I just finished In Defence of History, by Richard Evans. I read it with a pencil in hand, underlining things like I haven’t since I was an undergrad (ha, makes me sound so educated and old…). It was a fantastic book. I won’t attempt a dissertation of it here, except to say that it was largely a refutation of post-modernism in history. That is, Evans said that many of the good challenges post-modernism throws up for the historian are things that many have been aware of for years anyway – like the fact (contentious word!) that objectivity is an issue, and that reading the sources is fraught – and that other things post-modernism says about history, like that it is dying, are just daft. I loved the way he ripped into some of post-modernism’s ideas and arguments, revealing their inherent contradictions.

Essentially, this book defends the practice of history in its many and varied forms – social, political, micro – and warns all of us that we must be ever vigilant about how to use sources appropriately. Everyone who claims to be a historian these days must deal with the theory side, and I think that everyone should read this, if only to figure out where they stand on the issues he presents.

And I have the most recent edition, which includes a long Afterword with a vigorous rebuttal of lots of the criticism he received of the book. That was probably the most entertaining part of the whole book.