Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa

by Marshall Sahlins

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Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history - including the ethnocentric idea that Thucydides' historiography was universally valid, applicable to all societies at all times. Here, however, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides' history with a groundbreaking book that shows how different cultures develop different modes of historical production. Ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the nineteenth-century fight over the Fiji Islands to Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon, he demonstrates again and again the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history - with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not.
  • ISBN10 022610382X
  • ISBN13 9780226103822
  • Publish Date 11 November 2013 (first published 1 December 2004)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint University of Chicago Press