-WOOLF, Daniel. A concise history of history.

Global historiography from Antiquity to the

Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2019, pp.229-289.
6 Transitions: Historical Writing
from the Inter-War Period
to the Present

The Annales Historians; Microhistory

fi
Perhaps the most signi cant historiographic phenomenon of the first
half of the twentieth century, its in fl uence still powerful after nine
decades, was what eventually became known (over-stating its coher-
ence) as the Annales ‘School ’. This originated in inter-war France, and
is named for the journal Annales that began publication in 1929 at the
University of Strasbourg under the guidance of Marc Bloch and Lucien
fl
Febvre. Both men were in uenced by the earlier work of the sociologist
Émile Durkheim and the philosopher –geographer Henri Berr
(1863 –1954), editor of a journal called Revue de synthèse historique
and an early exponent of the need for a more comprehensive approach
to the study of the past. Bloch and Febvre also had close connections
with the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne. Both the journal and the
practices of those associated with it have evolved through successive
fl
generations, but they remain an in uential force in France and are
much admired elsewhere. The Annalistes repudiated a narrowly poli-
tical history in favour of an histoire totale that examined geography,
climate, economy and agricultural and trade patterns, as well as man-
ners, in one of the recurrent pendulum swings in European historio-
graphical taste between the social and the political, the general and the
particular, the inclusive and the selective, dating back to Herodotus
and Thucydides.
Bloch (1886 – 1944) has become the nearest thing to a historiographi-
cal folk hero in the decades since his execution by the Nazis for resistance
activities. Virtually all of his works remain in print in several languages,
including The Historian’s Craft, a posthumous collection of essays and
ruminations on history. Bloch served with distinction in the First World
War and then took up a post at Strasbourg before assuming a chair in
economic history at the Sorbonne. His first major book, Les rois thau-
maturges (1924) (English version, The Royal Touch ), about the

229

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230 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

medieval practice of touching for the ‘ king ’s evil’ or scrofula, has become
a foundational text in the cultural history of ritual. Bloch ’s later works,
written after he had collaborated with Febvre to found the journal
Annales, include Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française
(1931; English version, French Rural History ), famous for its evocative
treatment of the countryside over a long period of time, and La société
féodale (1939; English version, Feudal Society), which again took an
anthropological and sociological approach to feudalism as not merely
a military but a social and cultural system, and to the mentalités (‘men-
talities’) that underlay it.
Febvre’s (1878 –1956) works have not aged as well as Bloch ’s but
they were no less important in their day. In his most famous book, Le
problème de l ’incroyance au XVIe siècle (1942; English version,
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century ), Febvre explored
the concept of atheism in connection with the Renaissance writer
François Rabelais, arguing that the mental habits of a sixteenth-
century European did not allow for true atheism, however irreligious
or heterodox a writer may appear to have been. Febvre also became
interested in print culture, planting the seeds for a subject since taken
up by French historiens du livre such as Roger Chartier (b. 1945) and
by North American scholars such as Robert Darnton (b. 1939). Febvre
helped to found Paris ’ famous Sixième section of the École pratique des
hautes études. The École (est. 1868) was an institution for postgraduate
training only, intended to complement rather than duplicate the uni-
versities’ curricula. The new section was devoted speci fi cally to
advanced research in the social sciences, and by 1975 it had become
an independent institution in its own right, the École des hautes études
en sciences sociales (EHESS).
The Annales approach to scholarship has changed its orientation
several times in the past eight decades and is more appropriately
regarded as an evolving tradition rather than a ‘school ’. In fact, its
capacity to reinvent itself in response to new trends, symbolically
fl
re ected in several changes to the journal Annales ’ subtitle, has been
a mark of its strength and a reason for its continued importance.
The fi rst major shift came almost immediately after the Second World
War, driven in part by wider experimentation with the social sciences
(see below). It was engineered by the ‘second generation ’ Annalistes,
a distinguished group at the head of which stood Febvre ’ s student
Fernand Braudel (1902 – 85). A product of the interests of both Bloch

/
The Annales Historians; Microhistory 231

and Febvre, especially their devotion to geography, Braudel aggres-

sively pushed the idea of the earth and the sea as agents of change.
Braudel called for the subjugation of histoire événementielle (short-
term human actions, for instance in the political world) to the study of
mid-length periods of social, material and economic conjonctures , and
to the even slower geographical and climatological changes that
occurred over the longue durée of centuries. This last was the sphere
in which natural forces ruled, providing the constraints and the struc-
tures within which the secondary and tertiary realms of change, and the
individual event, could occur. While the notion of climatological in fl u-
ence on human events has a long history, Braudel eschewed the older
link between climate and ‘ national character’ in favour of a more
complex, dynamic relationship which permitted scope for human
agency. The classic expression of this layered periodization is
Braudel’ s own study of La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à
l’époque de Philippe II (1949; English version, The Mediterranean and

the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II ). The degree to which

the approach is in fact applicable to different subjects remains unclear.

Critics of The Mediterranean and subsequent works such as the multi-
volume study of Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme,
XVe–XVIIIe siècle (1967 –79; English version, Capitalism and

Material Life) have pointed out that Braudel was not successful in

integrating the three levels of time. He was, however, extraordinarily

fl
in uential in setting the agenda for future research in sub-disciplines
not then fully conceptualized, such as environmental history.
The quantitative tendencies of this stage of Annales historiography,
also evident in the work of Braudel ’s non-Annaliste older contempor-
ary, Ernest Labrousse (1895 –1988), were elaborated by historians
usually considered part of Braudel ’ s ‘generation’ though actually
a decade or two his junior, such as Pierre Chaunu (1923 – 2009).
In more recent decades, however, a further shift in the tradition has
occurred. Many Annales historians, and others abroad who self-
identify as their admirers or associates, have veered away from quanti-
fication back to the study of mentalités in Bloch and Febvre ’ s mode,
placing considerably more emphasis on individual and collective
beliefs, and on life experienced in local settings. The medievalist
Georges Duby (1919 –96), initially trained as a historical geographer,
turned in this direction during the 1970s, exploring issues such as the
chivalric state of mind, and French perceptions of past events. Outside

/
232 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

France, others have worked on a deliberately smaller scale, for instance

the German proponents of Alltagsgeschichte – literally the history of
everyday life – during the 1980s, in a parallel reaction against the
abstraction of German ‘historical social science ’.
The ‘microhistory ’ of the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s emerged initi-
ally in Italy, where it is known as microstoria and associated especially
with the journal Quaderni Storici (est. 1966), and soon spread to France,
Germany, Britain and eventually America. Early examples include
works like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie ’s (b. 1929) Montaillou:
The Promised Land of Error (a study of a medieval Cathar village) and
Carlo Ginzburg ’ s (b. 1939) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of
a Sixteenth-Century Miller , both of which have proved highly saleable in
the academic and trade book markets and have spawned numerous
additional examples around the globe. Japanese practitioners of seikat-
sushi and seishinshi, roughly corresponding with Alltagsgeschichte and
histoire des mentalités respectively, similarly drew inspiration from both
German and French models. Microhistory is in fact a convenient short-
hand to describe a number of different ways of studying the general
through the local: one version of this examines a particular community
over a period of decades or even centuries, tracing kin, social and
economic relations. The more well-known version tends to a shorter
fi
chronology and sometimes a focus on a very speci c story or episode,
such as Robert Darnton ’s account of a ‘massacre’ of cats by French
printing-shop employees, a ritual in which the unfortunate felines were
a proxy for the workers ’ master and mistress.
The great strengths of microhistory, especially in the latter form, are
that it is highly readable (typically telling a story) and it involves
fi
identi able historical individuals whose human plights and quirks
evoke an emotive sympathy, recovering a humanity sometimes lost in
the grand scale of Braudel-style Annaliste history. Who could not but
sympathize with the plight of Ginzburg ’s Menocchio, de fiantly fabri-
cating a heretical, imaginative world view on his way to the stake, or
with Le Roy Ladurie ’ s medieval Cathars? Perhaps most famous (it
became a well-known film) is the extraordinary tale of the impostor
‘Martin Guerre’ in sixteenth-century France, chronicled by Natalie

Zemon Davis (b. 1928), which tells an interesting story while painting
a compelling canvas of the lives and beliefs of both villagers and judicial
authorities. Microhistories are effective at providing tiny details, not
especially relevant to the main points of the story, which confer on their

/
History and the Social Sciences 233

accounts a very strong version of what the French literary theorist

Roland Barthes (1915 – 80) once famously called the ‘reality effect’.
On the other side, critics have asked of some of these studies
‘So what?’ , questioning the degree to which valid generalizations can

be made about past societies and how they worked from these ‘micro’
examples, or challenging the evidentiary basis for the narratives them-
selves, or the degree of conjecture and inference that they demand.
It has also been argued that by making their subjects appear familiar
to us, they have the potential to elide the differences between past and
present and with them a sense of distance that for three centuries has
been deemed an essential element in thinking about history.

History and the Social Sciences

The Annales and microhistory are themselves both products of his-
tory ’s somewhat hot-and-cold fl irtation with the social sciences,
a phenomenon with pre-modern origins. Theoretically inclined minds
during the Enlightenment had experimented with the past: the mathe-
matician and physicist Jean d’ Alembert (1717 –83) thought that doubts
about knowledge of the past might be solved through a scienti fic
approach to its study. The Scottish stadialists, among the earliest
European proponents of what we now call ‘comparative history’, had
closely linked the study of the past to theories of the origins and
development of society and of economic systems. We have also seen
a number of non-European examples, among whom Ibn Khaldun is the
most famous. Nineteenth-century historians had been mainly suspi-
cious of the emerging social sciences, due to the dominance of
Rankeanism and its emphasis on political history, to the more general
historicist attention to the individual rather than society, and to the
popularity of heroic biography and history among the reading public.
By the end of the century, however, this began to change. In the midst of
the debate over history ’ s relation to the natural sciences, the ‘human ’
sciences seemed to offer a compromise. Economic history had emerged
by the century’s end as a powerful sub-discipline, with German scho-
fl
lars such as Gustav von Schmoller once again in uencing developments
in much of the rest of the world. Marx had, of course, already outlined
a particular version of the tie of history to economics, while others such
as Comte had linked it with the even newer discipline of sociology.
The non-Marxist late imperial Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii

/
234 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

(1841 –1911) had begun to study the impact of class and geography on
history, breaking with the political history mainstream. The German
Methodenstreit had been in part a debate about the nature of history ’ s
connection to these and other disciplines, especially anthropology,
geography and psychology, and James Harvey Robinson ’s New
History had generated champions for it across the Atlantic (and, as
we saw earlier, in East Asia).
Among the founders of modern social science-driven history, two
other early sociologists stand out: the Frenchman Durkheim and the
German Max Weber. Both were enormously interested in the past.
Durkheim saw history as falling short of being a science itself, but
nonetheless as providing a useful source of material for social science.
He described collective phenomena that exist independently of indivi-
dual instances of them, and encouraged an impartial, almost clinical
detachment in their study, exempli fi ed in his classic The Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life (1912), a work remarkable also for the
global span of its reference group. Weber, whom Frederick Beiser
describes as a very late representative of the same historicist tradition
that dates back to Herder, is best known today as a sociologist but in
fi
fact he self-identi ed more as a historian through much of his life.
Equally ill-disposed to mainstream German historical scholarship of
the late nineteenth century and to positivist critiques of it, he had
nonetheless joined in the denunciation of Lamprecht during the
Methodenstreit . Weber’ s sociological thought fl
was in uenced by
fi
Dilthey ’s clari cation of the distinctions between the natural and
human sciences. While Weber insisted on the rationality of the latter
and their need for clear concepts and practices, he also stressed the
subjective element to inquiry and the gap between actual lived reality
and systematic representations of it such as ‘ideal types’. Weber was
also a strong comparativist, interested among other issues in explaining
the differences between oriental and occidental cultures, and in exploring
the connections between the economic and ideological – for instance in
a famous book on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (
1904 –5). Thefi rst half of the twentieth century saw British and especially
American sociologists turn to history (a traf fic not always reciprocated in
the other direction). George Homans (1910 –89), for instance, would teach
both sociology and history at Harvard, one of his earliest works being
a study of English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century . One of his most
prominent students of the next generation, Charles Tilly (1929 – 2008)

/
History and the Social Sciences 235

would similarly straddle the two disciplines over the course of his long
career, as has Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol (b. 1947).
Both sociology and especially economics have become highly quan-
titative disciplines, and empirical measurement has always been an
important component of social science-oriented history – and some-

times even of political history as the prosopographic or ‘collective

biography ’ approach of historians such as Britain ’ s Sir Lewis Namier

(1888 –1960) showed. While quanti fication has a lengthy pedigree, it
emerged most clearly as a potential ‘silver bullet ’ for historians anxious
to ally their craft to the ranks of the ‘hard ’ sciences after the Second
World War. The Braudelian generation of Annalistes was, as we saw
fi
earlier, much taken with quanti cation, and one of Braudel ’s most
illustrious pupils, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, once boldly prophesied
that all historians would soon need to become computer programmers.
Despite the subsequent ubiquity of personal computers on current
historians ’ desks, this has, at least to date, not come to pass, though
many historians have adopted quanti fication into their toolkit – the

Annaliste historian Pierre Chaunu established ‘ serial history’ (the col-

lection of data for lengthy time series), and historical demographers
such as Louis Henry (1911 –91), Tony Wrigley (b. 1931) and Peter
Laslett (1915 – 2001) have done so to work out not simply the size of
past populations but to chart mobility, family structure, sexual rela-
tions and intermarriage, and birth and death rates. Public attention has
sometimes, rather misleadingly, focused on a relatively small subset of
fi
quanti ers, principally those drawn to and often trained in advanced
statistics and econometric theory. ‘New economic history ’ or ‘ clio-
metrics’ fi rst arose in the 1960s. It often generates not only the large
datasets and broad conclusions of which quantitative historians are
fond, but also something additional, the use of the ‘counterfactual’ or

‘what-if?’ questions. Rather different from more qualitative and spec-

ulative forms of counterfactual thinking (see below, pp. 304 –5), clio-
metrics involves setting up a model of how various elements within
a past system interact, removing one or more of them, and seeing what,
if anything, changes. Thus Robert William Fogel (1926 –2013) investi-
gated the role of railroads in America (1964) and, by eliminating them
from his model of the economy, showed that other forms of transpor-
tation would have been developed or extended with very little long-
term effect on prosperity. Even more controversial, because it hit on the
rawest nerves in the American body politic, race and slavery, was his

/
236 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

subsequent book, Time on the Cross (1974; co-authored with Stanley

Engerman, b. 1936). This used plantation records to suggest that far
from being a backward, economically unproductive system, southern
fi
slavery was in fact relatively ef cient; unfree blacks, far from being the
lazy, shiftless characters of a century of post-emancipation racism,
were in fact industrious and accomplished. Leaving aside the objections
that non-historians might have to any defence of the ‘peculiar institu-
tion ’ of slavery (and the authors had been careful to declare their
personal moral objections to it), the book was criticized for a range
of methodological flaws and questionable assumptions. However,
a number of mainstream historians began making public arguments
fi
against the use of quanti cation, often lumping all of it with clio-
metrics. As early as 1962, two years before Fogel’s book on railroads
appeared, Carl Bridenbaugh (1903 –92), a historian of colonial
America, had issued perhaps the most memorable philippic against
‘the bitch goddess, quanti fication ’ in his presidential address to the
American Historical Association. The very long-lived Columbia
University historian Jacques Barzun (1907 –2012) attacked cliometri-
cians (along with psychohistorians) in Clio and the Doctors in 1974.
And the German-born Cambridge historian of Tudor England,
fl
Geoffrey Elton (1921 – 94), a sceptic of social science-in uenced quan-
fi
ti cation, debated its merits with Fogel in a jointly authored book.
The period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s marked the peak in
this phase of the alliance between sociology and history, re fl ected in
works on ‘historical sociology ’ and in early attempts at comparison
across societies in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and
History (est. 1958) and Past and Present (est. 1952). By the mid-1970s,
the stock of both sociology and economics had begun to fall among
historians, some of whom looked elsewhere in the social sciences, in
particular to anthropology, and in the fi rst instance the ‘ structuralist’
variety epitomized by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 –2009). The Oxford
historian Keith Thomas (b. 1933) was among the earliest to use insights
derived from anthropology, first in a 1963 essay in Past and Present
and then in a magisterial study of early modern witchcraft and other
aspects of English popular beliefs, Religion and the Decline of Magic
(1971). This was just at the same time that European historiography
was beginning to retreat from a focus on large patterns and systems and
instead turn to the examination of particular, local, sometimes typical
and sometimes quite atypical cases (as manifested in microhistory).

