Two eminent scholars of historiography examine the concept of national identity through the key multi-volume histories of the last two hundred years. Starting with Hume’s History of England (1754–62), they explore the work of British historians whose work had a popular readership and an influence on succeeding generations of British children.

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Named a Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Spectator, and The Economist The English first materialized as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. From the armed Saxon bands that descended onto Roman-controlled Britain in the fifth century to the travails of the Eurozone plaguing the prime-ministership of today's multicultural England, acclaimed historian Robert Tombs presents a momentous and challenging history of a people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in existence. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, Tombs sheds light on the strength and resilience of English governance, the deep patterns of division among the people who have populated the British Isles, the persistent capacity of the English to come together in the face of danger, and not the least the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. Momentous and definitive, The English and Their History is the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century.

This eBook edition of "The History of England" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The History of England is David Hume's great work on the history of England, which he wrote in while he was librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. It was published in six volumes. The History spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Contents: The Britons. The Romans. The Britons. The Saxons. The Heptarchy The Kingdom of Kent The Kingdom of Northumberland The Kingdom of East Anglia The Kingdom of Mercia The Kingdom of Essex. The Kingdom of Sussex. The Kingdom of Wessex. Egbert. Ethelwolf. Ethelbald and Ethelbert. Ethered Alfred. Edward the Elder. Athelstan. Edmund. Edred Edwy Edgar Edward the Martyr Ethelred Edmond Ironside Canute Harold Harefoot Hardicanute Edward the Confessor Harold William the Conqueror. Henry III. Edward I. Edward II. Edward III. Richard II. Henry IV Henry V. Henry VI. Edward IV. Edward V. And Richard III. Richard III. William Rufus. Henry I. Stephen. Henry II. Richard I. John. The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government and Manners Henry Vii. Henry Viii. Edward Vi. Mary. Elizabeth. James I. Charles I. The Commonwealth Charles II. James II.

This volume provides a new and nuanced appreciation of David Hume as a historian. Gone for good are the days when one can offhandedly assert, as R. G. Collingwood once did, that Hume “deserted philosophical studies in favour of historical” ones. History and philosophy are commensurate in Hume’s thought and works from the beginning to the end. Only by recognizing this can we begin to make sense of Hume’s canon as a whole and see clearly his many contributions to fields we now recognize as the distinct disciplines of history, philosophy, political science, economics, literature, religious studies, and much else besides. Casting their individual beams of light on various nooks and crannies of Hume’s historical thought and writing, the book’s contributors illuminate the whole in a way that would not be possible from the perspective of a single-authored study. Aside from the editor, the contributors are David Allan, M. A. Box, Timothy M. Costelloe, Roger L. Emerson, Jennifer Herdt, Philip Hicks, Douglas Long, Claudia M. Schmidt, Michael Silverthorne, Jeffrey M. Suderman, Mark R. M. Towsey, and F. L. van Holthoon.