SOURCE: Stone, Lawrence. “Resisting the New.” New York Review of Books 34, no. 20 (17 December 1987): 59-62.

In the following review, Stone asserts that The New History and the Old is a persuasive, intellectually brilliant, and stylishly written work. Stone, however, faults Himmelfarb's methodology and comments that she repeatedly overstates her case and that her tone is both strident and bitter.

The important subject of Gertrude Himmelfarb's passionately written and intelligent book [The New History and the Old] is the transformation of the methods, objectives, and content of much of current historical writing over the past forty years. Professor Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of political ideas in Victorian England, is shocked by the alleged dominance of what is called “new history,” for her a large category in which she includes the work of Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Theodore Zeldin, E. P. Thompson, Peter Laslett, among many others. She charges...