Re: Exam 08
The issues raised in the WIH source were handed to you on a platter, really.
- Can an historian tell a story? Can it be used to entertain?
I talked here about how Gammage seemed to contradict himself. Can history be used to entertain, while remaining truthful to the past? I used Herodotus here and stated that you would probably think no, you cannot entertain people while remaining truthful to the past, because he obviously used oral history to entertain, but he distorted his history because of this. But then I also talked about Polybius and how he didn't distort his history but was still able to appeal to a Greek audience by inserting Greek philosophers.
- Can an historian use history and comment on it?
Here I talked about von Ranke and how he believed that no, you can't comment on history. I contrasted this view with Elton, because Elton reckons that you can use history to learn from the past. I talked about how the histories of some events lend themselves so well to commenting e.g. when you talk about the Holocaust, it's hard not to feel some sort of sympathy and sadness, and such histories allow historians to instigate societal progress becuase humans are pretty stupid.
- Can an historian disregard theory?
The obvious implication of being able to use evidence to reach "truth" is the disregard of Postmodernist theory, and because I thought the source was leaning that way, I began bashing Postmodernism and how historians should disregard theory, because it gets in the way of what history should be about (to me). Enter Jenkins and Carr here. I wrote that because I believed that historians could comment on history for the progress of society, postmodernists believe that there is no universal essence to humanity and would therefore reject the notion of an historian commenting about events (since if there's no universal essence, there's no common morality, which is what I did for my extension two English project -_____________- ugh).
It was okay. Would have loved more time on the Postmodernist part.
P.S. I did Elizabeth and it was a lovely question for her.