Volume 50, Number 4 · March 13, 2003
Heroes of History
By Keith Thomas
Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation
by Anthony Grafton
Harvard University Press, 360 pp., $39.95
As most autobiographies suggest, people usually write about themselves when they have run out of other things to say. When physicians retire, they take up the history of medicine; and when historians approach the end of their career, they find themselves composing the annals of their universities or the obituaries of their colleagues. Until quite recently, the history of science was largely a pastime for scientists who had given up on their research, while the history of human scholarship was regarded as a narcissistic sideline, inappropriate for historians who were still in full possession of all their faculties. When, in the 1950s, it became evident that the Roman historian Arnaldo Momi-gliano was devoting much of his energy to the study of historiography, many of his colleagues openly lamented that he had turned away from what ought to have been his first responsibility, the history of the ancient world.
Review, 3684 words
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