In Defence of History

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For example his chapter headings are similar and his concluding paragraph is a homage to the concluding paragraph in Carr’s book. The gap between reality and representation, including historical reality, historical representation, far from being radical and irremediable, consists only of readily discernible degrees of directness and indirectness. The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. Elton is Evans’ standard-bearer for a hardline empiricism; and right from the start he asserts that “few historians would now defend the hard-line concept of historical objectivity espoused by Elton” and certainly Evans does not agree with Elton that what a historian does is “not a question of interpreting fact but of establishing it” . If you are feeling lost about what the study of history is, if you are puzzled by the recent brouhaha over cultural race theory (and let me clear that for you right away, CRT is not history), if you are revolted by historical revisionism, and why there seems to be always more of it, this is a book for you.

His definition of a historical fact as “something that happened in history and can be verified as such through the traces history has left behind” can be applied effectively to the current debates around ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. Proses pembuktian dan peranan fakta perlu diketengahkan di dalam mana-mana perbincangan historiografi.Tambahan, kita tahu bahawasanya bahasa berkembang selari dengan objek rujukannya (signifier) maka disana faktor ekstra-tekstual tetap ada. Despite the changes and challenges to historical approaches, Evans does not despair of finding truth in history but rather defends the process (as noted in the title). Ranke sebenarnya lebih tepat digambarkan sebagai filologis atau ahli bahasa, dan ini terjelma di dalam penggarisan-penggarisannya terhadap agenda-agenda yang sepatutnya melatari mana-mana perusahaan pengkajian sejarah.

Enjoyable romp through different contemporary approaches to history writing, pitching itself as follow-up/reappraisal of E.Evans’ In Defence of History is an attack on the influence of postmodernism on the practice of history. In this last he has a particularly strong point, since Evans spends a great deal of time deriding the rise of “jargon” during the dominance of social history writing. Postmodernism not only saw itself as the future of history, but as possessing the potential to destroy the empirical study of history. But this, again, is glib, because even is this was Evans intention, he certainly did not stick to that. Agak jarang satu-satu buku sejarah mampu membangkitkan satu-satu persengketaan dengan bahasa penulisan yang begitu tajam dan terang dalam sasaran permusuhannya.