Defences of History Flashcards
Stephen Fry, The future’s in the past (2006)
source of empathy preventing us from repeating awful events/ suffering and fostering greater understanding of one another and the human condition more generally - preventing us from judging the ppl of the past or worshipping them. History as levelling
Nussbaum, Philosophy Bites interview (2010)
humanities imbue critical ability essential for functional democracy
knowledge of world hist badly needed to get to grips w problems of today
imagination
Cultural knowledge allowing us to understand place in the world
Berridge
Historians should be bolder in addressing policy
Bull, Is Medieval History Relevant? (2005)
import for identities
collectivities drawing on Middle Ages
The extreme right-wing French
politician Jean-Marie Le Pen often invokes the early medieval settlement
of the Franks in parts of Gaul as the moment when France
and Frenchness came into being.
Hums contrib to lvl of civilisation, teaching values such as tolerance, open-mindedness
Medieval hist essential for understanding some aspects of today e.g. English language
a little relevance goes a long way
Crusades, historicising vs language of Bush helps us see where politicians smoothing out discontinuities. Helps prevent caricature of Islam/ medieval islam as homogenous bloc
Study of Middle Ages import because = study of alterity. Practice in liberating the richness of human diversity - essential in a modern age filled with disturbing perceived trends such as globalization’s flattening out of cultural differences and a rise of deterministic thinking
Arnold, Why history matters - and why medieval history also matters (2008) on hist and policy website
History gives us the tools to dissent
critical ability to ask questions and demur from absolutes
Tosh is strongest when critiquing the inadequacies of current political interpretation, and weakest when mistaking legitimation for motive.
History has more clearly been used by politicians as a source for policy legitimation rather than policy determination.
Better history would not have saved us from the invasion of Iraq; only better politicians.
danger that if one did serve up policy history, packaged and directed toward public political discourse, it would nonetheless remain re-appropriable by ideologies one opposes
Contemporary political ideology often grounds its authority through either a claim to radical novelty, or an assumption of what is ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’. Only through a long view can these claims be successfully critiqued
At Birkbeck, where I teach, the students
In their encounter with the pre-modern, their sense of whatthe world has been and could contain, and how that world has worked and could yet change, is necessarily broadened. This is itself political - and always has been
Tosh, Why History Matters (Hist and Pol Website) (2008)
this book inspired and made possible ‘to a considerable extent’ by History &Policy’s material
Time and again, complex policy issues are placed before the public without adequate explanation of how they have come to assume their present shape and without any hint of the possibilities which are disclosed by the record of the past
on many of the topics to which historical perspective can profitably be applied the problem is not the tenacity of myth but the lack of any relevant knowledge at all - here gains in pop understanding can be made w greatest confidence
For me the Iraq War was a wake-up call. Here was a crisis which manifestly had its roots in the past. Yet during the long lead-up to the invasion in 2003, there was almost no attempt to uncover that past in the media.
Hist as forming identity
The fault of the education system lies, not in having omitted to teach the history of Iraq, but in having failed to convey the essentials of historical thinking which are applicable to Iraq
‘think in bubbles’
should be reviewed
historical profession needs to be alert to the topicality of its scholarship and prepared to reach out
priorities of scholars are over-determined by the current research regime: books written for a general audience mean less time for meeting the pressing requirements of the Research Assessment Exercise.
An important service is performed in restoring to public memory events and trends from the past which are beyond contention. In such cases the anxiety expressed by John Arnold about the partisanship of politically focused history is misplaced. Thus to return to the case of Iraq, there is still debate over the motives of the British occupation in 1914 and the depth of the indigenous resistance, but there is no disputing that the occupation and the resistance took place
In 2003 even to know this much was grounds enough for taking seriously the possibility of political failure in a post-Saddam Iraq.
