Through a combination of exclusive articles written by leading scholars and eBook chapters exploring the nature and significance of history, this Topic in Focus allows you to reflect upon notions of honesty, truth, and objectivity in historical scholarship.
How do we define notions of objectivity? How have these definitions changed throughout history and historical practice? In Tor Egil Førland’s article Objectivity the author grapples with questions such as these with a specific focus on ‘perspective-independence,’ which Førland identifies as ‘the most salient dimension of objectivity.’ Beginning with the ideas of Leopold von Ranke and ending with the perspectives of postmodern history-theorists, this article establishes a timeline of objectivity and points towards a crucial question: what will the objectivity of the future look like?
Text: Why should the reader, professional, or amateur, within or outside the profession, trust what the historian has written? How can this trust be created and maintained? Engaging with the idea of intellectual honesty within historical and scientific study, Lutz Raphael and Benjamin Zechariah present the potential pitfalls, both socially and intellectually, of how truth and honesty are perceived within academic study. Throughout their article 'Intellectual Honesty and the Purposes of History', the authors explore how intellectual honesty and integrity can be maintained and regulated, particularly with regards to the ethical and professional implications of such honesty.
Historical narratives, both in literature and in film, are ever-present in popular culture. The history presented by these works, however, is frequently overlooked by historians as nothing more than popular entertainment. In Faye Sayer’s chapter from Histories on Screen: The Past and Present in Anglo-American Cinema and Television, the author seeks to establish the value of the moving image as a secondary source of historical information, exploring both the positive and negative implications of using films and television as secondary evidence for historical research – particularly when it comes to whether or not moving images can ever be regarded as ‘good history’.
In George G. Iggers’ paper The Role of Professional Historical Scholarship in the Creation and Distortion of Memory, the author explores the deeply-rooted relationship between the creation of history and the idea of collective memory. While memory an attached and committed recapturing of the past, professional historical scholarship sees itself in a different light; as a detached reconstitution of the past free from any moral judgements, a scholarly and even scientific discipline. And yet, Iggers argues, such a distinction is fraught with tension, with this idea of the historian as an ‘objective judge of the past’ being compromised by both political function and imperfections in the historical method.
We are delighted to present free-to-read articles from across the five article sections which are specially commissioned for Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. These essays, which lend themselves to discussions of presentism in teaching history, will help you get to grips with classic texts in context, using primary sources, tackling key thinkers and concepts, and understanding historiography.
Watch the Authors Discuss their Articles and the Trend of Presentism
Watch six professional historians discuss presentism in teaching history in a webinar chaired by Associate Professor Tyson Retz. Drawing on their teaching experience as well as their recent exclusive articles in Bloomsbury History: Theory & Method, each historian discusses their article in turn, including how its subject matter lends itself to presentism, before turning to a panel discussion and Q&A about the overall trend of presentism in teaching.
Marx’s Capital by Terrell Carver, Image courtesy of Getty.
This comprehensive essay on Capital’s context, arguments, and enduring influence forms a compelling and accessible introduction to a difficult historical text, and gives students the tools to situate the work in the history of Marx’s thought and life.
Police forces have never been a mirror of the society they are policing, but are more male, more conservative, and more hierarchical. Nadine Rossol discusses how historians can draw on awareness of these limitations when using police records as a historical source. She stresses the importance of police records for historians—particularly when studying authoritarian regimes in which opposition groups frequently destroy their own records—and guides the reader in how to approach the use of such sources.
The concept of masculinity is relatively recent; it is hardly found before the middle of the twentieth century. This article tracks the concept’s increased usage in academic works since that period and looks at interpretations of both Western and non-Western masculinities.
Catherine Hall is the leading feminist historian of empire, race, gender, and the nation practicing in Britain today. This article from our Key Thinkers series explores Catherine Hall through the lens of her influences, impact, interpretations, and legacy.
In the historiography of Enlightenment thought before WW2, scholars paid little attention to race or racism in the era. However, starting with Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno in the 1940s, a strand of scholarship highlighted the Enlightenment’s role in the tradition of positing European superiority and justifying the subjugation of non-Europeans. This extended article thoughtfully covers the history of this scholarship and its importance today, before looking to its future.
We are delighted to present free-to-read articles from across the five article sections which are specially commissioned for Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. These essays will help you get to grips with classic texts in context, using primary sources, understanding key thinkers and concepts, and deepening your understanding of historiography.
Covering Tacitus’s life, contemporary audience, text, and reception, this comprehensive introduction to the Annals enables the reader to understand the work in its historical, literary and cultural context.
First considering the best definition of ‘folklore’ and of folklore sources, this article looks at how folklore has been studied by historians throughout the ages and discusses how best to work with folklore sources as a modern historian.
This article considers the concept of “time” over time from Aristotle onwards. Looking at how different philosophers and schools of thought have perceived time, temporality, and the relationship between past and future, it covers thinkers from Nietzsche and Hegel to the Whig-historians and the Romantics.
Sima Qian (or Ssu-ma Ch’ien) virtually created the field of historiography in his culture, being the first person to write a comprehensive history of China at the turn of the first century BCE. This article considers Sima Qian’s influences, impact, interpretations, and legacy.
This article reviews the idea of the Anthropocene against previous trends in the understanding of the planet as historically shaped by humans; discusses the contemporary position of the Anthropocene in historical debates; and finally looks to the future of the Anthropocene in History.
Through a combination of exclusive articles written by leading scholars and eBook chapters exploring different aspects of global history and its practice around the world, this Featured Content allows you to reflect on the interconnected dimensions of all our pasts. It considers the ways in which historians are striving to illuminate these connections and what this teaches us about the world.
In this article, Xupeng Zhang gets to grips with Chinese global history writing. He considers how this needs to take the form of combining a distinctive national character and a world perspective in order for Chinese global history writing make a contribution to the formation of a global history with more universal significance. Zhang notes that this can only be achieved by reframing the history of China, freeing it from confinement in the existing framework of national history and opening it to a transnational and global context. The article makes the case that such a global history will eventually produce a re-spatialized national narrative, which will become a link between China's national past and its global present.Explore further by reading Xupeng Zhang's article.
Global History, Globally assembles scholars from around the world to survey the state of global history in different regions, including how it is practised, key areas of research and the problems facing global historians. The chapter of Rafael Marquese and João Paulo Pimenta cites three examples to show how transcontinental and global perspectives taken by historians in Latin America had an impact on scholarship elsewhere. First, they review a group of Caribbean historians, C.L.R James and Eric Williams most prominently among them, whose efforts to connect the history of Caribbean slavery to European economic ascendancy were widely ignored when their studies came out, but whose books are now considered a foundational perspective on Atlantic history. Marquese and Pimenta show how Fernand Braudel’s thinking about global capitalism was greatly influenced by his encounter with Brazilian historians when he taught at the University of São Paulo, and how, in turn, his global perspective influenced generations of historians in Latin America who, like Braudel, saw that capitalism could only be understood as a world system. Their final example is the dependency school, which was forged by Latin American economists and sociologists such as Raul Prebisch and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This school introduced the notions of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ into global debates, ideas that have had a profound influence on what historians and others have called the ‘world system’.Learn more in the introduction to Omar Gueye’s Global History, Globally.
