The Future of History

Sexual Relations between British Soldiers and Boer Women: A Methodological Approach

“…135 It therefore has a moral aspect since it propagates an ideology, in the anticipation that their common ideology will be reinforced in the readership. 136 From a postmodern perspective, history is, as J.M. Coetzee put it, 'nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other.…”

“…So Nietzsche's 'perspectivism of knowledge' -the knowing subject as a construct of time, place, discourse and ideology 149 delivers us into the hands of emotionally engaged expressive historians who constitute the past in order to propagate their own particular world view through their story space. 150 For most academic historians this represents an intolerable outcome. Over the years historians have embraced postmodern insights and incorporated them in their own thinking, acknowledging the constitutive role of language in social reality, the intensified need to interrogate sources, since history is seen to function as a legitimating mechanism for exercising power in society, and the contingent nature of the facts revealed by their sources.…”

Wikipedia and history: a worthwhile partnership in the digital era?

“…Certainly they raise questions about the contrived nature of the archive; they question the absences, gaps and silences in the evidence; they question the effectiveness of inductive inferences from the sources; they raise questions about referentiality and representation in reading evidence; and they question the ability to recover the intentionality of authors of primary sources. The emphasis instead is placed on concerns about the structure of knowledge (epistemic scepticism), the nature of being (ontological scepticism) and language and representation (semantic scepticism) (Munslow 2010). In this sense, deconstructive historians understand historians as authors, and place them at the centre of creating history by giving prominence to the aesthetics and structure of the imposed narrative.…”

Reassembling Weber to reveal the-past-as-history in management and organization studies

“…The 'rethink' involved a questioning of the basis of conventional history, focusing on issues of narrative form (Zagorin, 1999), representation (Ankersmit, 1998), ethics (Fay, 2004), aesthetics (Jenkins, 1997b) and the nature of 'the past' distinct and apart from 'history' (Munslow, 2010). The growing recognition of the differences between narrative history and the actuality of the past has significant theoretical implications for the practice of historiography (Iggers, 1997).…”

“…This phase is exemplified in the work of Durepos and Mills (2012b) and Weatherbee et al (2012). Starting with Munslow's (2010) argument that the conflation of the past and history creates 'the-past-as-history', the focus here is on how notions of 'the-past-as-history' come to constitute knowledge; knowledge not simply of the past but of the present.…”