The Idea of history
by R. G. Collingwood | 
The Writing of History
by Michel de Certeau |
Metahistory
by Hayden White |
The Historian's Craft
by Marc Bloch |
In Defense of History
by Richard J. Evans |
From Dawn to Decadence
by Jacques Barzun |
The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors
by Frances Cress Welsing | 
The Life of Greece
by Will Durant | 
The Renaissance
by Will Durant | 
Our Oriental Heritage
by Will Durant | 
The Machine in the Garden
by Leo Marx | 
The Echo of Greece
by Edith Hamilton |
The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
by Stephen Kern | 
Facing The Extreme
by Tzvetan Todorov | 
The American Soul
by Jacob Needleman | 
The Portable Enlightenment Reader
by Isaac Kramnick | 
Fire and Light
by James MacGregor Burns | 
Rethinking History
by Keith Jenkins | 
The Enlightenment
by Anthony Pagden | 
A Pelican in the Wilderness
by Isabel Colegate |
Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.