How history is made, and why accounts differ.
13 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Science of History
J. B. Bury · 1903
Argues in his Cambridge inaugural lecture that history is a science, no less and no more, and should be pursued for the discovery of truth rather…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Karl Marx · 1852
Argues that men make their own history but not under circumstances of their own choosing, reading Louis Bonaparte's coup as class conflict replaying…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Introduction to the Study of History
Charles-Victor Langlois & Charles Seignobos · 1898
Sets out the first systematic method for handling historical documents — establishing authenticity, then extracting and cross-checking facts before…
+1 more at this level
12 works
J. B. Bury
Argues in his Cambridge inaugural lecture that history is a science, no less and no more, and should be pursued for the discovery of truth rather than to point a moral or adorn a tale.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. M. Trevelyan
Rewrites the aftermath of Waterloo as a French victory to argue that counterfactual reasoning, done carefully from what each side actually believed at the time, can test claims about historical causation rather than merely entertain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026H. G. Wells
Attempts a single connected narrative of the whole human story from before writing to the First World War, arguing that history taught nation by nation cannot explain a species that has always been in contact with itself — a founding popular gesture toward world history that later transnational historians would treat far more critically.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Federal Writers' Project
Collects first-person interviews with formerly enslaved Americans conducted under a federal relief programme, arguing that slavery could only be understood from the testimony of the enslaved rather than from the records of their owners.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marc Bloch
An unfinished defence of history written while its author fought in the French Resistance, arguing that the historian's task is to ask living questions of dead evidence rather than to reconstruct the past for its own sake, and setting out the Annales programme of history built from every kind of trace, not just political archives.
Karl Marx
Argues that men make their own history but not under circumstances of their own choosing, reading Louis Bonaparte's coup as class conflict replaying an earlier revolution as farce.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ernest Renan
Argues that a nation is held together not by race, language or geography but by a shared memory of a common past and, just as importantly, by a collective agreement to forget the violence that made it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward A. Freeman
Argues that history can only be trusted once every document has been traced to its origin and cross-checked, treating source criticism as a discipline rather than an afterthought.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026James Harvey Robinson
Argues that historians inevitably write for the needs and interests of their own present, and that being honest about this selection is more useful to readers than pretending a narrative simply reports what happened.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carlo Ginzburg
Reconstructs the cosmology of one obscure Friulian miller from Inquisition records to argue that ordinary people's beliefs can be recovered in as much detail as any king's, founding microhistory as a method.
Charles-Victor Langlois & Charles Seignobos
Sets out the first systematic method for handling historical documents — establishing authenticity, then extracting and cross-checking facts before synthesis — that made history-writing look like a discipline with rules rather than an art, a positivist confidence later historiography has complicated.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Sidney Bradshaw Fay
Uses newly opened diplomatic archives to argue that responsibility for 1914 was shared among several powers' pre-war alliance systems, revising the Versailles Treaty's judgment that Germany alone caused the war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026