Six Books That Teach the Craft of History

Here are six books that formed me as a historian. They can also make you a better writer.

Fran Davis and Lauren Maguire recently invited us to think about the books that shaped us. How are our libraries our own living archives? What books tell our story?

Most of my collection consists of history books. I had always wanted to be a historian. I realized this goal in the spring of 2003, when I completed a doctorate in Modern European History from NYU. (My son was born in June of that year, and I was hugely pregnant at graduation. There are photos of me in the velvet tam and doctoral hood, with a gown the size of a circus tent.)

Here, then, are six books that made me want to become a historian.

These are just my six. They aren't “the essential books,” and all were written decades ago. They are simply my personal favorites because of how they teach the craft of history.

These are books that will inspire family chroniclers. They invite us to sharpen our lens and think more deeply about the past. They provide tools to probe the silences and pressure-test the narratives.

These books are also masterclasses in writing.

They are old books. All six are written by men, which I think says more about who was writing books and getting on course syllabi back when I was a history student than anything else. I am sure if I were a graduate student now I would have a completely different list. But then, I probably would be studying another kind of history. I still stand by these six books as must-reads.

I’ve included their URLs from the Internet Archive where available.

https://archive.org/details/makingofenglishw0000epth_p1l9

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is a people’s epic.

This book is perhaps the most influential work of modern social history, and the first comprehensive history of the British working class. It’s a sweeping chronicle of Britain’s industrial transformation between 1790 and 1832, detailing the disintegration of the pre-modern world and how British working people resisted. Thompson argues that radical action such as machine breaking was targeted and disciplined, and a principled defense of the ‘moral economy.’

For Thompson, the “working class” was not a Marxist theoretical category, something created by economic structures. Instead it was an identity that grew from shared experiences people lived through. “Class consciousness” was not new, but rather a continuity with traditional understanding of rights, fair prices, and fair wages.

The Making of the English Working Class is very much a book of its time. It romanticizes the labor movement and ignores the history of women, as well as the influence of religion. But it’s a thrilling read. It portrays ordinary people not as victims, but historical actors and makers of their own history.

Islands of History by Marshall Sahlins (1985) reconstructs the fatal final days of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779. It’s more than a historical whodunit. Two cultures collided in that fateful encounter. Cook’s initial landing coincided with the Makahiki festival, prompting Hawaiians to incorporate him into their cosmology as the god Lono. Cook departed then doubled back to Hawaii a week later due to storm damage to his ship. It was at the end of the ritual season, and his reappearance created a structural contradiction, as the continued presence of Lono now directly threatened the re-established political authority of the King. According to Sahlins Hawaiians had only one way to resolve it. ¹

Captain Cook did not just land in Hawaii; he fell into a pre-existing story that had no room for his return. Sahlins uses this tragedy to dismantle any remaining structuralist notions of indigenous cultures as static or 'ahistorical.’ All culture is dynamic. Ancient myth and new events are in constant dialogue. Our myths give meaning to events, but those events in turn reshape our myths.

https://archive.org/details/fallofconstantin0000runc

The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman (1957) is a classic narrative history of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.

The book opens with the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, facing a hard truth: his empire was doomed. Byzantium had endured for a thousand years, but was now reduced to the city of Constantinople, encircled by Ottoman forces under Mehmed II, who was preparing the final blow. The book recounts the events leading up to the final siege of the city in May 1453.

For Runciman, the fall of Constantinople was the inevitable end of a long decline, but also a tragic and heroic last stand against overwhelming odds.

The most moving passage comes at the end, when the emperor realizes that the Turks have breached the city’s land walls.

Constantine turned his horse and galloped back to the Lycus valley and the breaches in the stockade. With him was the gallant Spaniard who claimed to be his cousin, Don Francisco of Toledo, and his own cousin Theophilus Palaeologus and a faithful comrade-at-arms, John Dalmata. Together they tried to rally the Greeks, in vain; the slaughter had been too great. They dismounted and for a few minutes the four of them held the approach to the gate through which Giustiniani had been carried. But the defence was broken now. The gate was jammed with Christian soldiers trying to make their escape, as more and more Janissaries fell on them. Theophilus shouted that he would rather die than live and disappeared into the oncoming hordes. Constantine himself knew now that the Empire was lost, and he had no wish to survive it. He flung off his imperial insignia and, with Don Francisco and John Dalmata still at his side, he followed Theophilus. He was never seen again.

