| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Beverley Southgate. What Is History For? New York: Routledge. 2005. Pp. xiii, 214. Cloth $70.00, paper $22.95.

Beverley Southgate examines the purposes and uses of history, starting with Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, in a broad and erudite sweep leading up to the period of modernity, which according to him ended in the later twentieth century. Somewhat disingenuously he avoids the complexities of the definition of this term by declaring that it "simply denotes an historical epoch—the one that comes after 'modernity'" (p. 86). Summarizing postmodern criticism, Southgate sees a sharp break between the postmodern period and everything that came before it and concludes that real events in the twentieth century have made it imperative to rethink the functions and uses of history. He offers, in the last third of his book, his own rationale for the centrality of history to the humanistic enterprise in a postmodern age.

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