.98 at the old Yale Co-Op the day I arrived in New Haven and sat in my rooms the rest of the afternoon reading. I still have that copy, all these years later. "Style in History" is a series of essays on great historians--- Gibbon, Burckhardt, Macaulay, Ranke ---and how their choice of style reflected their views of history, politics, and the world. Wonderful writing, and a wonderful book on how we tell ourselves about the past and how "History" is done.

[Daniel Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a survey of 5 of the top historical minds of the last centuries. The treatment of Leopold von Ranke was particularly well written. Gay makes the most boring people in the world (historians) come to life.