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Thinking About History
What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History , a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.
Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.
Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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February 23, 2021
It seems like there are 2 kinds of "thinking about history" books: argument driven ones that stake out a position on the nature/proper role of the discipline and sort of "grand tour" books that explore the nature and evolution of the discipline without staking out hard position. Both can be valuable, and Maza's is a particularly valuable version of the second. She guides you through six big questions about how history has been written, thought about, and debated, focusing on who has written it, whom/what/where have they written about, how it is produced, whether it should be focus on causes or meanings, and the extent to which it can achieve objectivity. Each discussion is incredibly valuable and most of them are interesting, which isn't always easy when your accounting for intra-historian debates. I especially appreciated that Maza gives straightforward, accessible examples to illustrate sometimes abstract questions; she has a real talent for that. Probably the most valuable aspect of this book is the ability to see yourself and your own attitudes within the larger flow of how historians have thought, spoken, and written over time. I know every reviewer is probably saying this, but I wish I had read this at the start of grad school! Of course, it hadn't been written yet.
Maza advances a few micro-arguments in this book. She portrays history as a hybrid discipline in many ways: it is built on hard evidence but requires interpretation and narrative ability, it is both specialized and relatively easily accessed by outsiders because of its mostly straightforward methodologies, it is academic but highly public and probably more relevant to culture, politics, etc than any other field, it is a little bit social science and a little bit humanities. Moreover, she portrays historians as a step or two removed from theory and intellectual trends. We are rooted to contexts, to how things were at a specific time and place(s), so we tend to eschew abstraction, although new theories and methodologies are often compatible with our work. I think she's more optimistic about the ability of
I think where I departed from Maza the most was on the issues of truth and objectivity. She seemed to think that the linguistic turn, post-modernism, and other trends that attacked the notion of objective, scientific history . Of course, the idea that our positionality and the context of our own writing don't affect the history we produce is ludicrous, and we will never fully capture the past accurately; Ranke and positivism aren't coming back. However, through collective effort, peer review, and constant debate we can narrow things down pretty well and create a basic factual narrative and a range of plausible interpretations/explanations. There may be orthodox-revisionist debates all over history, but those actually narrow the field of explanation considerably and are often more resolvable than their advocates think. The postmodern challenge really just boils down to common sense and humility. When I read Maza's examples about how PM theory has shaped some historical work, I just kept thinking: you really didn't need the theory to say this! Of course, for instance, historical documents are not unfiltered, unbiased, objective windows into "how things really were." On the flip side, they can tell us about more than just discourses of the time period, especially if corroborated with other sources. I have ranted elsewhere about this, but historians need the concept of truth and objectivity at least as goals and standards because we also need the concept of lies and inaccuracy. If anything we need these things to maintain a shred of legitimacy with the general reader and student, who wants to know what happened and why without delving into too much epistemology. So I definitely come down on the side that PM theory, critical theory, and other mostly French stuff may provide some methodological benefits and minor new insights, it hurts the discipline in terms of good writing, intellectual intelligibility, and public credibility. Still, Maza is a perfectly objective (see what I did there) guide to these debates.
My last thought about this excellent book is about what kind of class I would assign it to. It isn't a "here is how to write your first real research paper" kind of book, so I would probably not assign all of it to an undergrad research seminar. The chapters on the basic evolution of historiography I might assign to this kind of seminar. It is definitely a great book for incoming graduate students to get a feel for the discipline's history and current state. Still, my feeling is that the average undergrad would find it overwhelming and/or boring if they've never read a similar, and possibly more introductory, book before.