/
History and the Social Sciences 237

Moreover, the often exotic Asian, Latin American or African settings of

anthropological investigations offered a compelling comparative
dimension to Europeanists looking to generalize beyond their own
immediate experience. Cultural anthropologists such as Margaret
Mead (1901 – 78), Clifford Geertz (1926 – 2006), Marshall Sahlins (b.
1930) and Victor Turner (1920 –83) offered a reliable touchstone for
the shift from the large-scale and structural to the local and particular
(and thereby provided a theoretical dimension to microhistory, dis-
cussed above). Sahlins in particular has engaged directly with the past,
reinterpreting, for instance the death of the explorer Captain Cook in
the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), an episode which provided a concrete
example of ‘how natives think ’. Geertz, an heir to Max Weber ’s early
fl
twentieth-century social science legacy, has been especially in uential:
his much-used term ‘thick description ’ and his analysis of popular
fi
events such as a Balinese cock- ght, have become references de rigueur
for many cultural historians and even for the ‘New Historicist’ branch
of literary scholarship that emerged in the early 1980s.
The continuing dialogue between history and the social sciences is in
part an outgrowth of that earlier, late nineteenth-century conversation
about history and the natural sciences, a debate that survived the
interventions of Windelband and Croce. It would spin off into three
other areas, philosophy of history, philosophy of the social sciences,
and the history and sociology of science, and from there double back
into the discipline of history itself. In the former case, the German-
émigré philosopher Carl Hempel (1905 –97) made a critical interven-
tion in 1942 with an article arguing that a core function of historical
inquiry was to offer explanation in terms of ‘covering ’ or ‘general’ laws,
and that explanations which did not adduce or develop such laws were
unsatisfactory. The article helped touch off a generation of debates
within what is usually called the ‘analytic’ philosophy of history.

In these exchanges, which focused on questions such as the nature

and proper form of historical explanation, Hempel ’s views were largely
rejected not only by most historians but by many members of his own
discipline, including the analytic philosophers of history American
Arthur Danto (1924 – 2013), Britain ’s Patrick Gardiner (1922 –97)
and the Canadian William H. Dray (1921 – 2009), the last-mentioned
being an authority on the thought of R. G. Collingwood.
The other development also involved science – speci cally fi its history
and sociology. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn (1922 – 96), a physicist-turned-

/
238 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

historian, published an unassuming little book called The Structure of

fi
Scienti c Revolutions . Instead of trying to maintain the highly positi-
vist and teleological notion of science ’s steady and seemingly inevitable
progress (as epitomized by what have become known as ‘internalist ’
histories of science), Kuhn suggested that science was conducted in two
distinct modes: routinely as ‘normal science’, in which researchers

operating under shared assumptions and rules incrementally augmen-

ted data and knowledge; and occasionally in a ‘ crisis’ mode during
which those old assumptions broke down – principally from the weight
of data which now contradicted them – and new ones entirely incom-
mensurable with the previous had to be generated. Kuhn called the
collection of determinative assumptions and practices a ‘ paradigm’,
and thus bestowed that word on the social sciences forever more.
In his account, paradigms determine the agenda of experiments and
fi
even of whole scienti c programmes; major advances in knowledge,
such as the shift from a medieval to a Newtonian universe, occur as
a result not of tradition and steady, step-by-step progress, but because
of their opposite – radical discontinuities between paradigms.
The impact of Kuhn ’s explanation of scienti fic change has been
fi
signi cant, though more so outside the scienti fic community than
within. With respect to historiography in general, the concepts of
‘paradigm shifts ’ and ‘normal science ’ have had two major effects.

First, within the history of science itself – which in the course of the
later twentieth century has evolved into a free-standing discipline – the
Kuhnian model helped bring about a different kind of history, fixed less
on the detailed explication of past scienti fic ideas and more so on their
social and cultural contexts (and the limitations and constraints these
imposed on the generation of knowledge) regardless of their normative
status or internal consistency. More recent historians of science such as
Steven Shapin (b. 1943) and Lorraine Daston (b. 1951) have extended
this approach. The second way in which Kuhn ’s ideas have affected
historiography goes well beyond the history of science into other areas.
For example, if his model helps explain scienti fic change, can it also be
applied to our understanding of how historiography itself changes?
Should the history of history itself, the subject of the present book, be
told as a series of paradigm shifts where a few of the key thinkers of the
past are highlighted at the expense of the rest who are deemed mere
‘problem solvers ’ , working away at plugging the holes in the dominant

paradigm and thereby doing the work of ‘normal ’ history? Such an

/
History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes 239

approach would certainly draw the historian ’s attention towards the

external social and cultural factors that lead one to embrace one para-
digm over the other, but it would necessarily minimize types of histor-
ical inquiry unable to achieve the status of a paradigm – including most
non-Western ones. However, Kuhn ’s ‘paradigm ’ has been employed
with somewhat greater success to account for the rise and fall of
historical interpretations about particular events or problems (for
instance, the French Revolution or the origins of the First World
fi
War). It is a suf ciently elastic term that allows for a great deal of
variation in use, and is thus rather less closed than the term ‘school ’ .

History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes

The philosopher Karl Popper (see above, p. 159) was deeply suspicious
of ties between history and social science, believing that they had led to
violent and oppressive attempts to engineer societies according to see-
mingly ‘ inevitable’ historical patterns. While Popper was mistaken in
fl
con ating this with ‘historicism ’, he was undoubtedly correct in one
essential: the twentieth century has seen (and the twenty- fi rst continues
to see) both History and history turned to the service of a number of
dictatorships, juntas and totalitarian regimes on the right and left of the
political spectrum, and a level of control and repression practised that
makes the state or crown interventions of earlier centuries seem almost
amateurish and benign. The most infamous of those regimes on the
right were the Axis powers, Fascist Italy, imperial Japan and Nazi
Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. In Mussolini ’s Italy, right –left
divisions in historiography were created which have never really dis-
appeared. The anti-Fascist historian Gaetano Salvemini (1873 –1957)
fled the country in the 1920s, becoming an American citizen before he
returned to Italy after the war. Others left for good, including the
classicist and historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano, who lost his posi-
tion following the Fascist imposition of anti-Jewish laws in 1938; he re-
established himself at Oxford and London, and later in Chicago. But
the Fascists did not stop, like some regimes, at the elimination of
perceived enemies: they co-opted historians such as Gioacchino Volpe
(1876 –1971) to write ideologically agreeable accounts. Japan followed
a similar course in the 1930s, highlighting connections to a glorious
imperial past and to more recent military successes against neighbour-
ing powers such as Russia. Dissenting historians were persecuted, for

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240 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

instance like Noro Eitaro (1900 – 34), a Marxist economic historian and
political activist who died in police custody. As in Italy, the military
government was also directly supported by historians of a pro-imperial
inclination. The postwar response would produce both a reaction to
the militarism of the past and a turn in the direction of non-Marxian
social and cultural or ‘people ’ s’ history. In Germany, an aggressive and
nostalgic nationalism provided the ideological backbone to Nazi his-
toriography and justi fi ed the purging of the profession and wider
intelligentsia. Jewish and left-wing historians fl ed Germany during
the 1930s, mainly landing in Britain and the United States, where
they would have a profound impact on the postwar professions in
both countries. Others from across Nazi-conquered Europe perished
in the extermination camps. The historical writing of the Nazi period is
exactly what one might expect, virulently anti-Semitic and anti-
Bolshevik, and imbued with a racialism (informed by misguided beliefs
about the ‘Aryan’ origins of Europe ’s Teutonic peoples) that would
ultimately produce the Holocaust. It need not detain us long, though
one of its outputs, Volksgeschichte, is of passing interest: it brought to
a dreadful climax the long tradition of ‘ Teutonism ’ in historiography
that began with Tacitus, was taken up by Reformation-era humanists,
and was reformulated by Fichte at the start of the nineteenth century.
fi
Of greater signi cance is the aftermath of Nazi historiography since
1945, the revision of German history, and the dif ficult, often painful
fl
process of re ection on its distinctive recent past. The major transition
occurred after the war’s end, as the profession ’s traditional resistance
to social science methods broke down. A few old-guard conservative
historians such as Gerhard Ritter (1888 – 1967), and even some rehabi-
litated former practitioners of Volksgeschichte , looked for the roots of
Nazism in the failure of democracy and weakness of mass society.
Others on the left, however, such as the Bielefeld social historian Hans-
Ulrich Wehler (1931 – 2014) looked to the modernization of German
political and social institutions in the nineteenth century. Wehler called
for a new ‘ historical social science ’, synthesizing aspects of American
and British social science with ideas drawn from Max Weber, Marx
and the ‘Critical Theory ’ of another group, just returned to Germany
from exile, known as the Frankfurt School. The central problem
addressed by several postwar generations of historians would be the
emergence of Nazism, and their most prominent organ the journal
Geschichte und Gesellschaft (‘History and Society ’, est. 1975).

/
History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes 241

In the past six decades, the debate over Germany ’s ‘ Special Path’ or
Sonderweg has touched off two major historiographical tempests, the

Fischer controversy in the early 1960s and the ‘Historikerstreit’ of the

late 1980s. The first of these episodes was ignited by the work of
a reformed ex-Nazi named Fritz Fischer (1908 – 99) on the origins of
the First World War. In Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik
des Kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914/18 (1961; English version,
Germany’s Aims in the First World War ), Fischer asserted German

responsibility not only for the Second World War, which was now
accepted by most mainstream historians, but for its predecessor, which
was not. In his view, a direct line from the policies of late nineteenth-
century German statesmen to the outbreak of the First World War could
be drawn, and German leaders had clearly sought for Germany to
become a world power well before the war erupted. Outrage was instan-
fi
taneous: Fischer ’s publisher ’s of ce was fire-bombed, and a number of
reputable historians, Ritter among them, attacked Fischer ’s methods and
sources.
The second controversy erupted about twenty- five years later, on
a separate but not unrelated topic, and ultimately on a more public
stage. Whereas the Fischer affair was only indirectly concerned with
the Second World War, the Historikerstreit focused on it directly, and
fi
especially on its single most morally de ning episode, the Holocaust.
The question here was whether the Holocaust was the anomalous act of
a small group of criminals (the Nazi leadership) or rather something
even more sinister – the appalling culmination of deep structural prob-
lems within German society. Accelerated by its rapid progress to mod-
ernization and statehood in the nineteenth century (again, along
a ‘ separate path’ of modernization from that of the western European
democracies), these societal weaknesses had led to the First World War
and the failure of democracy in the 1920s, and had then been exploited
by the Nazis in their rise to power; they had thus, in the longer run,
produced both the Second World War and, ultimately, the Final
Solution. On this view, the nation as a whole (rather than just a small
core of Nazi leaders and their collaborators) continued to bear
a profound burden of guilt. The controversy began when Ernst Nolte
(1923 –2016), a conservative historian, contended that the Holocaust
was (within Germany) a one-off act of a small circle of fanatical anti-
Semites and that Auschwitz, for instance, was merely an answer to and
imitation of Soviet gulags. The riposte to this issued principally from

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242 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

the left, beginning with the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen
Habermas (b. 1929) in Die Zeit charging Nolte with attempting
a ‘settlement of damages’, an exculpatory move to bury the unburiable.
Habermas’ intervention in a matter which might have been dealt with
more quietly within the historians ’ guild transformed it from
a disciplinary debate into a more widespread public spectacle.
Globally, the second half of the twentieth century has seen numerous
neo-Fascist and authoritarian regimes assert control over historical
writing and suppress dissent. As in the Italian and German examples,
this has taken both active and reactive forms. The active consists in the
energetic support by governments for ambitious, often multivolume
national histories – the old tradition of of fi cial historiography, long
marginalized in democratic Europe and the Americas, remains alive
and well in East and Southeast Asia. The reactive side of this policing of
the past is observable in those regimes, right or left, where blatant
suppression and censorship occurs, the channels of publication are
tightly controlled, opinion is closely monitored, and dissent is punished
with loss of academic employment, exile or imprisonment. ‘New

Order’ Indonesia of the Suharto regime (1966 – 98) offers an example

of the two approaches combined. There, a militaristic ‘of cial’ history fi
emerged under the direction of Nugroho Notosusanto (1931 –85),
a historian, soldier and minister of education. A virulently anti-
communist and ‘patriotic ’ multivolume history of Indonesia prepared
in the 1970s, Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (1975; rev. 1984), was an
fi
uneasy amalgam of of cial history with the work of university-based
historians. Since Suharto ’s resignation, nationalist historiography has
been openly challenged by a number of competing visions of the past,
including those representing different regions and minority ethnic
groups. Despite the declaration of Indonesia ’s historians of their inde-
pendence from state control, it remains unclear today whether the
fi
project for the ‘recti cation of history ’ (pelurusan sejarah) is simply
going to displace one set of ideological orthodoxies with a new one.
By 2007 a return to the anti-communism of the Suharto era was
signalled with a fi
con scation of history textbooks by order of
Indonesia ’ s attorney-general.
On the far left, the conditions for historiography during much of the
twentieth century were remarkably similar. The architects of Soviet
Marxist historiography were in the first instance two men, one
a professional historian, one not, both of whom had been at work

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History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes 243

formulating a Marxist historiography well before the October

Revolution. The latter, Georgi Plekhanov (1856 – 1918), did not long
survive the Revolution. A theoretician, Plekhanov had authored in
1891 a key text of Marxism, The Materialist Conception of History ,
followed in 1895 by The Development of the Monist View of History .
The other key fi gure, fl
more immediately in uential on academic his-
toriography, was a former pupil of V. O. Kliuchevskii, Mikhail
Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868 – 1932). Pokrovskii had gone into exile
after the failed 1905 Revolution, when he had got an early start on the
first problem of revolutionary historiography, displacing the standard
imperial account of the consolidation of Russia with a Marxist ver-
sion. Pokrovskii ’ s early take on Russian history appears in his fi ve-
volume History of Russia: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of
Commercial Capitalism (1910 –14; English trans. 1931). Politically

astute, Pokrovskii tied his fortunes in the early 1920s to the ascendant
Joseph Stalin (1878 –1953), and by 1928 had become the dominant
voice in Soviet historiography. In the next few years, as Stalin solidi-
fied his authority, opinion narrowed further still. Pokrovskii ’s in u- fl
ence at fi rst survived his own death and in early 1934 the country ’s
most distinguished female historian, Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova
(1897 –1957) defended his reputation, but by the end of the year, he
had been posthumously condemned by Stalin for his lack of national-
ist sentiment and for too deterministic a depiction of the impact of
economic forces on events. His portrayal of pre-Revolutionary Russia
as the backward land of Marx ’s estimation did not fi t with the Stalinist
encouragement of Russian pride and belief that the country had not
followed, exactly, the same course of History as western Europe. With
the simultaneous weakening and then dissolution (1936) of the Society
of Marxist Historians, previously the engine of much debate over the
past, and the establishment of the Institute of History within the
Communist Academy, the moderately tolerant atmosphere of the
1920s gave way to strict Party controls, and thenceforth the state
would exercise an overbearing fl
in uence on history-writing.
Historians would be among the victims of the purges in the 1930s.
Apart from rival party ideologues like Leon Trotsky (1879 –1940),
nationalist historians of non-Russian ethnicity were also targeted:
the leading Ukrainian professional historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky
(1866 –1934), was exiled to the Caucasus where he died suddenly
under mysterious circumstances.

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244 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

Rigid censorship peaked in the latter years of Stalin ’s rule, during

which virtually any form of history in book, film or broadcast had to
fl
re ect the judgments contained in the Stalinist textbook, History of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course ,
published in 1938, the very same year that the control of Soviet archives
passed under the control of the state security agency, the NKVD.
Following the death of Stalin, history remained under the oversight of
the Party and the state, though not without producing a few dissenters
from Marxist orthodoxy, for instance the medieval cultural historian
Aaron Gurevich (1924 –2006) and the literary critic and theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975). With the arrival of the Cold War,
Party oversight soon spread beyond the borders of the USSR to include
its Warsaw Pact ‘allies’ in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia, all of which imposed varying degrees of
constraint on historians. During the era of Soviet dominance, historio-
graphy in its European satellites often mirrored, with variations of
timing, the experience of the USSR itself. The various communist
regimes kept a fi rm grip on the activities of historians, though this
pressure was unevenly applied: Hungary, for instance, began to liberal-
ize relatively soon after the failure of the 1956 Revolution. So, too, did
Poland, which had also experienced an aborted revolution in that year.
Pre-war ties between Polish and French historians were re-established,
works in both languages were mutually translated, and a number of
Polish historians, such as the fl
Braudel-in uenced Witold Kula
(1916 –88) and the theorist Jerzy Topolski (1928 – 98) published work
in Annales. In other parts of the Soviet bloc, such as the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), the ruling regimes proved more repres-
sive and interventionist. In Bulgaria, for instance, a 1968 issue of the
country ’s leading academic history journal announced that the
Politburo had decided to commission a national history of the country,
to be assigned exclusively to scholars who enjoyed the Politburo ’ s
fi
con dence. The planned series, in ten volumes, would be written
according to strict Marxist – Leninist principles. The fi rst volume of
this ‘ people ’s history ’ appeared in 1979 in a print run of 50,000 copies –

the authorities were clearly determined to give the work wide

circulation.
The imposition of state Marxism on historiography in communism ’ s
other major bastion, China (since 1949, the People ’s Republic), was
complicated by the fact that Maoist dogma had to be superimposed on

/
History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes 245

a society still in many ways organized on Confucian principles, and

thus offers us a further example of the square peg of a western form of
historical thinking having to adapt itself to the round hole of a very
different receptor culture. The adaptation was not straightforward.
Confucianism saw the world as a stable continuum punctuated by
dynastic rises and falls, Marxism as the arena of linear progress;
where Confucianism saw order and harmony, Marxism turned on
class struggle and revolt. Yet China became the second major home
for Marxist historiography during the twentieth century, and today
fi
remains the last superpower state to retain Marxism as of cial ideology
despite recent economic liberalization. Although the ancient classics
had lost their enormous authority rather quickly following the earlier,
1911 Revolution, neither liberal republicans nor Marxists could easily
jettison the whole apparatus of Confucianism. Indeed it proved easier
to adopt rather than abandon. Confucius the ancient conservative sage
was refashioned into an early theorist of progress, and his very associa-
tions with class and feudalism were excused because they were appro-
priate for his own age, which had now vanished, along with its social
arrangements.
The re-visioning of the Chinese past through European historical
categories such as ‘feudalism ’, completed the process of Westernizing
Chinese historiography that had begun in the 1890s. Even more than
Liang Qichao or the republican May Fourth scholars, early Chinese
Marxist historians set about engineering a permanent break with the
didactic and moralizing practices that had dominated two-and-a-half
millennia of history-writing. An important early adherent of Marxism
was Fan Wenlan (1893 –1969), whose General History of China (1941)
is considered a landmark of Chinese Marxist historiography. With the
founding of the People ’s Republic (PRC) after the chaotic period of the
Japanese occupation and the ensuing Communist – Nationalist civil
war, Marxist historiography became state-sponsored orthodoxy. Fan
Wenlan, a communist since the 1920s, was eventually appointed to
head the Institute of Modern History.
Many of the leading historians whose careers spanned both the
republican and communist periods had been trained in either Europe
or America, and their scholarship transcended ideological lines. Chen
Yinke (1890 – 1969), a distinguished authority on the Tang and Sui
dynasties, was educated at Harvard and Berlin. A Columbia-trained
historian (who would eventually return to the United States as his

/
246 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

country ’s ambassador), Hu Shih (1891 –1962), authored a history of

Chinese philosophy, borrowing from such disparate European sources
as Windelband and Langlois and Seignobos. Hu ’s pupil Gu Jiegang
(1893 –1980) was perhaps the most formidable mind of the group.
A relentless debunker of bogus ancient texts in the great international
philological tradition that includes Lorenzo Valla and F. A. Wolf, Gu
published a popular school textbook situating China in world history.
Sceptical towards early Chinese history before the Zhou dynasty in the
eleventh century BC, he became the central figure of the early twenti-
eth-century ‘Doubting Antiquity School ’ (the ‘doubts ’ of which would
themselves be mitigated by the discovery of Shang oracle bone inscrip-
tions, a new source which put the early dynasties back into historical
fi
time, and signi cantly reinforced faith in the reliability of early histor-
ians such as Sima Qian).
Beginning in the early 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, the focus
of Chinese scholarship turned to the history of the peasantry and of
capitalism, with the triumph of communism depicted as inevitable.
fi
‘Party history ’ (dangshi) was a signi cant subject in its own right in

university curricula from the beginning of the PRC, with some univer-
sities even creating departments dedicated to it. The texts produced in
connection with Party History continue to be carefully controlled and
orchestrated from above in a manner that makes the bureaucrat-
historians of the Tang era seem positively individualist by comparison.
Since 1949, historians at various times have suffered persecution for
heterodox statements, while within the Communist Party itself, differ-
ent factions have sought historical support for contending political
positions. The Great Leap Forward (1959 – 61) opened a rift among
older and younger Marxist scholars and pushed academic historians
towards a militant repudiation of ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois ’ dynastic his-
tory, purging subsequent works of reference to former dynasties,
emperors and events. This was accompanied by directives to subordi-
nate past to present, history to theory, in a simplistic manner resisted by
moderate academics such as Peking University’ s vice-president, the
historian Jian Bozan (1898 – 1968), whose divergence from orthodox
Marxist analysis would put him on the wrong side of the regime.
The Cultural Revolution had an even more terrible impact a few
years later. It began with an attack on a respected historian of the Ming
era, Wu Han (1909 – 69). Wu had written a play several years pre-
viously entitled The Dismissal of Hai Rui, about a real-life Ming

/
History from Below 247

dynasty functionary famous for populist sympathies and opposition to

corruption. This was first performed in 1961, and because of its veiled
criticism of the current regime and the Great Leap Forward, it quickly
aroused the suspicion of hard-liners close to Mao, and sparked ten
years of violent persecution during which China ’s intellectual and
academic cohorts were imprisoned, tortured or sent into forced labour
in the countryside. While some leading figures such as Fan Wenlan,
a close associate of Mao, survived the purge, many others were less
fortunate. Wu himself and Jian Bozan lost their lives (though both were
posthumously rehabilitated after Mao ’s death). Since the beginning of
liberalization in the late 1970s, entire eras have been opened up for
examination, though a Party resolution of 1981 attempted to cut off
ongoing historical discussions of the Maoist period in the name of
unity. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Chinese historiogra-
phy has also begun interacting once again with the West, Chinese
academicians have been trained in Western graduate schools and
many Western books have been translated into Chinese (though there
fi
has been less traf c of Chinese books in the other direction). This
equivalent of Soviet Russian ‘glasnost’ has largely continued, despite
brief setbacks such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square reaction. It remains
to be seen whether the recent re-emergence of the ‘strong man’ in the
form of Chinese ‘paramount ’ leader Xi Jinping or his Russian counter-
part, Vladimir Putin, will have long-term de-liberalizing effects on
historical writing in those countries – in 2009, Russia inaugurated
fi
a presidential commission to counteract ‘the falsi cation of history
contrary to the interests of Russia ’ and refurbish the battered Soviet
image.

History from Below

One might have the impression from the foregoing section of a sharp
contrast between democratic and non-democratic states insofar as
freedom of historical inquiry and interpretation is concerned. But
political intolerance is not the exclusive preserve of authoritarian
regimes, and limitations on historians ’ speech and publication occur
even under democratic governments, as some Marxist and socialist
historians in the West would fi nd in the 1950s and 1960s.
Without state authority to support it, academic Marxism never
attained a monopoly position in the West, and its in fl uence has

/
248 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

waned somewhat since the 1980s, especially in North America.

Marxist, socialist or broadly left-leaning historiography began to
appear in the Western democracies relatively early in the twentieth
century. Part of the left ’s resilience has derived not from rigid ortho-
doxy but from its opposite, a rather broad ability to intermix with other
agendas and to cross-fertilize with other approaches to history.
A French socialist politician, Jean Jaurès (1859 – 1914), who was assas-
sinated on the eve of the First World War, authored a non-Marxist
Socialist History of the French Revolution . Similar works appeared

from a number of historians born in the last decades of the nineteenth

century, such as the Polish economic historian and educational refor-
mer Franciszek Bujak (1875 – 1953) and his English counterparts,
R. H. Tawney (1880 –1962) and John L. (1872 –1949) and Barbara
(1873 –1961) Hammond. Others of that generation were more radical:
the leading Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht (1873 – 1965), for
instance, was an early self-avowed Marxist (albeit one critical of
Marx’s strict materialism); the Greek historian Yannis Kordatos
fl
(1891 –1961) narrated his country ’s revolution as a con ict of class
rather than (as most nineteenth-century historians had done) ethnicity.
The attractions of Marxism increased in the aftermath of the Wall
Street crash of 1929, which seemed to bear out Marx ’s prediction of
the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Georges Lefebvre (1874 – 1959)
would place the French Revolution into a Marxist historical scheme,
whereby it became the necessary transition to the bourgeois state. His
most famous book, The Coming of the French Revolution , was repub-
lished in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War, only to have the
collaborationist Vichy government order all known copies of it to be
burned following France ’s defeat in 1940. It would eventually become
a favoured text of the postwar British left.
The dalliance of many intellectuals with both socialism and Marxism
prior to 1945 provided the foundations of a broader historiographic
tendency that, in the postwar era, would evolve into Labour history,
‘radical history ’ and what is sometimes called ‘history from below ’.

Several key Anglo-American examples of twentieth-century social his-

tory such E. P. Thompson ’s (1924 – 93) The Making of the English
Working Class (1963) and Herbert Gutman’s (1928 – 85) Work,

Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1977) were products

of an explicitly Marxist, but more humanistic and less rigidly determi-

nistic, perspective. They emphasized the daily lives of history ’s

/
History from Below 249

downtrodden, and highlighted their own agency, an aspect undervalued

in classic Marxism (and, in different ways, by that other major in fl uence
on social history, the Braudel-era Annales historians). A similarly ‘soft ’
approach to Marxism was adopted in other parts of the world, for
example by the Dutch journalist –historian Jan Romein (1893 – 1962),
who owed as much to Huizinga ’s brand of Kulturgeschichte as he did to
Marx and was excluded from membership in the Dutch Communist
Party because of his unorthodox opinions. A further modi fication of
Marxism was articulated in the legacy of the Italian socialist, and victim
of Fascism, Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937), whose 3,000-page Prison
Notebooks , first published a decade after his death, has become one of
the great political texts of the left. With his concept of cultural ‘hege-
mony’, the process whereby ruling powers or elites maintain authority
with the willing cooperation of the subordinated, Gramsci ’s star has
risen further in recent decades, and his ideas continue to appear in much
non-Marxist historical scholarship and literary history.
France and Italy aside, no democratic country has generated so
vigorous a Marxist historiography as Britain, where virtually every
period from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century has been
well covered, and where socialist and Marxist historians have enjoyed
fi
a public pro le quite disproportionate to their relatively small num-
bers. Many British Marxists, such as Christopher Hill (1912 –2003),
a historian of radical ideas and beliefs in seventeenth-century England),
were initially active Communist Party members, but left it after the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, along with several of their French
counterparts. Others such as Eric Hobsbawm (1917 –2012) retained
fi
their party af liation while nonetheless taking critical stands against
the excesses of Soviet expansionism. Perhaps the most important col-
lective contribution that many of them made was the founding of Past
and Present in the early 1950s. Quickly establishing itself as an alter-
native to the more mainstream political history journals, it has since
then achieved the kind of international prominence that Annales had
earlier acquired in France. Soon jettisoning its initial subtitle ‘a Journal
fi
of Scienti c History ’ (now become merely ‘a Journal of Historical
Studies’), Past and Present fi
had become suf ciently centrist by the
mid-1970s that it eventually ceded the space on its left to newer pub-
lications like the History Workshop Journal (est. 1976).
Left-wing British historians have largely avoided the political perse-
cution and career disruption suffered by their counterparts elsewhere –

/
250 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

with a few notable exceptions such as George Rudé (1910 – 93),

a historian of revolutionary movements who was unable to find employ-
ment in Britain, spending his career in Australia and Canada. Elsewhere,
there are a number of well-known example of persecution or career
blocking. In 1956, the young Australian historian Russel Ward
(1914 – 95) had his appointment to a lectureship vetoed by the institu-
tion ’s leadership because of his ‘seditious ’ and communist associations,
causing the department head (who by no means shared Ward ’s views) to
resign in protest against the violation of academic freedom. When one of
Japan’s most distinguished modern historians, Ienaga Saburo
(1913 – 2002), was commissioned to write a history text in 1953, his
manuscript was rejected by the authorities because it appeared to oppose
the Tokugawa family system, treated peasant uprisings as legitimate and
spent too many pages on the recent history of the Paci fic region.
On resubmitting the manuscript, without changing a word, it was
passed, suggesting to him the arbitrariness of the system.
The United States has a similarly long tradition of ‘left history ’,
dating back to the Progressive and New Historians of the early twen-
tieth century. A post-1945 recommitment to the twin ideas of
America’s exceptionalism and the ‘consensus ’ on which this was
built – papering over the fi ssures of race, class and (yet to be heard
from) gender – had the effect of cooling any radical impulses at the
same time that the Cold War was getting started. Those with leftist
fi
af liations often found themselves facing tough questions about their
‘loyalty ’ during the late 1940s and 1950s. A number emigrated to

Canada, Britain and other countries. The classicist Moses Finley

(1912 –86), a New York-born Jew, was fi red from his position at
Rutgers University in 1952, subsequently moving to Cambridge
where he had a long and successful scholarly career culminating in
a knighthood. Natalie Zemon Davis emigrated to Toronto in the early
1960s with her mathematician husband (a victim of political persecu-
tion) though she would eventually commute to the United States and
teach at Berkeley and Princeton. During the 1960s activist historians
such as Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010) and Staughton Lynd (b. 1929) were
dismissed from academic posts, the latter for visiting Hanoi in protest
against the Vietnam War. As recently as 2017, legislators in the state of
Arkansas were attempting to proscribe Zinn ’ s works, including his
well-known People ’s History of the United States from being used in
schools; another such effort was made in 2013 by a governor of the

/
Varieties of Intellectual History 251

state of Indiana, himself a former university president. (In fairness, it

should be noted that fellow academics, not all conservatives, have been
critical of Zinn ’s works on a purely scholarly basis.) The Belgian his-
torian Antoon de Baets (b. 1955) has devoted much of his career to
recording and describing known examples of political interference with
the academic freedom (and sometimes literally, bodily freedom) of
historians; in 2002 he published a depressing catalogue of such inter-
ventions since the end of the Second World War; there have been
annual addenda to this list involving both democratic and authorita-
tian regimes.
Sometimes, of course, censorship could come from the other direction,
as liberals fell afoul of those with more radical positions. By the mid-
1960s, with Vietnam and the civil rights movement dominating public
discourse, radical history emerged with a vengeance, and sometimes with
polarizing violence. In an echo of the Red Guards ’ attacks on Chinese
heritage sites and on the country ’s intellectuals two years previously, the
liberal historian of France, Orest Ranum (b. 1933) had a year ’s worth of
his notes destroyed by student protesters at Columbia in 1968, and soon
found the climate in his department so oppressive that he relocated to
Johns Hopkins University. While the radicalism of the late 1960s in
America and Western Europe dissipated within a few years, it left
a formidable pedagogical legacy. History from below, along with Black
history, women’s history and native history, had by the early 1970s
established a small but firm beachhead in university history departments.
By the end of that decade, the curricular position of all of these was rather
more secure – just in time to resist the resurgent conservatism of the 1980s
in the United States and several of its Western allies. Whether they can
withstand the spread of populist anti-intellectualism, hostility to evidence
and reductive thinking that has tainted public discourse in very recent
years is uncertain.

Varieties of Intellectual History

Historians have studied ideas as well as events for centuries, and the
German terms Kulturgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte alike embrace
the content and impact of human thought in past times. Within the
modern historical discipline, what is usually called intellectual history
established itself by the mid-twentieth century as a distinctive sub-
field under different names and in different styles: Meinecke’s

/
252 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

Ideengeschichte was the German variant; in France the study of

mentalités emerged with the Annales. In the United States, the ‘his-
tory of ideas’ as a recognizable subject of study began in earnest with
Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873 –1962). Lovejoy had produced in The Great
Chain of Being (1936) a book that epitomized his method: identify
a key concept or ‘unit idea ’ and trace it forward in time as it combined
and recombined with other unit ideas. Allying themselves with philoso-
phy as much as history – in the sense that sorting out a thinker ’s precise
arguments and their afterlife became the priority – intellectual historians
produced some remarkably fine work during this period, but the
Lovejoy approach began to attract criticism in the 1960s. Lovejoy
founded and edited the Journal of the History of Ideas (est. 1940)
which, though it did not adjust immediately to changes in historiogra-
phical fashion, nevertheless provides a measure of them. In the decades
since its foundation it has gone through a relatively small number of
editors, and in recent times it has complemented its traditional diet of
‘high intellectual ’ history, concerned with elite thinkers, with broader

‘cultural history ’ topics. It has also begun to abandon the almost

exclusively Western focus which, along with an ‘internalist ’ philosophi-
cal approach, had previously limited the appeal of this style of intellec-
tual history in much of the wider world. Newer journals such as
History of Humanities (est. 2015) and The Intellectual History
Review (est. 2007) have been established in recent years, following
the earlier-founded History of European Ideas (est. 1980).
Intellectual history in the European and North American context
peaked in popularity in the 1950s and fell out of fashion in the 1960s
and 1970s (a victim of the rapid success of social history), reinventing
itself as the less elitist-sounding ‘cultural history ’ in the 1980s, under
which umbrella it has regained a good deal of ground. Lovejoy ’s older
‘history of ideas ’ has been expanded at one end to include newer fi elds
such as the histories of the book ( histoires du livre ), of libraries and of
reading, and at the other into the pursuit of the meaning of terms and of
texts in their linguistic and/or social contexts. The latter stream is in turn
divisible into a so-called Cambridge School of the history of political
thought, associated most often with Quentin Skinner (b. 1940) in Britain
and the New Zealander (educated at Cambridge) J. G. A. Pocock (b.
1924) in the United States, and the Begriffsgeschichte (history of political
and social concepts) approach advocated by the German Reinhart
Koselleck (1923 – 2006). Koselleck ’s method has somewhat more in

/
Varieties of Intellectual History 253

common with Lovejoy ’s, though its focus is not on the ‘unit idea ’ as

fl
a kind of free- oating entity, but on the semantic usage of particular
fi
words, their signi cation and their connection with contemporary poli-
tical and social reality. (A good example, relevant immediately to this
book and already cited in Chapter 4, is the advent during the eighteenth
century of ‘Geschichte ’ in the German language, displacing the older
term ‘Historie ’, along with the development of what we have been calling
capital-H History.) Pocock has examined ideas historically, within their
sequential political and intellectual contexts, with major authors con-
sidered in comparison with or indebted to less well-known contempor-
aries and precursors. His mid-career masterpiece, The Machiavellian
Moment (1975), demonstrates this method most fully, as it follows key
political and historical concepts like ‘civic humanism ’ and ‘republican-
ism’ backwards to ancient and early medieval thought, then examines
their working out in the context of sixteenth-century Italy, before
tracing them forward, via seventeenth-century English thinkers, into
a transatlantic, eighteenth-century Britanno-American world. Pocock ’s
most recent work, a six-volume study of Gibbon ’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire , places that book amid multiple different streams of
historical thought and writing emanating from antiquity through to
the various European Enlightenments (the plural is deliberate, disaggre-
gating several different streams of eighteenth-century thought). Quentin
Skinner ’s approach is broadly similar in insisting that great works be
studied not simply to generate internally coherent meanings but within
the context of other works of their time, though Skinner places
a somewhat greater emphasis on particular leading thinkers such as the
seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and his own writing
makes more explicit use of linguistic theory. (In a recent survey of
intellectual history, Richard Whatmore points to a number of other
fi
signi cant differences in their views that need not, however, concern us
here.) The Marxist scholar Raymond Williams (1921 –1988) published
fl
a highly in uential study of the changing meanings of particular terms,
Keywords , in 1976 which has proved especially in fluential in the inter-
disciplinary field of Cultural Studies.
The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) inspired
a very different form of inquiry into the in fl uence of the mind in history,
in this case of the irrational and subconscious. In his later works,
especially Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud applied his theories
and clinical experience to the ‘diagnosis ’ of history. Freud had dabbled

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254 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

in history earlier in his career, using psychoanalysis in a 1910 book on

Leonardo da Vinci and more systematically in Civilization and its
Discontents (1930). He was known to have used archives, not relying
on secondary sources, for instance in his treatment of a seventeenth-
century exorcism as a type of neurosis. Freud envisaged the process of
civilization as an endless dynamic struggle of love and hate, sex and
death, arising from primal patricide, and carried forward by leader-
figures such as Moses in con fl ict with the mobs whom they dominated –

the resonance between the ideas of Freud and certain aspects of the
thought of his older contemporary, Nietzsche (for whom an innate ‘will
to power ’ was the most fundamental drive of human action) is dif ficult
to miss.
Psychohistory has probably aroused more passion among its most
fervent devotees and contempt from its most outspoken critics than
almost any other theoretical approach to the study of the past, even the
‘linguistic turn ’ (see below). Its heyday came a generation after Freud’ s

death, in the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. In 1957, the president
of the American Historical Association, William L. Langer (1896 –
1977), used the podium to call for historians to move on to ‘the next

assignment’, which was the application of psychology to historical

research. In the very next year, a German-born trained psychoanalyst
and refugee from the Nazis, Erik H. Erikson (1902 –94), published
Young Man Luther , the first full-length attempt to psychoanalyze
a particular historical figure. Like Erikson, most subsequent psycho-
historians were not strict Freudians and applied their particular version
of psychoanalysis to the past: in Wilhelm Reich’s (1897 – 1957)
case applying Freudian theories to an entire population, that of the
lower middle classes of Weimar Germany, to account for the then-
contemporary rise of Hitler and Nazism; and, in the case of American
classicist Norman O. Brown (1913 –2002), analyzing historical move-
ments more broadly through the lens of psychoanalysis. Other variants
have been applied to past social phenomena such as the early modern
witch hunts. Although psychohistory has never won wide acceptance
beyond a core group of admirers, and while Freudian theories and their
assorted offshoots have themselves been marginalized within modern
psychology by newer fields such as neuroscience and social psychology,
a Freudian approach has been championed by the occasional mainstream
historian such as the American intellectual historian Bruce Mazlish (
1923 –2016) and the German émigré Peter Gay (1923 –2015) who himself

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From Women’s History to Histories of Gender and Sexuality 255

underwent psychoanalytic training and wrote extensively about Freud, as

well as by less conventional figures such as the theologian and historical
ficant infl uence on
theorist Michel de Certeau. Indirectly, it has had a signi
other aspects of cultural theory – Michel Foucault, for instance, formu-
lated his ideas on sexuality in reaction to Freud ’s – and even on post-
modernism (see below, pp. 262 –67), though that approach – often

associated with the French theorist Jacques Lacan (1901 –81) – has also
challenged the very possibility of understanding the psyche since the self
(or ‘subjectivity ’) in its own right may be both fluid and a ‘constructed’

feature of Western culture. At its best, in the work of a trained analyst like
Erikson, psychohistory offers a plausible alternative set of explanations
for individual actions.
Other forms of psychology have been brought to bear on the study of
the past. The Annalistes, of course, have done so with their attention to
mentalities, but more recently non-historian social scientists, including
specialists in human cognition, have begun to ask whether behaviour in
bygone times, and especially collective action (the behaviour of crowds,
for instance), can be explained through understanding the ways in
which the mind comprehends and constructs reality. This in some
way is to adapt Dilthey ’s notion of Verstehen, or Collingwood ’ s related
concept of re-enactment, and try to apply it to the psychology of past
groups, but using the evidence of contemporary observation and
experimentation. In a sense, it provides a mirror image ‘scienti c’ fi
counterpart to the historicist assumption that while cultures and values
fi
may differ, elemental human thought processes are suf ciently similar
throughout time as to allow for inferences about past behaviour from
present evidence. To be fair, unless we assume a degree of congruence
in human reactions to similar situations, it is hard to see how any
conclusion about the historical motives of individuals or groups can
ever be reached.

From Women’s History to Histories of Gender and Sexuality

Aside from a few early twentieth-century exceptions like Eileen Power
(see above, p. 214), the presence of female historians in the profession
actually declined in the years following the conclusion of the First
World War, a trend that continued up to the 1960s. Outside North
America and Western Europe the prominence of women in the disci-
pline was even more uneven, a pattern that has continued to the

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256 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

present day. In China, the profession remains today a largely masculine

preserve. In Bulgaria, roughly a quarter of all its historians since the
mid-nineteenth century have been female, a proportion that had
improved considerably at the collapse of communism in 1989.
In Finland, by contrast, very few women prior to the 1950s achieved
doctoral degrees in history, though many more earned Masters degrees.
The Finnish profession remained overwhelmingly male in the fi rst
decades after the Second World War, despite the activity of many
women biographers and amateur historians. Practising history on the
margins was one thing; entering the profession as an academic histor-
ian another – a career goal denounced by Mary Ritter Beard
(1876 –1958), despite her own university connections, on the grounds
that the rules of academe were entirely set by men. Beard disapproved
of the university career as a goal for women in part because, she
suggested in her 1946 book Woman as Force in History, professional
historians had simply chosen, being overwhelmingly male, not to see
the contributions to history of half the human race.
A harbinger of the first major phase of women’ s history in the 1970s,
Beard’s book had counterparts elsewhere in the postwar world, nota-
bly Japan where Inoue Kiyoshi (1913 –2001), a male Marxist historian,
published Nihon joseishi (‘ Women’ s History of Japan’ , 1948) followed
the next year by the feminist, journalist and later politician Kamichika
Ichiko ’ s (1888 – 1981) Josei shisoshi (‘ Women’s History of Ideas ’),
fl
a work much in uenced by Beard. By the late 1960s the problem was
not a lack of interest in women ’s history, or of signi ficant writings
about it, but rather its absence from university curricula and research
agenda, along with an enduring scarcity of women in tenured faculty
positions, whatever their national field of study. The eminent historian
of colonial America, Mary Beth Norton (b. 1943), who was elected
president of the AHA for 2018, recently recalled joining the Cornell
history department in 1971 and being the only woman in the depart-
ment for fi ve years, under a department chair who began meetings by
saying ‘gentlemen’. For minority female historians (black and Hispanic
women, for instance), the challenges of life in the academy could be
even tougher as they faced both gender and racial biases.
The study of women in the past remained an occasional subject within
the main streams of military, political and social history, and most often
written outside the universities. The initial solution to this seemed to lie
in establishing women ’s history as a recognizable and distinct sub-

/
From Women s History to Histories of Gender and Sexuality
’ 257

discipline without detaching it from the professional mainstream

wherein lay the academic rewards and honours of which women had
been struggling to gain a share for half a century. The push for women ’s
history in the 1970s followed the growth of the Women ’s Liberation
movement (or ‘second-wave ’ feminism), and the development of feminist
perspectives in philosophy and the social sciences, with intellectual
inspiration coming from key earlier texts such as Simone de Beauvoir ’s
The Second Sex (1949) and Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own
’ ’

(1929). There had already been sporadic courses on women ’s history

offered at American universities, the Viennese-born Gerda Lerner
(1920 –2013) having taught the subject at various American institutions
since the middle of the 1960s. An important factor in establishing
women’s history on undergraduate curricula, and in making it
a research topic in its own right, may have been the decision by
a number of other well-established female historians to shift interests
or expand the focus of their scholarship and teaching. Natalie Zemon
Davis, whose early research was on French print-workers, authored
a pioneering essay on women and popular culture in early modern
France in the 1970s. (Davis became only the second woman elected to
the presidency of the American Historical Association, in 1987, though
from then till 2018 there have been a dozen more). Gisela Bock (b.
1942), a prominent German feminist historian, had written her fi rst
book on the Renaissance philosopher Thomas Campanella before her
political activities on behalf of pay equity for female workers moved her
in the direction of women ’s history. Eileen Power, principally known as
an economic historian, had begun before her death a book entitled
Medieval Women which fi nally appeared in 1975. The French
Africanist Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (b. 1935) published a history
of women in modern Africa in 1987, which was translated into English
a decade later. Major collaborative publishing projects on aspects of
women’s history have appeared over the years, such as the multivolume
History of Women in the West edited by the French historians Georges
Duby and Michelle Perrot (b. 1928).
However, arguments continued to occur during the 1970s and 1980s
as to where and how the history of women fitted into ‘history proper ’ or
‘the main stream’. From the point of view of some male historians,

women’s history was the symbol par excellence of the continuing

fragmentation of the discipline along ‘interest group ’ lines. Historians
of a Marxist persuasion often inclined to view women ’s history as

/
258 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

a distraction from the main agenda of understanding the dynamics and

impact of class; women historians responded that Marxism had
entirely overlooked the contribution of women in any other sphere
than the domestic. Despite its obvious intersection with family and
demographic history, women ’s history was still often seen as of mar-
ginal importance, and ‘ serious’ graduate students (that is males, and
any female who really wanted career advancement) were steered else-
where. Nor, for that matter, were women practitioners entirely agreed
among themselves on an agenda for their subject. Was women ’s history
simply a ‘ supplement ’ to the main agendas of historians, an addition to
the pool of knowledge of achievements previously and unjustly left
fi
out? Was it suf cient simply to attribute an agency to women that had
previously been attached to men, or to bring to light, as in the title of
a famous 1973 work by Sheila Rowbotham (b. 1943), an entire sex
‘hidden from history ’? Or was this simply to fall into a historiographic

analysis (and agenda) that had been established by males in the fi rst
place? In short, was it enough to write ‘ compensatory or contribution
history ’ – to add women, as the saying went, and stir?
fi
A signi cant shift came after 1986, in which year Joan Wallach Scott
(b. 1941), an American scholar working in French history, published
a seminal article, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis ’,
urging a redirection of attention away from women as biologically
essentialized beings and towards the study of gender and its social (and
linguistic) construction. Scott was by no means the only historian think-
ing along these lines, but her essay struck a chord. Its impact was felt,
albeit unevenly, elsewhere in the world over the next two decades, as
evidenced in a multi-author forum on it in a 2008 issue of the American
Historical Review. The eventual effect of this was to enlarge consider-
ably the areas of potential study for both feminist and non-feminist
historians. Instead of focusing on women ’s oppression, subordination
or the converse, heroic or transgressive past agency, one could now focus
fl
on the way in which gender in uenced the full scope of past human
activity, including those areas such as political life in which women had
been conspicuously rare. Scott herself, however, went further than sim-
ply advocating for gender’s equivalency with race or class as a category.
She questioned what ‘ gender’ meant in particular contexts and how it
acted as a determinant of other phenomena. In fl uenced by French cul-
tural theorists such as Michel Foucault (1926 –84), whose own later
works focused on the history of sexuality, Scott asserted that the written

/
From Women’s History to Histories of Gender and Sexuality 259

discourses generated by a society are forms of power in their own right,

and that they have created and constrained notions of male and female,
and of masculine and feminine qualities across time. Though Scott
herself has been criticized for too close an allegiance to postmodernism
(see below) at the expense of more traditional feminist agendas, her
article proved almost instantly catalytic.
In the past three decades women ’s history has been steadily augmen-
ted (some might say supplanted) by gender history, including the study
of masculinity and alternative sexualities: homosexuality, for instance,
has been explored in and across much of history by John Boswell
(1947 –94), as well as by Foucault himself; Mrinalini Sinha (b. 1960)
has used Edward Said’s ideas to examine ‘colonial masculinity ’, unfold-
ing in the interplay between gender stereotypes and British imperial
power in nineteenth-century Bengal. In a similar vein, Catherine Hall
(b. 1946) has studied gender ’s relations with class and race, and its
historical connections to the relations between imperial ‘metropole ’

and colonial periphery. Judith R. Walkowitz (b. 1945) has explored

the nature of the horri fic and shocking in Victorian London through
narratives of ‘sexual danger ’. The Australian Susan K. Foley (b. 1949)
has published major studies of gender and society in modern France.
And well-worn subjects such as the history of witchcraft in Europe and
America, previously examined from religious, psychosocial or anthro-
pological perspectives, have been revisited through the lenses of both
sexuality and gender. The changes in approach to the study of women ’s
past lives and historical roles over the past several decades can be
gauged by comparing Eileen Power ’s posthumous book on medieval
women, conceived in the inter-war period, with more recent work on
medieval gender by historians such as Caroline Walker Bynum (b.
1941) and Barbara A. Hanawalt (b. 1941), or by juxtaposing Alice
Clark’s classic study of seventeenth-century women ’s working lives
with that of Marjorie K. McIntosh (b. 1940) and the same author ’s
work on Yoruba women in Africa. The focus has shifted from recover-
ing lost contributions and lives to exploring the ways in which gender
and sexuality can be used to understand aspects of medieval life from
food, to spirituality, to the human body. And some orthodoxies of early
women’s history – notably the thesis that modernity marked a decline
in women’s position and prosperity from a supposed time of more
equal status in the ancient or medieval past – have been challenged by
recent scholars such as Judith M. Bennett (b. 1951).

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260 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

From relative marginality half a century ago, both women ’s history

fi
and gender history have become major sub- elds within the discipline
(with strong connections to emerging interdisciplinary subjects such as
Cultural Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies and Global Development
Studies) in many, though by no means all, parts of the world. As Laura
Lee Downs has noted in a recent book, ‘ sneering dismissal’ of either
women’s or gender history is no longer possible. And in North America
at least, the population of tenured or tenure-track women in history
departments has considerably grown. Norton, whose experience at
Cornell in the 1970s is mentioned above, noted in 2018 that the gender
split by then was much closer to even, and that more women than men
occupied endowed chairs. The Department of History in the Canadian
university that the present author attended in the 1970s was devoid of
non-adjunct female faculty for three of my four years (an earlier, senior
hire having died); I am a professor in the same department four decades
later, where the ratio has also approached equality.

Postwar African Historiography

Echoing Enlightenment assumptions about the necessity of writing for
the existence of historical thinking, and stadialist theories of the pro-
gress of the world away from barbarism, the British historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper (1914 – 2003), no stranger to controversy, set off a minor
firestorm. He pronounced in a 1963 set of television lectures and
ensuing 1965 book, The Rise of Christian Europe , that it was futile
to study African history prior to colonization, on the grounds both of
its seeming lack of source materials and because he saw it as irrelevant
to the concerns of modernity. For historians, it would be a distraction
from what he considered the ‘ purposive movement ’ of History (here in
the capital-H sense), a diversion on to irrelevant parts of the world that
he deemed useful only as revealing a past from which modernity,
largely through the dominance of Europe, had escaped.
Trevor-Roper ’s words were quickly rebutted by many scholars.
Beginning in the 1960s, in the wake of postwar decolonization,
African history began to make its way, slowly, on to mainstream
history curricula within and outside Africa. With the retreat of the
European colonial powers and the establishment of independent
nations, a deeper interest in exploring their own past quickly emerged
among African populations, stimulated by reaction to decades of

/
Postwar African Historiography 261

education in an alien imperial historiography. With this came an urgent

need to recast the historical record and to recover evidence of many
overlooked pre-colonial civilizations. One consequence of the decolo-
nization of Africa was that at fi rst, a European-style master-narrative of
progress was simply imported and converted to local purposes.
The political withdrawal of Europe occurred just at the point when
very new academic institutions were being created, principally as over-
seas extensions of European models, and highly dependent on
fi
European academic staff or af liated universities abroad – the pattern
previously seen in British India. Given this continued intellectual in fl u-
ence, a triumphal nationalist narrative of the advance of this or that
former colony maturing, under the nurturing mentorship of
a benevolent empire, into a free and full member of the international
community marked much of the new African historical writing well
into the 1960s. It came with most of the trappings of pre-war ‘ Whig ’
historiography, such as the steady development in the past of political
institutions, the centralization of power and the improvement of
administration – all the features of the modern Western state.
Foundational research in African history was done at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London by scholars such as
Roland Oliver (1923 – 2014), co-founder in 1960 of the Journal of
African History, and by the Belgian-born Jan Vansina (1929 –2017),

an authority on African oral tradition, which became a signi ficant

means of access to the pre-colonial past. Examining oral traditions
for historicity, much less for precise chronological information, is
often not very productive (there is an extensive specialist methodolo-
gical literature on this that cannot detain us here). We are better off
considering them for what they can tell us about contemporary values.
Even the most sympathetic experts have pointed to three major com-
plicating phenomena such as ‘telescoping ’ (the truncation or expansion
of dynastic lines to fi ll chronological gaps), ‘ feedback’ (the effect of
writing on spoken testimony, and speci fi cally the risk that a tradition
has been contaminated by, and is simply repeating, facts gleaned from
colonial or external literary sources) and ‘structural amnesia’ (the
collective forgetting of details of the past, and figures of history, that
no longer fit with present political circumstances). On the other hand, it
has also been argued that these distorting in fluences can be fi ltered out.
The techniques of oral traditionalists have been applied outside Africa,
in the study of Southeast Asian, Latin American and Caribbean

/
262 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

cultures, as well as to indigenous cultures in North America and

Australasia. For all its potential weaknesses as a source, there is no
doubt that oral tradition has reopened a road to the past once closed off
by the inherent bias of historiography towards writing which had
fi
solidi ed in the aftermath of early modern contacts in the Americas.
Modern African historiography has not, of course been the preserve
of well-intentioned Europeans. African universities have, despite the
instabilities of politics and civil war in many countries, trained their
own scholars and sent many others overseas for doctoral training. They
have also attracted European scholars into their teaching ranks: the
‘Ibadan ’ school of historians (initiated in the 1950s at the University of

fl
Ibadan in Nigeria and in uential into the 1970s) included both native
Nigerians and transplanted Britons. The pioneering Nigerian historian
Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917 – 83) studied at Durham, Aberdeen and
London, while SOAS has educated several leading African-born scho-
lars, including the Ghanaian Albert Adu Boahen (1932 – 2006). Boahen
in turn participated in an important early summary work of postcolo-
nial historical writing, the UNESCO General History of Africa, in-
augurated in 1964 and fi nally completed in the 1990s. This was
directed by a ‘scienti fic committee,’ two-thirds of whom were
Africans, and written by over three hundred authors including the
Kenyans Ali Mazrui (1933 – 2014) and Bethwell Allan Ogot (b. 1929),
Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1922 – 2006) of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)
and the Nigerian J. F. Ade Ajayi (1929 –2014). The development of
European historiography in Africa over the past century is, again,
rather reminiscent of Indian historical writing of the same period: the
tools and concepts of the colonial powers were adopted by the colo-
nized first to embrace and later to push against those powers in support
of a nationalist (and more recently, a Marxian, class-oriented) goal.

The Linguistic Turn: Postmodernism

In the late 1960s, with social history in the ascendant, few professional
historians were thinking much about their millennia-old relationship to
the world of literature. The overwhelming majority of readers and
writers of history accepted that there was a fundamental difference
between works of fi ction and history, which recounted a true story.
In the following decade, this began to change, at the very same time
that, partly as a consequence of 1960s unrest and rapid decolonization

/
The Linguistic Turn: Postmodernism 263

across the world, renewed questioning was occurring of the rationalist,

‘Enlightenment ’ agenda of the previous three centuries. In short,
doubts about both history and History (and, increasingly, about the
connection between the two), sounded in the early years of the century
but largely suppressed during and immediately following the Second
World War, began to re-emerge, now in a post-atomic world and
within a discipline much more fractured than it had ever been.
An early challenge to strict historical ‘empiricism ’ (a better term by
far than ‘positivism ’) came in 1961 in the form of a controversial but
widely read little book by the British historian of Soviet Russia,
E. H. Carr (1892 – 1982), entitled What is History?, which pointed to
the role of the historian in selecting and fashioning evidence.
It famously urged students to ‘study the historian before you begin to
study the facts’.
This seedbed of moderate scepticism, combined with disciplinary
fracturing, prepared the ground within the field of historical studies for
what has become known as the linguistic turn. This originated, however,
quite outside the discipline, in philosophy and literary theory, and is
fl
sometimes con ated with a parallel, anthropologically in fluenced ‘cul-

tural turn’, both being often associated with the broader theoretical
movement in the humanities known as postmodernism or, with declining
frequency, ‘poststructuralism ’ (the late historiographer Ernst Breisach
[1923 –2016] saw poststructuralism as a subset of the postmodern, but
for simplicity we shall dispense here with the former term).
fl
Postmodernism has been especially in uenced by the works of the
Frenchmen Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard (1924 –98) and
Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004), the German Martin Heidegger
(1889 –1976), his one-time pupil the hermeneutist Hans-Georg
Gadamer (1900 –2002), the pre-war German intellectual Walter
Benjamin (1892 –1940) and, further back, Friedrich Nietzsche.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott (see above, p. 190) anticipated
one aspect of postmodernism when he asserted in 1933 that history
could not exist outside of human experience of it – that ‘the course of

events, as such, is not history because it is nothing at all ’ and that ‘the
historian ’s business is not to discover, to recapture, or even to interpret; it
is to create and to construct ’ (though Oakeshott, like Carr, never asserted
the non-reality of historical facts). If one wants to trace its ‘genealogy’
(itself a favoured term in the later work of Foucault – who derived it from
Nietzsche – in preference to ‘causes’, or to his own earlier use of

/
264 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

‘archaeology’) further, one can go back through the eighteenth-century

and Renaissance debates about the merits of history versus imaginative

literature, and end up back at Aristotle ’s Poetics. Although the linguistic
turn has by no means exclusively been concerned with this issue, a major
thrust of it has been seriously to erode conventional boundaries between
history and fi ction – which, Sarah Maza notes, originally meant not

something false but something created and shaped. In doing so, it has
challenged the superiority history has assumed over fiction for a good
two centuries based on historians ’ claims that they portray real rather
than imagined events. Leading exponents of this view include the
Americans Hayden White (1928 –2018), Hans Kellner (b. 1945) and
Dominick LaCapra (b. 1939), the Dutch philosopher F. R. Ankersmit
(b. 1945), and the British theorists Keith Jenkins (b. 1943) and Alun
Munslow (b. 1947). Although its origins are Western, it has in recent
years spread into Asian historical discourse, aided by the somewhat freer
transfer of ideas and peoples since the late 1980s; there, it has become
associated less with epistemological critiques of history than with efforts
to locate Asian pasts on a trajectory leading to alternative forms of
modernity, distinctive from that which has characterized the West.
The central thrust of much historiographic postmodernism has been
to recast history from its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century status
as a distinctive mode of knowledge into a form of narrative. In this
respect, the work of Hayden White, beginning with a well-known 1966
fl
essay entitled ‘The Burden of History ’, has been especially in uential.
His 1973 magnum opus, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (the title of which borrows, for rather
different purposes, a term fi rst used by Collingwood, disparagingly,
to describe the likes of Toynbee and Spengler) purports to demonstrate
through close study of a series of nineteenth-century historians and
philosophers from Ranke and Burckhardt through Nietzsche and
Croce, that there is no fundamental difference between the writing of
history, philosophy of history and fiction, arguing in effect that there
can be no access to a ‘real’ past outside of our representation of it.
White does not assert that the past has never existed or is completely
imagined – merely that it is no longer directly reachable other than
through texts which are themselves mediated by language; original
documents do not provide direct access both because they, too, are
selections from past life, mediated by their authors, and because they
have no inherent meaning that is not bestowed on them by the

/
The Linguistic Turn: Postmodernism 265

historian ’s interpretation. Every narration or description of the past

involves the historian in a series of mental operations that require
a poetic act of imagination which in turn predetermines the story that
will be ‘discovered’ and then fashioned into a coherent narrative.
The focus on language suggests a kinship with the above-mentioned
intellectual historians Pocock and Skinner. But any connection is super-
ficial. As Michael S. Roth has observed, Skinner ’ s hunts for a writer ’s
intentions in writing particular texts, and Pocock ’ s exploration of
intellectual contexts within which texts are composed, are radically
different from White ’ s view that the content of texts is almost second-
ary to the literary form that they take, and that authorial writing
decisions are largely unconscious and unintended.
Borrowing from Vico, White argued that historical narratives are
constituted through four master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synec-
doche and irony) or figures of speech that create a meaningful past out
of the raw materials that make up the unprocessed ‘historical field ’.
These tropes in turn help determine the author ’s choices among three
different strategies of narration, whereby what would otherwise be
a mere temporally ordered sequence of events or chronicle is turned
into a story : modes of emplotment (the kind of story that is being told),
modes of formal argument (the way in which events and persons
interact within the historical world, effecting events and leading to
a conclusion) and modes of ideological implication (the moral to be
fl
drawn from the story). Perhaps more in uential (and controversial)
than the elaborate structure he erected for studying his chosen texts,
however, was White ’s conclusion, elaborated in subsequent essays,
that there is no essential difference between the writing of fiction and
that of history in the sense that both tell stories – one depicts imaginary
occurrences and the other events that are believed to have actually
occurred in the past but which, precisely because they are past, are no
longer ‘ real’ in an existential sense. R. G. Collingwood had seemed to
hint at this ‘narrativist’ view of history thirty years earlier, but White
fl
went much further. In uenced by the American philosopher (and critic
of Collingwood) Louis O. Mink, Jr (1921 –83) and by French criticism
(especially Roland Barthes and his notion of a ‘reality effect’), White
does not quite say that history and fiction are exactly the same thing,

nor does he suggest that a historian should simply make up documents

and historical fi gures in the same way a novelist creates characters, but
his arguments do have the effect of dissolving some key assumptions

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266 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

that have sustained the fi

history – ction distinction for centuries.
Because of this, his work has become a focal point in the postmodern
debate insofar as it involves history, motivating both outspoken defen-
ders (who often take his arguments to further extremes than White
himself) and equally fi erce critics such as the British historians Arthur
Marwick (1936 –2006) and Geoffrey Elton, the latter in a much sharper
tone than he had used with Robert Fogel during their earlier debate on
cliometrics (see above, p. 236).
Postmodernism is often explicitly political, and at times almost
fundamentalist in its antagonism to orthodoxies, master-narratives
(Lyotard proclaimed suspicion of these as a hallmark of ‘the post-
modern condition ’) and power structures. It is devoted to demolish-
ing these orthodoxies, and the knowledge foundations on which they
rest, as well as to ‘ de-centring ’ those objects of learning previously
deemed central, and to re-centring, at least temporarily, the pre-
viously marginal and peripheral. It is committed to dissolving
essences and investigating the modes whereby objects of intellectual
inquiry, analytical categories (gender, race, class) and even indivi-
duals are viewed as the product of social, psychological and even
linguistic ‘ construction ’. Rationalism is regarded with suspicion by
many postmodernists, and in particular so-called ‘ Enlightenment ’

rationalism. The Enlightenment (here seen more as a set of liberal,

fi
progressivist ideals rather than the speci c, eighteenth-century move-
ment) is a convenient target for much that postmodernism resists
because of its presumed tendency to universalism and essentialism,
its assumption of transcendental, objectively existing values, and its
faith in the direct and recoverable relationship between things and
the words that signify them. ‘ Positivism ’ is to a postmodernist even
more dubious and ‘naive ’, its parallel messages of social and scienti c fi
improvement (as in Comte and Buckle) and epistemological progress
being doubly suspect since they presuppose both linear forward
change and the veracity of the narrative underlying and endorsing
it. Thus during the 1960s Foucault (building on both Vico and
Herder, and in many ways paralleling Thomas Kuhn) reconceived
European intellectual history ‘archaeologically’ rather than as
a linear development: a series of discontinuous and largely incompa-
tible ‘ epistemes’ (an idea he soon reconceptualized as ‘discursive

formations ’ ), and not merely a tradition of great ideas evinced by

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The Linguistic Turn: Postmodernism 267

brilliant thinkers, had shaped how knowledge was arranged and

valued, and how it related to the exercise of power.
Like any historiographical movement, postmodernism has its fl aws
and extremes. In their zeal to caricature all opponents as ‘ positivist ’ (in
the broader sense of that term), rationalist or simply naive, many of its
adherents have, ironically, constructed their own convenient ‘other ’,
a fabricated knowledge-villain that in itself is an example of essentiali-
zation and generalization. They have also, with some exceptions,
imputed a ubiquitous and omnipotent blanket-like quality to
‘Enlightenment ’ narratives, homogenizing currents of thought from

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were much less harmo-
nious and single-minded than they are represented as being, and which
notably contained their own elements of resistance and counter-
argument. It is worth noting that opponents of postmodernism and
its focus on language have come from the traditional left as much as the
right: some Marxist and labour historians have seen the fixation on
language and discourse as a regrettable retreat from the main agenda of
class analysis back into the airy regions of ideas and abstraction, and as
a betrayal of the materialism and socio-economic analysis on which
progressive or radical histories are based.
However, in spite of its occasional extremities, one must concede
that postmodernism and the related ‘cultural turn ’ have provided
a salutary reminder to all historians that documents and texts never
‘speak for themselves’ . They are, indeed, interpreted by historians,

and even the most ‘neutral ’ document is ultimately an artefact created

by a human, driven by the assumptions, social pressures and linguistic
conventions of his or her own time – textual historians such as

Gabrielle Spiegel (b. 1943) have applied this insight usefully to the
interpretation of medieval chronicles. In other words, the sources
themselves are already interpreting the past when the historian first
confronts them, and few historians would now endorse Fustel de
Coulanges ’ optimistic admonition to a group of nineteenth-century
students that it was not he who spoke to them but ‘history, which

speaks through me ’ . Yet while postmodernism has been highly in fl u-

ential in literature and language departments, it has remained at best
a dissenting voice in most history departments; it has, however, found
a receptive audience among historians of gender, and among new
cultural historians for whom it has provided a set of categories to
replace those once derived from Marx.

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268 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

De-centring the West: Postcolonialism

The postmodern project has intersected and overlapped with a con-

temporary intellectual movement, postcolonial studies. The two are
not identical and have different origins and agendas, but they exhibit
some features in common. Like postmodernism, postcolonialism is
a rather broad term that includes the Indian ‘Subaltern studies ’
approach (in its early days, more a South Asian answer to
E. P. Thompson ’s ‘history from below ’) and the ‘Orientalist’ critique
of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said (1935 – 2003). Postcolonialism
is, the Sinologist Prasenjit Duara (b. 1950) has observed, less a theory
fi
than a critique of its own ‘other ’ – often de ned as a broad ‘ post-
Enlightenment ’ agenda characterized by reason, progress, the unstop-
pable increase of Western cultural and economic dominance, and even
the false notion of the stability of the nation-state. Anticipated in mid-
century by Caribbean writers such as Frantz Fanon (1925 – 61) and
C. L. R. James (1901 –89), postcolonialism is now often associated
with Said (whose 1978 book Orientalism is a key text), and with
a number of prominent Indian-born authors (many of them from
other disciplines than history) such as the literary critics Homi
K. Bhabha (b. 1949) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942), the
political scientist Partha Chatterjee (b. 1947) and the psychologist and
social critic Ashis Nandy (b. 1937).
Postcolonialism as a critical tool has been deployed most widely in
Indian or Middle Eastern studies, and has overlapped with post-
modernism in having the common goal of destabilizing, subverting or
de-centring existing master-narratives (in particular those created and
imposed by colonial powers or their indigenous elite allies) in favour of
the local and previously marginalized, and reading texts and docu-
ments ‘ against the grain’ to detect what they do not say as much as
what they do. Postcolonialism has redirected scholarship concerned
with former colonies such as India towards the subjected masses rather
than the imperial rulers and their Indian elite political successors.
The Subaltern Studies Group, a ‘ school ’ of Indian historiography

founded by Ranajit Guha (b. 1922), is a prominent example of this

latter trend, critical not only of pre-Independence historiography but
also of the rewriting of history after 1947 into simply a counter-history
with roles reversed, focused on indigenous political elites and omitting
nine-tenths of the population. The Subaltern agenda prioritizes the

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De-centring the West: Postcolonialism 269

subordinate and the voiceless, the local and regional rather than the
national – ‘subaltern ’ in this sense is a term derived from Antonio
Gramsci. Spivak, among the literary theorists associated with the
group (and a key link with the postmodernists as a translator of
Derrida), has extended the Subaltern approach to feminist topics.
In recent years, some early Subalternists such as the social historian
Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939) have broken with the movement ’s increasing
radicalism and its associations with postmodernism. A good many
others, however, have shifted away from Marxist categories of analysis
towards postmodern concerns with deconstructing the language of
colonialism. In some cases, they reject Western historicity itself as
a tool of imperial control, born of the Enlightenment ’ s progressivist
agenda, and enabling a ‘dominance without hegemony ’ over India ’s
(and, by extension, other colonized countries ’) true sense of the past,
a sense that must be liberated from the seemingly inevitable Hegelian
story of progress to nationhood.
This repudiation of Western historicity by Indian postcolonial critics
is not entirely new. A powerful early statement of the position, long
before the current discussions, came from no less a fi gure than
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869 – 1948), who rejected not only British
rule but ultimately much of Western culture, including history.
The Mahatma saw European modernization as part of India ’s problem,
not its solution, and was of a view that Indians would be better off
without history. ‘ It is my pet theory’, he said, ‘that our Hindu ancestors
solved the question for us by ignoring history as understood today and
by building on slight events their philosophical structure. ’ Ancient epics
such as the Mahabharata were not, pace Sir William Jones, remotely
like a history: they were better than histories, since they contained
eternal truths, portrayed allegorically. In fact, said Gandhi, not just
India but the world might pro fi t from a bit less history, because history
is at best a pathology of things that have gone badly wrong. History
cannot record harmony, peace and love because it must necessarily
focus on rupture and discontinuity rather than on the non-violence that
Gandhi championed. Gandhi ’ s position thus diverged from that of his
close associate Nehru, the earlier nationalist – novelist Bankim
Chatterjee, and the poet Tagore (see above, pp. 199 – 200), as well as
pre-Independence historians in the colonial system such as Jadunath
Sarkar, for all of whom history (despite their differing views on how it
should be done) was an essential ingredient in the construction of

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270 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

nationhood. And it anticipates what Gayatri Spivak described as ‘epis-

temic violence’, the imperialist project to eradicate indigenous forms of
knowledge and to Westernize and limit the very terms and conditions
under which ‘true ’ history can be written. This is the same charge
levelled by Latin Americanists such as the Argentine-born Duke
University scholar Walter D. Mignolo (b. 1941) at the fi rst wave of
European overseas imperialism in the sixteenth century, the decisive
moment at which the Western form of ‘modernity ’ became dominant,
to the exclusion of what he preferred to call ‘decolonial ’ alternatives.
And a fellow US-based Latin Americanist, the Viennese-born anthro-
pologist Eric R. Wolf (1923 –99), argued in a 1982 book (the title of
which has become virtually a catch-phrase), Europe and the People
without History , that mainstream historiography had ignored the
agency of the peoples subordinated in the expansion of Europe since
the fi fteenth century, and failed to take note of them in historical
writing.
The postcolonial agenda has spread well beyond the regions of the
world that gave it birth, overlapping with slightly older, more econom-
ically focused anti-colonial critiques such as ‘dependency theory ’,
a model adduced in the 1960s to explain the unequal relationship
between a developed colonizing north and underdeveloped colonized
south, especially Latin America and Africa. Later twentieth-century
Latin American historians, for instance, have come to view Western
historical scholarship as much more monolithic and alien than did their
nineteenth-century precursors. However, fi erce criticism of the imper-
ial, Westernizing enterprise had rather older, and most often Marxist,
origins, for instance in African and Caribbean ‘diasporic ’ historiogra-
phy. Parallels to the early twentieth-century Indian redeployment of
European historical methods against British colonialism can be found
in the writings of the Trinidadian historian – politician Eric Williams
(1911 –81) and in Williams ’ one-time teacher C. L. R. James. With an
intellectual parentage going back to Michelet (whose sympathetic
treatment of the French Revolution he much admired), James offered
in The Black Jacobins (1938) a Marxist analysis of the Haitian slave
revolt of the late eighteenth century and its interconnection with con-
temporary events in France. Revisiting his book in the early 1960s, in
the wake of Fidel Castro ’ s successful revolution in Cuba but despairing
of much of the rest of the West Indies (still dominated by wealthy white
minorities, American-backed dictators and cooperative black middle

/
History Wars, Revisionism, ‘Memory’ and ‘History’ 271

classes), James anticipated the Subaltern critique by nearly two dec-

ades, declaring that little had changed in the teaching of history since
the European withdrawal, since it was still a propaganda tool of ruling
elites rather than a means of grappling honestly with the past.
A Norwegian Africanist, Finn Fuglestad (b. 1942), made a similar
point with respect to African historiography, asserting that the
response of his colleagues to Hugh Trevor-Roper ’ s notorious provoca-
tion (see above, p. 260) had fallen into the ‘trap’ of agreeing with

Trevor-Roper that only ‘purposive movement ’ in history was worthy

of study, thereby unwittingly validating his Eurocentric views and
furthering the imposition of a Western-style historiography on cultures
with a very different relation to the past.

History Wars, Revisionism and the Problematic Relations

of ‘Memory’ and ‘History’

In its most extreme versions postmodernism hearkens back to

Renaissance Pyrrhonism in its radical denial of the fi xity of any historical
meaning, the existence of any external reality beyond language and the
impossibility of making ‘true ’ statements about the past. It is a variant of
what historians have for a very long time called ‘revisionism ’, with one
important difference: unlike mainstream revisionist historians, who
debate particular interpretations of events but generally share
a common vocabulary and set of reference points (usually key events,
individuals or structures), postmodernists question the very parameters
within which meaningful argument can occur. A conclusion derived
from this – that any interpretation of history is no more or less valid
than another – while seemingly liberal, also opens the door to the
legitimation of morally repugnant positions such as Holocaust denial.
These are positions that most postmodernists would presumably not
wish to claim, and a compromise response (articulated by Hayden
White) is that the fact of the Holocaust is beyond dispute, but its mean-
ing will shift as it is viewed over time from different perspectives and in

light of current concerns such as the fl

Palestinian– Israeli con ict.
The historicity of the Holocaust – its occurrence as opposed to its
fi
signi cance – has come to the fore in recent years through a number of
celebrated cases which had virtually nothing to do with postmodern
theorizing, perhaps most notoriously the libel suit brought in the
1990s by Holocaust denier David Irving (b. 1938), a proli fic writer

/
272 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

outside the academy, against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt

(b. 1947). Lipstadt had accused Irving of wilful selectivity, misreading
and distortion of evidence to support his theories. The ensuing civil trial
involved the historian Richard Evans (b. 1947) and a team of graduate
students scrutinizing Irving ’s research intensively, the results of which
were the utter demolition of Irving ’s arguments and a resounding vindi-
cation of Lipstadt and her publisher.
Holocaust denial is an egregious, hot-button example of what is at
issue when perceptions of the past, heavily freighted with moral views
of right and wrong, come into con flict with historians ’ sense of their
right to ‘tell the truth as they see it ’ – something that has been a tension
in historiography virtually as long as there have been historians. Irving,
and Holocaust deniers generally, rarely appeal to postmodernism or
relativism in formulating their arguments: it is not a matter, in such
cases, that their view may be as valid as the next person’ s, so much as
asserting that the ‘ facts’ as they see them support an alternative ‘truth ’
that should displace publicly held orthodoxy. (Recent US politics, com-
plete with the phrases ‘ alternative facts’ and ‘ fake news’, suggests that
such views are, disturbingly, more widely held than one would like to
believe.) In the Irving – Lipstadt case, historical research was adduced to
explode Irving ’s arguments, reveal their evidentiary flimsiness and
methodological flaws, and thereby sink his claim to having been
libelled. Irving claimed to be telling the truth and practising proper,
document-based historical method; the defendants and their expert
witness accused him of deliberate sins of distortion, omission and
manipulation of evidence. But other cases of prominent historiogra-
fl
phical con ict are often less clear-cut. This can be because the issues
themselves are more ambiguous and (marginally) less loaded, or
because the evidence is more equivocal. These also involve con fl icts
between historians ’ statements about the past and public perceptions of
what actually happened. The difference is that in these cases, the
historians themselves, often in signi ficant numbers, are either badly
divided on the evidence and how to interpret it, or are ranged against
powerful extra-professional interests: government, veterans ’ groups
and nationalist or religious movements.
As noted in earlier chapters, public disagreement over history and
fl
especially over its in uence in education is not especially new, having
been an issue in some of the nation-building debates of nineteenth-
century Europe and Latin America. University and especially school

/
History Wars, Revisionism, ‘Memory’ and ‘History’ 273

textbooks have been a site of ideological con fl ict for well over a century
as, even in democratic regimes, both government agendas and public
sensibilities change. In India during the late 1970s, several historians
were criticized by the government of the day for being ‘soft’ on Islam’s
history in India and insuf fi ciently pro-Hindu. Islamic regimes have been
similarly tough on historians seen as critical of or blasphemous towards,
revered figures such as the Prophet Muhammad. The governing regime
of Recep Tayyip Erdo ğan in Turkey conducted an academic purge
following a failed coup in 2016, and as recently as spring 2017 was
pursuing two historians accused of denigrating the memory of Turkey ’s
modern founder Atatürk (somewhat oddly, given Erdo ğan’s apparent
wish to undo much of Atatürk ’s secularist reforms).
The 1980s and 1990s saw a growing number of such episodes
around the world. In Canada, a 1992 television series on the Second
World War, which questioned the necessity of the Allies ’ intensive
bombing campaign, enraged veterans, leading to the programme’s
producers and writers being condemned in Parliament. More recently,
an exhibit at the new Canadian War Museum has in fl amed passions
once again, with veterans complaining about various aspects of its
representation of the Second World War, such as the depiction of the
bombing campaign, or the display of paintings showing Canadian
soldiers engaged in atrocities. Museums, because of their wide accessi-
bility to the public, many of whom will never read a history book, are
especially vulnerable to popular criticism of the ways in which they
present the past. They are highly visual, but their selection of exhibits,
fi
and the highly simpli ed, brief descriptions they must provide, can
easily provoke reaction if the subject discussed has anything to do
with a controversial past event. This need not be a recent episode:
plans in various parts of the world to mark the five hundredth anniver-
sary of Columbus ’ 1492 voyage were highly polarizing, with critics
finding nothing to celebrate in the conquest and depopulation of the
Americas. More often than not, however, the troublesome events are of
more recent vintage, with living survivors leading the charge, as in the
Canadian cases. These controversies fall into the grey zone between
memory and history. A famous example occurred in the United States
in 1994 around a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The suggestion in the exhibit – that the decision to drop the bomb was
morally complex and perhaps even unnecessary – aroused the fury of

/
274 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

US Air Force veterans and conservative politicians. In vain its curators

tried to tack between creating an exhibit that would make veterans ‘feel
good ’ and one that could also discuss the long-term legacy of the
creation and use of atomic weapons. Unsuccessful attempts followed
to rewrite the historical script, and by the time the affair was finished,
advisory committee members had quit in protest against the watering
down of scholarly standards, and the Director of the National Air and
Space Museum had resigned. In the end, the exhibit itself was cancelled
in early 1995.
Such controversies are not limited to museums. Occasionally, aca-
demic historiography, most of the time safe within its collegiate
cloister, finds itself uncomfortably under the public spotlight.
The above-mentioned German Historikerstreit is one such example.
The Australian ‘History Wars’ are another. These began with that
country ’s 1988 bicentennial and continue three decades later.
The Australian con fl icts also had a museums aspect, but went well
beyond this to include a wider range of issues and historical media.
The ‘ wars’ pitted liberal and left-of-centre historians against their
ideological opponents both within the profession and outside, the
Liberal– Nationalist coalition government of Prime Minister John
Howard becoming an active participant. In the wake of his 1996
electoral victory, Howard himself denounced what the nationalist
historian Geoffrey Blainey (b. 1930) called ‘Black Armband History ’,
an ‘insidious ’ development in Australian political life that seeks ‘ to
rewrite Australian history in the service of a partisan political cause ’.
Various historians had for some time been painting a rather critical
picture of the treatment of the aboriginals by nineteenth-century
whites. The fear that this was going to place Australia in the same
league as other countries with genocidal histories, along with com-
parisons to the Holocaust, induced sharp reaction. Historians such
as Keith Windschuttle (b. 1942, a one-time leftist turned conserva-
tive, and also an outspoken critic of postmodernism and feminism)
weighed in with alternative explanations of depopulation such as
disease and internecine violence, purporting to demonstrate that
the numbers of aboriginal dead at white hands had been exaggerated
by propaganda, and attacking opponents ’ apparent reliance on
aboriginal oral tradition. One Australian journalist claimed that
the school history curriculum had been hijacked by left-wing, politi-
cally correct ideologues. He wanted it back with the ‘community ’ to

/
History Wars, Revisionism, ‘Memory’ and ‘History’ 275

whom it belonged – showing no awareness of the fact that the

community itself was hardly a homogeneous entity.
The Australian controversy involved a systematic attempt by
a democratically elected government and the conservative press to
limit discussion, and to redress the perceived liberal – leftist bias of the
profession and the in fl uence of special interests. One may agree or
disagree with the perspective and at the same time worry about the
control of textbooks as a worldwide threat to open historical discourse
and to the training of students to think critically about the past. Yet the
metaphor of ‘past-as-property ’ is not, in itself, entirely misplaced,
raising, as it does, ethical issues that ought at least to be re ected fl
upon. What many of these disputes come down to is a variant of the
questions ‘Who owns the past? ’ or ‘Whose history is it, anyway? ’
Do members of groups of different kinds have a stronger or even an
exclusive claim to be the authentic historians of their common past?
Why should the alternative views of outsiders be permitted to ‘steal the
voices’ of the dead? Should even sympathetic outsiders be permitted to
capitalize on past injustice and misery in order to sell books and achieve
career advancement? Are some episodes – the Holocaust, for instance –
fi
so horri c and beyond the bounds of normal human experience that
they are simply indescribable historically? And what of the con flict
between the personal recollections of participants and the evidence
used by historians: does Major Smith’s right, as a decorated
Falklands War veteran, to his own and his peers ’ view of the war,
trump Professor Jones ’ academic freedom to use evidence to construct
an interpretation contrary to Smith ’ s?
Related questions apply to almost any history that is de fined in terms
of a particular group: to what degree must one be of that group in order
to be able to study and render an opinion on its past? Can men
legitimately do women’s history, and can a white man research native
or African-American history? Several white historians of slavery were
attacked by black scholars in the 1960s and early 1970s: in a tragic
incident, a sympathetic young white historian, Robert Starobin (d.
1971) was driven to suicide after being publicly humiliated by black
speakers at a convention. The Haitian ethnohistorian Michel-Rolph
Trouillot (1949 – 2012) once recalled teaching a class on the Black
Experience in the Americas, during which a young woman had asked
why he made the class read ‘all those white scholars. What can they
know about slavery? Where were they when we were jumping off the

/
276 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

boats?’ Scholars of race differ on this question: members of the

Subaltern School, and Edward Said, have resisted the notion that the
study of oppression is exclusively the property of the oppressed.
Others, as Anna Green and Kathleen Troup noted in a recent anthol-
ogy, regard attempts by liberal outsiders to represent that which they
haven’t experienced as ill-founded at best, and at worst a further form
of colonization through cultural appropriation. Is ‘integration ’ of the

untold histories of the marginal and conquered into the ‘main stream’

nothing more than yet another form of cultural assimilation – a variant

of Spivak’ s ‘epistemic violence ’?
From this perspective, the indigenous peoples of ‘settler’ colonial

nations (in North and South America, Polynesia and Australasia prin-
cipally), as well as European populations such as the Sinti or Roma,
have a special claim on our historical consciences. Few subjugated
populations have suffered the same degree of demographic devastation
as have aboriginals, along with the purging or marginalization of their
beliefs and traditions about the past – to say nothing of the general
misunderstanding and mischaracterization of those beliefs. Pre-contact
indigenous populations, as we saw in Chapter 3, relied heavily, if not
entirely, on pictorial and oral sources, and their historical narratives
appeared to text-obsessed white observers as more fantastic myth than
concrete reality. The four centuries after Cortés did little to alter this
view, and in 1915 the anthropologist Robert Lowie argued that
‘[American] Indian tradition is historically worthless ’. We have come

a long way since then, but there is an equal danger in the opposite
viewpoint, which imposes European categories on indigenous records
fi
that super cially resemble, but are fundamentally different from, our
own, and attempts to make them into the same kind of history, with the
same purposes, that we commonly practise. An example of the latter
fallacy occurred when a white scholar, Helen Blish, argued that Amos
Bad Heart Bull’ s (c. 1868 – 1913) sketchbooks on the Oglala Sioux were
evidence that his purpose was clearly the same as Herodotus ’ – that he
was ‘attempting to preserve the record of the life of a people ’ and
‘consequently earns the name historian ’. Bad Heart Bull probably had

several different intentions, some of which do loosely resemble those of

Herodotus (and indeed, rather more like Sima Qian, he was continuing
a function his father had exercised for the tribe). But it is doubtful that
he was emulating the ancient Greek pattern, even unconsciously, or
that he would have seen the posthumous bestowal of ‘the name

/
History Wars, Revisionism, ‘Memory’ and ‘History’ 277

fi
historian ’ as a desirable honori c. In fact, Bad Heart Bull left his
sketchbook to his sister, and it was buried with her when she died,
following Oglala custom, suggesting that the last thing its author had in
mind was the creation of a permanent record. Indigenous history, and
historicity, have received considerable attention, especially from ethno-
historians (often working in anthropology rather than history depart-
ments) over the past generation, with greater sensitivity to its social
functions, which are often of a religious or ritualistic rather than strictly
commemorative or explanatory nature.
Yet a great deal of suspicion remains between the colonized and the
colonizer or the occupied and occupier, manifested in the recent wave
of attempts at ‘truth and reconciliation ’. These questions become even
more complex when dealing with a past still in living memory: Japanese
exploitation of Korean ‘comfort women’; Apartheid-era persecution in
South Africa; the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; and Aboriginal residential
schools in Canada. The history wars in virtually every continent have
heightened awareness of the intimate connection between history and
memory, which has emerged in recent years as a subject of inquiry in its
own right. This has taken various forms, of which perhaps the most
well-known is the analysis of what might be called national ‘memory
cultures’. The work of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs
(1877 –1945), who died in Buchenwald, has been fundamental in the
development of concepts such as ‘collective memory’, ‘social memory’,
‘shared memory’ and so on. There is now a host of works on the

subject, as well as a journal devoted to it ( History and Memory , est.

