A very interesting book | After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection Combined

History as Art | After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection Combined | James West Davidson, Mark H. Lytle

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	• After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection Combined James West Davidson, Mark H. Lytle McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Langua, 1999 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The best history book ever

I cannot say more than this. This is the best history textbook I have ever read. This is an especially useful tool for those entering the field of history education at any level.

A very interesting book

Davidson and Lytle's book is an interesting book about history and the importance of looking at history from different views. They have various historical articles that challenge your beliefs about various historical events and I found that I learned a great deal about history that I had never considered before I read this book. It was required reading in my Historiography class and it will be a book that I will use for years to come when I need to be reminded of how history is written, the biases that are in all of us in our approach to history and the various aspects of history that we rarely, if ever even consider.

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History as Art

Anyone interested in history would enjoy this book, and learn from it, too. History is the story we tell about the past, and how the story is told is an art. The best historical art expresses truth and insight, and helps us to understand ourselves and others. When one considers that virtually all of our knowledge and perceptions, including scientific, are based on the stories we hear and believe, the art of history gains respect. The authors of After the Fact offer fifteen chapters on various historical topics, not so much for the purpose of writing history as of thinking about history. The authors' opinions about the topics are therefore not so important, and it really doesn't matter whether you agree with them, though I found all of them quite interesting and insightful. This book complements standard history books and is a great change of pace.

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Great & exciting reading for novice historians

For twenty years, I've been recommending to (i.e., forcing on) new history grad students that they read this marvelous book to get an idea what the profession of history is really about. Because it's not just gathering the "facts" and presenting them as "what really happened." That's very misleading, regardless of what your 6th Grade teacher told you. As the authors demonstrate in the very first chapter, history is a transitive verb. It's "the act of selecting, analyzing, and writing about the past." And they prove it through fourteen closely reasoned, carefully written chapters, each re-examining a historical event or circumstance. Some are major, like a documentary analysis of Jefferson's methodology in writing the Declaration of Independence, or how the decision was arrived at to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima. Others are much more minor, small gems of investigation, especially the truth of the mysterious death of failed American diplomat Silas Deane in 1789. They examine the "great man" theory of history in the light of the career of Huey Long, the "Kingfish," and the counterposed "grand theory" as elucidated by Frederick Jackson Turner. (And attitudes about Turner among historians have changed yet again since this book was published.) They investigate whether John Brown, an unargued terrorist by our standards but a hero to Norhern opponents of slavery in the 1850s, was a psychopath. Other chapters discuss the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the roles of social critics and muckrackers in making or changing public policy, the Salem witch trials, the aftermath of Watergate, the Federal Writers' Project's ex-slave narratives (collected in the 1930s and heavily reinterpreted in the 1970s), and the tradition of the "noble savage." It's gone through several editions and a second volume has been added to include new investigative methods and case studies on later events, but it really doesn't matter. You'll learn the basics just as well from the original book.

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Clues to the past

After the Fact is a very usefull book for students of history. After the fact uses case studies to examin different aspects of history. For example a chapter called The Visible and Invisable worlds of Salem looks at the Salem witch trials from 4 different points of view. The new fifth edition has chapters on what cupboards, clocks, quilts and other daily items can tell us about the early American Republic. The book is a very easy read and can be used to incoruage discussion in a classroom setting.

For more than twenty years, After the Fact has been a popular and best-selling approach to guiding students through American History and the methods used to generate it. In fifteen dramatic episodes that move chronologically through American history, this book examines such topics as oral evidence, photographs, ecological data, films and television programs, church and town records, census data, and novels.

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