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Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : University of Chicago Press website)


Allan MEGILL, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 304 p.
ISBN 978-0-226-51830-5
ISBN-10: 0-226-51830-2


SUMMARY

In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope oftheir discipline to include many previously neglected topics andperspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, andsexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. Theyhave turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubledrelations between “the West” and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes thesedevelopments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion amonghistorians about what counts as a justified account of the past.

In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of theconfusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, andmemory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence whileaccepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces uponhistorians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of theepistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus andThucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and onto Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.