Making history : the storytellers who shaped the past /

"A fascinating, epic 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cohen, Richard, 1947- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Edition:First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Overture: The monk outside the monastery
  • The dawning of history: Herodotus or Thucydides?
  • The glory that was Rome: from Polybius to Suetonius
  • History and myth: creating the Bible
  • Closing down the past: the Muslim view of history
  • The Medieval chroniclers: creating a nation's story
  • The accidental historian: Niccolò Machiavelli
  • William Shakespeare: the drama of history
  • Zozo and the marionette infidel: M. Voltaire and Mr. Gibbon
  • Announcing a discipline: from Macaulay to von Ranke
  • Once upon a time: novelists as past masters
  • America against itself: versions of the Civil War
  • Of shoes and ships and sealing wax: the annales school
  • The red historians: from Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm
  • History from the inside: From Julius Caesar to Ulysses S. Grant
  • The spinning of history: Churchill and his factory
  • Mighty opposites: wars inside the academy
  • The wounded historian: John Keegan and the military mind
  • Herstory: from Bān Zhāo to Mary Beard
  • Who tells our story? From George W. Williams to Ibram X. Kendi
  • Bad history: truth-telling vs. "patriotism"
  • The first draft: journalists and the recent past
  • On television:from A.J.P. Taylor to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.