The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences
David Cannadine
Allen Lane, 352pp, £20
This is a strange book. David Cannadine, a distinguished historian of 19th-century Britain, has taken it upon himself to admonish the historical profession for setting up a series of unhelpful oppositions in its narratives of the past, emphasising division rather than collaboration, conflicting identities rather than a common humanity. He chides us for not writing about the boring bits in between, when people got on with each other; instead, he claims, we are always chasing after the newsworthy moments of the past, when people evidently did not.
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