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As part of our contribution to millennial madness, the Bulletin
editors invited individual historians (some senior, some junior, some retired, some still in graduate school) to complété in 250 words the following statement: “The five history books published inthe 20th century that hâve most influenced me as a historian are...” Below you will find their responses. This survey is totally unrepresentative, absolutelyunscientific, but fun nonetheless! Dans le cadre de notre contribution à la folie dumillénaire, les rédacteurs du Bulletinont convié des historiens (chevronnés ou débutants, retraités ou candidats au baccalauréat) de compléter en 250mots la phrasesuivante : « Les cinq livres d’histoire qui m’ont le plus influencé en tant qu’historien sont... » Vous trouverez leurs réponses ci-dessous. Ce sondage parfaitement dépourvu de tout fondement scientifique n’est absolument pas représentatif, ce qui ne l’empêche pas d’être extrêmement amusant.
• Le livre qui m’a le plus influencé, celui auquel je pense le plus souvent, aété écritpar François Furetet s’intitule Le Passé d'uneillusion. Dansce gros ouvrage, Furettenteune explication decequi fut probablement la plus grandeillusion du dernier siècle :le communisme. J’ai aiméce livre parce qu’il étudie le parcours d’une idée, parce qu’il perçoit l’individu comme un être libre de ses choix, parce qu’il nous livre une synthèse qui donne un sens à notreépoque. Deux autres livres occupent une place très importante dans mon cheminement. Les deux traitent d’historiographie canadienne. Auteur de The Writing of Canadian History, Cari Berger nouspeintunefresque d’histoire intellectuelle saisissante. Faisantpreuve d’érudition, de nuanceset de beaucoup d’intelligence, Berger tentede comprendre les motivations personnelles de tous les grands historienscanadiensdecesiècle. Sonlivre a d’ailleurs servi d’inspirationà RonaldRudin dans Making History inTwentieth- CenturyQuebec, un autre ouvrage quim’a grandement influencé dans macompréhension de l’histoire du Canada français. Rudin nous rend plus humble face à l’écriture de l’histoire. De toutes les époques, les historiens ontestimé être «objectifs» mais, sans parfoiss’en rendre compte, ils furent hantés parles questions de leurépoque. Une bonne leçon pourun jeune historien!
EricBedard, candidat au doctorat, UniversitéMcGill
• The five books written in the twentieth century that hâve influenced me most as ahistorian are Michael B. Katz, The Peopleof Hautilton, Canada West: Familyand Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City,Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival
in Romans: JPeople’s Uprising at Romans, 1579-1580,Jonathan Spence, TheMemory PalaceofMatteoRicci,David Sabean,
Power in the Blood:PopularCultureand Village Discourse in Early ModemGermany and JohnMcManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Ch anging Attitudes to DeathAmongChristians andUnbelievers in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance. Katz’study of Hamilton introduced meto large-scalequantitative studies, and encouragedme in the beliefthatit is possible torecreate the life expériences of peoplewholeft few records. AJthough I do notpursue research using the same methodology, the desire to approachhistory in this manner remains. Le Roy Ladurie’s récréation ofmentalitésand social conflict in sixteenth-century France suggests fascinating ways to read historical evidence. Italsoevokes the dynamic nature of early modem history,where “freedom” took different forms than in our lifetimes. Likewise, Sabean’s study of Germanvillage culture provides insights into the methodsof interpreting local-level events. Spence’s work on China reminds methat history is alsoabout writing stories. Présentation, in addition to scholarship, is of vital importance. Finally, McManners’ book of attitudes towards death and lifeprovides anevocative lessonthat history isaboutpeople who also struggled to make sense of their world, and that historians can deal with those struggles withboth gentle humour and deep humanity.
