The History of Emotions: A New Historical Subject
How historians learned to study feelings and discovered that emotions themselves have a past
The Spatial Turn: When Historians Discovered Place
How rethinking the role of place in history reshaped an entire discipline's questions and methods
Why Environmental History Demands New Methods
When nature becomes a historical actor, the methods we developed to study human agents prove inadequate
Why Periodization Is Never Neutral
How we divide historical time quietly determines what stories we can tell about the past.
New Cultural History: Beyond the Social History Critique
How 1980s historians turned from counting lives to interpreting the meanings those lives held for those who lived them
Why British Empiricism Distrusted Continental Theory
How British historians' suspicion of theory concealed assumptions that shaped everything they wrote
The Cultural Turn: When Historians Discovered Meaning Mattered
How the shift from counting to interpreting transformed what historians could see, say, and know about the past
Intellectual History's Identity Crisis: From Ideas to Contexts
How the study of ideas became the study of contexts—and whether something vital got lost along the way
Cliometrics and Its Critics: The Quantitative History Debate
How economists' quantitative methods promised to make history scientific—and why traditional historians pushed back.
Why Archives Lie: Source Criticism Beyond Authenticity
Archives don't just store the past—they shape which past we can recover and which we never knew to look for.
Global History's Promise: Beyond National Frameworks
How global historians challenge the assumption that nations are the natural containers of historical experience
How Postcolonial Critics Transformed Historical Practice
How Subaltern Studies forced historians to ask whose voices count as evidence and whether Western methods can grasp non-Western pasts
Microhistory's Magnifying Glass: What Tiny Cases Reveal About Big Questions
How studying one obscure miller's heresy trial revolutionized historical methodology and revealed what aggregate data can never show
How Feminist Historians Rewrote the Rules of Evidence
How questioning whose experiences count as history transformed the entire discipline's relationship to evidence, archives, and significance.
Social History's Promise and Crisis: From New History to Fragmentation
How the movement to democratize history through science fragmented into specialized subfields, prompting fundamental questions about historical synthesis
The Linguistic Turn's Challenge: Did Words Replace Reality?
How poststructuralist theory forced historians to rethink truth, narrative, and whether we can ever truly know what happened
Why American Historians Rejected Theory: The Pragmatic Tradition Explained
How American historians' famous rejection of theory concealed rather than eliminated the frameworks shaping their interpretations of the past.
The German Historicist Legacy: Why Context Became Sacred
How nineteenth-century German scholars created modern historical method while embedding problems their successors spent generations untangling.
Why Annales Changed Everything: The School That Revolutionized How We Study History
How French historians proved that climate, geography, and collective psychology reveal more about the past than kings and battles ever could.
The Marxist Lens: How Class Analysis Shaped Historical Interpretation
How a theoretical framework about class and economics transformed the questions historians ask—even those who rejected Marx's politics entirely.