Keeping Score

...The historical study of historical thought and writing— what historians call historiography— has long been the basis of historians’ work...

...In writing this sweeping work, Burrow comes up against two limitations that cannot fairly be debited to his account...

...Nor is Burrow beyond entering his own convictions on the record...

...Thucydides took issue with Herodotus, who himself here and there corrected Homer and expressed skepticism about the Homeric epics...

...Burrow is silent about the great Chinese historians, both ancient and modern, and about the master 14th-century Spanish-Arab Ibn Khaldun, sometimes considered the father of historiography...

...What’s more, too many practicing historians are introduced to the subject (as I was) in dreary required courses in historiography at the start of their graduate preparation when they’re just gaining their professional legs, don’t yet know where they’re headed, and aren’t yet able to comprehend fully why they’re being made to study ancient texts...

...Expecting historians to agree and make nice with each other more than other humans do is like expecting the lion to suckle the lamb...

...Of Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks he writes that it is “Trollope with bloodshed...

...We are all forced somehow to integrate into our knowledge and understanding facts that surprise us, that don’t fi t easily with what we thought we knew...

...Nor, as Burrow shows, can any of us in the modern West—historian or otherwise—shake off the ways of viewing the past that the successors of the Greeks left to us...

...This great Greek historian set into a kind of intellectual amber many of the enduring themes of Western historiography: the confl ict between East and West and between Western freedom and Oriental despotism, the dangers of imperial overreach, and the corruptions of power...

...cal thought with themes of tragedy and inevitability that it has never lost...

...This is of double benefi t: You get balanced interpretations of the great histories, along with evidence of a thoroughly modern mind at work on them...

...Revisions of previous histories have been with us from the start...

...Dispute is built into the fabric of history...

...By examining (if in necessarily less detail) the many modern historical battles over the past and the methods used to interpret it—including philosophical attacks upon Whig history, the ideological warfare kicked up by Marxism, and the ruckus over the intrusion of theory into history—Burrow implies that contemporary historians, if not always giants of style and view, need yield little to the great fi gures of yore...

...Why bother with what’s been surpassed—except, perhaps, in literary merit...

...Second, historians have always taken issue with each other and adopted rival explanations of events...

...Burrow commences his tale, as he must, with Egyptian and Babylonian record keepers...

...To function as professionals, they must know the interpretive history of their subjects, whether they be the fall of Rome, the American Revolution, or the causes of World War II...

...Burrow is light when appropriate, broad-ranging always...

...The Romans, and especially Polybius, bequeathed to us the aspiration to write a universal history (what we now call world history) and to make historical knowledge useful...

...Like the great Greek dramatists, he believed that we might learn from history because human nature doesn’t change, and he endowed historiJames M. Banner Jr...

...But as he quickly makes clear, history as more than a chronicle of dates and deeds—history as a purposeful inquiry to discover and explain the past as well as to commemorate its leading fi gures and great events—commences properly with Herodotus and his history of the war between the Greek states and the Persian empire...

...And in throwing off the paganism of the ancients, their Christian legatees such as Eusebius and Bede tossed us the challenge of wrestling with the warring themes of historical progress and teleology on one hand and of recurring cycles of history on the other...

...Fortunately, however, when it does attract scholars, it attracts good ones indeed, as it has John Burrow, a respected historian of 19th-century thought and a biographer of Edward Gibbon...

...They have never been stilled...

...But overall, he lets other historians speak in their own voices through apt quotation...

...Then, starting in the 18th century, the pace of historical research and interpretation picks up—as does, increasingly, the number of practicing historians—so that by our own time Burrow is forced to mention many names without lingering over any...

...The mistaken assumption that new evidence and deeper understanding have long ago superseded many of the masters’ interpretations...

...After all, history is a branch of human thought, and historians are humans...

...When we complain that history has wandered from its only justifi able foundations in political and military history, or when we argue that human nature is fi xed and not plastic, we’re really in the grip of arguments that the ancients themselves waged...

...All three are worth the effort, but none can take the place of the originals—Herodotus, Tacitus, Macaulay, and the rest—as their three authors would readily agree...

