PERFORMING HISTORY: HOW HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP IS SHAPED BY EPISTEMIC VIRTUES

Philosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian's (published) output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, it focuses on the historian's “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct.     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

NEW HISTORIES OF EMOTION

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there was a growing sense that historians had neglected the emotions and failed to think seriously about them. Since then, there has been explosive interest in the history of emotions. What precipitated this development? What has this focus on emotion added to our historical understanding, and what does a historical perspective contribute to research on emotion? Two recent books help us think about these questions. In The History of Emotions, Jan Plamper offers the first book‐length introduction to this field available in English; in Emotional Lexicons, Ute Frevert and a group of fellow historians trace continuities and change in the vocabulary of feeling from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the millennium. At stake, in both books, is the idea that emotions are historically contingent—that history has the ability to shape and transform even the most basic features of human experience. This review essay engages with the central arguments of these books, and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the history of emotions. What is called for, the essay suggests, is not first and foremost a separate history of emotions nor the adding of emotion to existing histories, but new histories that systematically incorporate emotions into their analyses. Historians should seek to demonstrate how emotions are an integral part of history and historiography in a more general sense. Systematic attention to emotions not only adds nuance to a historical narrative, the essay concludes, but also fundamentally affects our ideas about how history actually happens.     

A TURNING POINT IN THEORY OF HISTORY: THE PLACE OF HAYDEN WHITE IN THE HISTORY OF METAHISTORY

This article intends to place Hayden White's reflection on the basic principles of meaning-construction in history into the historical context of modern historical studies. It first presents the self-understanding of professional historians in which they emphasize the academic (wissenschaftlichen) character of the discipline. In this way of reflection, the traditional (premodern) interpretation of history as a part of rhetoric was pushed back and replaced by methodological argumentation about the rules of research (with an emphasis on source critique). Historiography, or the presentation of the results of research in a narrative form, was not completely neglected, but was not widely recognized. After the analytical insight into the narrative form of historical knowledge, significant discussion of the principles of historical thinking dramatically changed from the issue of research to that of representation (historiography). Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) marked this change paradigmatically. It turned the shift from rhetoric to science in its contrary direction: a new turn to rhetoric was proclaimed. This new anti-turn set off a hitherto unanswered question as to how research methodology should be treated. Source critique was not refuted but did not attract significant attention. The research procedure of interpretation, in contrast, was met by a new understanding and interest: it was identified as representation by the linguistic procedures of meaning-construction. Its role as a part of historical method, however, was completely ignored. The article ends with a still unresolved problem of metahistory, namely the relationship between interpretation and representation. They are not identical, but are closely related. Their synthesis and their differences have to be systematically inquired into and reflected upon if metahistory is to step forward and engage in this task. Then the merits of White's return to rhetoric will be appreciated as well as its one-sidedness criticized, before a further step is taken.     

MAKING HISTORY BY CONTEXTUALIZING ONESELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERVENTION

This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Elliott created a new form of academic life‐writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical‐autobiographical genre—including the subgenre of the “autobiographical paper”—and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author's own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians’ autobiographies, including ego‐historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.     

Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History

Despite several decades of impressive scholarship in environmental history, the field remains largely marginal to the discipline as a whole. Environmental stories are still more likely to turn up in introductions, sidebars, and footnotes to political, social, and economic histories than they are to be incorporated into those narratives in a transformative way, though we as environmental historians know that potential is there. As we struggle to identify what precisely it is that we want other historians to do with our work, we run up against questions of definition and mission: What is environmental history? What do we do that is unique? What do we want other historians to learn from what we do? Some scholars in our field have suggested that we can answer these questions by framing “environment” as a category of analysis parallel to race, class, and gender, arguing that careful attention to the environment offers as rich a way of uncovering power relationships in societies as attention to these other categories does. While it is true that power can be read in the environment, and is frequently expressed through it, I argue that “environment” as both concept and fact is so fundamentally different from class, race, and gender that the analogy does not work, and distracts us from another, more fruitful strategy for articulating the broader relevance of our scholarship: demonstrating the significance of material nature for histories beyond the environmental realm. If other historians would join us in our attention to the physical, biological, and ecological nature of dirt, water, air, trees, and animals (including humans), they would find themselves led to new questions and new answers about the past.     

