Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits xv
Preface 3
Overture: The Monk Outside the Monastery 9
1 The Dawning of History
Herodotus or Thucydides? 29
2 The Glory That Was Rome
From Polybius to Suetonius 52
3 History and Myth
Creating the Bible 79
4 Closing Down the Past
The Muslim View of History 101
5 The Medieval Chroniclers
Creating a Nation's Story 129
6 The Accidental Historian
Niccolò Machiavelli 156
7 William Shakespeare
The Drama of History 174
8 Zozo and the Marionette Infidel
M. Voltaire and Mr. Gibbon 195
9 Announcing a Discipline
From Macaulay to von Ranke 228
10 Once Upon a Time
Novelists as Past Masters 256
11 America Against Itself
Versions of the Civil War 292
12 Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax
The Annales School 325
13 The Red Historians
From Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm 351
14 History from the Inside
From Julius Caesar to Ulysses S. Grant 390
15 The Spinning of History
Churchill and His Factory 420
16 Mighty Opposites
Wars Inside the Academy 441
17 The Wounded Historian
John Keegan and the Military Mind 470
18 Herstory
From Ban Zhao to Mary Beard 486
19 Who Tells Our Story?
From George W. Williams to Ibram X. Kendi 524
20 Bad History
Truth-Telling vs. "Patriotism" 562
21 The First Draft
Journalists and the Recent Past 596
22 On Television
From A.J.P. Taylor to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 626
Afterword 658
Acknowledgments 661
Notes 665
Index 709