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This review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present‐day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth‐century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the "styles" of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the "advent" of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea‐ or knowledge‐making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well‐informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy‐five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge‐making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book‐market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History," by Peter Fritzsche.

Reviews two books on European Orientalism. "La Haute-Asie telle qu'ils l'ont vue: Explorateurs et scientifiques de 1820 à 1940," edited by Aymon Baud, Philippe Forêt and Svetlana Gorshenina; "Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe," by Frederick N. Bohrer.

Reviews the book "Who Needs Greek?: Contests in the Cultural History of Greek," by Simon Goldhill.

A review of the book "Die Vergangenheit der Weltgeschichte: Universalhistorisches Denken in Berlin 1800-1933," edited by Wolfgang Hardtwig and Philipp Müller is presented.

The article reviews the book "Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany," by David Ciarlo, part of the "Harvard Historical Studies" series.

The article reviews the book "Die modernen Väter der Antike. Die Entwicklung der Altertumswissenschaften an Akademie und Universität im Berlin des 19. Jahrundertsrtschi," edited by A. M. Baertschi and C. G. King.

The article reviews the books "Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism," by Cathy Gere and "From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology," by Göran Blix.

The article reviews the book "L'archive des origines: Sanskrit, philologie, anthropologie dans l'Allemagne du XIXe siècle," by Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, edited by Michel Espagne.

The article reviews the book "The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna," by David Sorkin.

This article reviews the book "The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany," by Michael C. Carhart.

The article reviews the book "Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University," by William Clark.

The article reviews the book "In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," by Stephen L. Dyson.

Reviews the book "Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany," by Andrew Zimmerman.

Reviews the book `Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hissarlik,' by Susan Heuck Allen.

Reviews the book `The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology,' by Paul G. Bahn.

A review of the book "Race & Erudition," by Maurice Olender, translated by Jane Marie Todd is presented.

The article reviews the book "Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Cultural History," by Hannu Salmi.

Reviews the book "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich," by Gretchen E. Schafft.

Reviews the book "Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth," by M.E. Warlick.

Reviews the book "Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century," by David Bindman.

Reviews the book `Naissance de l'archeologie moderne, 1798-1945,' by Eve Gran-Aymerich.

Reviews the book 'German Thought and Culture From the Holy Roman Empire to the Present Day,' by H.J. Hahn.