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 questions: 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.

• History: Why It Matters
• The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• What Is History?
• History: A Very Short Introduction
• Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)
• A Pocket Guide to Writing in History
• A Student's Guide to History
• That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Ideas in Context)
• The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.