Volume 37, Number 7 · April 26, 1990
A Modern Hero
By Natalie Zemon Davis
Marc Bloch: A Life in History
by Carole Fink
Cambridge University Press, 371 pp., $29.95
This October the Institute for World History in Moscow held an international conference to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the French scholarly journal, Annales, which had been founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch, who was killed by the Gestapo in 1944, and Lucien Febvre, who died in 1956. A Soviet historian, once much criticized for his attachment to 'bourgeois science,' spoke of how Febvre and Bloch had taught him that past societies had to be understood through their basic mental categories, not through the false distinction between material structure and superstructure. A Mexican historian recalled how Marc Bloch had taught him to look for the connections between historical phenomena instead of breaking the life of the past into fragments. A Chinese historian said with some irony that the history of his land had provided the Annales school with an example of very slow change, of what the French call 'la longue durée.'
Review, 4249 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |