London, gave a negative review, saying it lacked sufficient archival sources. Weber briefly taught at Emmanuel College (1953–1954) and the University of Alberta (1954–1955) before settling in the United States, where he taught first at the University of Iowa (1955–1956) and then, until 1993 on his retirement, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Eugen Weber wrote a column titled "LA Confidential" for the Los Angeles Times. He also wrote for several French popular newspapers and, in 1989, presented an American public television series, The Western Tradition, which consisted of fifty-two lectures of 30 minutes each. He died in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, aged 82. Methodology Weber took a pragmatic approach to history. He once observed: Nothing is more concrete than history, nothing less interested in theories or in abstract ideas. The great historians have fewer ideas about history than amateurs do; they merely have a way of ordering their facts to tell their story. It isn’t theories they look for, but information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle them. Impact Weber is associated with several important academic arguments. His book: Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 is a classic presentation of modernization theory. Although other historians such as Henri Mendras had put forward similar theories about the modernization of the French countryside, Weber's book was amongst the first to focus on changes in the period between 1870 and 1914. Weber emphasizes that well into the 19th century few French citizens regularly spoke French, but rather regional languages or dialects such as Breton, Gascon, Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Alsatian, and Corsican. Even in French-speaking areas provincial loyalties often transcended the putative bond of the nation. Between 1870 and 1914, Weber argued, a number of new forces penetrated the previously isolated countryside. These included the judicial and school systems, the army, the church, railways, roads, and a market economy. The result was the wholesale transformation of the population from "peasants," basically ignorant of the wider nation, to Frenchmen. His book Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages chronicles "apocalyptic visions and prophecies from Zarathustra to yesterday ... . beginning with the ancients of the West and the Orient and, especially ... the Jews and earliest Christians," finding that "an absolute belief in the end of time, when good would do final battle with evil, was omnipresent," inspiring "Crusades, scientific discoveries, works of art,