History and Policy. From the perspective of public history the real potential of the website lies not so much in influencing government and think tanks, as in providing material for the media and thus raising the level of public historical awareness
much higher profile of the website now
Jordanova, ‘How History Matters Now’ (2008) Hist and Pol
claim that policy makers should pay more attention to history in the sense I outlined above does not logically entail the public doing the same. But both operate within the same broad environment, hence at a pragmatic level it makes sense to encourage both constituencies to develop a more informed understanding of the past.
central claim of Why History Matters is that this goal is both desirable and attainable
But it does not consider the deep obstacles that lie in its way
To change the public role of history we have to look such myths in the face, work out why they are held and also how they may be changed. In my view it is naïve to suppose that historical evidence alone can perform such tricks.
the history that is already in the public domain shapes public life, not least because a lot of it panders to the very myths about the past that many commentators would like to see dislodged.
Aim to entertain, not inform
Two different approaches will be required to the public and to decision makers respectively. To change historical understandings in the former case involves not only grasping the emotional appeal of simplified stories, but a profound alliance with all forms of media and with museums and galleries,
I suspect historical novels play an extremely important role
In reality history is treated by many people, including those in power, as a kind of bank account, to be dipped into as and when necessary without any hesitation about how those resources are used. History is a handy rhetorical tool
Harry Collins (Sociologist) and Trevor Pinch (Professor in Department of Science and Tech Studies at Cornell),TheGolem: What everyone should know about science(Cambridge, 1993)
Historicising science.
Science as either all good or all bad. Both these ideas wrong and dangerous
Science is a golem - creature of Jewish mythology. Powerful, grows more powerful every day. Will follow orders, do your work, and protect you from the ever threatening enemy. But it is clumsy and dangerous.
Truth drives it on - doesn’t mean it understands the truth
Laudable reason for concern w public understanding = scientific and technological issues figure more and more in the political process.
The ‘public understanders’… seem to think that if the person in the street knows more science - as opposed to more about science - they will be able to make more sensible decisions about these things
How strange they should think this - PhDs and professors are found on all sides in these debates
Why such debates are unresolvable… is what we have tried to show in the descriptive chapters of this book
Scientists’ knowledge no more immaculate than anyone else e.g. plumbers
The expertise that we need to deal w them is the well-developed expertise of everyday life; it is what we use when we deal with plumbers and the rest (THE EXPERTISE OF HISTORY - scepticism, ability to critique methodology)
To change the public understanding of the political role of science and tech is the most important purpose of this book
In the end, the scientific community brings order to the chaos, transmuting the clumsy antics of the collective Golem Science into a neat and tidy scientific myth. There is nothing wrong w this; the only sin is not knowing that it is always thus
SimonSzreter, ‘History and Public Policy’, in, Jonathan Bate (ed.),The Public Value of the Humanities(London 2011).
Having done the painstaking historical research, we believe that the fruits of historians’ labours merit being shared more widely
Without this, the policy process can remain trapped by unexamined and misleading assumptions about the present and how it came to be. Policies for change in the future are much more likely to bring about their intended outcomes if formulated on the basis of an informed, open and critical perspective on the past
strongest general argument both for the importance of bringing history into dialogue with policy and policymaking and for historians to take it as their social duty to bring about this expansion in contemporary public discourse is that history is already there, all the time, in the policy formulating process. The only question is what kind of history is going to be used by decision-makers?
profound respect which all good historical research gives to three methodological issues: questions of context, the study of process, and questions of difference when addressing human and social affairs (Tosh 2002: 36–46; Tosh 2002: 9–12). To these we would add of course the discipline’s high level of critical sensitivity to the provenance of information of all kinds and its commitment to a self-critical, reflective awareness of the historian’s own time and place
Context, process and difference
History provides a way of thinking about society and its component parts, about the messy, conflicted and negotiated process of change
The historian’s knowledge and the historicist perspectives are valuable precisely because they provide different and challenging intellectual resources to those available from other disciplines
The practice of studying history is of course a two-way dialogue between past and present. History and Policy believes that it can only be helpful for historians to be as critically well-informed as possible about those aspects of the present which most preoccupy the policy world.
WilliamCronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’,Journal of American History,Vol.78 (1992), pp. 1353 – 1355.
As Carr puts it, “Narrative is not merely a possibly successful way of describing events; its structure inheres in the events themselves.
we need stories to remind ourselves who we are, how we got here, what we want to become. The same is true of societies and individuals: we use our histories to remember ourselves,
At its best, historical storytelling helps keep us morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had not done before.
Narratives remain our chief moral compass in the world