1989), and memory has provided a new point of intersection for history
with philosophy, anthropology, psychology and sociology. The study
of memory has increasingly crossed agendas with postmodernism,
particularly with respect to ‘traumatic’ episodes of the past such as
the Holocaust, which signals not the continuity of History beloved
since the eighteenth century but its discontinuities, ruptures and radical
turns, emphasized alike in Foucault ’s ‘archaeologies’ of knowledge and
in contemporary interest in recapturing the ‘sublime ’ aspect of histor-
ical experience, a direct, powerful, emotive and even overwhelming
connection with the past that works against the cautious, ‘objective’
distance most historians have preferred to maintain since the end of
Romanticism.
There have been useful studies on the signi fi cance of the destruction
or wholesale removal of archival material on ‘ community ’ memory.

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278 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

It might be assumed that every modern nation has a strong national

memory, in the sense of shared beliefs about what happened in recent
decades, and indeed in more remote times, and what it means. This
does not, however, appear to be the case. In France, Pierre Nora (b.
1931) has emphasized the signi ficance of lieux de mémoire , literally
‘sites of memory ’, in promoting a robust sense of the past. These are

locations scattered around the countryside, or in cities, marking parti-

cular events. They may be as localized as a war memorial, church or
fi
statue, or as national or global as a celebrated battle eld such as
Waterloo or Gettysburg; and they can be man-made or natural.
The key feature that these sites have in common is association with
an event or chain of events in the past. Moreover, much of the remem-
bered past has, over time, been rather more based on locality or com-
munity than nation, where it has intermixed with oral tradition,
something that the travelling antiquaries and missionaries of the early
modern era knew very well.
The precise relation between memory and history is ambiguous,
and consideration of it often circles back to other and older metho-
dological issues such as the relative value of written and oral sources,
or the effectiveness of oral history as a means to capture recollections
of the past from those who lived through it before they die. The most
recent fi ve or six decades prior to a historian ’s present have been of
considerable interest at various times, and here ‘oral history ’ has
come into its own, especially in dealing with the large majority of
persons, often of working-class background, who will never commit
their experiences to paper. Although it shares some features in com-
mon, modern oral history is to be distinguished from the study of
oral tradition that we have seen in this and earlier chapters (though
the two are sometimes grouped together as ‘oral historiography ’).
Oral tradition deals with more remote periods beyond the memory of
persons still living, and thus crossing multiple generations. Oral
history, in contrast, is a set of methodologies, mainly re fined in the
1960s and 1970s, for interviewing human subjects and extracting
from them their personal recollections about particular events in
history through which they lived, or simply recording their descrip-
tions of their own past lives and experiences. Although open to some
of the same objections as oral tradition, in particular the natural
human tendency to see one ’s own past through the prism of inter-
vening times, or simply to misremember, oral history now has a well-

/
Conclusion 279

established set of standards or ‘best practices’ for accurately and

ethically coaxing testimony from living human beings. A number of
important archives of oral interviews have been created around the
world to preserve the testimony of particular groups – Holocaust
survivors for example, as captured in the hundreds of hours of inter-
views conducted by Claude Lanzmann (1925 – 2018) for his 1985
film, Shoah – before their voices are permanently silenced. It can

even be argued that this is the only thoroughly truthful way to

represent something so fi
horri c as the Holocaust. The Israeli-
American historian Saul Friedländer (b. 1932), an early exponent
of psychohistory, has proposed that the Nazi Final Solution was so
distinctive and sui generis in both intention and implementation that
it resists either narrative representation or even attempts at ‘histor-
icization ’. But that sentiment will not likely endure once the event has
faded entirely from living memory, as it will within one or two more
decades.

Conclusion
Commenting on the writings of Michel Foucault in 1979, the intellec-
tual historian Allan Megill (b. 1947) observed that while the French
writer ought not to be taken seriously ‘as a historian’ (in the sense of
someone committed to representing the past wie es eigentlich gewesen),
he needed to be taken seriously ‘as an indication of where history now
stands’. Megill went further, noting that ‘ Even as orthodox historio-
graphy has been expanding the range of its subject matter and render-
ing its methodology more and more technical and sophisticated, two
countermovements have been occurring: the higher intellectual foun-
dations of history have been crumbling, and its accessibility and imme-
diacy have been declining.’ A generation later, these tendencies have if
anything hastened in a post-Cold War, digital age.
This chapter has traversed a great deal of ground. But despite its
length, it has in temporal terms addressed only a fraction of the entire
period covered by this book. That is a re fl ection of contemporaneity – it
describes a historiographical world very much with us, unlike the
culture of Ranke, or Gibbon, or Motoori Norinaga, much less that of
Ibn Khaldun. The comparable historical culture of antiquity is by this
standard incredibly remote, though in fact many readers of this book
will know much more of Herodotus and Tacitus than they do of many

/
280 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

of the more recent names, especially those from outside the European
tradition of historiography. In part this is because we stand at the end
of a much longer period through most of which there were relatively
few historians, and the surviving names from the most remote times
fi
have had the bene t of long circulation and familiarity. One wonders
how many of the names mentioned in the present chapter (a minuscule
fraction of the notables who could be referenced) will have such long-
evity. And that raises two bigger questions: first, what, if any is the
future of these assorted sub- fields and sub-sub- fi elds of history;
fi
and second, is there a risk that, after twenty- ve or so centuries of
increasing historicity (and most recently, an increasingly fragmented
historicity), we have simply exhausted both the past and our capacity to
understand or even take interest in it? Are we close, in other words, to
‘the end of history ’ ? In our final chapter we will attempt an answer.

QUESTIONS F OR DISCUSSION
1. Are some historical topics more likely to create controversy than
others? What are some of the things that have got historians into
trouble over the past six or seven decades?
2. Do you accept the assertions of some postmodernists that (a) there is
no ascertainable objective truth about the past that can be dis-
cerned; (b) that history is essentially indistinguishable from litera-
ture – and that the historical act of telling a story in and of itself
distorts the actual reality of the past?
3. What are some of the roles that history has played in the ‘ decoloni-
zation ’ of the world since the Second World War? Do you accept the
notion that mainstream academic history has been an important
tool both for the imposition of empires and for their liberation?
fl
4. Can history play a role in the ‘reconciliation ’ of formerly con icting
nations or between rulers and historically marginalized populations?
5. In what ways does history interact with ‘ collective memory’?
In what ways has the academic sense of ‘what actually happened ’
fl
con icted with popular or of ficial beliefs about this?
6. Is history now more fragmented into specializations than at any
time in the past? Has there ever been a time when the study of the
past was more cohesive than now, or when there was greater con-
sensus as to appropriate subjects?

/
Further Reading 281

7. How would you evaluate the virtues of microhistory compared

with national history? What about the weaknesses of each?
8. Why is Marxist historiography nearly dead in some countries and
alive and well in others?
9. How have disciplines outside history interacted with it in recent
fi
decades and what have been the bene ts? What are the challenges
of practising ‘interdisciplinary ’ history?
10. How important is it that historians be members of the commu-
nities or groups they are studying? Can or should a white
scholar write about black history? Can a man write women ’s
history?

Further Reading
General

Ferro, Marc, The Use and Abuse of History, or, How the Past is Taught to
Children, trans. N. Stone and A. Brown, rev. edn (New York and

London, 2003)

Green, Anna and Kathleen Troup (eds), The Houses of History: A Critical
Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (New York and
Manchester, 1999)
Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scienti c fi
Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT, 1997)

Lambert, Peter and Phillipp fi

Scho eld (eds), Making History: An

Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline (London and

New York, 2004)

Maza, Sarah, Thinking about History (Chicago, IL, 2017)
Schneider, Axel and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Oxford History of Historical
Writing, Vol. 5: Historical Writing Since 1945 (Oxford, 2011)

The Annales Historians; Microhistory

Brooks, James F., Christopher R. N. DeCorse and John Walton (eds), Small
Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory (Santa Fe,

NM, 2008)
Burguière, André, The Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY,
2009)
Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School,

–
1929 2014, 2nd edn (Stanford, CA, 2015)

Clark, Stuart (ed.), The Annales School (London, 1999)

/
282 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

Fink, Carole, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989)

Magnússon, Sigurður Gyl fi and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory?
Theory and Practice (Abingdon, 2013)

Tendler, Joseph, Opponents of the Annales School (Basingstoke and

New York, 2013)

History and the Social Sciences

Barzun, Jacques, Clio and the Doctors: Psychohistory, Quanto-history, and

History (Chicago, IL, 1974)
Burke, Peter, History and Social Theory, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY, 2005)

Fogel, R. W. and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History
(New Haven, CT, 1983)
Hempel, Carl G., ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of
Philosophy 39.2 (1942): 35–48

Mahoney, James and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (eds), Comparative Historical

Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge and New York, 2003)
Monkkonen, Eric H. (ed.), Engaging the Past: The Uses of History across the
Social Sciences (Durham, NC and London, 1994)

Roseberry, William R., Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture,

History, and Political Economy (Rutgers, NJ, 1989)
Thomas, Keith, ‘History and Anthropology’, Past and Present 24.1 (1963):

3–24

History under Dictatorships and Authoritarian Regimes

Baets, Antoon de, Censorship of Historical Thought: A World Guide,

1945–2000 (Westport, CT, 2002)

Barber, John, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928 –1932 (Basingstoke, 1981)
Berger, Stefan, The Search for Normality: National Historical Consciousness
in Germany since 1800 (London, 1997)

Brunnbauer, Ulf (ed.), (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast

Europe after Socialism (Münster, 2004)
Dirlik, Arif, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography
in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, CA, 1978)

Enteen, George M., The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M. N. Pokrovskii and

the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park, PA, 1978)
Feuerwerker, Albert (ed.), History in Communist China (Cambridge, MA,

1968)
Knowlton, James and Truett Cates (trans.), Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?
Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy

/
Further Reading 283

Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ,

1993)
Low, A. D., The Third Reich and the Holocaust in German Historiography:

Toward the Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s (Boulder, CO, 1994)

Maier, Charles S., The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German
National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988)

Markwick, Roger D., Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of

Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (Basingstoke and New York,

2001)
McGregor, Katharine E., History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the

Construction of Indonesia’s Past (Honolulu, 2007)

Nozaki, Yoshiko, War Memory, Nationalism, and Education in Postwar

Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and

Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges (London, 2008)

Plokhy, Serhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the

Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005)

Saaler, Sven, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: The History Textbook
Controversy and Japanese Society (Munich, 2005)

Schneider, Laurence A., Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism

and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley, CA, 1971)

Schönwälder, Karen, ‘The Fascination of Power: Historical Scholarship in

Nazi Germany’, History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 133–53

Wang, Q. Edward and Georg G. Iggers (eds), Marxist Historiographies:

A Global Perspective (Abingdon and New York, 2016)

History from Below

Eley, Geoff, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society
(Ann Arbor, MI, 2005)
Hill, Christopher, R. H. Hilton and E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present:

Origins and Early Years ’, Past and Present 100 (1983): 3–14
Hobsbawm, Eric, On History (London, 1997)
Kaye, Harvey J., The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis
(Cambridge and Oxford, 1984)

The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History (New York,

1992)
Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)

Varieties of Intellectual History

Burke, Peter, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004)

/
284 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

Friedländer, Saul, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the

Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York, 1978)
Gay, Peter, Freud for Historians (New York, 1985)

Grafton, Anthony, ‘The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000

and Beyond’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67.1 (2006): 1–32
Hunt, Lynn, ‘Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Historical Thought ’, in

Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (eds), A Companion to Western

Historical Thought (Oxford, 2002), 337–56
Kelley, Donald R., The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History
(Burlington, VT, 2002)

Kren, George M. and Leon H. Rappoport (eds), Varieties of Psychohistory

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976)
Loewenberg, Peter, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, 2nd
edn (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996)

McMahon, Darrin M. and Samuel Moyn (eds), Rethinking Modern

European Intellectual History (Oxford, 2014)
Megill, Allan, ‘Intellectual History and History’, Rethinking History 8.4
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Moyn, Samuel and Andrew Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History

(New York, 2013)
Nakamura, Hajime, Parallel Developments: A Comparative History of Ideas
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Pernau, Margrit and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds), Global Conceptual

History: A Reader (London and New York, 2016)
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Psychohistory (New York, 1973)

Whatmore, Richard, What is Intellectual History? (Malden, MA and

Cambridge, 2016)

From Women ’s History to Histories of Gender and Sexuality

(See also titles listed in previous chapter)

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Beard, Mary Ritter, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and

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Feminism (Philadelphia, PA, 2006)

/
Further Reading 285

Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on

Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York and

Cambridge, MA, 1991)

Carroll, Berenice (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and

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Downs, Laura Lee, Writing Gender History, 2nd edn (London and

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Duby, Georges and Michelle Perrot (gen. eds), A History of Women in the
West , 5 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1992–4)

Foley, Susan K., Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference

(Basingstoke, 2004)
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(Oxford, 1993)

McIntosh, Marjorie K., Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620

(Cambridge and New York, 2005)
Meriwether, Margaret Lee, A Social History of Women and Gender in the
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Morgan, Sue (ed.), The Feminist History Reader (London, 2005)

Nadell, Pamela S. and Kate Haulman (eds), Making Women’s Histories:
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Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History, 30th anniversary
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the Ivory Tower (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008)

Zinsser, Judith, History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (New York, 1993)

/
286 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

Postwar African Historiography

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fl
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/
Further Reading 287

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288 Transitions: From the Inter-War Period to the Present

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fi
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/
Further Reading 289

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fl
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