Artful History
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A Practical Anthology
Edited and with an Introduction by Aaron Sachs and John Demos
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Format: PaperPrice: $37.50
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A collection of memorable, stirring, and eloquent historical essays, designed to help any historian write more artfully
Is there any reason serious historical scholarship cannot receive literary expression? Even the most committed empiricists and postmodernists might achieve better results by thinking of writing as a craft, rather than a means of packaging research. This book gathers some of the most compelling efforts to make history writing eloquent, stirring, and memorable, demonstrating that even the most rigorous scholarship can take on a wide range of creative forms.
With selections from: Jonathan Spence, Simon Schama, Saidiya Hartman, Wendy Warren, Jill Lepore, Louis Masur, Jane Kamensky, and John Demos, among others.
Is there any reason serious historical scholarship cannot receive literary expression? Even the most committed empiricists and postmodernists might achieve better results by thinking of writing as a craft, rather than a means of packaging research. This book gathers some of the most compelling efforts to make history writing eloquent, stirring, and memorable, demonstrating that even the most rigorous scholarship can take on a wide range of creative forms.
With selections from: Jonathan Spence, Simon Schama, Saidiya Hartman, Wendy Warren, Jill Lepore, Louis Masur, Jane Kamensky, and John Demos, among others.
Aaron Sachs is professor of history at Cornell University. John Demos is professor of history emeritus at Yale University. Together, they are the co-editors of the New Directions in Narrative History series.
“Good history can also be great literature. The essays in Artful History rupture the tired preconception that scrupulous history need be dry and dull with their powerful evocations of the vanished world of the past."—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
“Seventeen excellent writers who are also distinguished scholars offer a spirited, entertaining, illuminating, thought-provoking, militantly readable, thoroughly persuasive, and much-needed reminder that history is a subgenre of nonfiction literature.”— Carlo Rotella, author of The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood
“Our most engaging historians embrace the simplest of messages: show, don’t tell. These imaginative essays, each a gem, remind us that writing is part of the art of interpreting the past.”— Peter C. Mancall, author of The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England
ISBN: 9780300239904
Publication Date: February 18, 2020
Publication Date: February 18, 2020
304 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
![](https://drupal.yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/styles/book_jacket/public/imagecache/external/7fc252cb59afe2bba8b2daef686020ff.jpg?itok=IR7_OrNN "The Captain and "the Cannibal"")
