What is quality History?
Since class, I have been pondering Dr Petrik’s rhetorical question: What makes for good history. I can’t offer much opposition to the attributes we came up with…but I would add the following. All history is composed of two basic elements: historical facts and interpretation. These components sit at the poles of a continuum. Every historical work occupies a single spot on this continuum. To my mind, good academic history must be more factual and less interpretive, while good popular history should be in the inverse.
The reason for this is that, readers of academic history can draw their own conclusions and need far less interpretation to gleam the author’s central argument; while readers of popular history want something more readable, that is more forthcoming with fully fledged interpretive conclusions.
Since class, I have been pondering Dr Petrik’s rhetorical question: What makes for good history. I can’t offer much opposition to the attributes we came up with…but I would add the following. All history is composed of two basic elements: historical facts and interpretation. These components sit at the poles of a continuum. Every historical work occupies a single spot on this continuum. To my mind, good academic history must be more factual and less interpretive, while good popular history should be in the inverse.
The reason for this is that, readers of academic history can draw their own conclusions and need far less interpretation to gleam the author’s central argument; while readers of popular history want something more readable, that is more forthcoming with fully fledged interpretive conclusions.
posted by ksturcken at 5:35 PM
1 Comments:
WOW! A voluntary, unrequired blog!
I was paging through the blogs to remember who [whom!] I'd left comments for so I could add it to my blog and saw your maverick rumination. I too was very affected by our attempt to define "a good history." In fact, it has been on my mind a lot since class-- to the best of my memory, it has never been directly discussed in any class before (of course we discussed why a PARTICULAR history was good). This is a most thought-provoking class! By the way--I'm right now in the middle of a break from reading our next text The Way to the West---more good, thought-provoking stuff. And more myth-busting on the horizon...
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