The Holocaust and Historical Methodology

Most of the thoughtful papers, by scholars in Britain, Germany, Canada, the US, Israel, and elsewhere, seek to put the Holocaust in a broad cultural European and even worldwide perspective. The pivotal figure is Saul Friedlander, whose acclaimed books on the Holocaust incorporated testimonies of the victims together with meticulous analysis of the methods of extermination. Another important theme focuses on historians' moral sensitivity to what is now recognized as a paradigmatic genocide, in relation to dispassionate scholarly objectivity in evaluating sources and the literary qualities of historical narrative. Far too sophisticated for most college students, the collection is for their teachers and for historians involved in the study of 20th-century European and Jewish history. · ChoiceThis volume of essays makes a valuable contribution to theory in a field thickly populated with empirical work. Well indexed and containing both informative notes and a superb bibliography of Holocaust historiography, it will be well used by both faculty and students. · Histoire sociale/Social historyHistorians will find this volume a challenging, provocative, and wide-ranging collection. By explicating the complexities, controversies, and processes of understanding the Holocaust, it suggests implications for method and theory concerning other historical questions in other times and places. · Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire Dan Stone has gathered an impressive collection of historians whose scholarship on the Holocaust spans a diversity of academic themes and methodological schools of thought ... The authors in this volume make an important contribution to the discourse on how we study this event. As such, this work should be required reading for Holocaust students and scholars alike. · Post ScriptThis book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations...Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. · Tom Lawson, University of WinchesterIn the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust-and, by extension, any past event-as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Historiography of Genocide (ed., 2008), Histories of the Holocaust (2010), and The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (ed., 2012).