Title: Historiography and Historical Thought: Current Trends
Abstract: Basic assumptions that have guided Western historiographical thought and practice since the eighteenth century have been increasingly questioned in the last third of the twentieth century. The first of these assumptions held that an objective study of the past was possible and that this study revealed history as a coherent process culminating in the civilization of the modern West. Recent discussions have stressed the literary and imaginative aspects of historical writing that resist the reduction of historical study to a predominantly scientific or scholarly enterprise. Moreover, they have pointed at the function which professional historiography has served in buttressing existing power relations such as the imperialistic sway of the West over non-Western cultures and the domination of men over women. New historical approaches have stressed the multiplicities of histories, the need to replace macro-histories of social processes with micro-histories focusing on the life experiences of little people previously neglected, and the diversity of cultures. Much of this critique has been accepted by practicing historians but not the radical rejection by postmodernist thinkers who have questioned the very possibility of any distinction between fact and fiction and of rational criteria of historical knowledge.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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