History is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past,†wrote historian and journalist Edward Hallett Carr in 1961.
This fully-revised, third edition of Writing History demonstrates how writing turns information into history and new writers into historians. The collection contains fifty-two stories about historical subjects by twenty-one new writers from History and Writing, an upper-level course in the Professional Writing and Communication Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
These stories offer models of original, engaging, research-based history writing, with topics as diverse as the Partition of India, residential schools, body art, Vincent van Gogh and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
The pieces in this collection combine personal observation with intellectual analysis, close observation with detailed research, and the satisfaction of knowledge with the excitement of inquiry. The writers tell stories about what happened, what it felt like and how we know about it. They remind us why history is interesting and why it matters.