Historical Theory

The Many Faces of Clio: Cross Cultural Approaches to Historiography–Edited by Q. Edward Wang and Franz L Fillafer

by Adam Timmins

Essat review of Peter Icke - "Frank Ankersmit's Lost Historical Cause"

by Adam Timmins

Essay Review of Kerwin Klein - "From History to Theory"

by Adam Timmins

The Silence of the Archives: Postcolonialism and the Practice of Historical Reconstruction from Archival Evidence

by Stephanie Decker

Working Paper, MPRA
This paper has been discussed in the following blogs:
http://nephist.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/linking-history-and-management-discourse-epistemology-and-method/
and
http://exchange-bhc.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/nep-his-blog-on-linking-history-and.html

History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. For business historians working at business schools,... more History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. For business historians working at business schools, however, the issue of methodology looms larger, as it is hard to make contributions to social science debates without explicating one’s disciplinary methodology. This paper seeks to outline an important aspect of historical methodology, which is data collection from archives. In this area, postcolonialism has made significant methodological contributions not just for non-Western history, as it has emphasized the importance of considering how archives were created, and how one can legitimately use them despite their limitations.

Teoría antropológica e investigación histórica en el estudio de las sociedades del pasado

by Francisco Tiapa

Why Historical Distance is not a Problem

by Mark Bevir

History and Theory, Volume 50, Issue 4, pages 24–37, December 2011

This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear... more This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear with postfoundationalism. The developmental historicism of the nineteenth century appealed to narrative principles to establish continuity between past and present and to guide selections among facts. In the twentieth century, modernist historicists rejected such principles, thereby raising the specter of historical distance: that is, the distorting effects of the present on accounts of the past, the chasm between facts and narrative. The modernist problem became: how can historians avoid anachronism and develop accurate representations of the past? Instead of using narrative principles to select facts, modernist historicists appealed to atomized facts to validate narratives. However, in the late twentieth century, postmodernists (Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White) argued that there was no way to close the distance between facts and narratives. The postmodern problem became: how should historians conceive of their writing given the ineluctable distance between facts and narratives? Today, postfoundationalism dispels both modernist and postmodernist concerns with historical distance; it implies that all concepts (not just historical ones) fuse fact and theory, and it dissolves issues of conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment.

“Wie es eigentlich gewesen?” Early Film as a Historical Source”

by Michel S Beaulieu

In Bâtir de nouveaux ponts: sources, méthodes et interdicplinarité/ Building New Bridges: Sources, Methods, and Interdisciplinarity, eds. Jeff Keshen and Sylvie Perrier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005), pp. 249-264.

Why I am tired of turning: a theoretical interlude

by Katrina Navickas

A draft paper on the History Working Papers project website.

Comments welcome on the HWWP website. Comments welcome on the HWWP website.

Why historians won't talk about method

by Stephanie Decker

Draft paper presented at the “Qualitative Historical Methods in Management and Organization Studies” at Queen Mary University London, 8 September 2011

Fuzzy Set Theory (or Fuzzy Logic) to Represent the Messy Data of Complex Human (and other) Systems

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Co-authored with Emery A. Coppola, Jr.

Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation... more Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation presents a dilemma to those who use computational technologies, which demand a high level of precision to organize, analyze, and visualize information: the more complex the system is, the greater the imprecision of the available data. Historians and geographers often feel that their imprecise, ambiguous, contradictory, messy, largely qualitative information does not “fit” well in the available software categories, and they have trouble discussing the results produced when they work within computational environments because category assignment seems so arbitrary. This dilemma appears dramatically with the use of Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as a research strategy. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy set theory (or fuzzy logic) as a proven solution for dealing with imprecision in complex systems.

Introduction: The Mad History of the World

by Hannu Salmi

published in Historical Comedy on Screen: Subverting History with Humour. Ed. Hannu Salmi. Bristol: Intellect, 2010: 7-30.

‘History is about the most cruel of all goddesses’, wrote Friedrich Engels in 1893, ‘she leads her triumphal car over... more ‘History is about the most cruel of all goddesses’, wrote Friedrich Engels in 1893, ‘she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in “peaceful” economic development.’ In Engels’s view, history is a cruel tragedy, and the conception of history as something profoundly tragic has made our image of the past grim and joyless. Although one might assume there would be plenty of amusement to be found in the past, historians rarely laugh at the objects of their study. This collection of essays is devoted to exploring the comic treatment of history on screen.

More in Google Books. Follow the link below!

A történetelmélet önigazolása (The Self-justification of Historical Theory)

by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Aetas 26:4 (2011), 174-184.

Modernity as ‘passive revolution’: Gramsci and the Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism

by Peter D. Thomas

Peter Thomas, “Modernity as ‘passive revolution’: Gramsci and the Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism”, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), New Series, Vol. 17, issue 2, 2006.

