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Le Goût de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, the author was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. This book conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past. Originally published in 1989, this classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research while sharing astonishing details about life under the Old Regime in France.

A collection of ten chapters paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes the author's contributions to the history of medicine. The book critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, it examines the “double bind” of postmodernism and biological or neurological modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider. The chapters and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history's recent trends and trajectories—its points of passage to the present—and lead both to a critical account of the discipline's historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history.

Conceptions of distance are foundational to historical thought, but this book gives the idea new subtlety and meaning. The book argues that distance is a matter not just of time and space but also of form, affect, ideology, and understanding. In this study, the book examines the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and contemporary histories, as well as a broad spectrum of historical genres—including local history, literary history, counter-factual fiction, history painting, and museology.

This book is the third volume in a survey of Western historiography, and covers the twentieth century, focusing on Europe. As in the first two volumes, the text discusses historical methods and ideas of all sorts to provide a detailed map of historical learning. Here the text carries the survey forward to our own times, confronting directly the challenges of postmodernism and historical narrative. The book offers original discussions from the last half century, the “linguistic turn,” the “end of history,” the philosophy of history, and various new methods of histories. The book focuses first on the state of the art of history in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States on the eve of World War I. It then traces every important historiographical issue and development historians have encountered in the twentieth century. With the completion of this trilogy, the text presents a comprehensive modern survey of historical writing.