Historical knowledge, historical error: a contemporary guide to practice

Abstract

In past thirty years, historians have broadened scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to histories of non-Western peoples and to troubled relations between the West and rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of past. In Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along way, he offers succinct accounts of epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.