ColinCoûtes, Director, Centreof Canadian Studies, Unit'ersity of Edinburgh
• R.G. Collingwood wasthe first writer who forced me to reflect on the practice of history. InThe Idea of History (1946)
he madethe startling statement that “ailhistory is the history of thought”. By this he didnot mean thatintellectualhistory is the only kind that matters. His point was that the historian seeksto discover the thoughts that made people act theway they did. Indispensable to the writing of history therefore is there-enactmentof past thoughtinthe historian’s own mind. Or, to put it another way, historyis re-thinking thethoughts of thepast. E.H. Carr’s WhatisHistory?(1961) alsointerested me, not because ofhis crude dismissal ofhistory’s failures, but because of his intriguing discussion of the problem of causation, and howthe historian actuallyworks. John
Keegan’sTheFace ofBattle(1976) is an example ofthe “new military history” that is not onlymagnificentlywritten, but also illustrâtes Collingwood’s dictum. Keegan brilliantly recréâtes the terror and the miseryof the battlefield
expérience for the common soldier. He also explorescombat motivation, and convincingly argues that hackneyedconcepts such as courage, honour andleadership play a crucialrôle, since battleisessentially a moralconflict. WilliamMcNeill’s
The Pursuit of Power (1982)is in the same genre. An explo ration of howwarfare has been transformed over thepast thousand years, it awards thelaurels to Prince William of Nassau for discovering the importance of drill in advancing the efficiency and morale ofan army. “When a group of men movetheirarm andleg musclesin unison for prolonged periods of time, a primitive and very powerful social bond wells up amongthem...Militarydrill...tapped this primitive réservoir of socialitvdirectly”. Finally, S.R. Gardiner’s eighteen-volume History of England, 1603-1656 (1883-1901) is still required readingfor every seriousstudentofthe
seventeenth century. By anexhaustivereadingof manuscripts and printed sourcesinhalfa dozen languages Gardiner produceda masterlyrethinkingof the thoughts of the past.
lan Gentles, Glendon College, York University
• Two of the five books I’ve selected reflectmy enjoyment of broad, synthetic works. Eric Hobsbawm’sAge ofExtrêmes: The ShortTwentieth Century 1914-1991 (1994) and Eric Wolf’s
Europeandthe People Without History(1982) bothanalyse a vastarray of global developments in a compréhensible framework. Given my prédilection to getcaughtup inthe details ofEuropean politics,Wolf’s book serves as a powerful corrective,describinghowcultures evolvein relation to one another and howsuch interactions canbehorriblydestructive. I admire ail of Hobsbawm’s writings, but for someone who concentrâtes on the contemporary era Age of Extrêmesis a treasure, combining lucid treatments of socioeconomic trends withtelling comments on, among other matters, the volution ofWestern popularculture after 1945. The collective work by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the TruthAbout History (1994), informed me a great deal about the development ofhistory as a discipline. The authors defendthe historian’s ability to achieve knowledge of the past while also providing a critique of established structures and patterns of thinking, a practice essential tosustaining a démocratie society. One need not share ail of their
conclusions toadmire thescope of thiswork, with its incisive converge of topics suchas the impactof notionsof scientific objectivity on historical writing. Finally, Icite two books in my ownresearch area, twentieth-centuryFrance. The first, by my doctoral supervisor,William D. Irvine, French
Conservatism in Crisis (1979), studiesa right-wing political party inthe 1930s andstrongly influenced the structure and approachof mydissertation. Finally, aworkthat I constantly turnto forits insight and clarity ofexpressionis Robert Paxton’s Vichy France:OldGuard and New Order, 1940-1944
(1972), which literally redefined thehistoriography of its subject. To be sure, some of its conclusions hâve been qualified or elaborated upon by subséquent research;but for an introductionnot onlyto Vichy but to many aspects of contemporary French politics and society it remains indispensable.
Sean Kennedy, University ofNew Brunswick
• My own idiosyncraticlist beginswithE.P. Thompson’sThe Makingof the English Working Class(Penguin, 1963). Despite the legitimacy ofrecent feminist critiques, Thompson’s powerful and passionate history of the development ofclass consciousnessamong English workers remains a ground- breaking and enormously influential work. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850(Hutchinson, 1987) is among the first books to showin fine and complex detail how one could do genderhistory - notjust studying men andwomen, but also looking at the shifting gendered meaningsof their lives. Thompson and DavidoffandHall’s books were particularly important to myownscholarlydevelopmentin that they both saw religion as intégralto understanding their subjects, a récognition thatremains elusiveto mostgender, social and labourhistorians. Not ail ofmy “bestbooks”, however, touch on religion. InLove and Toil:Motherhoodin Outcast London, 1870- 1918 (Oxford Univ. Press 1993) Ellen Ross’s skill,empathyand extensive research enables us bothto viscerally feel the misery, anxietyand exhaustion ofso many working- classmothers and to understandthe complex ways in whichthe meanings andexpectations they had of mother hood differedsignificantly from our own. Ross also présents an unromanticized exploration of the complexifiesand ambiguous legacies of the active, but limitedagency ofthe oppressed. George Chauncey’s Gay New York (BasicBooks,
1994) amazed me at first reading, and continues to impress. Chaunceydid what onlythe very best history does,whichis to fundamentally reshapeunderstandings of the past, inthis case demonstratingthatprevious historians’unquestioneduse of current homosexual/heterosexual binaries had no meaning toearly twentieth century New York men,whoconstructed their own very different and farmorecomplex worlds of sexualmeanings. In Thank You, St.Jude: Womeris Dévotionto the PatronSaint ofHopelessCauses(Yale Univ. Press, 1996) Robert Orsi explores women’s faith and subjectivity, creativity,
complexand empathetic approachwhich pointsto newand exciting possibilités for incorporating religion into cutting edge work in social, genderand cultural history.
