Hayden White’s contention that “moral and aesthetic” preferences are primary in shaping a historian’s vision of the past seems to play in to various contemporary efforts to consider history at a scale conducive to insight into climate change and global political dilemmas. Nevertheless, his critique of the archive as a repository of truth acquires new resonance as the naturalist and technological reconfiguration of the archive accompanying these developments gets underway. The signal value of White’s polemical intervention in historical theory was to divorce claims of moral right and political justice from truth claims about the objective reality of the past. It remains so today.
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Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 434–4.
Ibid., 434.
D. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 5.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 1441.
Ibid., 1442.
Ibid., 1457.
S. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
See D. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), 197–222; and Idem., “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014), 1–23.
J. Guldi and D. Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See D. Cohen, P. Mandler, D. Armitage, and J. Guldi, “ahr Exchange: On The History Manifesto,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015), 527–554. For my own take on this book and ensuing debates, see K. Peden “What Is to Be Done?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 February 2014, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/done/. Cf. Allan Megill’s contribution to this special issue.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 45.
A. Momigliano, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), 259–268. The passage is on page 259.
H. Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). See also Ankersmit, Domanska, and Kellner (eds.), Re-Figuring Hayden White.
Ibid., 133.
Ibid., 132.
A. D. Moses, “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History,” History and Theory 44 (2005), 331–332. See also Idem., “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden White,” History and Theory 44 (2005), 339–347.
H. White, “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses,” History and Theory 44 (2005), 333–338.
F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). n.b., the translated title is more innocuous than the literal sense of the German one, roughly: “Grab for World Power.” The book was followed by a prequel that was less incendiary but arguably more tendentious. War of Illusions: German Politics from 1911 to 1914, trans. M. Jackson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
A. Mombauer, “The Fischer Controversy, Documents and the ‘Truth’ About the Origins of the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013), 290–314.
See, e.g., C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).
D. Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Ibid., 72.
Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, volume 1: Regarding Method, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88.
Ibid., 1.
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Hayden White’s contention that “moral and aesthetic” preferences are primary in shaping a historian’s vision of the past seems to play in to various contemporary efforts to consider history at a scale conducive to insight into climate change and global political dilemmas. Nevertheless, his critique of the archive as a repository of truth acquires new resonance as the naturalist and technological reconfiguration of the archive accompanying these developments gets underway. The signal value of White’s polemical intervention in historical theory was to divorce claims of moral right and political justice from truth claims about the objective reality of the past. It remains so today.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 800 | 141 | 3 |
Full Text Views | 334 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 192 | 41 | 1 |