| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £8.10
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Practice of History for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £8.10, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The new edition of G. R. Elton′s classic work is a wide–ranging, succinct and practical introduction for all students and general readers of history. It makes a major contribution to the question "what is history?".
From the Back Cover
This original and important book on the study of history is now available in a new edition. G. R. Elton′s classic work is a wide–ranging, succinct and practical introduction for all students and general readers, and it makes a major contribution to the question "What is history?"
This book sets out Elton′s experience in the study, writing and teaching of history. The author perceived the work as a manifesto, an explanation of his faith and practice of the subject. The book has become a classic text for students and teachers since its first publication in 1969. This edition includes a new afterword by Richard Evans which assesses the book′s relationship to Elton′s work as a whole, its impact on the historical profession and its lessons for historians today.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
The conclusions of a disciplined thinker are worth reading
18 Jan 2011
Format:Hardcover
"Meaningful interconnections in the particular, illuminating generalization beyond the individual case-- these are the marks that distinguish the inspired and inspiring historian from the hack." (p. 98) Regarding education: "The university must train the mind, not fill the untrained mind with multi-coloured information and undigested ideas, and only the proper study of an identifiable discipline according to the rules and practices of that discipline can accomplish that fundamental purpose." (p. 160) By being trained in any coherent discipline that requires effort and ability to follow rules, one becomes a better thinker in any field. "Since the whole of history... can never be got between the covers of one book, some means of rendering the material manageable must be found.... To transfer the universality of life on to paper, or even to comprehend it in the mind, is rarely possible, and without a main line of thought nothing results except the jumble which in fact is nearest to the common experience of life. This would be neither art, nor understanding, nor use. Issues and problems demand some sort of tunnel for their clarification." (p. 15) An important lesson I learned from this book is to let the topic guide your writing about it. Also, don't write history for historians and history for lay people; instead pick topics and write them as they require, and indeed some topics will only be useful for historians while others can be appreciated by lay people. Also, refusal to judge is amateurish (p. 17). Amateur history is written through "a veil woven out of strangeness and wonderment", and "cannot penetrate to fundamental explanation" (p. 18). One can read this book not just as instruction about how history should be done, but about how one should learn and do any scholarly discipline. See especially p. 19 for the intuition that a trained historian has, that his guesses are better than random because he understands setting, atmosphere, possibility, probability. His hunch "is in the nature of an inspired forecast which often leads to the discovery of evidence supporting it."
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Old fashioned but refreshing
3 April 2005
Format:Paperback
Although many of the ideas espoused by Elton in this book are very old fashioned and narrow-minded, such as his views on revisionism and newer trends in source criticism, the majority of the book deals with the subject in a refreshingly straight-forward manner. The language is, on the whole, very clear and the methodical approach in which he puts forward his arguments is very persuasive. I recommend reading this along side another historiographical work such as E. H. Carr's 'What is History?' or Richard J. Evans' 'In Defence of History'.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
