Alun Munslow

The New History

Introduction: What is History? Section One: Epistemology and Historical Knowing 1. The History of Historical Thinking 2. Inference, Causation, Agency and Meaning Section Two: Referentiality, Evidence and Practice 3. Evidence, Reality and Correspondence 4. Objectivity, Truth and Relativism in History Section Three: Theory and Concept 5. The History of Social Theory 6. Constructing Histories Section Four: Writing the Past as History 7. Narrative and Representation 8. History as Historiography Conclusion Guide to Further Reading Notes

History and Biography: An Editorial Comment

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Andrew Carnegie and the Discourse of Cultural Hegemony

Can cultural change be explained as a function of discourse ? A discourse is any language territory, whether a mode of thinking, talking or writing, which presupposes shared assumptions between its producer and consumer. This means that the relationship between language and ideology is dependent upon the nature of a particular discourse. This paper offers comments on this question with reference to the formation of the post-bellum American business culture and its ideology by examining the written works of one of its leading exponents, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie1. Working from the assumption that this business culture was serving the interests of a new ruling group at the expense of subordinate Populist-Producer ones, does an evaluation of the business mans discourse reveal how it helped create that ideological domination ?2 Both Hayden White and Michel Foucault have claimed that culture can

Why should historians write about the nature of history (rather than just do it)

Why do historians write (express?) history? Via a personal introduction the author explores the nature of memory and locates Alison Landsbergs book (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, 2004) within the historians understanding and engagement with memory, intertextuality, and epistemic choice. Locating Landsbergs book as unique within the exploration of memory by means of a comparison with R. G. Collingwood and contemporary examples of historical expression, inevitably raises questions concerning truth, what it is and where it comes from.

Film and history: Robert A. Rosenstone and History on Film/Film on History

Through a reading of Robert A. Rosenstones book History on Film/Film on History (Pearson, 2006) it seems clear that Rosenstones contribution to the contemporary understanding of history as more than textual mode of expression is without peer. Rosenstones epistemic scepticism has squarely confronted conventional historical thinking and practice, elevating issues of narrative construction, authorialism, point of view, and experimentalism to the forefront of concerns for the contemporary historian. Drawing telling parallels between conformist, conventional and intellectually conservative textual expression and film, Rosenstone has almost single-handedly ‘turned’ the historical profession toward a new understanding of how we can engage with the past—the filmic turn. Key concepts like meaning, interpretation and explanation have been radically rethought through his work.

Presenting and/or re-presenting the past

In a commentary on Philip Ethingtons paper it is acknowledged that historians apparently do tend to ignore time believing they have little reason to tinker, it being a concept tangential to their main interests. But this is not, in fact, the case. It might be through inadvertence and not thinking about time in the way Ethington does in his estimable paper, but historians are, of course, centrally concerned with time. Quoting the historian of the American frontier Frederick Jackson Turner as a paradigmatic case it is suggested that historians should engage with a range of theorists who have variously discussed time such as McTaggart, Dilthey, Rorty, Ricoeur, Genette, and Chatman, concluding that the fictive understanding of time demands the attention of historians.

Rethinking Metahistory: The Historical imagination in nineteenth century Europe

Deploying the autobiographical form in this essay, Alun Munslow addresses both a reading of the nature of the text Metahistory and offers a personal contextualised history of his reading and deployment of the text in his own work.

On ‘Presence’ and conversing with the past: do historians communicate with the past?

In endeavouring to evaluate how historians communicate with the past, I argued in this short presentation at the 2012 Social History Society Conference that the epistemology of empiricism, inference, colligation and representationalism ultimately fails to deliver meaning and explanation. The reason is because the common figure of ‘a conversation’ with the past occludes the fictive nature of the history/past engagement and which cast substantial doubt on the mechanism of conversational knowledge acquisition which assumes that (1) the inference as to what the empirical sources might mean can be accurately delivered in the ‘history text’, but as a result (2) the ‘truth’ and (3) ‘objectivity’ in, and (4) the ‘historical interpretation’, are in no way compromised by (5) the ‘narrative delivery’ of the presumed most likely history of the past.

Genre and history/historying

This article defines the historians genre decision as an epistemological choice. I argue that this genre choice is between ‘reconstructionist’, ‘constructionist’, ‘deconstructionist’ or ‘postist’ orientations to the nature of history. The consequences of the historians epistemic choice are then demonstrated in the forms of the history they produce. The conclusion is that historians do not discover the form and hence the meaning of the past. Rather they demonstrate how their epistemic assumption produces different forms of and meanings for (their) history.

Getting on with history

A significant part of the HE agenda in Britain, Europe and the USA at the present time is employability. In history programmes this usually takes the form of placements, modules in essay writing, literacy, team working and so on. But there is more than this. There is also the connection between these activities and the skills and qualities of mind expected from the history graduate. The Quality Assurance Agency History Benchmarking Statements and National Qualifications Framework are forging this link in the UK. The purpose of this paper is to dilate on this and deconstruct the assumptive argument that underpins what is a centrally imposed regime of knowledge acquisition. This paper explores the notion of regimes of knowledge, measurability and the generation of truth cast within (among other things) the supposed practical world discourse of skills and employability. I will argue that this agenda for making historians employable has the consequence(perhaps unintended?) of reinforcing a conception of historical thinking and practice that reduces and de-legitimises fundamental debate over the nature of what history is. Put in stark terms, can epistemologically sceptical historians who, by definition, do not conform and who are not merely intellectually disobedient but disruptive get jobs (especially in HE) and be seen as ‘getting on with history’?