Making History: How Great Historians Interpret the Past

How do historians create their histories? What role do the historian's viewpoint and method play in what we accept as truth? Answer these and other questions as you go inside the minds of our greatest historians and explore the idea of written history as it has shaped humanity's story over 2,000 years. These 24 intriguing lectures introduce you to the seminal thinking of historians such as: Herodotus, considered by many the first history writer, who replaced the poetic imagination of Homer with istorieis, or inquiry; Livy, the author of a 142-volume didactic history of Rome that spanned three continents and seven centuries; David Hume, who framed English history with an evolutionary vision of economic, political, and intellectual freedom; and Edward Gibbon, whose monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire forged a complex picture of epic collapse and decay. From the dramatic and military exploits of Xenophon and Thucydides in ancient Greece to Macaulay's dynamic career in the 19th