Maza advances a few micro-arguments in this book. She portrays history as a hybrid discipline in many ways: it is built on hard evidence but requires interpretation and narrative ability, it is both specialized and relatively easily accessed by outsiders because of its mostly straightforward methodologies, it is academic but highly public and probably more relevant to culture, politics, etc than any other field, it is a little bit social science and a little bit humanities. Moreover, she portrays historians as a step or two removed from theory and intellectual trends. We are rooted to contexts, to how things were at a specific time and place(s), so we tend to eschew abstraction, although new theories and methodologies are often compatible with our work. I think she's more optimistic about the ability of
I think where I departed from Maza the most was on the issues of truth and objectivity. She seemed to think that the linguistic turn, post-modernism, and other trends that attacked the notion of objective, scientific history . Of course, the idea that our positionality and the context of our own writing don't affect the history we produce is ludicrous, and we will never fully capture the past accurately; Ranke and positivism aren't coming back. However, through collective effort, peer review, and constant debate we can narrow things down pretty well and create a basic factual narrative and a range of plausible interpretations/explanations. There may be orthodox-revisionist debates all over history, but those actually narrow the field of explanation considerably and are often more resolvable than their advocates think. The postmodern challenge really just boils down to common sense and humility. When I read Maza's examples about how PM theory has shaped some historical work, I just kept thinking: you really didn't need the theory to say this! Of course, for instance, historical documents are not unfiltered, unbiased, objective windows into "how things really were." On the flip side, they can tell us about more than just discourses of the time period, especially if corroborated with other sources. I have ranted elsewhere about this, but historians need the concept of truth and objectivity at least as goals and standards because we also need the concept of lies and inaccuracy. If anything we need these things to maintain a shred of legitimacy with the general reader and student, who wants to know what happened and why without delving into too much epistemology. So I definitely come down on the side that PM theory, critical theory, and other mostly French stuff may provide some methodological benefits and minor new insights, it hurts the discipline in terms of good writing, intellectual intelligibility, and public credibility. Still, Maza is a perfectly objective (see what I did there) guide to these debates.
My last thought about this excellent book is about what kind of class I would assign it to. It isn't a "here is how to write your first real research paper" kind of book, so I would probably not assign all of it to an undergrad research seminar. The chapters on the basic evolution of historiography I might assign to this kind of seminar. It is definitely a great book for incoming graduate students to get a feel for the discipline's history and current state. Still, my feeling is that the average undergrad would find it overwhelming and/or boring if they've never read a similar, and possibly more introductory, book before.
May 13, 2024
"تنطوي نظرية التاريخ المثالي على التأكيد بأن الإنسان محدد من الناحيتين؛ الاجتماعية والتاريخية، فلا بد أن يكون هذا التاريخ الأبدي ذا بعدَيْن؛ البعد التجريبي الذي يتضمن نظام العلاقات الاجتماعية التي يشترط وجودها في أي عصر تاريخي؛ والبعد النظري الذي يتضمن نظرية القوانين التاريخية التي يقوم عليها تطور ذلك المضمون التجريبي." — فلسفة التاريخ عند فيكو | نظرية المعرفة التاريخية.
ماهو التاريخ؟ و مالذي يميز مجال التاريخ ؟ وهل هناك منهجية محددة في البحث و القراءة؟ ما هو الفرق بين المؤرخون و علماء الاجتماع والإنسانيات في كتابة التاريخ وصياغته؟ وهل أدوارهم تكميلية؟ "وفي حين تختلف أهدافهم، فإن كل نهج يلعب دورا قيما في فهم التاريخ. يوفر المؤرخون الأساس، ويقدم علماء الاجتماع سياقًا اجتماعيًا أوسع، ويتفاعل الأشخاص العاديون مع الماضي على المستوى الشخصي."
وهل على الباحث الانطلاق من نظرية تاريخية محددة في البحث والاستقصاء حول مادة أو حدث تاريخي ما؟
«التاريخ لا يفعل شيئا، إنه لا “يملك ثروة هائلة”، و”لا يشن أي معارك”. إنه الإنسان، الانسان الحقيقي، الانسان الحي هو من يقوم بكل ذلك، إنه هو من يمتلك ويحارب؛ إن “التاريخ” ليس شخصا منفصلا، يستخدم الإنسان وسيلة لتحقيق أهدافه الخاصة؛ التاريخ ليس سوى نشاط الانسان الذي يسعى لتحقيق أهدافه» —ماركس وإنجلز، العائلة المقدسة، الفصل السادس.
