Based on analysis of archival and published sources, Opponents of the Annales School examines for the first time those who have dared to criticise and ignore one of the most successful currents of thought in modern historiography. It offers an original contribution to the understanding of an unavoidable chapter in modern intellectual history.

Few stories are more captivating than the one told by Natalie Zemon Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre. Basing her research on records of a bizarre court case that occurred in 16th-century France, she uses the tale of a missing soldier - whose disappearance threatens the livelihood of his peasant wife - to explore complex social issues. Davis takes rich material - dramatic enough to have been the basis of two major films - and uses it to explore issues of identity, women's role in peasant society, the interior lives of the poor, and the structure of village society, all of them topics that...

A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that 'childhood,' as we understand it today - a special time that requires special efforts and resources - is an invention of the 19th century, and that before that date children were in effect thought of as small adults. This led him to a re-evaluation of sources that suggested a second, crucial, conclusion: the idea that these competing visions of childhood were...