30 Great Books That Made History

Jaume Aurell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781509562411
  9781509562404
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509562428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Today, many readers could easily list thirty classic authors, or thirty classic works of art, literature, music, philosophy, or science. But would they be able to name thirty classic works of history? In spite of history's outsized influence in the world of ideas, the books that made - and-remade - the history we know so well are often forgotten.

In this panoramic book, distinguished historian Jaume Aurell sets out to introduce readers to a new canon of historical writing. Taking a global approach, he places the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Michelet and Braudel alongside masterpieces from a myriad of periods and civilizations, from Sima Qian, Anna Komnene, al-Masudi and Fukuzawa Yukichi to Edmundo O'Gorman, C. L. R. James and Natalie Zemon Davis. At the same time, Aurell argues that we should not see these books as a definitive canon - instead, any canon should be seen as a list-in-progress to be contested and debated anew with each generation. It is only by being exposed to these diverse and deeply significant works that we can fully perceive the shape of the discipline, and carve out a new appreciation for the art of history writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Detailed Contents
• Introduction
• I. Classics of Civilizations
• 1. Greek Ethnography: Herodotus’ Histories
• 2. Greek Politics: Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War
• 3. Jewish Drama: The Bible
• 4. Chinese Dynasties: Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian
• 5. Indian Genealogies: Itihasa-Puranas
• II. Medieval Narratives
• 6. Christian Great Narratives: Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History
• 7. Islamic Cosmovisions: Al-Masudi’s Meadows of Gold
• 8. Byzantine Chronicles: Anna Komnene’s Alexiad
• 9. Icelandic Genealogies: Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla
• 10. Iberian Autobiographies: James I of Aragon’s Book of Deeds
• III. Modern Rationalities
• 11. Renaissance: Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy
• 12. Enlightenment: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 13. Romanticism: Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution
• 14. Historicism: Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations
• 15. Liberalism: Thomas Macaulay’s The History of England
• IV. Global Modernization
• 16. Westernizing Japan: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s An Outline of a Theory of Civilization
• 17. Preserving Africa: Carl Christian Reindorf’s The History of the Gold Coast
• 18. Revisioning China: Gu Jiegang’s Gushibian
• 19. Projecting India: Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History
• 20. Rethinking Latin America: Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America
• V. Modern Scholarship
• 21. Modernism: Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams
• 22. Impressionism: Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages
• 23. Annales: Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch
• 24. Structuralism: Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean
• 25. Postmodernism: Hayden White’s Metahistory
• VI. Activist History
• 26. Race: C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins
• 27. Class: Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class
• 28. Women: Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre
• 29. Subaltern: Ranajit Guha’s Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
• 30. Gender: Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman
• Epilogue
• Afterword: The Making of a Canon
• 30 Classics of History
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement