Defense Of History Research Articles

Fracchia and Burkett on Tailism and the Dialectic

This commentary addresses criticism of Lukács’s early book Tailism and the Dialectic: A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Two critiques published in Historical Materialism are analysed and alternative interpretations of Lukács’s theory developed. The commentary focuses on Lukács’s theories of class consciousness and his ideas on the social construction of nature.

Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the HumanPoetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human. Paul A. Bové. Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+159.

<i>Paul A. Bové</i>, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human<i>Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human</i>. Paul A. Bové. Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+159.

On the defence of (my) history

In this article I attempt to discover whether there is a defence of history, capable of withstanding the assault mounted on it by Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow and other ‘postmodern’ critics of the subject. To this end, I look at a number of the standard defenses of history, cited by Jenkins and Munslow in various works, in particular those of E.H. Carr, Geoffrey Elton, Richard Evans, Mary Fulbrook, C. Behan McCullogh and Arthur Marwick. And at the same time I look again at a series of papers on the subject acquired from the Institute of Historical Research, mainly by way of the Web. What I find, to my surprise, is that, whereas the postmodern critics of history invariably challenge the validity of the case put forward by the defenders of history, the defenders of history more often than not accept many of the principal tenets of the postmodern critique. Michael Oakeshott, a noted philosopher of history of a previous generation, alone, I find, offers a convincing defence of the subject.

Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography

It seems that the ‘historical turn’ in television studies is complete and scholars are now firmly on the historical road. Since the start of the new millennium, academic publications, research projects, conferences and online resources on British television history have proliferated. Drama has been one of the first beneficiaries of this interest, but historical research into other genres, such as current affairs programmes, and comparative approaches within the European context have recently borne fruit with important publications.1 The result is a growing body of histories that take a holistic approach, looking at television as a ‘whole way of life’: its aesthetic forms and texts, as well as institutions, policies and viewers. The collection of articles in Re-viewing Television History not only exemplifies this trend but also marks a new, second ‘historical turn’ in the field of television history. I want to argue that the new element this time is an intensified interest in television history at the level of both analysis and methodology. More specifically, it is the systematic interrogation of methods and theories, borrowed from history as an academic discipline, which characterizes this new television research. In other words, history in television studies is now as much the object of analytic attention as it is a method of analysis. Helen Wheatley's introduction to this book is one of the first concerted efforts to open up the dialogue between historians and television historians, and this is further explored in the essays which follow it.2 The introduction contains many references to key texts in history studies, including Edward Hallett Carr's What is History? (1961), Geoffrey R. Elton's The Practice of History (1967), Keith Jenkins's Re-Thinking History (1991) and Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History (1998), in an attempt to engage with the fundamental questions of how and why we do television history.3 But what can television history gain from this approach?

Arthur Marwick (1936–2006): An Appreciation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London, 1970), 189. 2. Arthur Marwick, Unit 1: Introducing the Course, Open University course A318 War, Peace and Social Change: Europe 1900–1955. Book 1: Europe on the Eve of War 1900–1914 (Milton Keynes, 1990), 33. 3. The Listener, 1 May 1969. 4. Noble Frankland, History at War: the campaigns of an historian (London, 1998), 188. 5. Marwick, The Nature of History, 164–165. 6. Arthur Marwick, Film in university teaching, in: Paul Smith (ed.) The Historian and Film (Cambridge, 1976), 142. 7. Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (3rd edn) (London, 1989), 314–315. 8. Ibid., 315. 9. Arthur Marwick, Class: image and reality in Britain, France and the USA since 1930 (New York, 1980), 22. 10. Arthur Marwick, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the “Cultural Revolution” in Britain, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1) (January 1984), 130. 11. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), 72. 12. Arthur Marwick, Two approaches to historical study: the metaphysical (including “postmodernism”) and the historical, Journal of Contemporary History, 30(1) (January 1995), 5–36. 13. Hayden White, Response to Arthur Marwick, Journal of Contemporary History, 30(2) (April 1995), 233–234. 14. Arthur Marwick, Conclusion, in: Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick (eds) Windows on the Sixties: exploring key texts of media and culture (London, 2000), 185. 15. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), 15.

Experience Must Be Our Only Guide (History May Mislead Us)

Experience Must Be Our Only Guide (History May Mislead Us) Melvin Yazawa (bio) Peter C. Messer. Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. x + 258 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00. In his seminal examination of "history" and "experience" in the eighteenth century, Douglass G. Adair argues convincingly that the American Revolutionaries often used these terms interchangeably because they tended not to differentiate between "wisdom gained by participation in events, and wisdom gained by studying past events." Thus John Dickinson's classic statement in the Constitutional Convention ("Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.") was an endorsement rather than a dismissal of the relevance of historical studies.1 Peter C. Messer offers an addendum to Adair's thesis: in constructing their own accounts, provincial and Revolutionary historians favored the promotion of "new identities as distinct peoples" over wisdom, however gained (p. 3). Based primarily on a close reading of fifty-three histories published between 1705 and 1817, starting with Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia and ending with David Ramsay's three-volume History of the United States, Messer argues that provincial historians succeeded in "craft[ing] a distinct American identity" that not only influenced the course of the Revolution but resulted in a "uniquely North American vision of republican politics" (p. 3). By emphasizing "common standards and behaviors associated with a distinctive place," these historians, "self-styled Americans" who relied heavily on Scottish political and social theorists, established a vision of the past that "laid the foundations for an American identity long before independence" (pp. 6, 12, 6). As such, they "provided the crucial component for transforming resistance to unpopular imperial policies into a revolution" (p. 3). And after independence, the extension of the sense of a "shared past" and "pride of place" combined to form an American brand of republicanism amid the confusing "variety of forms" comprising eighteenth-century republican ideology (pp. 6, 4). In making this case for the "central role" of historical studies in "creating a national identity," Messer claims that provincial historians advanced four [End Page 18] factors that came to "symbolize the unique qualities of American life": the development of stable families, the pursuit of economic opportunities, salutary interventions of providence, and the benevolent influence of nature (pp. 7, 24, 33). When filtered through the prism of the Scottish Enlightenment's idea that "communities evolved over time in a linear pattern of progress and improvement," these "American" ingredients filled the colonists with "pride" because they realized that "their communities . . . [were] distinct from the empire as a whole" (pp. 19, 13). That all of this was evident "by the eighteenth century," that by then "many colonists" had begun to identify themselves with one another on the basis of their "peculiar experiences in the New World and not by their ties to the Old World," established "an essential context for how Americans understood" their Revolution (pp. 4, 73). Imperial measures after the French and Indian War represented a threat to the colonists' "identities as Americans" (p. 5). To those immersed in the world created by the provincial historians, the actions of a jealously fearful Parliament betrayed a "profound hostility to the progress of history" (p. 79). Americans may have employed a "variety of languages" in reaction to repeated efforts to tax them against their consent, but when they resorted to Lockean ideas of rights "grounded in a contractual agreement" between rulers and ruled, the "people did not respond" (p. 75). Only when "authors" interpreted the imperial crisis from the perspective of historical "assumptions of provincial identities" did the independence movement take off (p. 95). Indeed, having adopted the notion that the orderly progress and improvement of their society was divinely and naturally ordained, American patriots saw the actions of king and Parliament as a giant "conspiracy to undermine the evolution of the state of society in America" (p. 78). Convinced that the "future improvement of American society" rested in the balance, "Patriot authors" thus instigated "a revolution in defense of history" (pp. 79, 73). In the immediate postwar years, as optimistic assumptions about orderly progress was contradicted...

The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939

second book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans' The Third in Power: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation explores how turned Germany from a vibrant democracy into a one-party state. Before seized power in 1933, Germany had been famous for its sophistication and complexity. So how was it possible for a group of ideological obsessives to re-mould it into a one-party state directed at war and race hate? How did the Nazis win over the hearts and minds of Germany's citizens, twist science, religion and culture, and transform the country's politics to achieve total dominance so quickly? From the Nuremberg Laws to the Olympic Games, Kristallnacht to the Youth, this gripping account shows how a whole population became enmeshed in a dictatorship that was consumed by hatred and driven by war. Impressive ...perceptive ...humane. (Ian Kershaw). Excellent ...powerful ...it makes an indelible impression. (Robert Service, Sunday Times). Likely to be the standard work for some years to come. (Spectator Books of the Year). A rich and detailed description of just what the Third did in every compartment of the state and every corner of society...Evans' magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come. (Economist). Written with great style and human sympathy. (Daily Telegraph Books of the Year). brilliantly conveys how the Fuhrer reignited Germans' pride as he led them to catastrophe. (Neal Ascherson, Observer). Sir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third at War.

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

An Interview with Richard J. Evans

22Historically Speaking · June 2003 An Interview with Richard J. Evans Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa RICHARDJ. EVANS is professor ofmodern history at Cambridge University. A specialist in German social and cultural history, Evans is also widely known for his historiographical writing, especially In Defense of History (1997; firstpublished in the United States in 1 999), for his role as principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial (2000), and his work on the clash ofepistemologie! when history enters the courtroom (see his "History, Memory , andthe Law: The Historian as Expert Witness " History and Theory {October 2002}). Professor Evans has recently written a new introduction to E.H. Carr's What is History? anda new afterword to G.R. Elton's The Practice of History. He is currently working on a three-volume history of the Third Reich, of which The Coming ofthe Third Reich will bepublishedby Penguin Books in October, 2003The following interview was conducted on March 21, 2003. Donald A. Yerxa: Why did you feel the need to defend history in the 1990s? Richard J. Evans: In Defense ofHistory came about because I was asked to teach a lecture course on historical epistemology at Birkbeck College in London, where I was professor ofhistory at the time, before I moved to Cambridge. As I read in preparation for the course, I discovered that the literature on questions such as "What is history?" and "How do we find out about the past?" was either very out of date (Carr and Elton, for example) or written in a spirit of extreme skepticism by postmodernist theorists (people like KeithJenkins and Frank Ankersmit). Clearly, there was room for an up-to-date statement about historical knowledge which argued for its possibility, while taking on board the criticisms of the postmodernists and trying to deal with them openly, rather than simply ignoring them. As I read more, particularly in the journals, I found that there was a good deal ofdebate among historians about postmodernist and post-structuralist skepticism and hyper-relativism. There were angry and dire wailings about this, without any real attempt to come to grips with it. So I developed my lectures, and as I shared them with some colleagues, they encouraged me to expand them into a book. Yerxa: Was history in a state of crisis in the mid- to late 1990s? Evans: There was a widespread feeling of an epistemologica! crisis. Ofcourse, a lot ofhistorians never even realized there were these postmodernists out there, so the sense ofcrisis was not universal in the historical profession . But those who paid attention to these things realized that there was a serious theoretical attack underway on the nature and possibility ofhistorical knowledge. And that did engender a sense ofcrisis. Yerxa: Has the sense ofcrisis dissipated? Evans: Interestingly, I think it has to a large extent. As I said in In Defense ofHistory, there is a tendency for new methodological and theoretical approaches to begin by proclaiming their universal validity and their power to revolutionize the whole ofhistorical study. Then within a short space oftime, they tend to become sub-specialties, with their own journals and societies where their adherents talk mainly to one another. And that is exactly what has happened to the extreme relativists among the postmodernists . Their critique has not left the practice of history unchanged, though the extreme skepticism which they voiced about historical knowledge has now subsided into a rather marginal phenomenon. After all, the only possible reaction from historians who actually did accept these notions was to stop writing history, and more history is being written today than ever before. Yerxa: What has been the legacy of these methodological debates? Evans: There have been negative and positive legacies. One noteworthy effect has been to direct attention to culture and language as ways ofexplaining and understanding history . And that has brought us away from the dominant, socio-economic model of the 1970s and 1980s which held that society and the economy were the driving forces in history . At that time, ideas took second rank in the explanatory models of many historians. Historians now take ideas, language, and culture much more seriously, and I think that is a good thing...

Where is the ‘social’ reflections in social history?

In most methodology books published since the mid-1990s, historical research is described by working out a list of the usual topics of research; political history, social history and economic history, sometimes with the addition of others such as cultural, religious, imperial or gender history. Besides being a list of research topics, this larger group has no other specific characteristics, unless they are given unconsciously or only implied. Only the so-called post-modern historiography is excluded from the list as a “good enemy” against which solid and respectable “history” wants to defend itself. In Defence of History by Richard J. Evans is the best example of larger group of recent methodology books in both these respects. One of the problems of defining “history” as a list of research topics is that it makes theoretical discussion within historical studies difficult, because disagreement on important issues would endanger the picture of disciplinary coherence and unity. The description of social history in Evans' book is given as an illuminating example of this awkward situation.

Review: History Education in Scotland

Anyone familiar with Aran-sweatered folk singing in the 1960s will recall the song T h e Work o' the Weavers', in which weavers were pictured sitting in a pub defiantly extolling the never-ending need for the weaving industry. It was, of course, a bitter-sweet song, written long after the decline of weaving in Scotland. Writers write songs lamenting the demise of industries, not rejoicing at their rise, and likewise any book on history education written by history teachers in defence of history should be approached with all the enthusiasm of the Titanic coming upon an iceberg.

The Reach of Cultural Analysis: Some Cuttings

REVIEW ESSAYS As he copiously acknowledges in the two introductory chapters on method, Amelang is greatly indebted throughout to theory and to literary as opposed to historical patterms ofinterpretation. Readers of TAe Comparatist will indeed recognize in Amelang's themes questions literary scholars have schooled themselves to ask about the canonical literary and philosophical texts they normally study. The author also expresses his debt to theory's help in overcoming the naïve perspectives through which historians often view popular documents and sources—though, as Richard J. Evans reminds us in his recent In Defense ofHistory (Norton, 1999), literary scholars tend to exaggerate historians' gullibility in this respect. Still, what Amelang takes from literary studies and from the cultural theorists on whom students of literature draw he gives back enriched many fold. The Flight ofIcarus is an indispensable research tool that, properly used, should alter the terms in which the nature, meaning, and origins ofthe "modem subject" are defined. Christopher BraiderUniversity ofColorado, Boulder MIEKE BAL, ED. The Practice ofCultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. xix + 392pp. THE REACH OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS: SOME CUTTINGS Not too long ago, a book ofessays enunciating a project ofcultural analysis undertaken at a single academic institution would have waited for the expected review injournals ofsocial science, ifnot, like Thorstein Veblen's 7%e Theory ofthe Leisure Class or Marjorie Garber's recent Sex andRealEstate: Why We Love Houses, in more popular venues than the PMLA. Today such a project may draw its energies from other disciplines, and in the case of The Practice ofCulturalAnalysis, edited very carefully by Mieke BaI, especially from comparative literature. Yet there will be a few, and not the most innocent, in the field ofComparative Literature who will be puzzled by such a "reach." As Bill Readings and Stephen Melville put it not too long ago in introducing an edited volume of similar scope, "[. . .] this collection may or may not end by exerting certain intellectual effects, but it will certainly exert institutional effects, such as gaining institutional capital for some ofits participants, testifying for (or against) the strength ofa certain market, fuelling (or quenching) certain desires for curricular or institutional transformation, and so on" ( Vision & Textuality [Durham: Duke UP, 1995] 4). What might these "institutional effects" be? To what extent is any discipline in the humanities, even theater, not attracted to the phenomenon of cultural analysis ? To what extent is any discipline this side ofhotel and restaurant management or marketing research or consumer studies not engaged to some extent in cultural analysis? Who cannot practice cultural analysis? I have begun with a somewhat unreasonable set ofassumptions about the present book's project. But my anxiety as a reviewer about how to write with assurance ofsuch a vast undertaking only mirrors that ofthe editor in her introduction: "The project ofcultural analysis, then, begins for me by making the positions of first, second, and third persons in the discursive sense shift around so as to destabilize the rigid relation to authority and mastery among expository agent, viewer/reader, and exposed object" (10). In a "postface," Jonathan Culler notes the anxiety that underlies this position: "One could say [. . .] that cultural analysis is that kind ofanalysis ofcultural production that constantly risks paralysis by reflecting on itself; it is that VcH. 25 (2001): 154 ??? COHPAnATIST mode ofanalysis and presentation that is compelled to attempt to analyze itself, its own concepts and standpoint. Cultural analysis, thus, would be the site of the anxiety-ridden subject" (346). The challenge to the anxiety-ridden reviewer is met by resorting to an organic metaphor. How might we transplant such a burst of local fruits and flowering shrubbery into the fields ofAmerican academic discourse? I think the answer is that we must take "cuttings." What follows then is a series ofcuttings from this collection, ones that I believe can grow and thrive this side ofthe Atlantic. One ofthe collection's unique qualities is its Dutch orientation, including writings by several members ofthe Amsterdam School ofCultural Analysis. In that regard it proffers an institutional response to the British version ofCultural Studies, while including among its contributors several prominent practitioners ofthat persuasion, Griselda Pollock, Stephen Bann, and Jon Cook, among...

Mapping the ‘New Jewish Cultural Studies’

4 Perry Anderson, 'Renewals', New Left Review New series, 1, Jan.-Feb. 2000, p. 10. 5 Frederic Jameson, 'Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism', in Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (eds), In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, New York, 1997, p. 175. 6 John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods, London, 1993; John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds), Early Modern Conceptions of Property, London, 1995; and Anne Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, London, 1995.

Evans, In Defence of History

Evans, <i>In Defence of History</i>

Defending History in the Classroom

1 St Giles School, Croydon

Historiography and Postmodernism

Historiography and Postmodernism

Book Review: Modern Historiography: An Introduction, in Defense of History

Book Review: Modern Historiography: An Introduction, in Defense of History

Dennis Dworkin — Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies; Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, editors — In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodem Agenda

Dennis Dworkin — Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies; Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, editors — In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodem Agenda

Book Review: In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda

Book Review: In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda

In Defence of History. By Richard J. Evans (London: Granta Books, 1997. vii plus 307pp. Australia $39.95.)

Journal Article In Defence of History. By Richard J. Evans (London: Granta Books, 1997. vii plus 307pp. Australia $39.95.) Get access Doug Munro Doug Munro University of the South Pacific Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 32, Issue 4, Summer 1999, Pages 941–942, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/32.4.941 Published: 01 July 1999