Also in Global History, Globally, Omar Gueye’s chapter on the history of global perspectives in Africa asserts that it would be nearly impossible to write the history of Africa in the modern era without references to places, people and processes on different continents, with very few African historians having done so. As a consequence, African historians have almost always taken on a wider, if not yet global, perspective. They wrote the history of the continent or of substantial parts of it; they wrote pan-African history that included the African diaspora in the Americas or they wrote global economic history centered on Africa, as in the pioneering work of Abdoulaye Ly. Yet history was as central to the forging of African nation-states as it was elsewhere: in the twentieth century, history became a prime ideological battleground, as African historians asserted their versions of history against European-dominated narratives that saw Africa as a continent ‘without history’. Gueye describes the early and central role historians played in the struggle for national liberation and the ways that the global orientation weakened as newly forged nation-states sought to establish their legitimacy. Historians wrote national histories that became central to the project of nation making, but still these histories remained connected to events outside the continent. It was only later that the transnational perspective became less prominent, as African historians increasingly focused their work on subnational groups. Today, Gueye says, the wealth of research accumulated over the past decades has encouraged African historians to step back out into the world and connect aspects of the continent’s past, including local histories, to that of the globe.
In The Practice of Global History, leading scholars from across Europe are brought together to analyse recent trends in historiography and the effects of the global turn in historical scholarship. The book covers key topics from cultural transfer and labour history to population change and the challenges of transcultural history writing. Michel Espagne’s chapter offers an appropriate methodology for those seeking a global history that focuses on entanglements and connections as well as on brokers who facilitate the mobility of cultural patterns. Espagne also applies his approach to historiographies of the global, underlining the fact that the seeming universalism of such historiographies is rather an illusion and that an investigation into how and why different historiographies borrow (selectively) from each other (or renounce them for one reason or another) can be very illuminating.Learn more in the introduction to Matthias Middell's The Practice of Global History.
Through a combination of exclusive articles written by leading scholars and eBook chapters exploring the nature and significance of history, this Featured Content is your way into tackling a critical question that is fundamental to the subject: why does history matter?
What is History and Why Does it Matter?
In this article Beverley Southgate reflects on how, in order to say why history matters, we need to know what history is. From 5th-century BCE Greek historian Thucydides looking to provide a ‘true’ record of past events to the meaning and importance of history today, the article considers how definitions of history have been and are ever changing. For history itself has a history: over the centuries its nature has been perceived very variously; and in parallel with that, so too has understanding changed of its purposes – of why it might actually matter.
Why Should Anyone Trust a Historian? Intellectual Honesty and the Purposes of History
Long before the professionalization of history, and as a part of the feudal privileges of a university, universities themselves and their constituent disciplines were supposed to be self-regulating. Then, with the professionalization of disciplines and the emergence of history as a distinct discipline, the responsibility for making one’s research and writing not only intelligible but also verifiable was placed upon the historian. The question of trust then looms large: why should the reader, professional or amateur, within or outside the profession, trust what the historian has written? How can the trust be created and maintained? This article sees Raphael Lutz contemplate this question, using the notion of ‘intellectual honesty’ as a yardstick, and what this all means for the purposes of history as a discipline.
Philosophizing History
Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives brings together an international cast of stellar contributors to offer a timely and comprehensive survey of recent developments in the philosophy of history that asks pressing questions about where the field is going in the 21st century. In this chapter, distinguished historian Allan Megill ponders the ‘affective dimension’ of history and the value of the ‘feeling’ aspect of people’s orientation to their pasts. Here he argues not to reduce history to feeling alone but rather to take account of both history’s affective and its thoughtful, reflective elements – vital, surely, to any rounded understanding of why history matters.
History as a Concept
Leading philosopher of history Dmitri Nikulin probes the presuppositions behind the contemporary understanding of history that often remain implicit in The Concept of History. The book provides a critique of the modern understanding of history, which presents itself as universal and teleological, progressively moving forward to an end, and offers a distinct perspective on the subject. In this chapter, Nikulin considers the structures of history with his main presupposition being that history derives from a profound need on the part of humans to somehow preserve themselves against non-being. Why does history matter? Perhaps, in part, because we need it intrinsically.
Police Records by Nadine Rossol. 
Masculinity by Henk de Smaele, adapted image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 
Catherine Hall by Antoinette Burton, Image courtesy of UCL. 
The Historiography of Race in Enlightenment Thought. 
