Rethinking History

This article sketches the intellectual biography of irascible social critic and historian Christopher Lasch. Even though Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, his political commitments shifted rather dramatically during the course of his life (1932–1994). The essay argues that as Lasch's commitments shifted – from being an outspoken leftist critic of Cold War liberalism to a self-styled populist moralist, denounced by feminists for his defense of the traditional family – so too did his historical approach, often in quite fruitful ways. Lasch's intellectual trajectory serves as a canvas for theorizing about the inherently political nature of historical writing.

This themed issue intends to open up new vistas on the history of emotions. It does so with articles that examine community-based or spatially defined emotional styles that were simultaneously performed within larger socio-cultural contexts. Following this approach one might – for example – discern ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’, ‘British’ and ‘Anglo-Indian’ emotional styles within colonial South Asia around 1900 as well

This paper analyzes key issues in the work of Frank Ankersmit: narrative, representation and sublime historical experience. It argues that his recent turn to experience marks a shift from an interest in narrative and the textual dimension of the past to an examination of the notion of an experience about the past. It suggests that although Ankersmit is usually associated with postmodernist avangardism in historical theory (narrativism, constructivism), as can be seen in his theory of historical representation, his understanding of the concept of historical experience and the sublime can be seen as regression. Thus, although Ankersmit had pushed historical theory beyond the linguistic
turn, his most recent work can be understood as a return to a traditional Romantic view of immediate experience combined with an Enlightenment analysis of it.

This article argues that neither the proponents of the uniqueness of the Holocaust nor those who see other genocides as paradigmatic provide helpful ways of furthering the scholarly understanding of genocide. A new generation of genocide scholars is incorporating the findings of earlier research into a synthesis that promises to respect the extremity of the Holocaust as well as the specificities of other genocides, positioning them in a history that sees genocide as a continuum of practices throughout the modern period that must also encompass the history of racism, colonialism, imperialism and nation-building.

In 2004, the Australian Liberal–National Party Coalition Government promised that, if re-elected, they would commission Film Australia to produce ten documentaries on Australia's history. The fruit of this promise was the Making History initiative, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast the resulting ten documentaries during 2007–9. The Making History initiative represented a significant funding boost to the documentary sector, and

Jean Said Makdisi's Teta, mother and me: An Arab woman's memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women, her grandmother, her mother and herself. The stories of three women are blended in one narrative about the historical transformations that took place in the Arab world as a consequence of an encounter between east and west. The story of the three women is the story of the plight of a Palestinian family living through tumultuous times: it is a story of high expectations, painful disillusionments and stoic struggles for survival amidst the raging conflicts and colonial interventions that beset the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The memoir is also a conscious attempt to revisit and re-inscribe the implications of a crucial cross-cultural encounter, between the east and west through missionary schools, on the lives of women in the Arab world. A historical record narrated from a feminist postcolonial lens Teta, mother and me is a valuable contribution to contemporary public histories about the Arab world in general, and Arab women in particular. This article argues that the memoir brings to world public histories new material and new voices that are not conventionally included, hence potentially leading to new historical narratives. It also contributes to an original and nuanced understanding of contemporary topical questions in world public history about the construction of national identities, modernity and neocolonial power relations as manifested and played out in missionary schools in the Middle East.

This essay revisits the work of the German historian Friedrich Meinecke and offers new interpretation of his major works, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (1907), Die Ideen der Staatsräson in der neuen Geschichte (1924), and Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936). The standard ...

Perhaps because I never wanted to be a historian but a novelist, or perhaps because I never had a single heritage to embrace, I became as a scholar more open to the deconstructive and decentering spirit of postmodernism. Or perhaps it was the events of my life and career which led me in that direction. Whatever the cause, these Confessions chronicle three-plus decades of a scholarly career which begins by chronicling the activities of the Left in traditional story form and ends up promoting the cause of memoir, fictional biography, and history on film as viable alternative modes of making the past important and meaningful to us in the present.

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The relationship between history and fiction has long been recognised as close but problematic and there are few places in which the problematics of this relationship manifest more clearly than in the case of the historical novel. Concerned with the borderland space in which history meets fiction, this reading of the historical novel is accompanied by the reading of another borderline case, that of popular narrative history, in the expectation that the proximity of these two modes of writing will allow insight into the workings of both. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1997), my interpretation of the relation between history and historical fiction turns on notions of hospitality, connecting Genette’s work with that of Jacques Derrida in order to outline a model of generic intersection in which historical fiction appears as the malign guest of historiography, for whom the hospitality of historical writing necessarily entails hostility at the threshold. More precisely, I will argue that it is this hostility (hostipitality) that guarantees the integrity of the threshold dividing history and fiction while at the same time calling into question the assumptions underlying the status of fiction as guest and history as host.

