Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history - including the ethnocentric idea that Thucydides' historiography was universally valid, applicable to all societies at all times. Here, however, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides' history with a groundbreaking book that shows how different cultures develop different modes of historical production. Ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the nineteenth-century fight over the Fiji Islands to Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon, he demonstrates again and again the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history - with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not.

About the Author
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. A member of the British Academy, he is the author of many books, including Culture and Practical Reason, How "Natives" Think, Islands of History, and What Kinship Is-And Is Not, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews
"This book is a paradigm of how history and anthropology might be brought together, to the mutual enrichment of both disciplines." (American Historical Review) "Marshall Sahlins's complex book... [addresses] questions of historical causation and agency using a wide variety of examples-including, at one point, Elian Gonzales and the 1951 New York Giants. The complete ramifications of Sahlins's argument will be appreciated best by anthropologists and historians. Even for the general reader, however, Apologies to Thucydides has much to offer, as an introduction to an unfamiliar culture and as a new perspective on our own." (New York Sun)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226103822
Author Marshall Sahlins
Format Paperback
Page Count 348
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 15mm * 3mm