Comments on: Historical Argument From Soup to Nuts

By: peter55

peter55 — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:52:22 +0000

And, what about history as a call-to-action, as motivation to change the future? I think this use of history is stronger than your #11 (because it concerns the future as well as the present), and maybe generalizes your #15 (because it may apply not only against western imperialism).

As examples, I am thinking of the various studies of the First Chimurenga in Zimbabwe (the uprisings by the maShona against white rule in the 1890s), written in the 1970s to inspire people to engage in the Second. And, perhaps, much of Marx.

By: peter55

peter55 — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:42:08 +0000

To support you, Timothy: I took your list to be an attempt at a philosophy of history. Every science, the philosopher of language John Austin supposedly once said, begins with a classification, and I think this is a superb one. I am not an historian, so perhaps such lists are old hat among historians or historiographers or philosophers of history. But, no one ever asked, let alone answered, the “what for” question in any high-school history class I took.

By: alph

alph — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:06:53 +0000

What about history as correction – a rigorous historical understanding can help correct commonly held misconceptions?

By: andrew

andrew — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:41:25 +0000

One thing that could be added to a list about historical writing in general – but perhaps not to a list of academic writing specifically – would be “history as a good story” where the goal is to write a compelling, if not all that analytical, narrative of some past event.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:34:21 +0000

That’s a good point, on multiple levels. One, that I do often argue against this kind of compression of history to an instrument or tool, and argue instead for its autonomous meaning, for the usefulness of writing about the phenemonology of the past, history for its own sake. And two, that maybe I’m employing the sense of “argument” here that John Holbo is complaining about over at the Valve, where “argument” is not “if A, then B” but instead raison d’etre.

But I can see the patterns in this list, also. And I think playfully, that any of us might be able to write within these patterns, to reproduce a given structure of argument or approach. I’m thinking pedagogically first and foremost. I think it’s easier for a student learning to write historical analysis to have a list like this and then try to escape from its neat diagram than it is to insist that no such list or pattern is possible or allowable.

By: aaron

aaron — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:21:57 +0000

Without taking away from the value of this kind of thinking (and I think it is valuable), I wonder how well this kind of list construction manages to stand outside of the very ideological constructions of history that it is attempting to categorize. While you identify Hayden White with number eleven, for example, it feels like the entire list-making gesture is White-esque move: by boiling every historical narrative into a “so what,” you’re producing a limited set of narratives down to which all history-writing can be reduced. And the logic of that reduction, how it’s done and what it takes for granted, seems to be a huge percentage of historical writing, but not all of it: what about historical writing that doesn’t assume the past is relevent? Or rather, not to claim that it isn’t, but how do we address the kinds of possibilities that are foreclosed when we focus on the assumption that it is?

To put it another way, it seems like what drops out is the kind of cultural history work that can take seriously the autonomy of a historical or cultural space, its resistance to being made relevent to now and to us. You’ve written eloquently on this sort of thing in the past; in fact, I feel like I’m trying to paraphrase *that* Timothy Burke so he can have a conversation with *this* Timothy Burke, because it would be a conversation I’d love to eavesdrop on. For example, where does “Saturday Morning Fever” fit in here? What kind of history writing is that?

By: tozier

tozier — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:10:19 +0000

I'm going to break the rules and push out past monographs, here. But I'd like to suggest you include miscellanies, even if you insist they remain focused on a particular subject. I was just thumbing through Hazlitt's wandering tome a few days ago, and while it's not a "history" as such is surely is historical writing. Maybe generously called a geographically-connected pile of notes, or an anthropological description? I don't know. It's not a popular or even scholarly style these days, but it sure represents a big swathe of antiquary's books on library shelves. One gets a similar feeling when thumbing through periodicals, like WIllis's Current Notes. But that's analogous to a modern mailing list transcript, and the presence of slow, braided conversations imbue it with a mixed-up sensibility. Still, if you squint, a fact-dump seems more fragmented than a "micro"history, but can be used as a book of wonderful trivia. Along the lines of your #4. Maybe the antiquaries were the Fodor's of the past. I miss that antiquarian telegraphic style, honestly. I wonder if it's coming back in style anytime soon. Hmmm... Where on your list would Wisconsin Death Trip fall? #2? #6? Somewhere between? It wasn't a miscellany as such, since it was fraught with [explicit] agendas. But I think it might be a kind of modern bridge between miscellany and monograph.

By: j.

j. — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:42:42 +0000

where does janik and toulmin’s ‘wittgenstein’s vienna’ fit? i.e. cultural-history-to-reframe-interpretation-of-a-past-text-in-its-historical-context-against-a-climate-of-ahistoricism?

(are there other cases, even of different types, in intellectual history where the object does not quite have the same kind of historical existence as some of the objects of investigation listed above? viz., a difference between events and times, on the one hand, and texts, on the other? i realize any number of historiographies may not accept that distinction, nor need they.)

By: peter55

peter55 — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:29:22 +0000

For #7, I would suggest:

Jeffrey Herbst: “State Politics in Zimbabwe”

John Lukacs: “Five Days in London: May 1940”.

For #7 and/or #12:

Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow: “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis”.