Books like Style in History — picked by fans

Jill Lepore is a Swiss-Army-Knife historian, capable of tackling any topic in American history with verve. Here she offers a biography of Jane Franklin Mecom, best known as Benjamin Franklin's younger sister. Jane's life gives us a wonderful foil for "Benny," who arose from obscurity in Boston to the center of the American stage. Lepore keeps the dual narratives moving briskly along while also opening a window on how biographies are assembled.

Along the way, the reader finds recipes for making soap, an assortment of maxims from Poor Richard and Silence Dogood, family gossip and tragedies, Jane's reactions to rising Revolutionary violence, her fear of dementia in old age, and the idiosyncrasies of Benjamin Franklin's earliest biographers. The chatter between the siblings, on matters large and small, is captivating. Lepore has to fill in many gaps in the source material to complete the life of Jane Mecom, but the pleasure… show more.

Historical thought, like everything else, has a history. But contrary to what you may think, such history doesn’t have to be dull, especially when told by a masterly writer who was also among the world’s most knowledgeable experts on the subject. So don’t think that this overview of what historians have written about the past since ancient Greece will be hard going. It isn’t. Sometimes it’s even fun. In fact, I know of no more enjoyable introductory guide to history’s history or a better place to start your journey within it than this book. Burrow canters through the major developments in historical writing and practices in the West over 2,500 years. His pages are peopled by pagan, Christian, Marxist, feminist, and many other kinds of thinkers and scholars. They’re a treat.

This book is important, authoritative, and compelling because it demonstrates that a conservative historian can be comfortable with revisionist history. Kagan, a Yale historian noted as a leading academic traditionalist, terms Thucydides “the first revisionist historian” not because he was like today’s leftists but because he took issue with his pioneering predecessor, Herodotus. In his great history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides threw down the gauntlet over which was the “best” and “right” way to do history. He thought its subjects should be politics, warfare, the relation between states, and—a surprise?—men. His views held the field for centuries. The Framers of the Constitution were its legatees. So were we until the late 20th century, when social and cultural subjects gained attention. This wonderful book shows why.

This splendid book, by another teacher of mine, one of the most influential 20th-century historians of the United States, takes up the works of three similarly prominent early 20th-century historians: Charles A. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon L. Parrington. Their books, too, make rewarding reading, even though time may have left their interpretations in the dust—Beard’s on the Constitution being, writes Hofstadter, an “imposing ruin.” Turner’s on the frontier and Parrington’s on American thought are also mostly ignored by historians today. So why bother with them? Because they can still be read for what they cover—the creation of a constitutional republic, how democracy came into being, and core American convictions. Hofstadter’s easy colloquial style is a delight. It’s critical, albeit sympathetic, American history at its best.

If you like dishy books, you’ll love this inside look at historians as they argue with each other and gossip behind other historians’ backs. While not offered as humor, Novick’s tale pulls back the curtain on academic historians’ ideological and often bitterly personal contests. In this case it’s over the central question of modern historical thought: whether or not history can achieve objectivity. Novick terms their arguments “essentially confused” and much like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Along the way, he reveals the altogether human elements behind all efforts to advance knowledge. The story is particularly relevant for a “post-modern” era in which it’s often argued that truth’s an illusion—it’s just fake. Novick’s story is of a very human world. He finds it fascinating. You will, too.

An old book, but still one of the best accounts of 19th-century American historical writing, showing how Romantic historians like William Prescott and Francis Parkman viewed history as a literary art. As Levin elegantly and lucidly demonstrates, these historians did not view themselves as mere chroniclers of fact but considered themselves artists whose purpose was to bring the past to life through the use of their own imagination. This was one of the first works of historiography that I read, and it is still a model to me of how to approach the subject.

Grafton shows how something we often take for granted as part of scholarly history writing – the footnote – itself has a history. There is no historian today who is better at making the history of erudition accessible and engaging to general readers, and The Footnote is a case in point. Wittily and elegantly written, Grafton’s book turns what might seem to be an esoteric topic – the story of how footnotes came to be a sine qua non of historical scholarship – into the story of how historians dealt with their uncertainties about the foundations for historical knowledge and truth.

A collection of essays about “classic” works of history by (mostly) European historians ranging from Edward Gibbon to Jacob Burckhardt, Clive’s book brings these works to life even for readers unfamiliar with them. Clive’s short but rich essays on these historians provide a wonderful introduction to both their writings and to the study of historiography more generally, showing the value of these classic texts as works of literature and as gateways into the worlds of their authors.

Nehamas’s lucid prose and lovely illustrations take us away from politics to a very different topic, our individual experience of art in all its many forms, from popular media to highfalutin forms, as an arena for the freedom of our imagination and taste.

I love Nehamas’s personal and personable voice, which cuts through centuries of theory to speak to the reader, one person to another. Few philosophy books are so accessible or have such beautiful pictures!

Written in 1997, this was the first of many books (including the others on my list here) that united my experience in sound design, music, and neuroscience.

In an elegant and entertaining style, Jourdain embraces the theme from Pink Panther by Henry Mancini and illustrates the continuum of musical experience in tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, listening, and understanding while revealing the hows and whys our brains perceive, integrate and elicit emotion. 

I keep referring to this seminal work, which helped me write my own book, and I feel grateful for Jourdain’s groundbreaking entry into this field.