Exchanges with Authors: John Tosh (The Pursuit of History)

John Tosh, author of The Pursuit of History, discusses the book’s new edition and offers advice for students and instructors using the book.

Lucid and engaging, the seventh edition retains the user-friendly features that make it a favourite with both students and lecturers, including marginal glosses, illustrations and suggestions for further reading. Along with its companion website, this is an essential guide to the theory and practice of history.

Merryl Goldberg is a Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at California State University San Marcos, USA. She is founder and director of Center ARTES, an organization dedicated to restoring the arts to education, author of numerous publications, and recipient of many grants relating to her work with the arts in schools. Prior to entering academia, she recorded numerous CDs and was on the road for 13 years playing saxophone with the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

The Pursuit of History, 7th Edition

This classic introduction to the study of history invites the reader to stand back and consider some of its most fundamental questions – what is the point of studying history? How do we know about the past? Does an objective historical truth exist and can we ever access it?

In answering these central questions, John Tosh argues that, despite the impression of fragmentation created by Postmodernism in recent years, history is a coherent discipline which still bears the imprint of its nineteenth-century origins. Consistently clear-sighted, he provides a lively and compelling guide to a complex and sometimes controversial subject, while making his readers vividly aware of just how far our historical knowledge is conditioned by the character of the sources and the methods of the historians who work on them.

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