Runciman reminds us that good historical writing should have the power to move us. History is not just social science. It can—and should be—literature.

Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism (1978) challenged prevailing grand narratives about the rise of modern industrial capitalism as the result o a sudden, violent transition from a medieval peasant society, whether through the enclosures (Marx) or Protestant Reformation (Weber). MacFarlane rejects the idea that individualism was created by modern capitalism. He argues that England’s culture was already individualistic, market-oriented, and relatively egalitarian, long before the Industrial Revolution.

Medieval England, he claims, was already no longer a peasant society, in which land was held jointly by families and seldom sold. By the 12th century, English land was held by individuals (both men and women) and was often sold to nonfamily members. English people were not tied to the land. A good portion of them were wage workers and accustomed to moving as the market demanded.

MacFarlane’s proto-capitalist medieval England, with its cash market in land, suggests that England was “modern” much earlier than previously thought. MacFarlane does however have a vague definition of “individualism.” He also relies on legal records that may well misrepresent the extent of communal and feudal ties that still existed. But I loved this book, less for its thesis than that it challenges broad totalizing theories of history.

It’s a reminder that the history of ordinary people found in account books and property records can upend those grand sweeping narratives.

https://archive.org/details/isbn_039300371x

Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch (1946) is not really a history book since it was an analysis of the fall of France in 1940, just three months after the event. It’s a book by one of France’s greatest historians offering his eye-witness account.

As a historian of modern France, it’s hard to find words to express how much I admire Marc Bloch.

Bloch was a medieval historian and a founder of the Annales school. In 1939, already a veteran of the Great War and at an age when he would have been exempted from service, he was mobilized as a captain of a motorized unit. After the defeat, he returned to teaching at the University of Montpellier, where he required escorts to protect him against antisemitic right-wing violence.

Strange Defeat analyzes all the short and long term reasons for the French defeat, notably the tactical failures of the French military that Bloch knew firsthand from having served on the front line.

Bloch joined the Resistance. In 1944 he was captured, tortured, and killed by Klaus Barbie.² Bloch did not give up a single name of a résistant who wasn’t already in custody or safe with de Gaulle. His last words were (allegedly) “vive la France.”

Strange Defeat was published posthumously in 1946. We can’t know what history Marc Bloch would have written had he survived, or what heights the Annales school may have reached had he lived to lead its research.

According to his instructions, on his grave was carved with the words dilexi veritatem.

I have loved the truth.

https://archive.org/details/cheesewormscosmo00ginz

I’ve written about this last book before. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, tells the story of Menocchio, a miller in 16th century Friuli, who was put on trial for heresy. Menocchio challenged church orthodoxy and had his own unique theory of the universe, which he believed originated from chaos, comparing it to cheese forming with worms inside it. The worms were the angels and God.

The inquisition investigated Menocchio’s books to identify the sources of his heresies. Menocchio did not get a hold of many books but he read widely, reflected on his readings, and grafted them onto his existing store of knowledge, much of which was based in folklore and oral culture. Reconstructing Menocchio’s library from trial transcripts, Ginzburg explored the intersection of oral and written culture in a world of growing literacy and the possibility of independent thinking in a repressive society.

It is a classic work of micro-history, and inspired many people like me to research and write about historical people whose inner lives have gone unexplored.

I have written more about the uses of micro history here:

What is Micro-history?

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I could probably recommend dozens of other books. Most of them are European history, though, because it was my area of study but now a fusty subject for young scholars.

Give one of these old books a try. Each one shows us a unique way to write history and to look at historical people with both rigor and empathy.

Another time I’ll post something about the inspiring history professors under whom I had the privilege to study.

(Thinking of you, Tony Judt, as I write this.)

1. A debate about Sahlins’s work in the 1990s was over how to define “rationality” of indigenous, non-Western peoples. Marshall Sahlins argued that non-Western cultures possess their own rationalities. Gananath Obeyesekere argued that this narrative created a false dichotomy between “rational Westerners” and “irrational, mythological” natives, and that all humans share a basic “practical rationality.”

2. Klaus Barbie was a German S.S. officer in Vichy France. He became known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for having personally tortured prisoners, primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance, as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon. After the defeat of Germany the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps helped him escape to Bolivia. In 1983 Barbie was arrested and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. He had been sentenced to death in absentia twice earlier, in 1947 and 1954, but capital punishment had been abolished in France in 1981.