This article provides an alternative interpretation for the roles of film in the ideological struggle that tore apart the Weimar Republic. Emphasizing the overlooked contribution of Jewish film-makers and critics to the development of the German ‘national film’ after World War I, I examine popular comedies that were associated with the ‘Jewish milieu’ by contemporaneous reviewers. My analysis suggests that

ABSTRACT In the form of a conversational exchange of ideas, Ewa Domańska, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm reflect on the condition and role of historical knowledge in the Anthropocene. In the conversation on the potential of ‘anthropocenic historical knowledge’ – including the limitations and use of the term – each author offers and elaborates on one main theme for discussion, on which the other two co-authors reflect: Tamm begins by posing the question of the extension of ‘the territory of the historian’, Simon takes on the challenge by calling for the development of a ‘scientific literacy’, and Domańska pulls the threads together by advocating ‘anticipatory knowledge’. In the conversation, each author reflects on all three themes that they present as fundamental tenets of a renewed historical knowledge attuned to the Anthropocene predicament.

In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed connection between history and ethics and that this is a ‘good thing’. This is not to say that, in practice, history is not governed throughout by ‘values’ (politics, ideology, etc.) and that ethics are not always ‘historical’ and similarly ‘governed’, but that there is no ‘formal connection’. It is argued that it is this ‘break’ that enables just any kind of contingent connection to be made and that, like it or not, this condition—of ethical relativism—is what we have to live with and make the ‘best of’ … and we can.

Philosophers and historians in Cambridge did not recognise either the relevance or the importance of Metahistory when it was published in 1973. The reasons are here explained in terms of the nature of the analytical tradition: the principled distinctiveness of analytical philosophy from (1) history, (2) speculative metaphysics, and (3) political morality. Following an analysis of ‘analysis’, Metahistory is argued to be an exercise in the recovery of paradigm cases in Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics that offers the outlines of an advanced philosophy of mind and philosophy of time.

Like the Annals of Rajasthan by Colonel Tod, the Ras Mala by Alexander Kinloch Forbes is one of Gujarat's foundational histories. The term history is contestable to describe it, and the prcoess of the making of Ras Mala a fascinating mixture of various methods.

In her seminal work ‘The era of the witness’ (1998, 2006) the French historian Annette Wieviorka has described the rise of the witness as key figure in the cultural memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War since the 1960s. This article elaborates on the concerns Wieviorka has expressed regarding what she referred to as the new technologies of dissemination, which have become ubiquitous by now: searchable online portals to video testimony collections. These testimony portals have two important characteristics: they ‘force’ users to choose from a large number of testimonies; and they reconfigure the relation between witness and audience. In effect, as will be argued with help of Caroline Wake’s notion of tertiary witnessing, a different approach to testimonies has emerged, in which the user is central, not the witness. As a case study, the online portal getuigenverhalen.nl (‘eyewitness stories’) is chosen, which contains nearly 500 video interviews about the Holocaust and the ...

In my previous work I have established a theoretical framework called “the Singularization of History” by criticizing the way social, cultural and microhistorians have practiced their scholarship in the last two or three decades. I have paid particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz. the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I refute this principle and demonstrate its inherent contradictions. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to what has been called “a great historical question.” The challenge of my paper will be to consider whether this research focus excludes the global perspective from historical inquiry. If that is not the case, what is the best possible approach to gain that vision?

ABSTRACT Sustained academic engagement with the colonial and imperial implications of videogames is a relatively recent phenomenon. This article employs the case study of Medieval II: Total War’s 2006 simulation of the battle of Otumba to interpret player interactivity with grand narrative formations dating back to the sixteenth century. The steady revitalization of imperial apologism, colonial violence, and commemorations of heroic action suggest the complexity of player reception of gamified history and the importance of games to not only popular culture, but also historical memory and constructions of identity.

This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.

Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavow—that as a genre of literature history is necessarily, and primarily, the product of rhetorical figures and devices—Jean François Lyotard's work is used here in order to remind historians of both the failure of the empirical/epistemological and the actual aesthetic construct that all histories are…and always have been. It is argued, further, that developing Lyotard's idea of the immemorial, a way of considering ‘the before now’ as a kind of history—as if it were a history—opens up historical discourse to things it could be but has not yet been.