A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century

Burrow' s command of the intellectual roots of historians, social scientists, commentators, and intellectuals is astonishing and riveting. Every sentence is meaningful. It's dense but hugely rewarding. Makes you wonder whether you are truly educated since there is so much in this book that most of us "amateur historians" do not know.

As a political scientist and diplomat, I read history for four reasons: 1) as part of my professional training, since it was absolutely necessary to have a sound grasp of the 20th century international system; 2) as area studies for regions of the world I was assigned; 3) opportunistically, to follow up on intriguing things I had heard or read: and, 4) as escape, as travel in time, since a book on Roman history took me as far into the distance as a book on hiking the Apennines. But I'm not sure I had even heard the word historiography until recently, and had certainly never been trained in it. Now retired, I am reading history as literature, to savor the skills of a good writer telling a good story, opened "A History of Historians" thinking that historical writing had followed a linear and unvaried course from Herodotus to the present, and hoping that Burrow would aid me in identifying some good reads. I did get some good leads (whoever had ever heard of Clarendon, anyway?), but I was amazed to find that the historical works I know are really rather a new phenomenon, developing, as I understand Burrow, only after the Renaissance humanists and really only after Gibbon. This was mind-blowing! Some critique: As much as anyone, I deeply appreciate any book that comes in at less than 500 pages, but I would have liked more on the anthropological approach to history. Plus, while I realize that Burrow is British and his work is European centered, I wonder what he knows (I would guess a lot) about Japanese, Chinese or Indian historiography, or what he thinks about Aussie or Kiwi historians. Maybe someone else will take up these subjects. I am really pleased that I discovered this book, salute Burrow's encyclopedic knowledge and crystal clear style, will steal a moment to deplore those historians of whom he writes who disparage history as narrative, and recommend this book to others.

Burrow has four themes that run simultaneously. The first is an outline of Western history. It is good because he has found the approximate center from which all other interpretations radiate. The second is around thirty short articles on the major historians that have recorded Western history. The third is a discussion of the methods of interpretation used by each historian. The fourth is an interpretation of each interpretation. The most valuable part is his method of interpretation. I cannot explain how he does it, but he has found a way that is short, apparently accurate and shows how each method is both good and bad. I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to write interpretations that are short, clear and powerful.

A History of Histories is an idiosyncratic work filled with a kaleidoscope of insights that derive from the author's broad education and lifetime of reading. At his best, Burrow seems like an animated tour guide pointing us to histories that we have never read and never will read: "Bet you've not thought about William Robertson. Well, let me tell you what's important about his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769). And then Carlyle--how about his peculiar and evocative prose style?"What one should not expect of Burrow is a systematic study of great historians or western historiography. Everyone can choose his own favorite examples of imbalance. Ancient Greek historians get more space than the entire twentieth century. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the egregious medieval mythmaker, gets five and a half pages to Leopold von Ranke's three at best. Among Americans, William Hickling Prescott gets eight pages, Charles Beard a sentence and a half.I also think Burrow has slighted the influence of the religion of the Bible in the development of western historiography. He postpones consideration of the Book itself until after all the ancients, although anyone guessing at the dates of composition for what Herbert Butterfield calls the "Court History of David" (I & II Samuel) would probably place it several centuries before Herodotus and would also probably, like Butterfield, credit it with "an amazing impartiality and independence." Then too, much of the praise bestowed on Enlightenment historians should, in my opinion, be attributed to the outworking of the Reformation. Likewise, nineteenth-century historicists reflect the soft glow of German pietism at their backs.In the end, A History of Histories is still the finest piece of historigraphical literature written for the educated general reader in our generation. It's an eccentric smorgasbord of delights. If there are too many kinds of artichokes, there is still plenty of steak on the table.

Erudite is how I would sum of this book in a word. As in John Burrow's knowledge of history and historical works is erudite and encyclopedic. A History of History is an excellent read about the history of history telling (or historiography), starting with the ancient Greeks and telling the story up to the last century. I acknowledge that the book is missing some major contributions to historiography, e.g. the Chinese, Indian and Arab works that the book omits. Also the book is fairly Anglocentric. That all being said, it's a very good read for those with an interest in how history has been told up till now.

