P EM Manifestos for History /EM is a thought-provoking and controversial text that, through a star studded collection of essays, presents a wide ranging ...

Narrative and History explains the key concepts and practices in the composition and writing of history. It explores how knowledge of the ways in which historians author history affects many conventional understandings of its nature. Major concepts such as truth, objectivity, reference and representation are re-evaluated and re-thought in radical ways. Combining theory with practice, Alun Munslow expands the boundaries of the discipline and charts a new role for unconventional historical forms and modes of expression.

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they (...) acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ . There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies provides a much-needed critical introduction to the major historians and philosophers together with the central issues, ideas and theories that have prompted the rethinking of history that has gathered pace since the 1990s. With twenty-nine new entries, and many that have been substantially updated, key concepts for the new history are examined through the ideas of leading thinkers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Croce, Collingwood, White, Foucault and Derrida, and through subjects ranging over class, empiricism, (...) hermeneutics, inference, relativism and technology. New entries for the second edition include: * Carl Becker * Frank R. Ankersmit * Jean-François Lyotard * gender * justified belief * the aesthetic turn * race * film * biography * cultural history * critical theory and experimental history. With a revised introduction setting out the state of the discipline of history today, as well as an extended and updated bibliography, this is the essential reference work for all students of history. (shrink)