E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927
Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, volume 2 of Civilization and Capitalism
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism
Normon Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage Books, 1966; orig. 1963)

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

The blurring of the boundary between "male" and "female"-a civilization without sexes-served as a primary referent for the ruin of civilization itself.
Besides an elite of writers such as Drieu la Rochelle, social observers, popular novelists, doctors, members of parliament, and journalists all used gender issues to talk about the war's meaning and impact. The decade after the 1918 armistice witnessed an enormous preoccupation with the issues of female identity and woman's proper role. There was a marked increase in attention to these issues in periodical, fictional and political discourse…
I propose to examine this debate on women as a set of responses to the war's impact on French culture and society. My general purpose is to explore in two ways the relationship between gender and change during the decade 1917 to 1927. First, I want to show how certain images of female identity-the "modern woman" and "the mother"-provided the French with a compelling, accessible way to discuss the meaning of social and cultural change. Second, I want to demonstrate that the debate on women worked on a literal as well as on a symbolic level. Debating other images of female identity-"the single woman," in particular-helped the French come to terms with changes in the social organization of gender.

Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (George Braziller, Inc: New York, 1962).

The nineteenth century experienced a communications revolution which, though a part of the industrial revolution, may very well have been the most important of its results.
Certainly for the historian the consequences have been terrifying. The historian's technique was developed centuries before the communications revolution. It was a product of the fact that documents were limited in number. A single human mind could master them. All the surviving documents of ancient Greece can be intimately studied within a few years, including inscriptions cut into stone. Consequently we have a clear picture of the history of ancient Greece. That clarity is a consequence, not of our understanding, but solely of the fact that there is so little to understand. When the historian attempts to grapple with any period after the communications revolution had begun, he is lost in a chaos of documents. His technique no longer serves him. There is, however, a consolation. He is forced to recognize the fact that history is a construct; he can no longer delude himself into thinking that what happened was identical with what was recorded in a very small number of surviving documents; he cannot escape-at least so one would think-the conclusions that his construct is an instrument which he uses to organize the documents and that is it successful to the degree it is unstable. To be sure, many historians have so far managed to evade noticing what has happened; but historians who devote themselves to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the age affected by the communications revolution, are beginning to show a healthy despair, to realize that in any traditional sense of "history" the history of the nineteenth century cannot be written.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, volume 2 of Civilization and Capitalism (Harper & Row Inc., 1982; orig. 1979).

I have started the chapters you are about to read four or five times over. I have delivered them as lectures at the College de France and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. I have written and rewritten them from start to finish. Henri Matisse, according to a friend of mine who once sat for him, used to begin his drawings ten times over, throwing them into the wastepaper basket day after day, and only keeping the last in which he thought he had achieved purity and simplicity of line. Sadly, I am not Matisse. And I am not at all sure that my final version is the clearest, or the closest to what I think, or am trying to think. I console myself with a remark by the English historian Frederick W. Maitland (1887) that 'simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal, not starting point'. With luck, we may achieve it in the end.

Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (Pantheon Books, 1991; orig. 1989)

Male and female witches met at night, generally in solitary places, in fields or on mountains. Sometimes, having anointed their bodies, they flew, arriving astride poles or broom sticks; sometimes they arrived on the backs of animals, or transformed into animals themselves. Those who came for the first time had to renounce the Christian faith, desecrate the sacrament and offer homage to the devil, who was present in human or (most often) animal or semi-animal form. There would follow banquets, dancing, sexual orgies. Before returning home the female and male witches received evil ointments made from children's fat and other ingredients…
How and why did the image of the Sabbath crystallize? What did it conceal? From these two questions (which, as we shall see, have taken me down unforeseen paths) my inquiry was born.

Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1985).

This book does not argue one dominant thesis, but it is activated by a number of related concerns: the complex nature of history as a "dialogical" exchange both with the past and with others inquiring into it; the role of critical theory in historical understanding; the relation of historiography to other disciplines; and the need for historians to respond creatively to newer challenges in contemporary thought. From a long-term perspective on problems, I try to revive a Renaissance ideal of historiography that is largely out of favor at present-one in which scholarly research is intimately linked to "rhetorical" and ethicopolitical discourse. In more contemporary terms, I am especially interested in the relations between intellectual history, which must develop modes of critical and self-critical interpretation, and social history, which has been preoccupied with the attempt to elaborate methods to investigate the contexts of interpretation. I continue to believe that historians have much to learn from disciplines such as literary criticism and philosophy where debates over the nature of interpretation have been particularly lively in the recent past. I would like to help bring historiography to the point at which it is able to enter those debates in a more even-handed way-not simply as a repository of facts or a neopositivistic stepchild of social science, and certainly not as a mythologized locus for some prediscursive image of "reality," but as a critical voice in the disciplines addressing problems of understanding and explanation.

Normon Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, 1961)

This book deals with the millenarianism that flourished amongst the rootless poor of Western Europe between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries; and with the circumstances that favoured it. But if that is the main theme, it is not the only one. For the poor did not create their own millenarian faiths, but received them from would-be prophets or would-be messiahs. And these people, many of them former members of the lower clergy, in turn took their ideas from the most diverse sources. Some millenarian phantasies were inherited from the Jews and early Christians, and others from the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore. Others again were concocted by the heretical mystics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit. This book examines both how these various bodies of millenarian belief originated, and how they were modified in the course of being transmitted to the poor.