捍卫历史

• ウツビョウ

  2023-11-01
  If unpredictable and uncontrollable forces were shaping the present, itseemed, then the previous belief of historians that they could undestand by a simple process of induction the forces that shaped the past now seemed dangerously naive.
• ウツビョウ

  2023-10-31
  "Flaubert once commented," as Pemble remarks, "that writing history was like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.Ranke it seemed was doing the opposite."
• 一颗咖啡豆

  2014-01-23
  从1970年代中期以来，大屠杀否认这活动的广度与强度日益剧烈，这反映了后现代主义思想气候的猖獗，尤其是在美国，这里的学者愈来愈强烈地否认文本有任何固定的意义，认为意义是由读者赋予的，在美国，诘责西方理性主义传统的做法蔚然成风。伴随着否认真想观念有任何正当性的行为，在利普塞特看来，这些情况“已经产生了一种默许对历史事件的意义进行质疑的氛围”，使得很难“断言历史研究中存在‘不可擅越的雷区’（off limits）……此种观感一直在社会中产生——不仅是在大学校园——使得以下之言难以启齿：“这无关乎理念，这是故意寻衅滋事。‘”利普塞特认为，此种观感“在最坏的情况下，是在为解构主义的历史学推波助澜。没有事实、没有事件，以及历史之任何面向不会有固定的意义或内容，任何真理都可以被重构，任何事实都可以被重铸，不再存在终极的历史真实”。
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  The theory of history is too important a matter to be left to the theoreticians. Practicing historians may not have a God-given monopoly of pronouncing sensibly on such matters, but they surly have as much right to try to think and write about them as anybody else, and the experience of actually having done historical research ought to mean that they have something to contribute which those who have not shared this experience do not.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  Of course, very few historians in practice have possessed the necessary expertise to discuss the theory of history at a level that a trained philosopher would consider acceptable. On the other hand, the level of abstraction at which most studies of historical epistemology operate is so theoretical, so far moved from actual problems experienced by working historians, that the subject in general is of little practical relevance to what historians actually do.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  History is an empirical discipline, and it is concerned with the content of knowledge rather than its nature.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  His view is shared by William H. McNeill, of the University of Chicago, who used the occasion of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1986 to castigate his colleagues for practicing a "historiography that aspires to get closer and closer to the documents - all the documents and nothing but the documents" - because this meant "merely moving closer and closer to incoherence, chaos, and meaninglessness." Coming from a historian whose lifelong specialism had been in the history of whole world from the beginnings of humanity to the present, and whose acquaintance with original documents was correspondingly limited, this view was perhaps unsurprising, if somewhat tactlessly expressed.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  Here Munslow seems to use "evidence" in the sense of "sources". Elsewhere he cites a well-known history of America which states that President James Madison was "Small of stature... light of weight...bald of head, and weak of voice." The implication is that he was a weak president (though why this should be so is unclear; one can think of many men with bald heads who were not at all weak, such as Julius Caesar; many powerful men who were light of weight and small in physique, such as Napoleon; and many strong leaders who had feeble speaking voices, such as Bismarck).
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  As three American historians have recently pointed out in their reflections on the current state of the debate, "History is much more than a branch of letters to be judged only in terms of its literary merit." If it were so judged, of course, it would generally found wanting. [...] Most history books are hopelessly unreadable. [...] (Historians) usually lack the kind of literary ability that would make their work rival that of major poets or novelists. If they had it, no doubt most of them would be writing poems or novels.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  No doubt Knowles was right to argue that historians should not engage in explicit moral judgments on the past, an argument which was convenient indeed for him as a Catholic monk dealing with English monasticism in the 15th and early 16th centuries, when monks and nuns alike had been widely condemned by Protestant historians for all kinds of supposedly immoral behavior.
• 野次馬

  2012-10-21
  Typically, what British empiricists admired in Namier was the thoroughness of his scholarship; they more or less ignored his Freudianism as an embarrassing but excusable Continental heresy.
• ちゅ、多様性。

  2018-06-09
  But in truth, ever since the early nineteenth century, one of the main purposes of historians has been to find the strange in the familiar, to increase the distance between ourselves and the past.