يبحث الكتاب في عدد من المواضيع المهمة؛ كالقومية وكيف نشأت ؟ وفي تاريخ الأفكار وفلسفة العلم ؟ وكذا عن موضوعة " كيف ينتج التاريخ"، ما بعد الحداثة والتاريخ ، وأيضاً يتقصى حول بعض القصص والأحداث التاريخية وهل هي حقائق أم أخيولات ، وكيف نعرف التمييز حقاً؟ - هناك دائمًا مستوى معين من التفسير في الروايات التاريخية. يساعد التعرف على التحيزات المحتملة في المصادر والكتابة التاريخية في تكوين فهم أكثر شمولاً. ف غالباً ما يُكتب التاريخ من وجهة نظر المنتصرين أو الثقافات المهيمنة. ومن المهم أن نأخذ في الاعتبار وجهات النظر المختلفة والأصوات المهمشة للحصول على صورة أكثر اكتمالا. يعتمد المؤرخون على مصادر مختلفة، مثل الوثائق والتحف وحتى الأعمال الفنية، لإعادة بناء الماضي. وتقييم مصداقية هذه المصادر أمر بالغ الأهمية.
هذا الكتاب ثقيل في مادته، لكن الترجمة رائعة !
ماهو التاريخ؟ و مالذي يميز مجال التاريخ ؟ وهل هناك منهجية محددة في البحث و القراءة؟ ما هو الفرق بين المؤرخون و علماء الاجتماع والإنسانيات في كتابة التاريخ وصياغته؟ وهل أدوارهم تكميلية؟ "وفي حين تختلف أهدافهم، فإن كل نهج يلعب دورا قيما في فهم التاريخ. يوفر المؤرخون الأساس، ويقدم علماء الاجتماع سياقًا اجتماعيًا أوسع، ويتفاعل الأشخاص العاديون مع الماضي على المستوى الشخصي."
وهل على الباحث الانطلاق من نظرية تاريخية محددة في البحث والاستقصاء حول مادة أو حدث تاريخي ما؟
«التاريخ لا يفعل شيئا، إنه لا “يملك ثروة هائلة”، و”لا يشن أي معارك”. إنه الإنسان، الانسان الحقيقي، الانسان الحي هو من يقوم بكل ذلك، إنه هو من يمتلك ويحارب؛ إن “التاريخ” ليس شخصا منفصلا، يستخدم الإنسان وسيلة لتحقيق أهدافه الخاصة؛ التاريخ ليس سوى نشاط الانسان الذي يسعى لتحقيق أهدافه» —ماركس وإنجلز، العائلة المقدسة، الفصل السادس.
يبحث الكتاب في عدد من المواضيع المهمة؛ كالقومية وكيف نشأت ؟ وفي تاريخ الأفكار وفلسفة العلم ؟ وكذا عن موضوعة " كيف ينتج التاريخ"، ما بعد الحداثة والتاريخ ، وأيضاً يتقصى حول بعض القصص والأحداث التاريخية وهل هي حقائق أم أخيولات ، وكيف نعرف التمييز حقاً؟ - هناك دائمًا مستوى معين من التفسير في الروايات التاريخية. يساعد التعرف على التحيزات المحتملة في المصادر والكتابة التاريخية في تكوين فهم أكثر شمولاً. ف غالباً ما يُكتب التاريخ من وجهة نظر المنتصرين أو الثقافات المهيمنة. ومن المهم أن نأخذ في الاعتبار وجهات النظر المختلفة والأصوات المهمشة للحصول على صورة أكثر اكتمالا. يعتمد المؤرخون على مصادر مختلفة، مثل الوثائق والتحف وحتى الأعمال الفنية، لإعادة بناء الماضي. وتقييم مصداقية هذه المصادر أمر بالغ الأهمية.
