British Politics in Uncertain Times
Alexander123
Video1IntroductionandhistoricalrealityLectureonHistoriography.pptx
British·Politics·in·uncertain·times
Lecture·historiography·
1/ what is historical reality?
2/ introduction to historiography, historicism and historical narrative
3/approaches to historiography
structure
What is historical reality?
What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History? in Journal of Contemporary History
Article by Peter Catterall 1997
What is historical reality?
Walter Benjamin on the concept of history 1940
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
What is historical reality?
Historical reality becomes everything that historical happened – impossible infinite, and impossible to categorise – as storm in Benjamin’s words.
How to we make sense of this? How do we categorise events and eras? How do we decide what to study? When to start and end? What sources to use?
And ultimately how to make historical judgments and explanations?
To answer these questions we have to make choices – we have decide how we are going to study history: what is important, and what is not; what makes things change; what are the important moments of history; and what constitutes a fact and a persuasive argument.
Our process of answering this questions about the study of history is called historiography.
But this is quite a broad term: it can refer to questions of historical method; to metatheoretical choices; or just to accounts of how past historians have written.
