Fashioning History : Current Practices and Principles

This book offers historians and aspiring historians a learned, absorbing, and comprehensive overview of current fashions of method, interpretation, and meaning in the context of postmodernism that has washed over the historical profession in the last two decades.

Historians in the early twenty-first century must reconcile long-standing approaches to evidence and narrative with the challenges posed by postmodern criticism, the explosion of historical sources and interpretations on the Internet, and the popularity of histories provided in movies and on television. Fashioning History is the first book to develop and apply the same methods of source analysis and principles of synthesis to the chief forms historical representations take in the early twenty-first century: to moving images and Web sites as well as books and articles, to museum exhibitions and historical sites as well as classrooms and archives, to memory and heritage as well as conventional histories. The result is an illuminating assessment of the discipline, indispensable to those who wish to understand the ever-changing landscape of the historical profession.