Popular Histories

Historiography has been approached in delicious ways. Consider Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , for example - still juicy reading even as we begin the 21st century. It's because he wrote so well and his characters come alive. I don't know if it's Gibbon who is vital or the Roman emperors whose lives are like 20th century violent lives wrapped in ancient costumes. Even now, they're still vital to Hollywood for their perverse stories and the academe for their perverse politics. Or Spengler's proto-Nazi Decline of the West, interesting because idiosyncratic.
The writing of history can be in grand sweeps like Toynbee's. When it is, it often becomes an academic exercise which the rest of us poor folks read only in abridged editions. Or it may focus on plain folk and plain guilds like Huizinga's and the Annales school's. Histories often read well if written in this gear. Or histories may be pseudo-histories written specifically for the initiated few to demonstrate particular philosophical positions like Michel Foucault's demonstration of society's exercise of power in sexual or mind matters.
Often, though, they're now written with the hope of making the bestseller lists. Here, the focus is on persons who make history, the more notorious being more attractive.
Occupying a middle ground is Peter Watson's history of the 20th century trailblazers and their ideas, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind (Phoenix Press, 2000). Watson's book does not focus on events but on ideas and the people that mattered. It has extensive sections dealing with technological and scientific advances, unusual for a general history. And this is a congenial book, easy to read and like, almost an encyclopedia. This is a tremendous work - tremendous for the extent of coverage, from the invention of the unconscious and discovery of the quantum to black holes, Freud to Hawking. It's tremendous for the amount of research that went into it.
It helps that Watson is not very opinionated. It's his main strength as it enables him to present people and ideas quickly, with very little fuss. It's also the main weakness. There are sections, which because of the lack of philosophical or political bias, look like a recitation of items from a dictionary of ideas, giving the impression that this history is but a huge summary. Still, this is an impressive summary. The bibliography alone can populate an impressive inquiring mind's Delicious Library.