This splendid book gives us the flavour of Western historians from the Ancient Greeks to the Twentieth Century. Burrow does not neglect the Philosophy of History, but that is not his main concern: rather does he bring out the personality of the historians through their writings and how their books have been shaped by their own times and their own experiences. Plentiful quotations from their works illustrate the book; they are beautifully chosen, and a pleasure to read in themselves.Burrow is very good on tracing the influence of the historians of Greece and Rome on the historians of much later centuries - of Tacitus on Gibbon, to give just one example. About a third of the book is rightly devoted to Antiquity. We are reminded how deservedly Antiquity is regarded, in this field also, as one of the cradles of European thought, and how extraordinarily relevant the experiences of the Ancient World are to our own. This was known among the educated classes in the days when Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus were a staple of education: they found these classics an inexhaustible fund of enlightenment and understanding of political processes, providing models as well as warningsCertainly there is a sad falling off after the classical period. The early Christian historians abandoned the aim of being impartial, relentlessly promoted orthodox Christianity and implacably blackened the unorthodox. Where historians like Eusebius and Bede did have a philosophy to guide them, they traced what they saw as God's plan in history; but a lesser man, like the 6th century Bishop Gregory of Tours, to whom Burrow devotes an amusing chapter (he calls him `Trollope with bloodshed'), seems to show, in his mistitled History of the Franks, nothing at all of what we could recognize as philosophical reflections - though with or without such reflections, we can of course learn much about the ways of life and preoccupations that he depicts.The same is broadly true of the medieval annals and chronicles to which Burrow devotes a solid chunk of his book. In Froissart's Chronicles we learn much about the code of chivalry between knights (though the code does not apply to the treatment of commoners). Burrow extracts some vivid or entertaining material from them, and he is often a witty and entertaining commentator himself. He remarks that we should not expect narrative or thematic connections in annals: `we should think instead of a newspaper whose time scale is the year, not the day. We are ourselves unperturbed by the most diverse news stories appearing in juxtaposition, ...' The scurrilous 13th century chronicler Matthew Paris reminds Burrow `of a modern tabloid editor: disrespectful, populist, xenophobic, and anti-intellectual', and an attempt to bowdlerize him would be `like trying to de-vein Gorgonzola'.However, Renaissance historians, like Bruni, Machiavelli and Guiccardini, modelled themselves once again on the histories of ancient Rome and Greece. Like them, they were fine stylists and sometimes invented speeches; looked for lessons that history could teach; saw patterns of order degenerating into disorder until order was reestablished; lamented the decline of the republican virtues and the decline of freedom; were cynical (realistic?) about how rulers maintain themselves in power; and were interested in the intricate relationships between neighbouring and competing states.During the Renaissance also we first find an interest in Antiquarianism, research not only into the sources of Roman Law, but also into the Customary Law of the `barbarians' which Roman Law replaced or absorbed. The discovery of these more ancient sources and of the `immemorial rights' of subjects will play a part in the struggle against absolutism in the 16th century France and 17th century England, and, in the hands of William Stubbs in the 19th century, in the progression of English liberties down to his own time.As the book moves into the discussions of historians in the 17th and 18th century, it becomes slightly heavier going and is not lit up as often by shafts of Burrow's wit, though one of these historians, Edward Gibbon, compensates for this with his own, thankfully mined by Burrow.For the 19th century we have two superlative sections contrasting Macaulay and Carlyle - all they have in common is that they both `stand at the apex of a long movement, before austere professionalism spoiled the game, to render history for the reader in its full sensuous and emotional immediacy and circumstantiality'.These sections are followed by one brilliantly contrasting 19th century French historians, notably Michelet and Taine, showing how the French Revolution continued to be subject to different and passionate interpretations.Another section also deals beautifully with contrasts, this time between the sober way in which Bernal Diaz describes the conquest of Mexico in which he had himself taken part and the more Gibbonesque version of the subject by W.H.Prescott in the mid-19th century. Another American historian whom Burrow describes with infectious sympathy is Francis Parkman, the evocative 19th century chronicler of the American Indians' 17th century encounters with the French (who sometimes went native) and the British (whose victory over the French was a disaster for the Indians).Burrow's last two chapters deal with the professionalization of history: its introduction into the universities as independent faculties; its consequent bureaucratization; its aim in the late 19th century, under German influence, to be like a science; and, in the 20th century, in its conscious obedience to rival philosophies of history and the influence that other disciplines exert on it. It became more technical and more specialized. Analysis of structure became more fashionable than narrative. There was an explosion in the number of historians and in the areas of life that are of interest to them. These chapters are worthy rather than inspiring - possibly Burrow himself is less inspired by that kind of history: he treats no individual work of history with the expansiveness which he had bestowed on earlier works.I hope the success of this book will lead to a reprint of the author's book on Victorian historians.

A fantastic book for anyone interested in history. I've really enjoyed reading this and will continue to dip into it long into the future.