Getting started: objectives and justifications in the history of neurology

Contemporary historiographical ideas have the potential to enrich the history written by practicing neurologists. Neurology is a science, and historians of neurology might profit from considering the experiences of historians of other sciences. An explicit consideration of the range of possible objectives, justifications, sources and methods of historical research may open new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Any plausible answer to the question, "What does a historian do when he or she sits down to write history" helps an historian to develop the structure of his or her project. The selection of sources for a historical study is improved, if also expanded, by understanding its aims.     

Getting Started: Objectives and Justifications in the History of Neurology

Contemporary historiographical ideas have the potential to enrich the history written by practicing neurologists. Neurology is a science, and historians of neurology might profit from considering the experiences of historians of other sciences. An explicit consideration of the range of possible objectives, justifications, sources and methods of historical research may open new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Any plausible answer to the question, “What does a historian do when he or she sits down to write history” helps an historian to develop the structure of his or her project. The selection of sources for a historical study is improved, if also expanded, by understanding its aims.     

The Merovingian accounting documents of Tours: form and function

A little fewer than thirty Merovingian accounting documents which originated from the Abbey of St Martin of Tours, though fragmentary, provide for the historians of early medieval Europe an unexpected tool with which the latter could cast a new light over actual conditions in tribute collection and the management system for the fiscal administration of the abbey. The present article asks some basic questions about these accounting documents in the hope of casting further light on their form and function: which form did take the documents while they had been used for the collection of dues? At which stage of collecting procedure they served in the abbey as a tool for the keeping of records? When was each document prepared? In which historical context could be placed the birth of fiscal document of the abbey? All of these question are important for an understanding of the history of St Martin's of Tours and of the use of documents in general in the Merovingian era.     

影视史学的思考

影视史学在现代科技发展和历史学本身变革的交相催产下 ,它呱呱坠地 ,蹒跚走来。影视史学不仅仅是历史方法上的摸索和创新 ,还对长期以来的历史思维、历史认识等传统概念产生影响 ,许多方面牵连到了史学上许多基本的理论问题。本文试图对影视究竟能在多大程度上用来“写”历史作出初步探讨 ,并对其本身的优势和局限性作一论析。     

THE USES OF WALTER: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE COUNTERFACTUAL IMAGINATION

Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi‐occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly “counterfactual” thought experiments regarding Benjamin's “survival,” including Hannah Arendt's influential “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” and asks why our attachment to Benjamin's story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also explores the larger question of why few intellectual historians ask explicitly counterfactual questions in their work. While counterfactuals have proven invaluable for scholars in diplomatic, military, and economic history, those writing about the history of ideas often seem less concerned with chains of events and contingency than some of their colleagues are—or they attend to contingency in a selective fashion. Thus this essay attends to the ambivalence about the category of contingency that runs through much work in intellectual history. Returning to the case of Walter Benjamin, this essay explores his own tendency to pose “what if?” questions, and then concludes with an attempt to ask a serious counterfactual question about his story. The effort to ask this question reveals one methodological advantage of counterfactual inquiry: the effort to ask such questions often serves as an excellent guide to the prejudices and interests of the historian asking them. By engaging in counterfactual thought experiments, intellectual historians could restore an awareness of sheer contingency to the stories we tell about the major texts and debates of intellectual history.     

Fact, Truth, and Text: The Quest for a Firm Basis for Historical Knowledge Around 1900

The object of this essay is to discuss two problems and to present solutions to them, which do not quite agree with what is generally said of them. The first problem concerns the history of methods for reaching firm historical knowledge. In three methodological manuals for historians, written by J. G. Droysen, E. Bernheim, and C.‐V. Langlois and C. Seignobos and first published in the late nineteenth century, the task of the historian was said to be how to obtain firm knowledge about history. The question is how this message should be understood. The second problem concerns the differences between the three manuals. If their common goal is firm historical knowledge, are there any major differences of opinion? The answer given in this article is yes, and the ground is sought in their theories of truth.     

A History of the Future

Does history have to be only about the past? “History” refers to both a subject matter and a thought process. That thought process involves raising questions, marshalling evidence, discerning patterns in the evidence, writing narratives, and critiquing the narratives written by others. Whatever subject matter they study, all historians employ the thought process of historical thinking. What if historians were to extend the process of historical thinking into the subject matter domain of the future? Historians would breach one of our profession’s most rigid disciplinary barriers. Very few historians venture predictions about the future, and those who do are viewed with skepticism by the profession at large. On methodological grounds, most historians reject as either impractical, quixotic, hubristic, or dangerous any effort to examine the past as a way to make predictions about the future. However, where at one time thinking about the future did mean making a scientifically–based prediction, futurists today are just as likely to think in terms of scenarios. Where a prediction is a definitive statement about what will be, scenarios are heuristic narratives that explore alternative plausibilities of what might be. Scenario writers, like historians, understand that surprise, contingency, and deviations from the trend line are the rule, not the exception; among scenario writers, context matters. The thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. With only minimal intellectual adjustment, then, most professionally trained historians possess the necessary skills to write methodologically rigorous “histories of the future.”     

