Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (original) (raw)

. xv + 251pp. £16.99. One of the side-effects of the explosion in historical sub-disciplines since the 1960s has been a renewed interest in historical methods and practice. No longer accepting that the task of a historian is simply to go to the archives, find material and write an account of 'how it really was' (wie es eigentlich gewesen), historians now daily grapple with issues around the creation, selection, meaning and interpretation of evidence. A further consequence of this development has been that today no British undergraduate course is seen as complete if it does not include at least one course covering historiographical debates and methods. No surprise then that there has been a proliferation of books aimed at helping tutors and undergraduates alike to steer their way through what Popkin terms the 'glorious confusion' of new historical approaches. Sometimes taking the Elton/Carr debate at their starting point, sometimes grappling with the implications of the 'cultural turn', there is now a bewildering array of books aimed at getting students to move beyond thinking of the writing of history as simply putting facts down in the right order. Less common are works which try to set out what John Burrow called 'a history of histories'. These move from Herodotus, the problematic founding father of the discipline, through the historians of Antiquity, and via Ranke and the professionalization of history, to the present. In the process they often explore what unites the idea and practice of history over two and a half millennia, and how different periods and individual historians shaped it in distinctive ways. Yet despite the resources now available for those teaching in this field, the topic remains commonly unpopular with, and often frustratingly impenetrable to, students who yearn for the simplicity of narrative accounts of the past. Consequently those venturing into this terrain risk both simply adding yet another book to the pile and failing to illuminate their chosen field in the process. Popkin's work, however, sidesteps these pitfalls, and instead constructs a lucid and approachable account of how history has changed over time, while also engaging seriously with the question of what it means to be a historian in the contemporary world. As readers we benefit from two strengths which Popkin brings to his writing: having taught historiography for over three decades he keeps at the front of his mind the needs of students; and secondly every page crackles with his deep enthusiasm for history as a way into understanding our world. This book is no mere tick box exercise which dutifully covers chronological ground MEDIEVAL 481