The New History: Confessions and Conversations

In this innovative volume, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke examines the nature of the so-called ‘new history’. In conversation with nine leading scholars associated with the movement, Pallares-Burke investigates the new approaches to the writing of history. In a series of interviews, Asa Briggs, Peter Burke, Robert Darnton, Carlo Ginzburg, Jack Goody, Daniel Roche, Quentin Skinner, Keith Thomas and Natalie Zemon Davis are questioned about their major works and their relation to other key historians and theorists.

Urging each historian to justify their methods and to reflect on their intellectual trajectory, Pallares-Burke tries to make explicit the experiences and ideas that are otherwise implicit in the historian’s work. The interviews probe the historians’ personal and intellectual background and offer fresh insight into the possibilities, problems and preoccupations of contemporary historical practice. The result is a lively and illuminating book that will appeal to both students and scholars.