Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

by Richard Cohen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982195786
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Pages:	784
Sales rank:	315,604
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Richard Cohen is the author of By the Sword, Chasing the Sun, and How to Write Like Tolstoy. The former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses, he has edited books that have won the Pulitzer, Booker, and Whitbread/Costa prizes, while twenty-one have been #1 bestsellers. He has written for most UK quality newspapers as well as for The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Connect with him on Facebook @RichardCohenAuthor and Twitter @AboutRichard.

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

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/13/2021

Cohen (How to Write Like Tolstoy), former publishing director of Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K., demystifies the act of history-making in this sweeping survey. He documents how European history was shaped by Greek philosophy, Roman mythology, and Judeo-Christian theology and formalized as a discipline by 19th-century German scholar Leopold von Ranke and others. Along the way, he profiles noteworthy historical figures including Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish physician living in 11th-century Spain who cataloged inconsistencies in the Pentateuch, and Marc Bloch, a historian turned French Resistance fighter who was executed by the Nazis in 1944. Elsewhere, Cohen examines academic debates over the ethical limits of revisionist history, analyzes the influence of cinema and digital technologies on historical scholarship, and compares ancient historians such as Thucydides and Herodotus, who “wrote to be read aloud,” with Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. Though the biographical minutia threatens to overwhelm, Cohen makes a persuasive argument that history is created by historians as much as by politics, war, economics, and other forces, and convincingly shows how “the rivalries of scholars, the demands of patronage, the need to make a living, physical disabilities, changing fashions, cultural pressures, religious beliefs, patriotic sensibilities, love affairs,” and other human concerns have shaped the understanding of the world. The result is a fascinating and finely wrought history of history. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Richard Cohen has written an utterly engaging love letter to history’s hidden story tellers. Provocative, funny but scrupulously fair, Making History is a timely reminder that history doesn’t write itself.

Amanda Foreman

With meticulous research and riveting anecdotes, Richard Cohen has peeled back the hidden history behind those who record our past. He brilliantly shows how an extraordinary gallery of characters—from prodigies to charlatans, from ideologues to heroes—has exposed, shaped, and, at times, bent and even covered up the facts. In the process, Cohen has achieved what only the finest historians can: He has scrupulously and engagingly made history.

David Grann

What a grand, illuminating, and fun book! Richard Cohen takes us on a learned tour through the cacophony of history and of the characters who’ve told the stories that shape us. To understand who we are, we have to understand who we’ve been—and, as Cohen amply demonstrates, who has formed those understandings.

Jon Meacham

★ 01/01/2022

When Cohen (How To Write Like Tolstoy) was in school, his teacher was David Knowles, author of works on monasticism in medieval England. As scrupulous a historian as his mentor was, Cohen learned early that historians too have agendas: he contends that understanding a historian's ideology can help readers appreciate what's truly special in their work. This book, intended for the educated layperson, not academic specialists, is Cohen's love song to the profession of history; within its limits, it's extremely effective. Cohen's range is admirably broad: he discusses not just today's historians and their precursors but also William Shakespeare, composers of the Bible, and Samuel Pepys—all of whom, he contends, shaped perceptions of history scholarship, popular history, today's historical fiction, and the depiction of history on TV. Though mostly focusing on Western historiography, the book also touches on the influence of Arab historians and includes brief sections on Chinese and Japanese historical writing; the scantness of these sections is the book's only drawback. Overall, Cohen's judgments are insightful, thought-provoking, and thoroughly researched. VERDICT History lovers will find this exceptionally well-written book as insightful as it is a pleasure to read.—David Keymer

Library Journal

2021-12-29
Former book publisher Cohen surveys the state of history writing over the past two millennia.