Archivos e investigación histórica: de la teoría a la práctica

by Maria Flores-Collazo

Published in "Cuarto Propio. Revista literaria" Departamento de Español, Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo

Nationalism and Historiography

by Daniel Woolf

Cultural History, the Possible, and the Principle of Plenitude

by Hannu Salmi

published in History and Theory 50 (May 2011), 171-187

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised... more Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and theoretical implications of this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study.

The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past.

The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular.

The Logic of the History of Ideas - Then and Now

by Mark Bevir

Intellectual History Review 21 (2011), 105-119

This paper is response to a special issue of IHR devoted to my book, The Logic of the History of Ideas. I look back at... more This paper is response to a special issue of IHR devoted to my book, The Logic of the History of Ideas. I look back at that book and consider how it relates to my later work on social theory (especially governance) and intellectual history (especially the history of the human sciences).

Memory and Trauma: Narrating the Western Front 1914–1918

by Ross Wilson

Rethinking History 13(2) (251-268).

The memory of the Western Front still seems to haunt British society nearly 90 years after the Armistice. The mention... more The memory of the Western Front still seems to haunt British society nearly 90 years after the Armistice. The mention of the battlefields of the Somme or Passchendaele, or references to 'the trenches' evokes sadness and poignancy as the Western Front represents a traumatic memory within Britain. The image of the soldiers suffering in the trenches as victims of the war appears so deeply ingrained that military historians have lamented the seemingly impossible task of revising the popular memory of the conflict. Attempts to show the tactical advances made by the army, the positive attitudes of the soldiers and the emphasis on the fact that the British Army was victorious in the war, have failed to make an impact on popular perceptions. This paper highlights that this failure stems from the narratives employed by historians of the war, which fail to accommodate or acknowledge the trauma still felt by contemporary society. By exploring alternative narrative styles this paper offers an alternative to the linear narratives, and stresses that through a non-linear narrative historians can begin to engage with the ideas which drive the popular memory. Using recent multi-disciplinary work which has drawn from archaeological and anthropological perspectives this paper describes the British soldiers on the Western Front as arriving at an understanding of a hostile war-landscape. Through an alternative narrative this paper demonstrates a way in which the conflict can be remembered and studied without being hidden within a veil of sentimentality.

Die Sowjetunion und die Welt im Kalten Krieg: Neue Forschungsperspektiven auf eine vermeintlich hermetisch abgeschottete Gesellschaft = Soviet Society In the Cold War World. New Perspectives

by Tobias Rupprecht

Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58,3 (2010), pp. 381-399

Until recently, research in the field of Soviet social history on the one side and Cold War historiography on the... more Until recently, research in the field of Soviet social history on the one side and Cold War historiography on the other side went separate ways. Experts on the Soviet Union focused on the inner history of primarily Stalinism, whereas diplomatic and military historians dominated Cold War research with a strong bias for the Western perspective.
This research reports seeks to give an overview of contemporary scholarship that tries to overcome that divide, outlining new trajectories and pointing at potential backlogs.
In a first step, it presents a number of new monographs on the Cold War and asks to which extent they incorporate the Soviet point of view and social historical phenomena of the so called home front of the Cold War. Most research on the Cold War now uses a multiperspective approach, it gives analytical room also to actors on the Soviet and Third World side of the conflict, it takes their ideological mindsets seriously and it has discovered cultural diplomacy as a meaningful source to reconstruct them. Repercussions on Soviet society beyond political decision makers and party ideologues, however, are still largely absent from most Cold War monographs.
The second paragraph then changes perspectives, assembling recent literature from historians of the Soviet Union who have transnationally broadened their view and analysed aspects of relations between the Soviet Union and the (Third) World. While most work is still traditional diplomatic history, there is also a tendency towards an examination of individual and group interactions across the Iron Curtain, and of Soviet perceptions of the world abroad through modern media and literature.
A last paragraph finally discusses the contribution a transnationally amended Soviet history could make to the debate on global history. The Soviet path to modernity did not happen in a completely sealed-off world, it shared indeed many phenomena with the Western one. At the same time, a global history of the second half of the 20th century needs to consider the world wide fascination for and fear of the Soviet economic and social project.

The Oath of Fidelity in Iceland: a Tie of Feudal Allegiance ?

by gregory cattaneo

http://www.scandinavianstudy.org/site/

[réf. The Oath of Fidelity in Iceland: a tie of feudal allegiance, in Scandinavian Studies 82 (1), Spring 2010,... more [réf. The Oath of Fidelity in Iceland: a tie of feudal allegiance, in Scandinavian Studies 82 (1), Spring 2010, 21-36.]

An analysis of the oath of fidelity as first step of the ties from men to men in medieval Europe : "comparison cannot constitute a resulting obligation, but the means to evaluate one's own culture as confronted by others".

1. Recommandation and fidelity in Norway and Europe
2. The Norwegian oath of fidelity : a copy of European rituals ?
3. An oath of fidelity during Saga Age Iceland ?
4. The oath of fidelity during Sturlunga Age Iceland: similarities with feudal practices ?
5. The oath ritual in Iceland: look under the text.
6. Concluding points.