Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past Tapa dura - 2008

THE REMARKABLE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY THROUGH THE AGES What began as a minor literary genre in ancient Greece stands today as perhaps the most successful monument to the global spread of Western civilization, rivaling even science in its ubiquity. Yet it did not have to turn out that way. In A Brief History of History, the most accessible and lively biography ever of history as a living idea, Colin Wells moves forward through the ages to show how the great historians and their works have changed our understanding of history, and why "history" is a startingly fluid concept, with an evolutionary course--a story--all its own. An Excerpt from A BRIEF HISTORY OF HISTORYHere's a question: What if Thucydides had written smut? In the LatinWest, writers like Gregory and Bede may have abandoned secular history, but on its home turf in the Greek East, the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides proved more, shall we say, robust . . .