Table Of ContentAUTHORING THE PAST
Why do you think about and write history as you do?
Collecting together the responses to this question from fifteen of the world’s
foremosthistoriansandtheorists,AuthoringthePastrepresentsapowerfulreflectionon
and intervention in the historiographical field.
Edited by Alun Munslow and presented in concise digestible essays, the collection
covers a broad range of contemporary interests and ideas and offers a rich set of rea-
sonedalternativethoughtsonourculturalengagementwithtimesgoneby.Emerging
from an intensely fertile period of historical thought and practice, Authoring the Past
examines the variety ofapproaches to the discipline that have takenshapeduring this
time and suggests possible future ways of thinking about and interacting with the
past. It provides a unique insight into recent debates on the nature and purpose of
history and demonstrates that when diverse metaphysical and aesthetic choices are
made, the nature of the representation of the past becomes a matter of legitimate
dispute. Students, scholars and practitioners of history will find it a stimulating and
invaluable resource.
Alun Munslow is a founding and UK editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of
Theory and Practice. His recent publications include Narrative and History (2007) and
The Future of History (2010).
AUTHORING THE PAST
Writing and Rethinking History
Edited by
Alun Munslow
Firstpublished2013
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Alun Munslow
1 Writing, Rewriting the Beach: An Essay 7
Greg Dening
2 ‘After’ History 26
Keith Jenkins
3 History is Public or Nothing 39
Alice Kessler-Harris
4 I Am Not a Baseball Historian 53
Steven A. Riess
5 Beyond History 66
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth
6 Practices of Historical Narrative 84
Richard Price
7 More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern 91
Patrick Joyce
8 Rethinking History 105
Frank R. Ankersmit
vi Contents
9 Confessions of a Postmodern (?) Historian 127
Robert A. Rosenstone
10 The Story of My Engagements with the Past 142
Peter Munz
11 In Search of Ariadne’s Thread 153
Beverley Southgate
12 Invitation to Historians 165
C. Behan McCullagh
13 An Intellectual Self-Portrait or the History of a Historian 171
Peter Burke
14 History, the Historian, and an Autobiography 183
Jeremy D. Popkin
15 Invitation to Historians 196
Alexander Lyon Macfie
Glossary 204
Index 210
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ThepublisherwouldliketothankRethinkingHistory:TheJournalofTheoryandPractice
for their kind permission to republish the following articles: ‘Writing, Rewriting the
Beach: An Essay’ – vol. 2 no 2 1998 pp 143–72, ‘After History’ – vol. 3 no 1 1999
pp 7–20, ‘History is Public or Nothing’ – vol. 5 no 1 2001 pp 11–26, ‘I Am Not a
Baseball Historian’ – vol. 5 no 1 2001 pp 27–41, ‘Beyond History’ – vol. 5 no 2
2001 pp 195–215, ‘Practices of Historical Narrative’ – vol. 5 no 3 2001 pp 357–65,
‘More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern’ – vol. 5 no 3 2001 pp 367–82,
‘RethinkingHistory’–vol.7no32003pp413–37,‘ConfessionsofaPostmodern(?)
Historian’ – vol. 8 no 1 2004 pp 149–66, ‘The Story of My Engagements with the
Past’ – vol. 8 no 3 2004 pp 465–78, ‘In Search of Ariadne’s Thread’ – vol. 9 no 1
2005 pp 91–104, ‘Invitation to Historians’ – vol. 12 no 2 2008 pp 273–9,
‘AnIntellectualSelf-Portrait,ortheHistoryofaHistorian’–vol.13no22009pp269–81,
‘History, the Historian, and an Autobiography’ – vol. 14 no 2 2010 pp 287–300,
‘Invitation to Historians’ – vol. 15 no 3 2011 pp 431–9.
INTRODUCTION
Alun Munslow
Thisbookisacollectionofshortessaysbypractitionerhistoriansandhistoricaltheorists
(although this distinction is somewhat arbitrary) who answered the call of the editors
of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice to explain why they think
about and write history as they do. The first Invitation was made in 1998 and since
then the editors havepublished on average one each year.While wehave a varietyof
Invitationswhichdefyeasyclassification,whatseemsclearisthatalltheinviteesmade
eclecticauthorialdecisionsabouthowtheyviewtheconnectionbetweenthecontent
of the past and how they think about the historical form they give to it.
InthisIntroductionIshallnottrytoevaluatewhateachinviteehaswritten.Ioffer
a very brief description for eachInvitation but you will have toreadthemfor yourself
and make of them what you will. However, what I want to do now is offer some
sort of broad conceptual framework for the essays. The title of this collection should
indicate itsnatureandthatwhatisbasictoeach Invitationisthat‘doinghistory’isan
authorial activity. This seems to suggest that the past is always authored as history.
I believe it is.
So,unlikemostothertextsthatdealwithwhathistoriansthinkanddo,thiscollection
doesnotconstituteahandbookofhistoricalmethodsbecausethemostbasicprinciple
of‘historying’isthatitisanauthorialactivity.Sothereis,asonemightexpect,much
discussion among contributors on the nature of their individual authorial engage-
mentswiththetimebeforenowandwhytheybecamehistorians.However,Idonot
believethatitispossibletobuildsomesortofcollectiveego-histoireunderstandingout
of these Invitations in regard to any collective agreement on the nature of history.