هذا الكتاب ثقيل في مادته، لكن الترجمة رائعة !
May 14, 2018
I wish I had had this book when I started grad school. Most of what is in here I knew, having worked in the field for well over a decade now. I did find gems that I will sprinkle into my own teaching. This would be a great reader for an advanced undergrad history seminar or a first year grad student seminar to introduce majors themes and topics in the field.
January 11, 2021
I read this as part of a class on historical research methods and found it very enlightening about historical scholarship. The book introduces many approaches to history and their contexts in an effort to get readers to really think about the questions history should be asking. I found the narrative to be engaging and not overly academic in tone. I'm glad that I read it and now have more of a sense of the overall trends and questions that historical scholarship has and will continue to cover.
December 4, 2023
4.5 stars
this was really really good!! i read it for my historical methods course, and i think it should be required reading for every history major. thinking about history’s place in current life, and discussing the politics of history is an integral part of the discipline and i’m glad i got to learn more about it.
this was really really good!! i read it for my historical methods course, and i think it should be required reading for every history major. thinking about history’s place in current life, and discussing the politics of history is an integral part of the discipline and i’m glad i got to learn more about it.
October 4, 2025
For uni :P Actually, an enjoyable read, which is rare in this establishment.
September 20, 2024
4,5 stars; what a refreshing read/listen; a kind of meta-history writing; how to go about telling the stories of humanity and the author succeeds brilliantly; the various angles of history telling are explored, leaving me inspired to take up the pen and get started.
Read
September 17, 2022i love reading books for class
reading books for class is an activity that is enjoyable for me
reading books for class is an activity that is enjoyable for me
May 16, 2021
A fantastic book about how the academic discipline of history has dramatically changed over the last few centuries.
I find this kind of thing fascinating and important, because a lot of the things we believe about the world we believe because of history, and because history shows concretely how epistemology works. We piece together from historical artifacts and texts an idea of "why" and "how" something happened and we try to tell a story based on it. That means there is a lot of room for error and that we know a lot less than we often think we do.
So I was eager to see how Maza laid out the current scholarly scene. Maza is, if not postmodern, at least open to the sexual revolution, and it comes out in the way she describes history opening up through gay history.
However, there is a lot to value. In the first few chapters she explains how the subject of history expanded from just focusing on elite white men, the 20th century saw historians expand history to focus on social inferiors of all sorts (women, racial minorities, lower classes). In the second, she describes how history moved from focusing on nations as the defining entities beyond boundaries (influenced in part, interestingly by globalism). We learned, in the 20th century, not only to slice the pie differently, but we became more conscious (through Kuhn in part) about the fact that slicing up pies was slightly arbitrary and that history could be a creative act, fraught with peril.
In the latter half of the book, which I paid more attention to, she shows how good historiography got, and also how pretentious it was in the 19th and early 20th century. Historians sometimes aped the lure of science and simply saw their work as reading the sources and putting things together. They are documentarians, nothing more. The 20th century, being the home of postmodernism, made this laughable and showed that history had a lot more in common with other more creative disciplines. To tell a history is to tell a story and that means deciding what questions to use to frame the endeavor and what things to exclude and what things to hypothesize about. As Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes shows, history books can lie or misrepresent things by not reading sources carefully enough.
Now, the part that particularly interested me was the chapter on causes and meanings. The gist of it is that, even though historians still look for the causes of events, they are more likely to be interested in describing what the meaning of an event was to the original actors. Since events are multi-causal it is actually immensely difficult to know what caused World War II or the Great Depression. It's not impossible, and some things are obviously more relevant than others, but knowing exactly what caused what event is kind of like asking what caused the person right next to us to do what they did. We can know certain things, but a lot less than we sometimes think.
An important point though that Maza makes is that historical agents are obviously influenced by their culture and some of their actions are predictable. But predictable does not mean that their actions are determined by their tribe or class status.
