History Manifesto (2014) Flashcards
Arguments
History is in crisis - quote from Llyn Hunt of AHA
Impact agenda
higher education and research councils in Australia,
Europe, and the United Kingdom have mandated public engagement,
‘impact’, and ‘relevance’ as criteria for evaluating university performance
this = profound opportunity for service
proliferation of ‘histories’ rather than ‘history’; greater prestige for novelty and discovery rather than synthesis and theory: all these are familiar features of the human sciences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
professional historians ceded the task of synthesising historical knowledge to unaccredited writers and simultaneously lost whatever influence they might once have had over policy to colleagues in the social sciences, most spectacularly to the economists.
hists need to take a leading role and grab attention of policy-makers
convenient visualisations of economists easier to circulate
Critique of short-termism
‘A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term.’
Thinking about past to see future
Hists giving us info about relationship between past and future
moral stakes of longue-durée subjects mandate that hists choose as large an audience as poss
Need for fusion between big and small, ‘micro’ and ‘macro’
History to help escape ‘conceptual fetters’ of the present moment
Historians as critical problem-solvers in digitised and globalised future
John Tosh
‘timely and useful’
Jordanova
also in favour of the manifesto
Houlbrook
crit caricature of ‘micro-historians’
Untrue to claim likes of Natalie Zemon Davis somehow disengaged from vital questions of power and inequality
Public must not be addressed, must be worked with
Grange
No fully formed argument about how hists might go about speaking to power
Should serve as rallying cry, not manual
Francis
Welcome reminder of hists’ duty to speak beyond the academy
defends microhistory
to conceive of hist’s relevance just in terms of utility to policymakers is to overlook much bigger contribs hists can make to pub life
Jones
intrinsic value of variation in hist practice
fails to account for how history and historical consciousness is increasingly
being produced outside of the Academy. If historians truly wish to be relevant and have
‘impact’, they will need to take more seriously the myriad of forms through which our
society represents the past to itself. This includes historical novels, films, television dramas,
This discussion absent from hist manifesto
Funke
Historians need to confront myths and embrace complexity. To bust politicians’ myths
Hist seems to die every 50 years
Sefton
focus on policymakers risks moving us further away from wider, marginalised publics we should be engaging w
Yarrow
Longue durée used 130 times in 125 pages of text
Microhistory was an attempt to improve on the structural deficiencies of the longue durée, not some inverted abandonment of it.
Big data sets as way forward = old-fashioned
Webb
hists should not be concentrating on production of profit, as G+A suggest, but on production of knowledge
historians must continue to explore the social costs of
capitalism with a renewed vigour and invite our students and communities to engage in
complex, rigorous historical thought.
Hilton
I don’t agree with this description of how things are. the REF has imposed an ‘impact’ agenda the nature of that engagement will be far more imaginative than on the
deliberate influence on public policy initiatives which Guldi and Armitage think is the be all
and end all of history’s usefulness. Historians everywhere are engaged with the cultural sector, the creative economy, the voluntary sector, the media in all its forms
Hists are already doing work with does not serve direct policy service, but can help transform debate within which policy is set
Reinarz
Medical hists long pre-empted manifesto
Many important questions in
medicine about how we might reintroduce care and compassion into medicine will
inevitably take us back to the micro-, not the macro-level, nor do we need to go back
far to consider scandal and abuse in healthcare.
Payling
the small, short, qualitative and local can also shed
light on the big picture
Twitter often reflects society with the same people having big voices and a lot of reach on and offline.
Problem w only rly white m-c men responding to the Manifesto. Importance of mentorship for female and BME historians
Background
History Manifesto - open access format to facilitate discussion
Berridge
G+A ident ‘golden age’ from 19th C to 1970s
Micro history itself had
originated in Italy as a means of testing longue duree questions as a reaction to the
totalising theories of the Annales and Marxist schools. In its initial late 60s incarnation,
such history remained committed to the study of big questions and social change, but
this emphasis died away as radical movements themselves lost their edge
G+A do not discuss critiques of big data methods - digital sources close down options and encourage easy overuse of partic collections, w own biases
Missed UK developments - The foundation of History and Policy a decade ago emphasised the interest of British historians in addressing the divide; the ‘impact’ agenda central to the UK government’s REF (Research Excellence Framework) has made historians very aware of this aspect of their work and obliged to demonstrate
it; and public engagement awards from funders such as the Wellcome Trust have seen
historians taking on new roles in the community.
Ultimately, however, the authors are to be
commended. Statistics and long-term trends do convince policy makers. A combination
of the new longue duree history and micro history, with carefully assessed use of digital possibilities, is needed to curtail short termism
historians need to be bolder in addressing future policy agendas
Cohen and Mandler, 2015
history
is a subject almost uniquely ill-suited to manifestos. Historians are not soldiers; they don’t fight on a single front
HM offers diminution of current audiences and narrowing of public role
Discovering a “transition to the Short Past” in the 1970s
requires that Guldi and Armitage ignore the very data they cite
Since the mid-1960s, there has been a steady rise in the length of time that
dissertations cover, measured by either the mean or the median.
we surveyed book
reviews published in the AHR in eight sample years over a span of eighty years:
Sample amounted to nearly 1100 books in total
longest time scales came
after 1975, when the numbers of years covered steadily increased, with the median
more than doubling between 1966 and 1986.
the percentage of studies conducted on such “biological” time periods declined significantly between 1926 and 2006.
The expansion of universities led to the
proliferation of all kinds of history-writing: the short-termist dissertations that Guldi
and Armitage cite and long-term studies as well, thus laying the groundwork for the
so-called “history boom” of the 1980s and 1990s
Far from closing themselves off in their professional ivory towers, historians in
the last forty years have been reaching larger and ever more diverse publics in a wide
array of public theaters: in the classroom, media
most of the problems that
beset policy and business elites today are probably best couched in the five-to-fiftyyear
“biological time-span” about which Guldi and Armitage are so scornful
In Europe, a string of
legal and political disputes since the 1980s have drawn on the expertise of historians
The History Manifesto is brimful of contempt for everyone else who seeks to address complex
problems
History and the humanities in general have done well to hold their position
for the last thirty years, and a similar stability over an even longer period has been
evident in the UK, though in the short term the humanities tend not to do well in
periods of economic downturn
By portraying much of the work of hists over the past half-century as irrelevant/ worthless, risk contributing to decline. Also their manifesto itself contribs to sense of crisis
Superb history, influential either in academic circles
or more broadly in public life, can be conducted on any time scale, from a single
day to thousands of years. It is precisely the diversity of our discipline, its rich, humane
traditions that speak to multiple audiences on all the scales in which humans
feel and think, that have made us an indispensable part of the educational and cultural
landscape over the past generation. Nurturing and, where necessary, defending
these traditions is “the future of the university,” and the job for us all.
