Sarah Maza

Thinking about History is a general introduction to historical studies that explores what's special about history as a discipline. Sarah Maza revels in history's eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and regular controversies that shape it. With the classroom in mind, she organized her text around a series of big questions through which she discusses various themes, works, and schools of history. She asks, for example, whose history do we write, and how does writing about different people affect what stories get told, and how they are told? Her questions gather together topics for discussion but no definitive answers, and she enlivens her writing with plenty of concrete examples drawn from the work of historians in a wide variety of fields. Based on the premise that much of the excitement about history comes from the controversies, substantive and methodological, that it ignites, this book is designed as a contribution to the urgent task of keeping those arguments alive.

Thinking about History

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette’s act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era—discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.

A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris

Violette Nozière

What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it. Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.

Thinking About History

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.

Sarah Maza

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