Emigrierte deutsche Historiker in den USA

German Refugee Historians in the United States. - After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, some twenty historians left Germany. They had lost their academic positions for political and/or ?racial”? reasons. Most of them immigrated to the United States, and here they launched their second academic career. This intellectual immigration promoted the study of German and intellectual history and strengthened the development of comparative approaches in American historical scholarship. Many German refugee historians became interested in incorporating social science concepts into historical writing and thereby contributed to the advancement of a ?Social History of Ideas.”? Although some were originally skeptical of the democratic process, in emigration these historians absorbed and accepted the political value system of a democratic and liberal republic, a change that is reflected in their historical studies. Despite the fact that almost all refugee historians chose to stay in the United States, their books and guest professorships left their mark on the course of West German historiography.     

The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY,INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

Compared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.     

WHAT OBJECT IS FEAR?

This article reviews two edited volumes on fear, important contributions to the newly developing field of the history of emotions. The question at the center of Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier's volume is how fear is constituted as an object; this question is investigated in an interdisciplinary dialogue. Focusing on the twentieth century, the editors bring together psychologists, historians of science and of emotions, and specialists in literature studies, politics, and film. Taking the dialogue beyond the social sciences is certainly an exciting and necessary exercise, but it also raises the question whether both sides are really talking about the same object. Michael Laffan and Max Weiss place fear in a global history perspective. They cover a wide scope, from early modernity to the present, and geographically including the Americas and Indonesia. Taken together, both volumes not only give an impressive overview of the field of fear studies, and add to it through a number of case studies, but also raise the question “what object is fear?” in a new way. If this object is as fluid as appears from the two volumes—not only with respect to the different events that trigger fear, the different uses it was put to, and the politics it allowed, but as a felt emotion—this calls for further investigation notably into the words and concepts used to make sense of the experience.     

Georges Canguilhem als Medizinhistoriker

The work of the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem is introduced here. Medical historiography is not the ultimate aim of Canguilhems work, but rather a tool for the analysis ef epistemological questions. These questions are to be investigated, as well as the art of medical history that Canguilhem considers to be helpful for such investigations. French ?epistemology”?, a direction of philosophy of science to which Canguilhem belongs, is discussed first. Canguilhem's epistomology does not aim at a rational reconstruction of decontextualized scientific results, but at an historical reconstruction of science. It analyses the functioning of scientific concepts in relation of their historical context. The main themes of Canguilhems work (biological normality, scientific ideology and history of physiology) are summarized in a second part of this study. Finally we investigate the importance of Canguilhem for modern research in history of medicine.     

A New Liberal Descent: The 'Labourer' Trilogy by Lawrence and Barbara Hammond

In 1906, citing the complexities of what he would subsequentlyterm the ‘Great Society’, the New Liberal GrahamWallas called for ‘a fresh approach to the question: What,under modern conditions constitutes history?’ A burgeoninggroup of historians, including among others R. H. Tawney, theWebbs, J. H. Clapham and W. J. Ashley, responded to this needby establishing economic and social history as a legitimatefield or historical study. However, beginning with The VillageLabourer in 1911 followed by The Town Labourer in 1917 and TheSkilled Labourer in 1919, Barbara and Lawrence Hammond completeda historical enquiry that more than any other of its time definedfor progressives an answer to Wallas' query. This article examinesthe Hammonds' unique achievement in terms of its contributionto New Liberal politics and to the growing field of economicand social history. It sets their overtly political and literaryapproach against the growing trend towards professionalizationamongst contemporary historians and compares their radical treatmentof industrialization to the orthodox Liberal conclusions ofnineteenth century Whig historians. The groundwork is thus laidfor an exploration into the implicit assumptions that definedthe shape and character of the Hammonds' New Liberal descent;an exploration that enhances our understanding of both Englishprogressivism and the development of social history as a legitimateapproach to studying the past.