The Birth of the Past

Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this books repays close attention. -- Malin Dahlstrom Reviews in History 2012 Thought-provoking. -- Steve Goddard History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive 2012 Complex and erudite, confident and controversial... As Zachary Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anacharonism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. -- David Lowenthal Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite... His learned and engaging style, and his fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions... Essential. Choice 2012 This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past form the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment... Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides... and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. -- Jessica Wolfe Sixteenth Century Journal 2012 This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. -- Clifford Cunningham The Sun News Network 2013 Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review 2013