Now, part of postmodern influence was realizing that we are very context-driven creatures. This means that when we are reading a historical source, we often don't have the hundred unspoken assumptions about the context that would have been apparent to the people involved. For instance, up until the advent of modernity, most reading was aloud, says Maza. This means that when we look at a text or an account about someone reading, we should try to keep in mind that this is how the text would have been processed and not in the super-private way that we read our novels in our bedrooms.
Anyway, another reason to give a cheer for fallibility and to not overstate one's case about what caused this or that event, based entirely on sources. This is a competent book: put it alongside Writing Ancient History to understand not just the "what" but the "how" of your world.
I find this kind of thing fascinating and important, because a lot of the things we believe about the world we believe because of history, and because history shows concretely how epistemology works. We piece together from historical artifacts and texts an idea of "why" and "how" something happened and we try to tell a story based on it. That means there is a lot of room for error and that we know a lot less than we often think we do.
So I was eager to see how Maza laid out the current scholarly scene. Maza is, if not postmodern, at least open to the sexual revolution, and it comes out in the way she describes history opening up through gay history.
However, there is a lot to value. In the first few chapters she explains how the subject of history expanded from just focusing on elite white men, the 20th century saw historians expand history to focus on social inferiors of all sorts (women, racial minorities, lower classes). In the second, she describes how history moved from focusing on nations as the defining entities beyond boundaries (influenced in part, interestingly by globalism). We learned, in the 20th century, not only to slice the pie differently, but we became more conscious (through Kuhn in part) about the fact that slicing up pies was slightly arbitrary and that history could be a creative act, fraught with peril.
In the latter half of the book, which I paid more attention to, she shows how good historiography got, and also how pretentious it was in the 19th and early 20th century. Historians sometimes aped the lure of science and simply saw their work as reading the sources and putting things together. They are documentarians, nothing more. The 20th century, being the home of postmodernism, made this laughable and showed that history had a lot more in common with other more creative disciplines. To tell a history is to tell a story and that means deciding what questions to use to frame the endeavor and what things to exclude and what things to hypothesize about. As Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes shows, history books can lie or misrepresent things by not reading sources carefully enough.
Now, the part that particularly interested me was the chapter on causes and meanings. The gist of it is that, even though historians still look for the causes of events, they are more likely to be interested in describing what the meaning of an event was to the original actors. Since events are multi-causal it is actually immensely difficult to know what caused World War II or the Great Depression. It's not impossible, and some things are obviously more relevant than others, but knowing exactly what caused what event is kind of like asking what caused the person right next to us to do what they did. We can know certain things, but a lot less than we sometimes think.
An important point though that Maza makes is that historical agents are obviously influenced by their culture and some of their actions are predictable. But predictable does not mean that their actions are determined by their tribe or class status.
Now, part of postmodern influence was realizing that we are very context-driven creatures. This means that when we are reading a historical source, we often don't have the hundred unspoken assumptions about the context that would have been apparent to the people involved. For instance, up until the advent of modernity, most reading was aloud, says Maza. This means that when we look at a text or an account about someone reading, we should try to keep in mind that this is how the text would have been processed and not in the super-private way that we read our novels in our bedrooms.
Anyway, another reason to give a cheer for fallibility and to not overstate one's case about what caused this or that event, based entirely on sources. This is a competent book: put it alongside Writing Ancient History to understand not just the "what" but the "how" of your world.
February 22, 2024
Sarah Maza's "Thinking About History" is a densely packed, concise overview of the transformations of historical thought in the public forum and academia, primarily focused on the West. The essays' scopes do include treatments of more global concerns, but primarily through the lens of the West's increasing emphasis on grappling with global concerns.
I picked up this book from Chicago's Public Library after seeing it recommended in a thread on the AskHistorians subreddit. Historical works and surveys have come to comprise a healthy portion of my reading diet these past few years and I wanted to expand my sense of where a given author might be situated epistemologically.
My clumsy 5am review notwithstanding, readers with at least a few years of popular history reading under their belts would deepen their appreciation of historical research and narratives by picking up this engaging outlay of the discipline.
