| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Miguel A. Cabrera. Postsocial History: An Introduction. Translated by Marie McMahon. Foreword by Patrick Foyce. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2004. Pp. xx, 163. Cloth $60.00, paper $22.95.

Miguel A. Cabrera's rather dry historiographical overview, which describes and classifies some of the most influential work in social and cultural history done across the English-speaking world (and a bit of the French and Italian-speaking world), will be found useful by many. The most ready audience will likely be graduate students who did not live through the "discourse battles" of recent decades and who need a survey of the fights that are now generally left unmentioned but that shaped the research methods and writing styles of today. But for those of us who lived through the discourse wars (and bear the odd scar), the end of this short book does not come any too soon. The relief at having finished prompts thoughts about the inevitable failure of theoretically driven classificatory work to capture the nuances, and the often creative inconsistencies in method, that are found in historical monographs acknowledged as influential and innovative. That E. P. Thompson's work is somewhat inconsistent theoretically, since ringing statements about artisan agency are in tension with a vaguely Marxist economic plot, would look to Cabrera like a serious flaw. But it could be said that, now that the theory wars of the late 1980s and the early 1990s have withered away, it has become clear that demanding increased theoretical rigor and consistency was at one level counterproductive. Much historical writing was and remains boringly descriptive; but in those heady times some historians produced works that were instances of a theoretical position more than open-minded examinations of ever-fluid processes.

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