Lynne Marks, Dept. ofHistory, Universityof Victoria
• When Iwas still an undergraduatestudent, Griselda Pollock’s
Vision and Différence: Femininity, Feminism and the Historiés of Art(Routledge, 1988) showedme, not only that Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt hadpainted the “spaces of
femininity” during the late nineteenth century, butthat it was possible for feminist art historians to create their ownspaces within the modemuniversity Like Pollock, Mieke Bal, especially in her Reading Rembrandt: Beyond theWord-Image Opposition (Cambridge, 1991), revealed that arthistorians coulddo far morethan simply muse, along withKenneth Clark, about whether ornotRenoir’s nudes were like peaches ripe for the plucking. Bal instead challengedme to appreciate both literary theory andthe smellof paint. Perhaps that is why I went on to spend the better part ofmy firstvear in graduate school reading the works of Sigmund Freud, an activity that no doubt affectedmein profound anddisturbing ways I am not yet able to articulate fully. Although Freud’s influence may be mostévidentin mydesire to see beyond the “manifestcontent”, he also helped metounderstand the sheer efficacy of repression anddéniai. I willthereforeinvoke thesestrategies in order tomove on to my third sélection,
UamourdeFart : Les Musées européens etleur public (Minuit, 1969). Using the data collectedin the first extensive visitor surveysof European muséums, the French sociologists Pierre Bourdieuand Alain Darbelconcluded that, while apparently open to a diverse public, muséums in factboth produced and reinforcedclass distinctions. In an even more extensive critique of the foundations of the Western aesthetic tradition, Jacques Derrida’sThe Truth in Painting, (Universityof
Chicago Press, 1987)unraveled Kant’ssearch forthe proper object of the pure judgment oftaste. More recently, however, the combination of careful archivai research witha thorough understandingof contemporary visual andpostcolonial theory in Ruth B. Phillip’s TradingIdentities: TheSouvenir in Native NorthAmericanArt from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (University of Washington Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998) reassured me that it is stillpossible to be an art historian, orI shouldsay a historian ofvisual culture, even aswe enter this “new” millennium.
Lianne McTavish,Départirent ofHistory, UNB
• Genevieve Foster’s American historybooks for children awakened my love ofhistory, but the most influential early book wasthe abridged version ofToynbee’sA Study of History.,
from whichI learned that history could transcend the
préoccupations offur tradersand politicians to encompass the movementof ideas andthe rise and fall of religions. I spent my nineteenth year in Europe, intriguedby a médiéval manual on Albigensian heretics, learnedtomes on Joan of Arc, and historiés of revolutionary France, ail demonstrating that historians’ politics affected their writing. Back in North America, I read Hugh Maclennan s Tvvo Solitudesand became convincedthat the idéal Canadian historian read both French and English. Perhaps it was introducing Pepys to high school studentsin the 1960s thattaught me the importance of social history, but the most influential bookof this period was Bernard Bailyn’s Education in theForming of American Society,
discoveredwhen I embarked on my doctorate. Bailyn
confirmed a growing belief that exploring educational history wasvital to understanding the modem world. Finally, Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties tookme back to the fur traders, but with a différence. First nations women as well asmixed blood and white women moved to centre stage and confirmed another developingconviction: thatunderstandingwomen’s history is crucial to understanding ail history. For that reason, Icannotend my accountwithout recommending at leastone contemporary book: Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History. Read it and be both amazed and refreshed.
