The following was composed in January of 2014 for Professor Darien's Historiography course at Salem State University.
Historiography
in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern
Challenge
is a compact, accessible introduction to Western historiography by State
University of New York at Buffalo’s Distinguished Professor of History emeritus
Georg G. Iggers. Iggers’s book is broken into three parts, corresponding to the
major periods of Western historiography. The first describes the
professionalization of the field of history and its conception of itself as a
scientific field, a conception articulated by Leopold von Ranke, who “ultimately became the
model for professionalized historical scholarship in the nineteenth century.”[1]
The second describes the desire to render history more scientific,
incorporating social and economic developments and placing them within
theoretical frameworks, such as Marxism. Part Three describes the questions
raised by postmodernist thinkers, many of whom went so far as to conclude that
history has no more correspondence to an objective reality than does literary
fiction.
Throughout, Iggers discusses the
authors and works that exemplify particular approaches or signify challenges to
prevailing approaches. For example, Karl Lamprecht’s Deutsche Geschichte (1891) “questioned the two basic principles of
conventional historical scholarship: the central role assigned to the state and
the concentration on persons and events,”[2]
though “attempts at introducing social history” continued to be “hampered for a
long time.”[3]
Also particularly interesting is Iggers’s discussion of the French Annales school, which occupies “a unique
place in the historiography of the twentieth century.”[4] The
works of the Annales were
characterized by “the abandonment of the concept of linear time” and are
“regional or supranational” in focus.[5]
Fernand Braudel of course exemplified this tradition with his 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, but Iggers discusses many other authors,
including Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch.[6]
One of Iggers’s major arguments is for
the continuity of basic assumptions by historians over time. While he
discusses the challenges raised by postmodernist thinkers—or authors at least
influenced by postmodernist ideas—such as Hayden White and Joan Scott, in addition to Foucault and Derrida, Iggers contends that fundamental
assumptions have remained intact even if they are now qualified. "There was no radical break," he writes,
"between the older social science history and the new cultural history, but the
themes and with them the methods of the new historiography changed as the
center of gravity shifted from structures and processes to cultures and the
existential life experiences of common people.”[7] Though
“faith in the grand narratives focused on the modernization of the Western
world as the culmination of a coherent historical process is irredeemably lost,”[8]
and “while historians became much more guarded in their belief in the authority
of science,” the “conviction that the historian dealt with a real and not an
imagined past and that this real past…called for methods and approaches that
followed a logic of inquiry” [9] has
persisted.
Historiography
in the Twentieth Century is concise and well-structured; a perfect
introduction to the ways that historians have thought about their discipline
and the different approaches they have taken. My only criticism is that
postmodernism—officially the topic of a third of the book, but arguably central
to the book’s emphasis on continuity within the field–annoyingly does not
appear in the index.
[1]
26.
[2]
31-2.
[3]
33.
[4]
51.
[5]
57.
[6]
52-59.
[7]
100.
[8]
139. One wonders if the increasing popularity of “big historians” such as David
Christian, who emphasize progress and often neglect to one degree or another
issues such as slavery, war, or inequality, would inspire Iggers to amend this
position.
[9]
15.
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