Modern Historiography In The Making
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Modern Historiography in the Making
Author: Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2022-02-24
At the end of the 19th century, German historical scholarship had grown to great prominence. Academics around the world imitated their German colleagues. Intellectuals described historical scholarship as a foundation of the modern worldview. To many, the modern age was an 'age of history'. This book investigates how German historical scholarship acquired this status. Modern Historiography in the Making begins with the early Enlightenment, when scholars embraced the study of the past as a modernizing project, undermining dogmatic systems of belief and promoting progressive ideals, such a tolerance, open mindedness and reform-readiness. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen looks at how this modernizing project remained an important motivation and justification for historical scholarship until the 20th century. Eskildsen successfully argues that German historical scholarship was not, as we have been told since the early 20th century, a product of historicism, but rather of Enlightenment ideals. The book offers this radical revision of the history of scholarship by focusing on practices of research and education. It examines how scholars worked and why they cared. It shows how their efforts forever changed our relationship not only to the past, but also to the world we live in.
Mythistory
Author: Joseph Mali
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2003-05
Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography. In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory." Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
History in the Making
Author: J. H. Elliott
language: en
Publisher: Yale University Press
Release Date: 2012-09-14
From the vantage point of nearly sixty years devoted to research and the writing of history, J. H. Elliott steps back from his work to consider the progress of historical scholarship. From his own experiences as a historian of Spain, Europe, and the Americas, he provides a deft and sharp analysis of the work that historians do and how the field has changed since the 1950s.The author begins by explaining the roots of his interest in Spain and its past, then analyzes the challenges of writing the history of a country other than one's own. In succeeding chapters he offers acute observations on such topics as the history of national and imperial decline, political history, biography, and art and cultural history. Elliott concludes with an assessment of changes in the approach to history over the past half-century, including the impact of digital technology, and argues that a comprehensive vision of the past remains essential. Professional historians, students of history, and those who read history for pleasure will find in Elliott's delightful book a new appreciation of what goes into the shaping of historical works and how those works in turn can shape the world of thought and action.