Making History

The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

Richard Cohen

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781982195786
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982195809
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A “supremely entertaining” (The New Yorker) exploration of who gets to record the world’s history—from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns—and how their biases influence our understanding about the past.

There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.

“Scholarly, lively, quotable, up-to-date, and fun” (Hilary Mantel, author of the bestselling Thomas Cromwell trilogy), Making History investigates the published works and private utterances of our greatest chroniclers to discover the agendas that informed their—and our—views of the world. From the origins of history writing, when such an activity itself seemed revolutionary, through to television and the digital age, Cohen brings captivating figures to vivid light, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and Gibbon, Winston Churchill and Henry Louis Gates. Rich in complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a revealing exploration of both the aims and art of history-making, one that will lead us to rethink how we learn about our past and about ourselves.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits
• Preface
• Overture: The Monk Outside the Monastery
• Chapter 1: The Dawning of History: Herodotus or Thucydides?
• Chapter 2: The Glory that was Rome: From Polybius to Suetonius
• Chapter 3: History and Myth: Creating the Bible
• Chapter 4: Closing Down the Past: The Muslim View of History
• Chapter 5: The Medieval Chroniclers: Creating a Nation’s Story
• Chapter 6: The Accidental Historian: Niccolò Machiavelli
• Chapter 7: William Shakespeare: The Drama of History
• Chapter 8: Zozo and the Marionette Infidel: M. Voltaire and Mr. Gibbon
• Chapter 9: Announcing a Discipline: From Macaulay to von Ranke
• Chapter 10: Once Upon a Time: Novelists as Past Masters
• Chapter 11: America Against Itself: Versions of the Civil War
• Chapter 12: Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax: The Annales School
• Chapter 13: The Red Historians: From Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm
• Chapter 14: History from the Inside: From Julius Caesar to Ulysses S. Grant
• Chapter 15: The Spinning of History: Churchill and His Factory
• Chapter 16: Mighty Opposites: Wars Inside the Academy
• Chapter 17: The Wounded Historian: John Keegan and the Military Mind
• Chapter 18: Herstory: From Bān Zhāo to Mary Beard
• Chapter 19: Who Tells Our Story?: From George W. Williams to Ibram X. Kendi
• Chapter 20: Bad History: Truth-Telling vs. “Patriotism”
• Chapter 21: The First Draft: Journalists and the Recent Past
• Chapter 22: On Television: From A.J.P. Taylor to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Photographs
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Image Descriptions
• Copyright