For many years before his death in 1943, R. G. Collingwood, who was both a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and a practicing historian, was engaged in what he intended as a major contribution to the philosophy of history. 

The Idea of History, first published in 1946, was this contribution. It became a canonical text, and linked the practise of philosophical thought with the job of the historian to place themselves in the minds of those men whose deeds he was placing into a context.

Four parts of the book describe how the modern idea of history has developed. Collingwood begins with the Greeks and Romans, writing of Livy, Tacitus, Herodotus and Thucydides, then progressing to the early modern period throughout Europe and focussing in turn on each of the main centres of historical thought: Italy, Germany, France and England.