Making History Review: Writers of the Permanent Record – The Wall Street Journal

History offers no promise of an answer or a happy ending. There is not even a promise of a happy beginning: The further back we go, the less we have to go on. Worst of all, a historian cannot make anything up, but must still make everything into a story. No wonder historians tend to avoid historiography, writing about how history is written. It would give the game away.

Richard Cohens Making History is a substantial, ambitious and consistently readable inquiry into the history of history. His search for how the historical sausage gets made leads him to examine the biographies of the butchers, from Herodotus (the father of history, Cicero said, the father of lies, Plutarch said) to Nikole Hannah-Jones (the mother of more recent inventions in The 1619 Project). Academics may object that biography is vulgar, like writing for money, but the approach of Mr. Cohen, a longtime London book editor, has the weight of history behind it. Character always was destiny. It is not histories we are writing, but Lives, Plutarch wrote in the early 2nd century. The characters of the past, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, shape our present and future.

See the article here:

Making History Review: Writers of the Permanent Record - The Wall Street Journal