Essays on how historians argue. The pieces gathered here examine the concepts historians use and the claims those concepts license. Reviews of recent scholarship appear alongside essays on temporality and comparison, with sustained interest in what separates a demonstration from a resemblance.
Thompson and Koselleck offer mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity: Thompson traces a compression of plural premodern rhythms into disciplinary clock time, Koselleck a proliferation of horizons as eschatology dissolves. The divergence is methodological.
HistoriographySurveying four monographs on colonial violence in French Algeria (Brower, Sessions, Surkis, Cole), this essay shows how each abandons the colonizer/colonized binary for a view of violence as plural in logic, and treats metropole and colony as a single analytic field.
Historiography