The Historian and His Day
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Deceptively mild and modest in tone, J. H. Hexter's essay "The Historian and His Day" is bold in conception and execution. Hexter was venturing upon a subject—the nature of the historical enterprise—that has engaged the most eminent historians, raising the perennially vexing question of past- and present-mindedness in the writing of history. It is also memorable because it addresses that issue in a notably down-to-earth, commonsensible, personal manner. Hexter counteracts the present-minded relativism that is subversive of truth, while reasserting the history-mindededness that can aspire to truth—not to a final, definitive truth but to the incremental truths that historians have always sought and often achieved.
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Available for the first time as an eBook, with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb, this edition of 'The Historian and His Day' is published by Now and Then Reader, Digital Publishers of Serious Nonfiction.
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Jack H. Hexter (1910–1996) was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and studied at the University of Cincinnati and at Harvard, where he received a Ph.D. He specialized in Tudor and seventeenth-century British history and was recognized for his essays on historiography. Hexter taught at Washington University in St. Louis and then at Yale, where he became the Charles Stillé Professor and founded the Yale Center for Parliamentary History in 1966. Returning to Washington University, he founded the Center for the History of Freedom and was named John M. Olin Professor. His books include The Reign of King Pym, More's Utopia, Reappraisals in History, The Judaeo-Christian Tradition, Doing History, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, and On Historians.
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Gertrude Himmelfarb, an intellectual historian of Britain and the Victorians, is professor emeritus in the graduate school of the City University of New York and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her many books include Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Victorian Minds, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians, The De-Moralization of Society, and The Moral Imagination.