But,leavingtheiregosaside(whichinpracticeisofcoursenotpossible),Ithinkall
the invitees took the Invitation as an opportunity to explain why they are engaged
with the time before now and of what kind of understanding they have about the
nature of their engagement with the time before now. Although the act of ‘doing
history’cantellusmuchaboutthepast,ofcourse,itisstillrareforhistorianstoclaim
2 AlunMunslow
to be able to seize its reality in their histories. As invitee and co-founder of the
journal Rethinking History, Robert A. Rosenstone, said elsewhere, historians
knowtoomuchaboutframingimagesandstories,toomuchaboutnarrative, too
much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of
perception,toomuchaboutourownculturalimperativesandbiases,toomuch
about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe
to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page.1
So, there is noprogrammatic structure to this book.It simply comprisesthe thoughts
of fifteen historians who have answered the request in their own words.
Accordingtoconventionalcustomandpracticehistoriansinterprettheirsourcesby
comparing and contrasting them and then locating and explaining the most likely
meaning that is presumed to exist in them. This meaning is widely understood as
being the most likely narrative that is presumed to exist in the series of the causally
connected past events that are examined. This ambition is achieved through the
mechanisms of empiricism, inference and representation. However, the intention in
issuing these Invitations was that the invitees might explain what they do with
and how they think about the past and why this classic empirical, analytical and
representationalist procedure may or may not be followed.
As you will read, few of the invitees addressed why they wanted to know what
happened in the past. At first blush this might seem odd. But is it? Becoming a his-
torian is probably not to be summarized as merely wanting to know what happened
inthepastand–asweshallsee–notnecessarilytoexplainitsmeaningbydeploying
precisely that empirical, analytical and representationalist procedure. Moreover, from
myreadingofthesefifteenInvitationsIdonotseeanyattempttovalorizethediscovery
of the nature of human destiny by learning the lessons of the past. There is, in sum-
mary, little evidence of a desire to generate ‘insights’ that might help us avoid the
‘mistakes of the past’. Doing history is all rather more complex than that.
And perhaps it might seem surprising that there is little effort to defend social
science historying as such. Only three of the invitees actually use the term social
science – the philosopher of history C. Behan McCullagh; Richard Price uses it in
passingtodescribeaphaseinhisgraduatetraining;andStevenRiess,whoistheonly
invitee to note social science historying as a phase he passed through (I would also
describemyownengagementwithsuchapracticeofhistory–aphasebeforemoving
on).OfcoursethismighthavesomethingtodowiththeperiodinwhichtheInvitations
wereissuedandtowhom.Itmustbeacknowledgedthatthesefifteenyearswereprobably
the high tide of the postmodern or multi-sceptical insurrection and social science
historying was not on the journal’s intellectual agenda and hence the Invitations.
So, what criteria prompted an Invitation? The majority of Invitations were issued
by me although two were made by guest editors of a themed issue, as in the case of
Alice Kessler-Harris and Steven A. Riess. Over the years I found that these criteria
were never fixed as they tended to reflect my own writing and other intellectual
interests at the time of the Invitation. This goes some way to explaining what a few
Introduction 3
readers may find to be the idiosyncrasy of the selection of invitees. I should say only
two historians declined an Invitation. In one case it was pressure of time because of
their writing obligations and the other was a professional commitment, viz., being
President of the American Historical Association. I hope that Invitation – which
remains open – will be taken up sooner rather than later.
IfweinsistonhavingarationalefortheInvitations(andthiscollection)itprobably
has at least four elements. The first is that the past fifteen years have been among the
most intellectually fertile periods in historical thinking and practice. The Invitations
were intended to offer an intellectual space to reflect upon and mediate an intensely
fruitful period of historical thinking and practice which was primarily the product of
theriseofsocialsciencehistoryingsincethe1960s/1970s,theintellectualinsurrection
of Hayden White, and the work of other narrativist theorists of history like Maurice
Mandelbaum, W. H. Dray, David Carr, W. B. Gallie, Andrew P. Norman, David
Carr, Louis Mink, Noël Carroll and of course Frank R. Ankersmit. The latter’s
acceptance of an Invitation in the journal is very significant because of his centrality
to the debates on the nature of history since the early 1980s.
And this leads to the second reason for this collection. It is intended to be a
contribution to and a reflection on the force and passion of the recent debates
in rethinking history in terms of theory, practice and understanding the cultural
purposes ofboth upper and lower-case H/history. It seems opportune to offer sucha
collection as this in the hope that it will fall into the hands andthereby influence the
thinking of historians who would not usually read a journal, the aim of which is not
to publish history understood as the epistemologically and representationalist inspired
pursuit of the past. This collection is intended to demonstrate that history is a highly
complex process of authorial insight, invention and experimentation that is not in
thrall to the exclusivity of the understanding that history is wholly an empirical,
analytical and representationalist undertaking.
So, and connectedly, the third reason for publishing this collection is the practical
one of bringing to a wider audience the reflections of a range of significant historical
thinkersandpractitionerswhohave variouslyexaminedtheprocess of‘doing history’
during a period of intense professional self-analysis. Each of the fifteen contributors
reflects carefully on how they and how other historians might engage with the time
beforenow.ButwhatIfindparticularlyinterestingisthevariedandshareduseofthe
concept of ‘story’.
While in all the Invitations there is a strong and highly self-conscious sense of the
complexities in the processes of authoring of ‘the-past-as-history’ all of the invitees
have argued directly that they are creating stories about the time before now. Frank
Ankersmit describes his Invitation as a story. Peter Burke acknowledges that he has
tried to tell ‘the story’ of his intellectual development. Greg Dening is constantly
aware that he is creating a story. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth refers directly to her story
while asking what her true story is and concludes there isn’t one – all we have is
writing. Richard Price evaluates authorialism. Patrick Joyce refers to his story. Alice
Kessler-Harrisreferstoherstory.AlexanderLyonMacfiereferstothestoryofthepast.
C. Behan McCullagh acknowledges he is telling – storying – history. Peter Munz has