This wide-ranging account hits most of the predictable points in a traditional, occasionally entertaining introductory-level course on the writers of history in Western civilization. Cohen, the author of How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers and other books, begins with a chapter on Herodotus and Thucydides and then moves steadily forward, with chapters on Latin historians, medieval European historians, Civil War historians, “The Red Historians: From Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm,” and so forth. The work of Herodotus, he writes, “brought into play…a special kind of inquiry—one that encompasses geography, ethnography, philology, genealogy, sociology, biography, anthropology, psychology, and imaginative re-creation (as in the arts).” Cohen seldom considers history as written by scholars other than those in Europe and, later, North America, and he recapitulates the biography of each of the historians he considers, which leads to an uneven text. For example, he spends more time on Voltaire's many mistresses than on his thoughts and writings. This makes for smooth but rarely thought-provoking reading. While the book is useful as a broad overview for neophytes, readers looking for fresh insights into history and history writing should look elsewhere. As the narrative progresses, Cohen tends increasingly to group historians together not so much by historical period or approach to the subject matter as by less relevant standards. A chapter titled “Herstory” lumps together women scholars from the past 2,000 years, from Chinese historian and philosopher Ban Zhao to notable 20th-century historians Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the chapter on Black historians could have been more well considered. (Overall, the book is notable more for its length than depth.) Cohen branches out to consider, though seldom favorably, novelists, journalists, TV producers, and photographers as historians. The book is amply illustrated with photographs, maps, and cartoons.

Lively but long-winded and largely superficial biographies of historians through the ages.

Kirkus Reviews

"Sprawling and wildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and also consistently readable and engaging, Making History dives deep into the way history-driven scholars and artists — from Burns to Shakespeare to Herodotus — have shaped the collective memory of humankind."

The Washington Post - Douglas Brinkley

What a brilliant achievement! Like all Richard Cohen’s writing, Making History opens a dialogue with the reader—grave and witty, suave yet pointed, erudite yet engaging and full of energy. It has huge scope but never forfeits the telling detail. It is scholarly, lively, quotable, up-to-date, and fun.

Hilary Mantel

"An enthralling investigation into the ways in which the background of historians affected and affects the way they present the past."

The London Times - Christina Hardyment

"Supremely entertaining. . . . Whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio.

The New Yorker - Louis Menand

What a grand, illuminating, and fun book! Richard Cohen takes us on a learned tour through the cacophony of history and of the characters who’ve told the stories that shape us. To understand who we are, we have to understand who we’ve been—and, as Cohen amply demonstrates, who has formed those understandings.

Jon Meacham

"[A] superb survey from Herodotus to Mary Beard. . . . Witty, wise and elegant, this tremendous book deserves to become a classic of history itself.

The Spectator - Nigel Jones

It’s hard to imagine any other narrator performing this audiobook as effectively, and equally hard to imagine this narrator performing any work other than his own. A well-known British publisher and author, Richard Cohen has a strong, distinctive, heavily accented voice, untrained but engaging—a grandpa voice. It’s one you grow accustomed to over time and eventually come to appreciate as his information-packed and idiosyncratic narrative unfolds. All the great historians are here—Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon—along with figures like Caesar, Machiavelli, and Churchill whom you wouldn’t primarily class as historians. But who cares? Cohen is a gifted raconteur, informative, sometimes tiresome, but someone you can listen to anytime, anywhere, in any order and feel you’ve profited. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MAY 2022 - AudioFile

It’s hard to imagine any other narrator performing this audiobook as effectively, and equally hard to imagine this narrator performing any work other than his own. A well-known British publisher and author, Richard Cohen has a strong, distinctive, heavily accented voice, untrained but engaging—a grandpa voice. It’s one you grow accustomed to over time and eventually come to appreciate as his information-packed and idiosyncratic narrative unfolds. All the great historians are here—Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon—along with figures like Caesar, Machiavelli, and Churchill whom you wouldn’t primarily class as historians. But who cares? Cohen is a gifted raconteur, informative, sometimes tiresome, but someone you can listen to anytime, anywhere, in any order and feel you’ve profited. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MAY 2022 - AudioFile