Description: The distinguished historian Carl Schorske -- author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siecle Vienna -- draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science -- all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. Schorske shows that the nineteenth century's attachment to thinking with history and the modernist way of thinking without history are more than just antitheses. They are different ways of trying to address the problems of modernity.

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