According to Dewald, we need to view Febvre and other Annales historians as participants in an ongoing cultural debate over the shape and meanings of French history, rather than as inventors of new topics of study. He closely examines the work of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, the antiquarian Alfred Franklin, Febvre himself, the twentieth-century historian Philippe Ari&ès, and several others. A final chapter compares specifically French approaches to social history with those of German historians between 1930 and 1970. Through such close readings Dewald looks beyond programmatic statements of historians&’ intentions to reveal how history was actually practiced during these years.
A bold work of intellectual history, Lost Worlds sheds much-needed light on how contemporary ideas about the historian&’s task came into being. Understanding this larger context enables us to appreciate the ideological functions performed by historical writing through the twentieth century.
Jonathan Dewald is Professor and UB Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association for his book Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France 1570&–1715 (1993).