Overview
"In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the "long nineteenth century" - the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings." Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the "new histories" of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.Synopsis
"In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the "long nineteenth century" - the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings." Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the "new histories" of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.
The Washington Post
Donald R. Kelley, an eminent historian at Rutgers and the editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, has here produced an authoritative, densely detailed and sometimes even witty survey of how 19th-century English, German, French and American scholars approached writing about the past. All well and good. The problem lies in the essential character of Fortunes of History: Kelley's text is largely geared toward other professionals. If you don't already know a fair amount about Thomas Macaulay, Leopold von Ranke, Jules Michelet and Henry Adams -- to name, arguably, the outstanding historians of their respective nations -- you're not going to get a friendly introduction here. — Michael Dirda