they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg and later in Paris. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians whom Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history. Co-founder Marc Bloch (1886–1944) was a quintessential modernist who studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strasbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch's interests were highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). His own ideas, especially those expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society, were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel. Precepts Georges Duby, a leader of the school, wrote that the history he taught: relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strove on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation. The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem. Postwar Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II for his active membership of the French Resistance, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Braudel, who would become one of the best-known exponents of this school. Braudel's work came to define a "second" era of