I picked up this book from Chicago's Public Library after seeing it recommended in a thread on the AskHistorians subreddit. Historical works and surveys have come to comprise a healthy portion of my reading diet these past few years and I wanted to expand my sense of where a given author might be situated epistemologically.
My clumsy 5am review notwithstanding, readers with at least a few years of popular history reading under their belts would deepen their appreciation of historical research and narratives by picking up this engaging outlay of the discipline.
September 13, 2025
i found this book sooo interesting and honestly i think every historian should read this. i love a book that's more train of thought than anything and i feel like i really get her perspective on history as a genre. i'd like to reread it when i'm not crashing out over a deadline though :3
December 18, 2024
Finished my class! Did I read this whole thing?? Maybe not
December 18, 2024
Dit tentamen ga ik nailen. Banger van een studieboek
August 24, 2025
back at it!
October 22, 2025
As someone who is about to graduate university, I'm trying to get into more historical reading and invest myself out of personal interest. I was recommended this book by a friend of a friend who knows much more about the field than I do. I definitely am very limited in my historical knowledge and my repertoire of historical thinking, so this was a really useful foundation for that.
It did a really wonderful job of demonstrating how multifaceted history is as a discipline. I appreciated how the chapters were categorized (especially as opposed to a straight chronology), and I loved the specific historical anectodes used to demonstrate concepts and ideas. It felt very accessible in terms of prerequisite knowledge and covered so much ground.
I will say that it is an incredibly dense book and there is no chance I retained all of it. However, as the conclusory chapter puts it, the goal of the book was not necessarily to capture everything in detail, especially not at this stage in my reading, but rather to "sharpen readers appetite and skills for learning and arguing about the past in all its form." For me, it was a success.
It did a really wonderful job of demonstrating how multifaceted history is as a discipline. I appreciated how the chapters were categorized (especially as opposed to a straight chronology), and I loved the specific historical anectodes used to demonstrate concepts and ideas. It felt very accessible in terms of prerequisite knowledge and covered so much ground.
I will say that it is an incredibly dense book and there is no chance I retained all of it. However, as the conclusory chapter puts it, the goal of the book was not necessarily to capture everything in detail, especially not at this stage in my reading, but rather to "sharpen readers appetite and skills for learning and arguing about the past in all its form." For me, it was a success.
October 31, 2024
This is an academic text that read for my Intro to the Masters (History) Program at PSU. It surveys many of the top texts that historians have written and what their contribution to the field is. For that reason, it is a pretty valuable text. It also looks at some of the trends/changes that have taken place in recent historical scholarship. My favorite part of the text is when Maza looks at the differences between popular history written for the masses and academic history written by those in academia. The academic history is written with an agenda too! Not the most exciting text but now that I am supposed to be more of an academic than a popular history person, I guess I better learn to like it!
September 11, 2025
A better book than From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography, but perhaps a worse introduction to the topic. Maza is certainly the better writer, but I think Popkin has the better book for a novice
Side note, why are historians of French history writing these Historiographic books
Side note, why are historians of French history writing these Historiographic books
January 31, 2024
A book that started off slowly but got better throughout. The early chapters constantly shoe-horning in feminism got tedious quickly but fortunately it didn’t last too long. Some of the stories based on piecing together the everyday lives of everyday people was fantastic and certainly was where the book excelled most.
February 19, 2020
Good overview of the discipline of history - what it is exactly, major trends in the field, important works. Maza gives a nod to popular historians (as opposed to academic ones) but by and large the work is mainly about the academy.
February 3, 2021
A very thought provoking book that comprehensively addresses the many ways history is made, the many questions historians ask (or should ask), and the many ways historiography has evolved. I highly recommend this book for anyone contemplating a career in history.
