History's Role in the 21st Century Flashcards
Cronon, Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History (2012)
Cheer 1 = 1 for Butterfield’s original 1931 The Whig Interpretation of History, for identifying key dilemmas hsits face - oversimplified narratives, which achieve drama and apparent moral clarity by interpreting past events in light of present politics.
Historical characters need to be understood on own terms. Path ppl followed winding, w many an unexpected twist and turn - reminding us of the contingencies that prevent change from being inevitable.
Cheer 2 = for abridged hist, which Butterfield’s capacious definition of whiggishness seems to encompass, bc abridgement inescapable
Cannot evade the storytelling task of distilling history’s meanings. Historians exist to explain the past to the present
Arnold, Why History Matters on History and Policy Website (2008)
Sometimes history has to be difficult, because history is difficult.
Of course, none of this is an easy sale to politicians accustomed to thinking in five-year (or five-day) timeframes. But it can perhaps have some purchase on other ‘opinion formers’: those few journalists who read and reflect on the wider world, the researchers and producers of TV and radio shows, and most importantly, the next generations of undergraduates who will be taught by academic historians
Reid and Szreter, History and Policy (2008)
If we can secure sufficient funding, our ambition is to become a self-sustaining, national institution providing impartial historical knowledge in order to build public confidence in the way decisions are taken and create better policy-making that benefits everyone.
Modern British Studies Conference 2017, call for papers
As we enter moment of crisis, are some hists more import than others? Should hists pay more attent to inequality, power, economy…
Rutherford on Twitter - three problems when historians treat their discussions in a way that explicitly evokes a political position
I don’t think study of history must/should be pegged to present political/social circumstances
We don’t know what current PhD theses will turn out to be SUPER relevant in 20 years’ time, even if they don’t seem so now
At #MBS2015 I saw a preference not just for pol/econ hist, but pol/econ hist from one partisan perspective
risk of producing a homogenous, and self-congratulatory type of history, where dissident voices are excluded, and where approach is dictated by political correctness.
Will Pooley, Cognitive Dissidents Blog (2016)
Why do history?
answer always comes back to personal decisions that I would consider ‘political’
surely we write our histories with an intention for how we hope they are used and understood? That’s the sense in which I think history cannot help but be explicitly political.
no such thing as ‘objective’/ ‘neutral’ hist.
We all bring specific questions to the history we study, and yes, those questions are informed by our politics
Better to openly discuss political difference
MBS 2015 - did not feel like discussions where political positions were ‘policing’ what people could say
To complain that the explicitly political appeals in the working papers and at the conference itself are damaging to a broad view of what history can be sounds (to me) worryingly like a claim that certain opinions are not acceptable.
much comes down to the definition of politics, which I clearly see in broad terms, as a child of the feminists and the New Left.
With this sense of politics, I am left wondering, how can history NOT be political, without a profound personal and collective sense of cognitive dissonance?
Emily Rutherford, ‘Worthless Drivel’Blog
2016
certain ethical commitments that structure my work: I believe in the importance of the individual and her or his emotions and personal lives, in looking for stories that haven’t yet had the opportunity to be told
I see my research not primarily as something that will change how we—and by “we” I particularly mean people outside my specific subfields—think about any particular topic
rather as something that gives me personal pleasure
Only at the level of in general thinking that we should all be kind and love one another…does my practice as a historian have anything to do with how I vote, the kinds of policies I would like to see
At the last Birmingham MBSdisturbed by the kinds of ideological purity being enforced
One plenary speaker asserted that someone who voted Conservative could not be a good modern British historian, an assertion that no one in the room of hundreds sought to challenge.
When I asked a question in the final plenary session, challenging the speaker’s assertion that political history whose role is to challenge “neoliberalism” from a leftist perspective is more important than the kind of intellectual and cultural history I do, the room felt cold, frightening, and hostile.
MBS blog post, however, suggested to me that.. it was important to them that history should make political interventions
I don’t think every historian has to see what they’re doing like this (Pooley’s definition of politics)
What I was really looking for was a world in which I could have the freedom to seek other frameworks for living a good and ethically committed life, and in which my historical scholarship could be practiced to different ends.
not a binary between politically-committed history and Rankean objectivity
this post isn’t really about the Birmingham MBS conference, it’s about the culture shock that I have experienced over the last couple years as I have gone from being one of the most left-wing people I know to one of the most conservative without feeling as if I have changed any of my views
growing sick and tired of always having to beat myself up for not being right-on enough
what I would say to Birmingham MBS is that if the conference has an explicitly political orientation it should say as much
Will Pooley asks “why some voices so clearly feel policed by the left-wing.” I guess what I would say in response is that I thought I was part of the left wing (I mean, you would, if you grew up in Republican country) until I found myself losing friends and colleagues because I didn’t participate in particular ritual acts of ideological positioning within academia. I am of course very elite, and have much to apologize for, but I sometimes think that other people who are as privileged as I do escape the need to apologize by committing themselves to certain kinds of leftist rhetoric or by positioning themselves as part of a proletariat that is oppressed by greater forces such as capitalism.
Will, I’m not sure if any of this very long reflection helps to clarify where we disagree, but it does seem clear that we are working with different categories, and it looks to me as if these categories are shaped by certain political (in the more expansive sense) assumptions we had going into thinking about history and what made us historians
Richard J.Evans,‘The Wonderfulness of Us:the Tory Interpretation of Whig History’,London Review of Books, Vol.33,No.6(2011),pp.9-12
History is by its nature a critical, sceptical discipline
puncturing myths, demolishing orthodoxies and exposing politically motivated narratives that advance spurious claims to objectivity
History is a critical academic discipline whose aims include precisely the interrogation of memory and the myths it generates. It really does matter to historians thatNelson and Wellington weren’t national heroes to everyone. For those in power, this makes history as a discipline not only useless but dangerous too.
VirginiaBerridge,’History Matters: History’s Rolein Health Policy Making’,Medical History,Vol. 52 (2008).
Historians as policy prescribers would only join the ranks of the “usual suspects” in policy making.
But as analysts offering the classic function of “enlightenment” they have a perspective which no other discipline can offer
VirginiaBerridge, ‘Thinking in time: doeshealth policy need history as evidence?’, Lancet, Vol 375, No. 9717 (2010), pp. 798-799
History is the evidence-based discipline par excellence.
In seeking a better use of history, historians are not
promoting what some have disparagingly called “advocacy history”. Historians should not become activists
can help enlarge the
boundaries and the terms of the debate on health issues.
In the USA at the moment, historians are doing this in the
debate on health-care reform, and British historians also
off er insights founded on the pre-NHS British experience
with health insurance.
SimonSzreter, ‘History and Public Policy’, in, Jonathan Bate (ed.),The Public Value of the Humanities(London 2011).
Historians can grumble among themselves
challenge for historians is therefore twofold. Firstly, it is in communicating the value of history to a policy audience, then, if this value is accepted, to persuade policymakers to listen to and act on these historical insights.
healthy counter-weight to the preponderance of largely unhistorical theories, models and projections that characterize the kind of policy advice offered by other influential disciplines. This represents the rationale behind ‘History and Policy’ (History and Policy 2010).
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?
History provides a way of thinking about society and its component parts, about the messy, conflicted and negotiated process of change
WilliamCronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’,Journal of American History,Vol.78 (1992), pp. 1353 – 1355.
a dilemma for all historians-
different stories from same events
Because stories concern the consequences of actions that are potentially valued in quite different ways, whether by agent, narrator, or audience, we can achieve no neutral objectivity in writing them
virtues of narrative as our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world.
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.
