SOURCE: Kelley, Donald R. Review of The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Historian 51, no. 2 (February 1989): 311-12.

In the following review of The New History and the Old, Kelley asserts that Himmelfarb's arguments are not relevant to current historical scholarship.

This slim volume [The New History and the Old] contains ten essays, many previously published, about historiography and its discontents. Although concerned, critically and sometimes condescendingly, with a so-called “new history,” the preoccupations seem dated. Written in the eighties, the essays seem—in terms of “mentalité”—a product rather of the fifties, and the author's horizons are for the most part limited to historians important enough to achieve notice in the New York Review of Books and questions important enough, i.e., political enough, to warrant discussion at gatherings of urban, and especially anglophile, intellectuals who would like to walk the corridors of power, or at...