Volume 5, Number 5 · October 14, 1965
Good and Bad History
By M.I. Finley
Ancient Mesopotamia
by A. Leo Oppenheim
University of Chicago, 433 pp., $8.50
Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles
by Robert Flacelière, translated by Peter Green
Macmillan, 310 pp., $6.95
What is history? This question is exercising an unusual number of historians and others these days, and there is reasons to believe that underneath there is a considerable malaise. To a degree, though not altogether, the question can be re-phrased and divided into two: 1) Why bother? 2) Why bother to get it right? (Only a moment's reflection is needed to appreciate that these two questions are far from identical, that, indeed, certain answers to the first demand a negative answer to the second.)
Review, 1805 words
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