SOURCE: Kiernan, Victor. Review of The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. History 74, no. 240 (February 1989): 85-6.

In the following review, Kiernan offers a mixed assessment of Himmelfarb's The New History and the Old.

Ten essays are collected in this volume, [The New History and the Old] all but one of them in revised form. They are all concerned with the regrettable dominance which Professor Himmelfarb believes to have been established by the ‘New History’ and its practitioners; history-writing, that is, concerned with small subdivisions of the past, and with minutiae of social life to the exclusion of politics and thereby of all large, significant problems of man's past. This trend she sees as having gone so far as to threaten History with a complete loss of meaning. Some of the Annales school ‘are beginning to suspect that they have unleashed a force they cannot control’ (p...