A Brief History of History

"In A Brief History of History, acclaimed historian Jeremy Black seeks to reinvigorate and redefine our ideas about history. The stories we tell about the past are a crucial aspect of all cultures. However, while the traditional storytelling process--what we think of as "history" in the proper sense--is useful, it is also misleading, not least because it leads to the repetition of bias and misinformation. Black suggests that the conventional idea of history and historians is constructed too narrowly, as it fails to engage with the broad nature of lived experience. By focusing on a singular idea or story within the history being explored, we fail to understand the interconnectivity of the everyday experience. A Brief History of History challenges accepted norms of the historical perspective and offers a view of human history that will surprise many and (perhaps) infuriate some. But above all, it is a history of historians written for this moment in time, a time when the traditional Eurocentric approach to history now appears wholly inappropriate"--

1. Introduction: The Controversy of History
2. Origin Accounts and Sacred Time
3. Printing and New Universal Histories
4. Rejecting the Past
5. New Pasts
6. Contesting the Nations
7. History in the Long Cold War, 1917-89
8. Methods for a Modern Age
9. The Many Means of History
10. Into the Future
Selected Further Reading