A review by serenade
History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold

medium-paced

3.75

Read this for a class, so I'm predisposed to dislike it, but it was surprisingly not too bad of a read. As the title posits, an introduction to history (and a bit of historiography). Half of the book traces the history of writing history and how the focus or purpose of writing history has changed across time periods, balancing truth-telling and story-telling. The latter half tackles the selection and usage of sources, approaches to (lenses to look at) history. Argument-wise, the book is rather all over the place (and fleshed out with lots of unrelated historical accounts that don’t quite illustrate the points he make), but for an introduction it's rather all right.