September 8, 2025
this would've been so useful when i first started grad school instead of just getting thrown in the deep end of theories and instead of being told to just google what Saussurian structuralism is by a professor who couldnt even come up with his own original syllabus (iykyk)
June 11, 2023
mandatory reading for anyone who teaches History
November 21, 2023
SO EXCELLENT!! I love learning about the discipline I am studying!!! Maza gives so much context to historiographical trends and also breaks down how history compares to other disciplines. It was very readable and interesting and gave me lots to mull over.
November 23, 2021
This book makes you question about the existence of history in whatever form it exists. A very convincing but critical approach to consuming history.
Interesting book.
Interesting book.
June 12, 2024
"Historians construct narratives that provide social groups - national, regional, ethnic, and other - with a collective identity, in the same way that we construct our personal identity by telling ourselves the story of our life."
This book was recommended to me as I began my ascent towards graduate school, and I have never been happier to pick up a book that my professor recommended. Thinking about History by Sarah Maza explores how the study of history has changed since the rise of the profession. As an aspiring historian, this book really opened my eyes to how much change there has been recently in the profession and how that has allowed for more representation in the field. As a woman, it can be disheartening at times to be in a male-dominated profession, but this book showcases how rapidly the profession is changing and how there is increasingly more space for women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and any other marginalized group. The only issue I had with this book is it took me forever to read, but I don't read Kindle books that often, so I am going to blame it on that. As always, thank you for listening.
This book was recommended to me as I began my ascent towards graduate school, and I have never been happier to pick up a book that my professor recommended. Thinking about History by Sarah Maza explores how the study of history has changed since the rise of the profession. As an aspiring historian, this book really opened my eyes to how much change there has been recently in the profession and how that has allowed for more representation in the field. As a woman, it can be disheartening at times to be in a male-dominated profession, but this book showcases how rapidly the profession is changing and how there is increasingly more space for women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and any other marginalized group. The only issue I had with this book is it took me forever to read, but I don't read Kindle books that often, so I am going to blame it on that. As always, thank you for listening.
August 24, 2024
Could've been way shorter. Some examples are factually wrong.
April 21, 2022
Thesis-evasive, but a great launching point for discussions! HIST 3301 in a couple hundred pages! Enjoyed tremendously!
January 21, 2022
Consider the slime toy. It is obviously an entity, a thing, right in front of you there it is. But as soon as you try and grab it, it slips out of your hand. Try and describe it–or worse, explain it–and you quickly run out of words. Or perhaps you find yourself forced to use too many words, and in the end you stop talking out of exasperation with yourself and the thing you are trying to define.
History is like a slime toy. They are both functioning contradictions. A slime toy is solid and liquid. It is slippery and dry. It is pleasant and unpleasant. Meanwhile, history is the past and the study of that past. It is a story and the creation of that story. It is a science and a liberal art. It is an artifact and a text. It is concrete and abstract. It is physical and ephemeral. It is popular and esoteric. It is the pursuit of the amateur and the expert.
Because of its amorphous nature, everyone has an opinion on history, and everyone thinks they can teach and write history. However, if we take a closer look at what history is–if we try and investigate that slime toy before it slips out of our hand–we will soon discover that history is a complicated thing with a long and complicated history of its own.
In her excellent book Thinking about History (The Chicago University Press, 2017), Sarah Maza, professor of history at Northwestern University, addresses the issues of the amorphousness of history and how that came to be. Divided into six chapters, Thinking about History discusses the who, what, where, and how of history production, as well as the-chicken-and-the-egg debate of historical causes and meanings, and the rise and fall of historical objectivity. The book is a fresh take on the history of history (historiography) that successfully breaks down the inherent Eurocentrism of the field. In doing so, it demonstrates how the parameters set up for what history is and should be are inherently northern European, Protestant, patriarchal, and imperialist, which still to this day actively disqualifies the histories of societies considered outside of the so-called “West” and groups considered not part of the mainstream.
Historiography might seem like a niche subject, but it is at the core of the polarization that we see in society today. At the heart of the so-called culture wars is a fight over history: who gets to write history; who should be included in that history; and what should that history be about.
