History, Historiography, Uses of the Past

Last update: 03 Oct 1994 12:01
First version:

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Stray thought: lots of historians talk about wanting to understand how people in the past thought, to enter empathetically into their perspectives, their understandings, even their morality. Doesn't that sound like it would be dangerous if you could actually pull it off? Mightn't there be some risk of getting stuck in this alien mentality?

See also: Archaeology; Historical Genetics; Historical Materialism; Nationalism; Scientific Method; Social Science Methodology

Recommended (very misc.):
• Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher
• Peter Bearman, James Moody and Robert Faris, "Networks and History" Complexity 8 (2002): 61--71
• Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness
• Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History [As an example of a very ingenious use of sources that seem to be about one thing to cast light on something else]
• Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel [Doesn't so much put forward a theory of historiography as exemplify an implicit one.]
• David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought
• Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method [Interesting, with much food for thought, but not fully convincing. His discussion of "clues", for instance, (a) doesn't mention the philosophy-of-science discussion of hypothetico-deductive method at all, which is intensely puzzling since that's basically what he's talking about; (b) doesn't mention Helmholtz (whose work made the idea of "unconscious inference" from sensory cues to the external world a huge part of psychology); (c) draws the untenable distinction he does between generalizing, "Galilean" sciences, e.g. astronomy, and particularizing, historical sciences --- since the diagnoses in the particular case depends on general principles (e.g., to appropriate one of his examples, that each artist has a certain, stable and distinct, way of drawing hands), and generalizing sciences attempt to explain and deal with particular cases (why did this reaction-vessel turn red, the cause of that supernova); and (d) claims that the intellectual changes he describes were somehow motivated by the class struggles, claims he doesn't even begin to support. Nonetheless, his discussion of "clues" has a lot of interesting material and obervations.]
• E. J. Hobsbawm, On History
• Marshall Hodgson
  • The Venture of Islam [The Introduction to vol. I has a very fine methodological discussion...]
  • Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History [... which is reprinted, with some related papers and manuscripts, in this collection. Mini-review]
• ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah
• Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
• Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth
• David Stannard, Shrinking History [Review: A Strange Delusion of the Recent Past]
• E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
• Charles Tilly
  • Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons [Mini-review]
  • Explaining Social Processes [Mini-review]
• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

To read:
• Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity
• Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas
• Collingwood, The Idea of History
• Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History
• M. I. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models [Review by Danny Yee]
• George M. Frederickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements
• Carlo Ginzburg
  • History, Rhetoric and Proof
  • Threads and traces: true, false, fictive
• Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
• Jonas Grethlein, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine
• Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences
• Florian Kerschbaumer, Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Martin Stark, and Marten Düring (eds.), The Power of Networks: Prospects of Historical Network Research
• Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods
• Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity
• Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period
• Claire Lemercier, "Formal network methods in history: why and how?", halshs-00521527
• David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
• Raymond Martin, The Past Within Us: An Empirical Approach to Philosophy of History
• Murray G. Murphey
  • Our Knowledge of the Historical Past
  • Philosophical foundations of historical knowledge
• Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography
• William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
• G. Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History
• Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion
• White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge
• Rosalind Williams, Retooling