Not By Fact Alone; Essays on the Writing and Reading of History

The format is approximately 5.5 inches by 8.25 inches. xiv, 334 pages. Notes. Index. John Leonard Clive (born Hans Leo Kleyff; September 25, 1924 – January 7, 1990) was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History. In 1952 Clive received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and began teaching there. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. That year he published Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815. in 1960 Clive moved to the University of Chicago, where he was an assistant and associate professor until returning to Harvard in 1965. He would remain at Harvard for the rest of his career ultimately becoming the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Literature in 1979. Clive won the National Book Award for Biography and History in 1974 for Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well.[6] Clive retired in 1989 and gave his last lecture that December. He was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for his final book, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History. This book consists of essays on master historians including Thomas Babington Macaulay; Edward Gibbon; Thomas Carlyle; Jules Michelet; Alexis de Tocqueville; and other topics. The author underlines the importance of Marx's artful use of language, Carlyle's gift for capturing the flow of history in time, Gibbon's humor and his creation of a benevolent conspiracy between the reader and himself, Macaulay's ability to propel inert facts into motion, and the literary artistry of other great historians. The great historians created suspense, balanced background and foreground, and enabled readers to feel like actual participants in, as well as observers of, events large and small -- and at times acted as prophets and sages, opening up to their readers fresh, sometimes radical, views of the world and of man's place in it. The author describes what he sees as the threat to the art of narrative history brought on by the complexities of social history, and parodies the misplaced use of computer techniques in current writings; the works of truly great historians should be, he believes, not only part of a true education but also the source of great and continuous pleasure.…