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Rodney's avatar

Philosophy of history aside, just the process of doing historical research is the cat’s meow, especially outside one’s comfort zone. Learning a language(s), spending time in archives, trying to make sense of a world understood only through the mediation of documents, chasing down vague leads, getting to know librarians and archivists, putting it all in your own words, maybe living in a foreign country. No doubt the internet has drilled a hole in the pure *adventure* of historical research.

A tiny melodrama that cracked me up: 1985, I’m in the spectacularly beautiful public library in Bologna doing some research. If you want to copy any documents, there’s one guy standing behind a photocopy machine who is the only one authorized to do it. That’s his job, all day long. People line up at the machine with their stuff, when it’s your turn, you hand it to him and tell him which pages you want copied.

One day he’s standing there but there’s a hand-written sign on a piece of cardboard on his machine that says, “sciopero per forza maggiore” (“on strike due to force majeure”). I ask him what’s going on and he says, “Just a dispute with the boss. Come back tomorrow.”

No lesson in the “laws” of history here and I don’t think my politics would have been any different if I’d followed my brother into construction, but there’s something about just doing history and trying to make sense of it in a serious way that is intrinsically worthwhile and maybe offers some protection against facile, lazy and simplistic bromides. Not enlightenment, for sure, but more than just a pot to piss in.

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Todd's avatar

Historiography should be a much more prevalent field of study than it currently is. I think E.H. Carr encapsulates it best in his work “What Is History?” but of course I’m likely bias as someone who closely relates to 20th century modernist thought.

The act of history (yes, it’s a verb) requires sources, interpretation, and selection. Carr proposes that none of these has specific primacy over the other, so history becomes not only a view into the past, but an expression of the present as well. The historian, through interpretation, makes clear their framework; and through selection, makes clear their objective. Often times both of these work in tandem to reveal a nagging question so important to the present situation.

Carr is Hegelian in a sense. Not that he thinks progress is some objective science, but in that the study and interpretation of history seeks a path toward a kind of progress.

“The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all present thinking is neces- sarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming - something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past.”

- E.H. Carr

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