Description
Book SynopsisLeopold von Ranke (1795-1886), generally recognized as the founder of the school of modern critical historical scholarship, and Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), the great Swiss proponent of cultural interpretation, are fathers of modern history--giants of their time who continue to exert an immense influence in our own. They are usually seen as contrasts, Ranke as representative of political history and Burckhardt of cultural history. In five essays, each flowing gracefully into the next, the distinguished historian Felix Gilbert shows that such contrasts are oversimplifications. Despite their interest in different aspects of the past, Ranke''s and Burckhardt''s views arose from common elements in the first half of the nineteenth century, the time in which they grew up and in which their first masterworks attracted such wide attention. This concise volume clarifies the beginnings of history as an autonomous discipline, while forcing us to examine our views on basic questions in histori
Table of Contents
*FrontMatter, pg. i*CONTENTS, pg. vii*PREFACE, pg. ix*CHAPTER I. The Impact of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Age on Historical Thought, pg. 3*CHAPTER II. Ranke's View of the Task of Historical Scholarship, pg. 11*CHAPTER III. Ranke and the Meaning of History, pg. 32*CHAPTER IV. Burckhardt's Concept of Cultural History, pg. 46*CHAPTER V. Burckhardt and the Cultural History of His Time, pg. 81*CHAPTER VI. Ranke and Burckhardt: The Common Bond, pg. 93*INDEX, pg. 107
