Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It is a book by Marc Bloch, first published in French in 1949; published in English in 1954.
The author was a French historian and co-founder of the Annales School of historiography. He lived in France during the Second World War, when this book was written but it was incomplete. He was killed by the Gestapo on 16 June of 1944 for his involvement in the French Resistance.
In this book, the author explores the basic concepts and ways of thought of a good historian - and how he can conduct his craft in research, evaluation of evidence, and writing. The main objective is “the study of men in time”, where he goes directly to the primary sources of information to give examples of how individuals have lived and worked in time to form history. The nature of evidence and forgeries and its contribution to historical study is also discussed in depth.
Notable quotes
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History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.
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But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.
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The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.