Alison Prentice, University ofVictoria;OISE
• La profession d’historien ne m’attirait guère quand j’étais étudiantà l’Universitéde Leningrad. Rien ne m’avait rendu cette profession plus répugnante que lecours obligatoire d’histoire du PartiCommuniste, dont le manuel canonique changeait decontenu chaque fois qu’unnouveau leader prenait le pouvoir en URSS. Voici, donc, un livre qui m’a immunisépour toujours contre les récits d’histoire
théologiques. Deux livres m’ont sensibiliséà l’histoire, les deux écritspar desAnglais formés en physique : C.P. Snow,
The Two Cultures, et Derek De Solia Price, Little Science, Big Science. Le premier m’a montré l’abîme culturel qui sépare le monde dessciences etle monde littéraire. Je suishereux que mescours attirentautant d’étudiants en sciencequ’en histoire. Le secondm’a présenté la science entantqu’objet d’étude ordinaire, démystifié, que l’on peut observer et mesurer. Un autre livre m’amontré qu’en choisissantla science en tant qu’objet d’étude, l’onpeutdéjouerlacensure. Vasilii Nalimov, l’auteur de Naukometria, statisticien derenom et ex-prisonnier duGoulag, livrait unecritique mordante du
régime totalitaire tout en prétendant qu’il ne parlait quede la science. Ces trois livresm’ontencouragé à poursuivre mes études doctorales en histoire dessciences plutôt qu’en chimie organique où j’avais déjà été accepté. Je me rejouis toujours de cette décision. Enfin, le livre Out of theGhetto par Jacob Katz a stimulé ma réflexionsur laculture juive contemporaine et ses rapports aux cultures scientifiques, une réflexion qui est autant savante que personnelle.
Yakov M. Rnbkin, départementd'histoire, Université deMontréal
• Chronologically, the first historical work to expand my perspective onthe past was E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English WorkingClass,which showed me that we can learn a great dealabout peopleneglected in conventional historiés through analyses of popular songs, rituals, and sociability. The next book to broaden my conceptionof history was Fernand Braudel’s Capitalismand Material Life, 1400-1800,
which introduced meto the importanceofdemography, geography, material history, andconsumptionpatters. Thirdly, Natalie ZemonDavis’s collection of essays,Society and Culture in Early Modem France, drew my attention to women’s participation in popular uprisings and religious change and tothe utility of deep analysis and other
techniques of symbolic anthropology in historical interprétation. Joan Wallach Scott’s twocollections ofessays, Gender and the Politicsof History and OnlyParadoxes to Offer: FrenchFeminists and the Rights of Man, wouldbemy fourth and fifth choices. Thefirstbook persuaded me thatgender is a category of historical analysis withimplications far beyondwomen’s history and that there is a placein historical research for consciousdeconstruction of the language deployed and assumptionsembedded in archivai and other sources. The latter alerted me to the need to acknowledge, and not to try to reconcile, the paradoxes in women’s history andin history generally. It isperhaps redundant to concludeby saying that French anthropologists like Pierre Bourdieu and French feminist literarycritics hâve also profoundlyinfluenced my historical research andwriting.
Mary Lynn Stewart, Simon Fraser University
• Duringthe over fortyyears Ihâve studied, researched, and written about history (principallythat of modem Europeand Germany),a number ofbookshâve made an indelible impression onmythought and life -many more than the handful I can mention here. The first“real” historical tomes Iowned while still a schoolboywere Winston Churchill’s
memoir ofThe Second World War(Boston, 1948-1953), ail six volumes ofwhich1 read including theirlengthy documentary appendices to thepermanentbenefit of my own admiration for literarystyle. As an undergraduate my personal religious complacency was shaken by two related studies on Gerrnan Catholics andHitler's Wdrs(New York, 1962) and InSolitary Witness: TheLifeandDeath of Franz Jagerstiitter(New York, 1965)whose author,theAmerican sociologistGordon Zahn, had himself been aconscientious objectorimprisoned for his beliefsafter 1941. The bookI mostvividlyrecall reading as part of my doctoralfieldrequirements was a classicby Geroid T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Régime (London,
1932), supplemented by apair ofnovels(Turgenev’s
Sportsman 's Sketches and Dead Soûlsby Gogol); together they taught methe value of great works of fiction in achieving a better understanding of developmentsin history, in this case the institution of Russian serfdom. Finally, in my courseson contemporary GermanyI regularly assigned students to read Alan Bullock’s biography Hitler: A Studyin Tyranny (New York, 1962, rev.ed.) Aswell asthe pioneering publication on a localityby William S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Expérience ofa Single Gerrnan Tovm 1922-1945 (New7 York, 1984, rev.ed.). FromtheformerI had learned that itwas possible towrite a scholarly account of even themost horrendous personalities and events in history; whereas the latter encouraged me to devotealmost three décadesof my career to reconstructing theinterwar course followed by another Kleinstadt. Indeed, Eutin in Holstein continuesto preoccupyme in retirement.
