30 Great Books That Made History

Jaume Aurell is Professor of Medieval History at the Department of History at the University of Navarra.

• 1. Greek Ethnography: Herodotus' Histories2. Greek Politics: Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War3. Jewish Drama: The Bible4. Chinese Dynaties: Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian5. Indian Genealogies: Itihasa-Puranas6. Christian Great Narratives: Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History7. Islamic Cosmovisions: al-Masudi's Meadows of Gold8. Byzantine Chronicles: Anna Komnene's Alexiad9. Icelandic Genealogies: Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla10. Iberian Autobiographies: James I of Aragon's Book of Deeds11. Renaissance: Francesco Guicciardini's History of Italy12. Enlightenment: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire13. Romanticism: Jules Michelet's History of the French Revolution14. Historicism: Leopold von Ranke's History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations15. Liberalism: Thomas Macaulay's The History of England16. Westernizing Japan: Fukuzawa Yukichi's An Outline of a Theory of Civilization17. Preserving Africa: Carl Christian Reindorf's The History of the Gold Coast18. Revisioning China: Gu Jiegang's Gushibian19. Projecting India: Jawaharlal Nehru's Glimpses of World History20. Rethinking Latin America: Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America21. Modernism: Henry Adams's The Education of Henry James22. Impressionism: Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages23. Annales: Marc Bloch's The Royal Touch24. Structuralism: Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean25. Postmodernism: Hayden White's Metahistory26. Race: C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins27. Class: Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class28. Women: Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre29. Subaltern: Ranajit Guha's Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India30. Gender: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman

"Although certain works of history are often described as 'classics', Aurell is the first scholar to offer a serious discussion of the criteria for such a description. His book is indispensable."Peter Burke, University of Cambridge"Jaume Aurell's obviously subjective, but well-founded choice to present thirty works representative of all the world's historical cultures is an excellent demonstration that historical writing feeds on its own memory: even if the questions posed to the past and the methods used to resolve them are evolving at a rapid pace, historians mustn't be amnesiac!"Jean-Claude Schmitt, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris"Global in reach, spanning twenty-five centuries, Aurell's incisive essays provide a brilliant introduction to the historian's craft as well as to the philosophy of history. Blending narrative and analysis seamlessly, Aurell makes each of his thirty historians come alive."Carlos Eire, Yale University