In Defense of History

A master practitioner gives us an entertaining and instructive tour of the historian's workshop and, along the way, a spirited defense of the search for historical truth. E.H. Carr's What Is History?, a classic introduction to the field that has held sway for a generation, may now give way to a worthy successor. In his compact, spirited survey, Richard Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation and powerful computer models to the skilled investigator's sudden insight, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past.