The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present

Fritz Stern has compiled a wide-ranging collection of original source materials written by historians, ancient and modern, that illuminate the nature of history as a discipline and a process. Beginning with Voltaire and Barthold Niebuhr and progressing through Macaulay, Jaures, Turner, Trevelyan, Beard, Barzun, and ending with C. Vann Woodward, Stern focuses on different roles history has assumed over a period of thousands of years as well as the various genres and subtopics in which history has made itself a home. These topics include cultural history, economic history, literature, positivism, materialism, scientific history, relativism and others. Stern opens each chapter and discussion of a new historian with insightful preliminary and background information that helps to set the historian in a better context than if it were not to appear. Other than this, his presence is undetectable, which speaks to his ability as a historian himself to remain detached from his work. Any university level historiography course needs this work either as a main text or as a supplementary text given its survey-like nature. Stern opens each chapter and discussion of a new historian with insightful preliminary and background information that helps to set the historian in a better context than if it were not to appear. Each featured historian presents or engages a new variety of history, as the title enunciates, and provides further evidence of the depth and breadth of history as a scholarly subject as well as a process spread out over time. The intense and quite complex nature of the selections make this book a perfect fit for an upper level university or graduate level historiography course. Furthermore, any reader who wishes to supplement any knowledge of history would be well served by this work. High school students intending to pursue history as a major might also read this as a prelude to what lies ahead.