Writing History (writing + history)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


,WHY ARE WE CURSED?': WRITING HISTORY AND MAKING PEACE IN NORTH WEST UGANDA

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2005
Mark Leopold
This article examines the nature of peacemaking and social reconstruction in Arua district, a marginalized border area of Uganda, in the late 1990s. After considering other recent accounts of violence and peacemaking, it focuses on the roles of local history writing and other forms of historical narrative in coming to terms with past violence. Local historians had two main aims: to maintain a particular understanding of the past within the local community itself, and to present themselves to others as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the violence in their past, as part of a wider process of mending relationships with both neighbouring groups and the Ugandan state. In attempting this, they deployed a variety of media that may be understood as historical narratives, from the performance of ritual healing ceremonies to writing conventional local histories. [source]


Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History , By Alon Confino

THE HISTORIAN, Issue 2 2008
Kimberly Redding
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Don't kill the messenger: writing history and war

CRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005
RICHARD TOBIAS
This article explores the effort to invert Edmund Burke's Sublime and the Beautiful to talk about the Hell and the Ugly of warfare. Official histories fall into the 'rotted language' (Wallace Stevens) of ancient heroics. Since the actual experience of warfare is beyond language, irony - a dangerous and difficult force - is the recourse. Since no Thucydides can write our history of the thirty-one-year war between August of 1914 and August of 1945, a few participants have sufficient irony to find language to convey the actual horror of our inhumanity. The public, however, prefers to obliterate this message. [source]


Making History, Talking about History

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2001
José Carlos Bermejo Barrera
Making history,in the sense of writing it,is often set against talking about it, with most historians considering writing history to be better than talking about it. My aim in this article is to analyze the topic of making history versus talking about history in order to understand most historians' evident decision to ignore talking about history. Ultimately my goal is to determine whether it is possible to talk about history with any sense. To this end, I will establish a typology of the different forms of talking practiced by historians, using a chronological approach, from the Greek andRoman emphasis on the visual witness to present-day narrativism and textual analysis. Having recognized the peculiar textual character of the historiographical work, I will then discuss whether one can speak of a method for analyzing historiographical works. After considering two possible approaches,the philosophy of science and literary criticism,I offer my own proposal. This involves breaking the dichotomy between making and talking about history, adopting a fuzzy method that overcomes the isolation of self-named scientific communities, and that destroys the barriers among disciplines that work with the same texts but often from mutually excluding perspectives. Talking about history is only possible if one knows about history and about its sources and methods, but also about the foundations of the other social sciences and about the continuing importance of traditional philosophical problems of Western thought in the fields of history and the human sciences. [source]