This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with
the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This
movement has been the single most important force in the development of
what is sometimes called 'the new history'.
Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four
main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first
generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the
old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales to
encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second generation was
dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work on the
Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third generation, deeply
associated with the 'cultural turn' in historical scholarship, includes
recently well-known historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques
Le Goff and Georges Duby. This new edition brings us right up to the
present, and contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including
practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques Revel.
This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of the previous
Annales historians, while diversifying further, and becoming
increasingly 'reflexive', a move that owes much to the sociocultural
theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu.
Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of analysis
of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth
century will be welcomed by students of history and other social
sciences and by the interested general reader.
