Modernizing England's Past by Michael Bentley

Modernizing England's Past by Michael Bentley

What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, this book reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers a full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period. Modernist historiography set itself the objective of going beyond the colourful narratives of 'whigs' and 'popularizers' in order to establish history as the queen of the humanities and as a rival to the sciences as a vehicle of knowledge. Professor Bentley does not follow those who deride modernism as 'positivist' or 'empiricist' but instead shows how it set in train brilliant new styles of investigation that transformed how historians understood the English past. But he shows how these strengths were eventually outweighed by inherent confusions and misapprehensions that threatened to kill the very subject that the modernists had intended to sustain.

'… energetic …' History Today

Michael Bentley is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the editor of the Routledge Companion to Historiography (2002) and the author of Modern Historiography: An Introduction (1999).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521841788
ISBN 10	052184178X
Title	Modernizing England's Past
Author	Michael Bentley
Series	The Wiles Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2006-01-12
Number of pages	254
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.