MAKING HISTORY

Former book publisher Cohen surveys the state of history writing over the past two millennia.

This wide-ranging account hits most of the predictable points in a traditional, occasionally entertaining introductory-level course on the writers of history in Western civilization. Cohen, the author of How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers and other books, begins with a chapter on Herodotus and Thucydides and then moves steadily forward, with chapters on Latin historians, medieval European historians, Civil War historians, “The Red Historians: From Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm,” and so forth. The work of Herodotus, he writes, “brought into play…a special kind of inquiry—one that encompasses geography, ethnography, philology, genealogy, sociology, biography, anthropology, psychology, and imaginative re-creation (as in the arts).” Cohen seldom considers history as written by scholars other than those in Europe and, later, North America, and he recapitulates the biography of each of the historians he considers, which leads to an uneven text. For example, he spends more time on Voltaire's many mistresses than on his thoughts and writings. This makes for smooth but rarely thought-provoking reading. While the book is useful as a broad overview for neophytes, readers looking for fresh insights into history and history writing should look elsewhere. As the narrative progresses, Cohen tends increasingly to group historians together not so much by historical period or approach to the subject matter as by less relevant standards. A chapter titled “Herstory” lumps together women scholars from the past 2,000 years, from Chinese historian and philosopher Ban Zhao to notable 20th-century historians Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the chapter on Black historians could have been more well considered. (Overall, the book is notable more for its length than depth.) Cohen branches out to consider, though seldom favorably, novelists, journalists, TV producers, and photographers as historians. The book is amply illustrated with photographs, maps, and cartoons.

Lively but long-winded and largely superficial biographies of historians through the ages.