LawrenceD. Stokes, Dalhousie University, Adjunct Professor, retired
• S’interrogersur les livres quinous ont le plus influencés dans notre pratique de l’histoire, c’estaussiessayer de comprendre ce qui nous a donné notre vision du monde. Il yena souvent deux ou trois qui se démarquent ou qui nous viennent
rapidement àl’esprit. En premier arrive L'Occident devant la révolutionsoviétique de Marc Ferro. Cet ouvrage doit sevoir non pas comme un livre sur un événement, mais plutôt comme une étude surla perception quel’extérieur a d’un phénomène bouleversant l’ordre établi. Derrièrele phénomène figé reste alors notre vision qui elle, touten évoluant, façonne notre manière d’interpréter le présent. Un deuxième ouvrage majeur dans ma compréhension de l’histoire est Les Chinois àMontréal: 1877à 1951 deDenise Helly. Ecrit par une anthropologue, ce livre montreune visionsociale d’un phénomène aussi important que la transplantation d’une culture dans un lieu. Il démontre ainsi l’importance des études multidisciplinaires des groupes
minoritaires. Comprendre l’autredans son développement est, pour commencer,se regarder soi, mais aussi regarder son voisin, principalement lorsqu’il est le principal canal de la transformationculturelle. Dans l’enseignement de l’histoire au collégial, comprendre l’évolutiondenotre voisin du sud est primordial même si on n’enseigne pasl’histoire des Etats-Unis. C’est ce que permetle livreLa civilisation américaine.
Mais n’en nommerque trois, c’est malgré touten mettre d’autres de côté. Comment passersous silence deslivres comme Les trois ordres ouL'imaginairedu féodalismede Georges Duby,ou simplement un simplelivre sur l’histoire du Québec comme Histoire du Québec contemporain?
J.-LouisVallée, professeur d'histoire, Centre d'études
collégiales de Montmagny
• The five historybooks published this century that hâve most influenced me as a historian are: C.P. Stacey, A Very Double Life, The Private Worldof Mackenzie King (1976); Isaiah Berlin,
TheHedgehogandthe Fox, an Essay on Tolstoy's Viewof History
(1953); D.G. Creighton,John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician (1952)and The Old Chieftain (1955); Wallace
Stegner, WolfWillow, a History, a Story and aMemoryof the Last Plains Frontier (1955); and a children’sbooks, A.Philippa Pearce, Tom'sMidnight Garden (1958). Stacey’s book has an instructive though dangerous undercurrent: he did notreally likeKing, and occasionally his account is overtaken by surrenders to Schadenfreude. In Stacey’s case it should be remembered thatthe whole corpus of his work is important, whereas with D.G. Creighton hisfamé canrest especiallyon hisMacdonald, though he might not hâve relished one saying so. Unlike Stacey, Creightonadmired his subject, so much so thatone cansaythat Macdonald’s enemies became
Creighton’s. But for a brilliant amalgamof research and writing, Creighton’s Macdonald has few superiors. Isaiah Berlin canstand on his own as intellectual history. Stegner’s book isa marveloustransmutationof the history ofsouthern Saskatchewanintoliterature. Philippa Pearce’s isfor children, andotherpeople like me,who love the mysterious magic that grows from an unobtrusive context; here a young boy’s adventures in agarden flash him back to aworld two générations earlier. Ail this suggeststhat history isabout peoples’ lives, fromwhichwe make analysis andabstractions at our péril.
PB. Waite,Professor Emeritus, Dalhousie University
• I hâve named these my five best history books of thepast
centurybecause theywereimportantin shaping my curiosity about history and memory in the context of empire and racism. If mychoices are incomplète and idiosyncratic, the books are still worth reading. Edward Said’s Orientalism has beenmuchcriticized in recent décades, butstill provides the basic reference point for rethinking thefoundations of European daims to knowledge about their colonized others. Although Philip Curtin’s The Image ofAfrica is squarelya historyof British rather thanAfrican ideas,it préfigurés much currently fashionable writingabout the intricacies ofcultural invention in thepower playsof imperialism. Samuel
Johnson’s A History of the Yorubasis a magisterial study by a Nigérianmissionary. It isan exemplar of many African’s attempts to render their past in a new form, but also far more. Careful reflection on it revealshow littlewestill understand the complex currents of colonial intellectual life. By
connectingthe deep and diverse roots ofPan-Africanisminto one framework, ImanuelGeiss (in The Pan-African
Movement), simultaneously opened the stage of BlackAtlantic history and set a challenging researchagenda for later scholars. Finally, Anthony Appiah’s incisive reflections on what theidea ofAfrica has meantand should mean to African intellectuals, inhisInMy Father's House, charts territory which promises to lead Affica’s intellectual history beyond the powerful legacies of European empire and racism.
