Preface. The Abuses of History

Personal Reflections on a Calling

1. A Discipline in Crisis

2. Living in a Valley

The Central Themes of American History

3. A History of American History

4. Theories of Historical Interpretation

5. Historical Criticism

6. An Instance of Criticism

Dealing with the Evidence

7. How to Read a Word

8. How to Count a Number

9. Seeing and Hearing

10. History in a World of Knowledge

Persistent Themes and Hard Facts

11. Political Theory and Popular Thought

12. Man and Magic

13. Good Guys and Bad

14. The Two-Party System

The Uses of History

15. The Diet of a Ravenous Public

16. Ethnicity and the New History

17. The Uses of History

Acknowledgments

Index

Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Emeritus, Harvard University. He is the editor of This Was America.

Read More by Oscar Handlin:

• From the Outer World
• Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861
• Glimpses of the Harvard Past
• Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation, Enlarged Edition
• The Dimensions of Liberty
• The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis
• This Was America: True Accounts of People and Places
• Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
• The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780
• American Jewish Ephemera: A Bicentennial Exhibition from the Judaica Collection of the Harvard College Library