This splendid book gives us the flavour of Western historians from the Ancient Greeks to the Twentieth Century. Burrow does not neglect the Philosophy of History, but that is not his main concern: rather does he bring out the personality of the historians through their writings and how their books have been shaped by their own times and their own experiences. Plentiful quotations from their works illustrate the book; they are beautifully chosen, and a pleasure to read in themselves.Burrow is very good on tracing the influence of the historians of Greece and Rome on the historians of much later centuries - of Tacitus on Gibbon, to give just one example. About a third of the book is rightly devoted to Antiquity. We are reminded how deservedly Antiquity is regarded, in this field also, as one of the cradles of European thought, and how extraordinarily relevant the experiences of the Ancient World are to our own. This was known among the educated classes in the days when Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus were a staple of education: they found these classics an inexhaustible fund of enlightenment and understanding of political processes, providing models as well as warningsCertainly there is a sad falling off after the classical period. The early Christian historians abandoned the aim of being impartial, relentlessly promoted orthodox Christianity and implacably blackened the unorthodox. Where historians like Eusebius and Bede did have a philosophy to guide them, they traced what they saw as God's plan in history; but a lesser man, like the 6th century Bishop Gregory of Tours, to whom Burrow devotes an amusing chapter (he calls him `Trollope with bloodshed'), seems to show, in his mistitled History of the Franks, nothing at all of what we could recognize as philosophical reflections - though with or without such reflections, we can of course learn much about the ways of life and preoccupations that he depicts.The same is broadly true of the medieval annals and chronicles to which Burrow devotes a solid chunk of his book. In Froissart's Chronicles we learn much about the code of chivalry between knights (though the code does not apply to the treatment of commoners). Burrow extracts some vivid or entertaining material from them, and he is often a witty and entertaining commentator himself. He remarks that we should not expect narrative or thematic connections in annals: `we should think instead of a newspaper whose time scale is the year, not the day. We are ourselves unperturbed by the most diverse news stories appearing in juxtaposition, ...' The scurrilous 13th century chronicler Matthew Paris reminds Burrow `of a modern tabloid editor: disrespectful, populist, xenophobic, and anti-intellectual', and an attempt to bowdlerize him would be `like trying to de-vein Gorgonzola'.However, Renaissance historians, like Bruni, Machiavelli and Guiccardini, modelled themselves once again on the histories of ancient Rome and Greece. Like them, they were fine stylists and sometimes invented speeches; looked for lessons that history could teach; saw patterns of order degenerating into disorder until order was reestablished; lamented the decline of the republican virtues and the decline of freedom; were cynical (realistic?) about how rulers maintain themselves in power; and were interested in the intricate relationships between neighbouring and competing states.During the Renaissance also we first find an interest in Antiquarianism, research not only into the sources of Roman Law, but also into the Customary Law of the `barbarians' which Roman Law replaced or absorbed. The discovery of these more ancient sources and of the `immemorial rights' of subjects will play a part in the struggle against absolutism in the 16th century France and 17th century England, and, in the hands of William Stubbs in the 19th century, in the progression of English liberties down to his own time.As the book moves into the discussions of historians in the 17th and 18th century, it becomes slightly heavier going and is not lit up as often by shafts of Burrow's wit, though one of these historians, Edward Gibbon, compensates for this with his own, thankfully mined by Burrow.For the 19th century we have two superlative sections contrasting Macaulay and Carlyle - all they have in common is that they both `stand at the apex of a long movement, before austere professionalism spoiled the game, to render history for the reader in its full sensuous and emotional immediacy and circumstantiality'.These sections are followed by one brilliantly contrasting 19th century French historians, notably Michelet and Taine, showing how the French Revolution continued to be subject to different and passionate interpretations.Another section also deals beautifully with contrasts, this time between the sober way in which Bernal Diaz describes the conquest of Mexico in which he had himself taken part and the more Gibbonesque version of the subject by W.H.Prescott in the mid-19th century. Another American historian whom Burrow describes with infectious sympathy is Francis Parkman, the evocative 19th century chronicler of the American Indians' 17th century encounters with the French (who sometimes went native) and the British (whose victory over the French was a disaster for the Indians).Burrow's last two chapters deal with the professionalization of history: its introduction into the universities as independent faculties; its consequent bureaucratization; its aim in the late 19th century, under German influence, to be like a science; and, in the 20th century, in its conscious obedience to rival philosophies of history and the influence that other disciplines exert on it. It became more technical and more specialized. Analysis of structure became more fashionable than narrative. There was an explosion in the number of historians and in the areas of life that are of interest to them. These chapters are worthy rather than inspiring - possibly Burrow himself is less inspired by that kind of history: he treats no individual work of history with the expansiveness which he had bestowed on earlier works.I hope the success of this book will lead to a reprint of the author's book on Victorian historians.

A fascinating guide through the histories completed across history! Easy to read (though I am a history student so maybe I'm used to worse!) and a good price. Highly recommendable to all those interested in history.

A great read