Bloch's colleague, historian Lucien Febvre, took up the task after the war of assembling the unfinished text into a draft for publication. He was tortured, imprisoned, and then murdered by a firing squad in June 1944. Vichy police eventually captured him in March of 1944 and he was turned over to the Gestapo for interrogation. In late 1942, while working on the manuscript, he became active in the French Resistance. Bloch then began writing The Historian's Craft. He wrote the first, Strange Defeat, during the summer of 1940 to chronicle how and why France failed to rout the German invasion. After Nazi troops invaded France in 1940, Bloch went underground and began to work on two manuscripts. Marc Bloch was a French Jewish historian who was well known and respected for his scholarship on medieval and early-modern French feudal society. Recently, I found myself reaching for my well-worn copy of Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, a 200-page meditation on the meaning and value of history and a primer on how to do it well.
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