Students currently starving on a force-fed diet of Foucault should look to the following books by solidly empirical historians as an antidote:
A good place to start is E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963), a magisterial work that proves that "social history," written without benefit of French theory, can actually be about people. The breadth of Thompson's scholarship is stunning, and his narrative, about the responses of English artisans to industrialization, remains gripping for more than 900 pages of vigorous historical prose.
Another social historian blissfully free of the mania for theorizing is Barbara Tuchman, who brilliantly reconstructs European society in the last decades before World War I in "The Proud Tower" (1966). No one is better than Tuchman at bringing disparate historical characters to life, weaving stories of real men and women together with great theatrical effect so that we empathize with them and always yearn to find out what will happen next.
Those interested in the history of European colonization should read C.D. Rowley's "The Destruction of Aboriginal Society," a broad survey of the destructive impact of British settlement on the native population of Australia since 1788. Rowley treats sensitive subjects candidly, avoiding the cultural studies jargon that so often infects academic discussions of race and imperialism. Instead of arid relativism, Rowley offers vivid facts. His sweeping historical narrative, published in 1970, has sparked tremendous interest in Aboriginal history and, according to Keith Windschuttle, helped ignite the contemporary Aboriginal movement for redress of past grievances.
James McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Battle Cry of Freedom" (1988) is a bracing account of the American Civil War that may never be surpassed. McPherson mixes copious empirical detail together with a lucid exposition of the great issues at stake, so that his readers sense the drama of a historical conflict in which the outcome was always in doubt. Today, we assume that the Northern victory, and the subsequent abolition of slavery, was inevitable. In McPherson's hands, we perceive the Civil War as contemporaries did: as a violent, wrenching cataclysm that was shaking the American republic to its core, with no end in sight.
Students curious about a genuine motor of historical change (hint: It's not semiotics) can do no better than pick up John Keegan's "A History of Warfare" (1993). Keegan clearly explains how the evolution of military technology and the cultural ethos of warmaking have shaped the course of human history from ancient times to the present day, deciding the fortunes of different civilizations and the fates of millions of people.
These are just a few of the treasures awaiting students of history wishing to extricate themselves from the various swamps of cultural theory. All of these books were written after 1960, proving that one does not need to go back to Gibbon and Macaulay to find page-turning historical works that excite the imagination. What sets these books apart is this: Their method is narrative, and their subject matter is real people and real historical events. Doing theory is easy; it is the capacity for storytelling that distinguishes the truly great historians, and we should all be grateful for their talents.
