Scandals, massacres, collapse, kidnappings: many themes that were associated with tabloids and crime novels have been the object of a great number of books of history, which have been garnering privileged space on the shelves of bookstores. This is a matter of the rise of a new historiographical genre, that of the "analyses of events", which is attaining great public success. Examining diverse subjects, these analyses coincide in their attempt to circumscribe an event, reconstruct it, and tell it as a story, using every sort of narrative technique, as well as following up its repercussions and versions throughout time. Such studies reflect in this practice the recent interest of historians in the way that the experience of history is constructed and made meaningful. At the same time, questions on the limits of reconstruction of an event, and the use of artifices in their narrating, are raised, re-situating the discussion on the border between history, narration, and fiction. Starting from an examination of the book A Sentimental Murder. Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (BREWER, 2004), which relates a crime of passion that occurred in London, in 1779 and its repercussions up to 1950, the present essay attempts to debate the historiographical panorama created by the emergence of the analyses of events.
History; Historiography; Incident History