Apologies to Thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa

Abstract

Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history - including the ethnocentric idea that Thucydides' historiography was universally valid, applicable to all societies at all times. Here, however, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides' history with a groundbreaking book that shows how different cultures develop different modes of historical production. Ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the nineteenth-century fight over the Fiji Islands to Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon, he demonstrates again and again the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history - with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not.

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