What is the point of history? Why has the study of the past been so important for so long? Why History? A History contemplates two and a half thousand years of historianship to establish how very different thinkers in diverse contexts have conceived their activities, and to illustrate the purposes that their historical investigations have served. Whether considering Herodotus, medieval religious exegesis, or twentieth-century cultural history, at the core of this work is the way that the present has been conceived to relate to the past. Alongside many changes in technique and philosophy, Donald Bloxham's book reveals striking long-term continuities in justifications for the discipline.
Author(s): Donald Bloxham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 416
City: Oxford
Cover
Why History?: A History
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Contents
Introduction
On ‘Modern Historical Consciousness’
Continuity and Change in Justifications for History
1: Classical History between Epic and Rhetoric
Introduction
Genealogy, Ethnography, and Historical Consciousness
Rhetoric, Purpose, Truth
Useful and Pleasurable History
From Greek to Roman Historiography
Philosophy, Poetry, History: A Greek in Rome
Roman Historiography in the Late Republic
History under Monarchy
Pre- and Anti-Christian Influences
2: History, Faith, Fortuna
Introduction
Classical–Christian Fusion
Christianity and Judaism
Early Christian Historiography
Christian Philosophy of History
On Causation: Determinism and Human Agency
3: The ‘Middle Age’
Introduction
Annals and Ancestry
Exemplarity, Allegory, and the Presence of the Past
Periodization and the Conceptualization of Change
Theology, Religious Hermeneutics, and History as Communion
Socio-Economic Change and the Function of Genealogies
History and Developments in Political Identity
‘Others’ Present and Past
4: Renaissances and Reformations
Introduction
Re-Encounters
Romans, Greeks, Goths
Developments in Source Criticism?
Changed Circumstances, Contested Purposes
The Return of Similitudo Temporum
Sixteenth-Century French Historiography
Modern Contextualization?
Montaigne
Church, State, and Historianship: A Comparative Perspective
Ecclesiastical History and Source Criticism
History in the Scientific Seventeenth Century
5: Society, Nature, Emancipation
Introduction
Prelude: Bolingbroke and Vico
The French Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment
The German Enlightenment and Early Romanticism
Hegel
Marx
6: Nationalism, Historicism, Crisis
Introduction
Nationalism, Romanticism, Whiggery
Historicism and Developmental Thought
Alternatives to the Dominant German Model in the 1860s
Reactions to Historicism
New Philosophies of Historical ‘Neutrality’ from the Later Nineteenth Century
‘Progressive’ History
The Decline of Historicism and the Rise of German Social History
7: Turns to the Present
Introduction
Structures and Superstructures
Structures and Events
From Interwar to Post-War
Social History, Sociology, Modernization
Social History, Experience, Identity
Language and Culture
Theory and History
New New Histories
8: Justifying History Today
Introduction
History as Speculative Philosophy
History as Method
Knowledge and Human Interests
History as Practical Lesson
History as Moral Lesson
History as Travel, History as Tolerance?
History as Therapy
Varieties of Emancipatory History
History as Emancipation III
History as Emancipation II
History as Emancipation I
History as Identity
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index