...Carlyle’s French Revolution reminds him of Sergei Eisenstein’s handling of crowd scenes, “with the camera panning in and out from the most highly individualized close-up moments to the widest perspectives...

...Whether we like revisionism or not, the growing stock of historical evidence, and the advance of ways to think about it, won’t let us be anything but revisionists...

...Burrow brings to his project a refreshing zest, seductive enough to make you think that, rather than reading the originals, you might rely on his evaluations of the great masters’ works rather than reading them...

...Their reason...

...This book, like other works of historiography, should lay to rest many misapprehensions about what has come in recent years to be known pejoratively as “revisionism” and “revisionist history...

...centuries go by without a historian of note, sometimes even of a historian whose work has survived...

...At the start of the story are large gaps in time and in the record...

...is a historian in Washington and cofounder of the National History Center...

...We have not escaped them and probably never will...

...but so key are they to his story that their absence is lamentable...

...It would be hard to conceive of a work that better reveals its author’s modesty, his command of the literature, his stylistic fl air, and his penetrating refl ections than this readable, fascinating, learned history of some of the greatest histories the world has known...

...Cynical, insisting on confi rming his sources, and a believer in realpolitik, Thucydides believed that all history is contemporary history...

...The fi rst, which he acknowledges (and which is embodied in the indefi nite article of the book’s title), is that this is a history of Western historiography, not of all histories, even all great ones, ever written...

...In addition to knowledge and sheer pleasure, what can a reader take away from A History of Histories...

...Even without the credulous curiosity of Herodotus, the gravity of Thucydides, the rolling periods of Gibbon, or the propulsive sweep of Carlyle, Burrow effectively gets you inside his subjects’ minds without surrendering his own critical sense...

...Historians, like other thinkers, are always looking over their shoulders at their predecessors, entering into discussion and debate with them, suffering the anxieties of their infl uence...

...Yet Herodotus’ history quickly was challenged by that of his near contemporary, Thucydides, the result being centuries of tension and disagreement within historical circles as to how best to do history and what to focus on...

...No wonder that the history of history enjoys so few students...

...To be sure, he relies on them...

...It was also Herodotus who ventured down the paths of social and cultural history, and whose ethnographic researches and interviews prefi gured the methods of modern historical inquiry...

...Thus, at the very inauguration of history’s history 2,500 years ago, the debates and tensions between myth and fact, and between what we now call social and cultural history (Herodotus) and political, military, and institutional history (Thucydides), were with us...

...After all, he writes in closing, however much we may argue about the past and ways to pursue knowledge of it, history will continue to be written in a never-ending conversation about where we have come from and where we might be going...

...The result is, toward the end of his work, some loss of the considered tone and leisurely pace of the rest...

...Nor are they likely to have encountered historiography as undergraduate majors of history...

...As a forthcoming report prepared for the Teagle Foundation by the National History Center indicates, few undergraduate courses in the subject are offered at all by American colleges and universities...

...And why shouldn’t it be...

...Yet historians rarely pursue the larger subject of the history of all history itself, and many never directly acquaint themselves with the works of the great master historians...

...A History of Histories joins the distinguished, but rare, company of comprehensive, modern histories of historical thought, of which the best recent examples are Ernst Breisach’s synthesis, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern and Donald R. Kelley’s three volumes (Faces of History, Fortunes of History, and Frontiers of History), which also cover the history of history since ancient times...

...It would be a mistake to conclude from all this that Burrow’s work is only for the philosophically inclined, or only for those who want their reading on the heavy side...

...Third, since history is evidencebased, and since new evidence is always being unearthed, we are all revisionists now, as the noted historian of Ireland Roy Foster once said...

...You would not go far wrong to do so—if only as an introduction...

...More regrettable is that he doesn’t refl ect extensively about some of the great Western students of historiography, such as Arnaldo Momigliano...

...The second limitation of the book, an artifact of Western history itself, is that any historian who undertakes the task that Burrow essays gets caught in a kind of double bind...

...Burrow is livelier reading than Breisach, intended for a broader audience than Kelley...

...Even if Burrow’s won’t be (because it can’t be) the last word on any of his subjects, what he writes is unfailingly solid, sometimes delightful, always keenly considered...