As Maza demonstrates in her book, historians themselves have a lot to answer for in this mess. It is because of the biases, prejudices, and performative objectivity of historians in the past that we have ended up where we are. But, at the same time, it is also made clear that the key to solving the problem of polarization lies with the culprits.
In her conclusion, Maza states that for “the past to serve its best purpose we must not freeze it in place, we must argue about it” because history “becomes useless or boring at best, and dangerous at worst, when it jells into consensual orthodoxy of any sort.” Even though history studies the past, it does so in response to the needs of the present-day, and as such, history is one of the most important subjects we can study.
For history to be able to address the issues of today, we historians need to learn about our own sordid history. A very good place to start is with Sarah Maza’s Thinking about History.
History is like a slime toy. They are both functioning contradictions. A slime toy is solid and liquid. It is slippery and dry. It is pleasant and unpleasant. Meanwhile, history is the past and the study of that past. It is a story and the creation of that story. It is a science and a liberal art. It is an artifact and a text. It is concrete and abstract. It is physical and ephemeral. It is popular and esoteric. It is the pursuit of the amateur and the expert.
Because of its amorphous nature, everyone has an opinion on history, and everyone thinks they can teach and write history. However, if we take a closer look at what history is–if we try and investigate that slime toy before it slips out of our hand–we will soon discover that history is a complicated thing with a long and complicated history of its own.
In her excellent book Thinking about History (The Chicago University Press, 2017), Sarah Maza, professor of history at Northwestern University, addresses the issues of the amorphousness of history and how that came to be. Divided into six chapters, Thinking about History discusses the who, what, where, and how of history production, as well as the-chicken-and-the-egg debate of historical causes and meanings, and the rise and fall of historical objectivity. The book is a fresh take on the history of history (historiography) that successfully breaks down the inherent Eurocentrism of the field. In doing so, it demonstrates how the parameters set up for what history is and should be are inherently northern European, Protestant, patriarchal, and imperialist, which still to this day actively disqualifies the histories of societies considered outside of the so-called “West” and groups considered not part of the mainstream.
Historiography might seem like a niche subject, but it is at the core of the polarization that we see in society today. At the heart of the so-called culture wars is a fight over history: who gets to write history; who should be included in that history; and what should that history be about.
As Maza demonstrates in her book, historians themselves have a lot to answer for in this mess. It is because of the biases, prejudices, and performative objectivity of historians in the past that we have ended up where we are. But, at the same time, it is also made clear that the key to solving the problem of polarization lies with the culprits.
In her conclusion, Maza states that for “the past to serve its best purpose we must not freeze it in place, we must argue about it” because history “becomes useless or boring at best, and dangerous at worst, when it jells into consensual orthodoxy of any sort.” Even though history studies the past, it does so in response to the needs of the present-day, and as such, history is one of the most important subjects we can study.
For history to be able to address the issues of today, we historians need to learn about our own sordid history. A very good place to start is with Sarah Maza’s Thinking about History.
July 5, 2022
This was a fun read. I read it as a lay person after seeing a friend recommend it on social media. Maza introduces historiography (what it is, the relevant recent debates) in a way that’s relevant for both lay people and for people in the field. In the process, she summarizes several major debates in history and helped me contextualize other work I’d read. She brings attention to assumptions we can easily take for granted, and discovering new assumptions I’d carried made the book unexpectedly fun (among others, that nations or things like them - and events important to them - are the default unit of history). It was a useful read, and it’s been a great reference for exploring further important history books.
March 2, 2022
Maza's well-written book offers a thoughtful introduction to the discipline of history. It primarily explores the way in which the field has been changed, expanded, and debated over the past several decades. Maza uses many examples from published works, which adds interest and helps to show the theories and perspectives she describes in practice. The survey and analysis are objective to an admirable degree, but Maza's own perspective is certainly present. Maza also explores the ways in which history is different from other disciplines, like art history, philosophy, social science, etc. Overall, Thinking About History is an interesting read, and expresses how history is a unique and inexhaustible area of study.
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