Historiography

J.H. Plumb comments on how the famous historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, sought a detached and truthful past, free from preconception or the idea of inherent purpose.

Nick Poyntz looks at the ways in which the ubiquitous search engine is changing the nature of historical research.

This month Nick Poyntz looks at how to access the wealth of digitised source material now available to historians.

This month Nick Poyntz examines the rapid rise of blogging among both professional historians and amateur enthusiasts.

The acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh talks to Paul Lay about his influences, working methods, the need for historians to engage in public policy and why he is relieved to be free from academic bureaucracy. 

The importance to historians and anthropologists of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, ten years after its first publication. 

The ‘Milan Kundera affair’, in which the eponymous Czech novelist was recently accused of denouncing a ‘spy’ to the security services in 1950, illustrates how the Communist past has become a battlefield for Czech historians of different generations, writes Aviezer Tucker. 

Giles MacDonogh visits the History Today archive to examine Nancy Mitford’s 1968 article on one of the ‘oddest’ biographies ever written, Thomas Carlyle’s massive study of Frederick the Great.

Juliet Gardiner explains why her new book examines a short period of the 20th century and how she attempts to achieve a panorama of experiential history that gives readers a real feel for a slice of time.

By taking a rational, global overview of the past, historians can better understand the challenges facing humanity, says Paul Dukes.