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Sto caricando le informazioni... History in the Makingdi J. H. Elliott
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Following the distinguished career of a ground-breaking historian such as John H. Elliott can be nothing but fascinating, and he doesn't disappoint. His description of his early academic life in Barcelona under Franco are particularly powerful, and his commentary on the 17th century Catalans reverberates particularly well today. Understatement has always been a strong element of his style in his academic writing, and it continues here in his memoir. We could have wished he would open up a bit more, reveal more of the inner man, but he remains distantly professional throughout. Thus it is a history of his career, and a history of the profession through the past 50 years, rather than an autobiography of Elliott himself. Can we hope he's working on that now?
At age 82, he [J. H. Elliott] has now composed a memoir, History in the Making, tracking his own intellectual development as well as the challenges that any historian faces when it comes to understanding, and reconstructing, the past. . . . He became what he calls a "Hispanicist"--a foreigner who devotes a career to understanding Spain and who possesses thereby, or so it is hoped, a perspective less ideologically partisan or personally engaged than native scholars and intellectuals. Over time, Mr. Elliott notes, the effort to understand another culture can make the outsider begin to feel like an insider, as if picking up a second identity. This process, of course, affects any historian working to engage another time and place. It enabled Mr. Elliott to do important scholarship on Spain while explaining its history to foreign audiences in a compelling way. . . . By studying the "people, commodities, ideas and cultural practices around and across the Atlantic," he writes, we can often see "unsuspected connections." Discovering such connections is perhaps the essence of the historian's task, one that Mr. Elliott has performed, like his great predecessors [Gibbon, Macaulay, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Taylor, Richard Cobb, et al.], with remarkable skill and erudition over many decades.
From the vantage point of nearly sixty years devoted to research and the writing of history, J. H. Elliott steps back from his work to consider the progress of historical scholarship. From his own experiences as a historian of Spain, Europe, and the Americas, he provides a deft and sharp analysis of the work that historians do and how the field has changed since the 1950s.The author begins by explaining the roots of his interest in Spain and its past, then analyzes the challenges of writing the history of a country other than one's own. In succeeding chapters he offers acute observations on such topics as the history of national and imperial decline, political history, biography, and art and cultural history. Elliott concludes with an assessment of changes in the approach to history over the past half-century, including the impact of digital technology, and argues that a comprehensive vision of the past remains essential. Professional historians, students of history, and those who read history for pleasure will find in Elliott's delightful book a new appreciation of what goes into the shaping of historical works and how those works in turn can shape the world of thought and action. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)946.0072History and Geography Europe Spain and Iberian Peninsula SpainClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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