Carolyn Kay Steedman

In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an original-and sometimes irreverent-investigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material world-inherited from the nineteenth century-with which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.