Introduction

Abstract

For avid readers of history, the historical essay offers all the pleasures of a book, compressed; here, in just thirty pages or so, are the elements that make historical scholarship such a compelling literary genre—a good story, well told and thoroughly researched, a narrative that illuminates the past and, in some cases, inspires fresh ways of looking at the present. Indeed, a case can be made that the history essay compares to a book the same way a short story compares to a novel: The shorter work provides the gratification and intellectual stimulation of the longer one, but the story moves more briskly, and the reader is rewarded more quickly.