History Made Conscious: Politics of Knowledge, Politics of the Past

How History has changed in the half-century since the 1960s

During the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the value of social explanation.

Then, responding to new theoretical debates, the cultural turn upset many of those freshly earned certainties. Each challenge was profoundly informed by politics, from issues of class, gender, and race to those of...