Includes bibliographical references (p. 445-479) and indexes

1. The emergence of Greek historiography -- The timeless past of gods and heroes -- Discovering a past of human dimensions -- 2. The Era of the Polis and its historians -- The new history of the Polis -- The decline of the Polis: the loss of focus -- 3. Reaching the limits of Greek historiography -- The history of a special decade -- Hellenistic historiography: beyond the confines ofthe Polis -- The problem of new regions and people -- 4. Early Roman historiography myths, Greeks, and the Republic -- An early past dimly perceived -- The Roman past and Greek learning -- Greco-Roman history writing: triumph and a Latin response -- 5. Historians and the Republic's crisis -- History as inspiration and structural analysis -- History divorced from Rome's fate -- 6. Perceptions of the past in Augustan and Imperial Rome -- History writing in the "New Rome" of Augustus -- Historians and the Empire -- 7. The Christian historiographical revolution -- The formulation of Early Christian historiography -- The problem of continuity in an age of upheaval -- The Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon consolidation is historiography -- 8. The historiographical mastery of new peoples, states, and dynasties -- Integrating peoples into Latin historiography -- Legitimizing new states and dynasties -- 9. Historians and the ideal of the Christian commonwealth -- The last synthesis of Empire and Christianity -- The persistence of Christian themes -- Histories of a grand and holy venture: the Crusades -- 10. Historiography's adjustment to accelerating change -- The search for developmental patterns -- Transformations of the chronicle -- 11. Two turning points the Renaissance and the Reformation -- The Italian Renaissance historians -- Humanist Revisionism outside of Italy -- The collapse of spiritual unity -- 12. The continuing modification of traditional historiography -- The blending of theoretical and patriotic answers -- Universal history: a troubled tradition -- Historians, the new politics, and new perceptions of the world -- The origin and early forms of American history -- 13. The eighteenth-century quest for a new historiography -- The reassessment of historical order and truth -- New views on historical truth -- New grand interpretations: progress in history -- New grand interpretations: the cyclical pattern -- 14. Three national responses -- The British blend of erudition, elegance, and Empiricism -- Enlightenment historiography in a German key -- Recording the birth of the American nation -- 15. Historians as Interpreters of progress and nation: I -- German historians: the cause of truth and national unity -- -- France: historians, the nation, and liberty -- 16. Historians as Interpreters of progress and nation: II -- English historiography in the Age of Revolution -- Historians and the building of the American nation -- Historiography's "Golden Age" -- 17. A first prefatory note to Modern historiography (1860-1914) -- 18. History and the quest for a uniform science -- Comte's call to arms and the response -- The German and English responses to Positivist challenges -- The peculiar American synthesis -- 19. The discovery of economic dynamics -- An economic perspective on the past -- Karl Max: paneconomic historiography -- Economic history after Marx -- 20. Historians encounter the Masses -- Jubilant and dark visions -- Social history as institutional history -- The American "New History"; call for a democratic history -- 21. The problem of World history -- 22. Historiography between two World Wars (1918-39) -- The twentieth-century context -- Challenges to historians -- Historicism: from dominance to crisis -- Historians and the War Guilt Debate -- 23. History writing in Liberal Democracies (1918-39) -- American historiography after the "Great War" -- American progressive history -- Other social histories -- England: historiography in a fading Empire -- French historians: the revolutionary tradition and a new vision of the past -- 24. Historiography and the grand ideoligies -- Italian Fascism and historiography (1922-43) -- German historians in the Weimar Republic and Hitler's Reich -- The Soviet Union: the imagined future as the guide for history -- 25. American historiography after 1945 -- New realities and traditional horizons -- Historiographical reprecussions of America's new status -- Historiography as call for reform -- 26. History in the scientific mode -- History in the language of numbers -- Reshaping economic history -- Growing dissent: Narrativism -- Psychohistory: promise and problems -- 27. Transformations in English and French historiography -- Voices in the War Guilt Debate -- History writing in Post-imperial England -- Traditional and New French historical perspectives -- 28. Marxist historiography in the Soviet Union and Western Democracies -- The problems and the end of the Soviet Union's Marxism -- Marxist historical theory in the West -- 29 Historiography in the Aftermath of Fascism -- Historical perspectives in Postwar Italy -- History for and of a New Germany -- 30. World history between vision and reality -- The multiple cultures model -- Progress and Westernization -- World system theories -- 31. Recent historiography: fundamental challenges and their aftermath -- The maturation of the new history -- History and two visions of Postmodernity -- The new cultural history -- Prospects