Apologies to Thucydides

Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Presents Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War that 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. 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.