particularly good introduction to historiography. Gilderhus clearly identifies and decribes of the major themes and debates among the more important historical thinkers from Herodotus to the 1960s. Includes good lists of recommended readings for each chapter. As an introductory text it earns 4 stars.

Chapter seven, the second to last chapter of the book, remains my favourite. Elsewhere, concepts and schools of thought are briefed over with little explaination. Chapter 7 has a more detailed look at a couple key issues in history; mainly the Enola Gay / Smithsonian scandle. I wish the rest of the book handled issues in this way.
I did find the last chapter, on reading and writing history, to be a bit pretentious in nature, and as a history student myself, I understand the need for clear and concise writing, but I can't help but think that there should be room for more liberal writing in academia. Scholars that I've read that have attempted to communicate more freely, I find much more enjoyable. His discouragement of these practices comes off a bit harsh and, as I said, pretentious.
Ultimately, this book is a useful tool, and has helped me formulate my understanding of the history of history. May not read again, but I did take quite a few notes I'll return too.

A brief guide describing an overview of Western historical thinking. When we read history books or tour a historical museum, we expect to see all of history as it happened-properly. Sometimes, key groups get omitted or a twist is taken on a certain historical account. And not all done with malice. Sometimes, yes. It's just how people tend to relay history according to various factors. This book discusses this at length. And it's no small task.

"Although particularities and divergences of many sorts characterize the craft of history in the present day, one thing seems reasonably clear. History no longer sets forth common stories that presumably speak for the identity and experience of all readers."

So, when you travel to a historical site, think of whether it's based on factual evidence. Or if all players in that historical account are included. It's funny how our history is written, portrayed in books, defined by someone else. Is that person elitist in their portrayal of historical accounts? Have they included all the facts. Did they dilute the facts? These things we take for granted when it comes to history and how it's told. This book is great because it tries to explain why this happens.

It's lucid enough and... adequate. But I think that Gilderhus, while dismissing teleological views of history, tends towards a teleological view of historiography. The book is dismissive of premodern history-writing, and doesn't really engage with the tendentious nature of the constructed "western tradition" of history-writing. History is generally presented as, ideally, a rational and objective enterprise, scientific and secular. The cursory overview of various historiographical schools might be useful in conjunction with excerpts from the historians themselves, but I don't find it particularly satisfactory as a teaching text.

Good info, but buried under too much scholarly prose. Remove the academic gobbledygook, and this brief volume would reach a much broader audience. Postmodernism and culture wars need more fleshing out than the brief postscript provides.

The volume is informative, brisk, and keeps an engaging pace that never left my mind wandering or feeling bored. Gilderhus encapsulates a large amount of information in a very approachable and easy-to-understand format in cataloging the various historiographical methods of the world's greatest historians and how they viewed history.

Gilderhus is largely unable to keep his biases hidden, and holds a great contempt for the Enlightenment thinkers, primarily Voltaire. Gilderhus simultaneously criticizes Voltaire for hating and judging the past, and failing to view previous events in their proper historical context. This is ironic, as Gilderhus commits the same "historian's sin" against Voltaire by not considering or acknowledging the context of the Enlightenment era that led Voltaire and his ilk to consider the past a cautionary tale to avoid repeating in matters of theocratic government. Gilderhus also venerates Vico as a man of logic and evidence, while turning a blind eye to his entirely superstitious based Providential schema which viewed the divine will of an invisible being as the ultimate source of all historical events.

Definitely one of the more readable historiographical texts I've read!

Not only was this book a required text for our "Prelude" class as history majors at Colorado State University. The author was our professor and the department head. Dr. Gilderhus was a great instructor with a passion for the subject of history. This book is meant to serve as an introduction to the study of history.

Eurocentric and outdated.

reading this in my theory and practice of history class

Especially helpful for its coverage of the history of philosophy from the Early Modern period through the present day, which incidentally is also a history of how historical inquiry has changed. For the most part I thought it was fair. The section on the Israelites and early Christianity was poor in my opinion, but that is pretty common from any secular writer. The last chapter broke into a diatribe about current historical disputes and he had a bone to pick with the other parties.

Clearly written, something like this would have been useful as the framework for the historiography capstone course I took, then dropped, at Grinnell College. Instead, our ambitious instructor started us off with Thucydides, which was fine, and Augustine, which wasn't. Now, of course, I can appreciate, having actually read, 'The City of God', but then, having the compulsion to never read only selections from a text, I saw Augustine's work as too much craziness to endure. What Gilderhus' history of history does is to put such works in context and in relation to one another. With that I might have finished the history major. Instead I switched to religious studies, itself substantially a field of historical study as it was taught there.