The Critical Role of Historiography in Writing IS History

Insightful histories of an academic field can only be written when there is sufficient raw material to serve as “grist for the mill” for historians. This is the first task for those who are monumentally interested in preserving the origins of a field from the ravages of time is to collect artifacts—written, verbal, visual, and physical—that can later be used in historical inquiries. But the critical perspective to know what to collect and how much to collect is served by historiography, the science that elaborates on the variety of methods and procedures that historians use. A simple but incomplete set of these variations include: political history, intellectual history, cultural history, and social history. Each of these viewpoints brings with it a different set of assumptions about what is important and, although there is considerable overlap among them, each brings a different set of requirements for artifactual evidence. Historiography should not be overlooked when the field of information systems begins an all-out effort to collect data about the history of the field

Textual representations of the socio-urban history of Baghdad : critical approaches to the historiography of Baghdad in the 18th and 19th centuries

This thesis focuses on historiography, which is the study of history and methodology of the discipline of history. The problems of historical theory and the role of critical theory in historical understanding are the main objectives of this study. The thesis explores the urban history of Baghdad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to posit alternative historiographical methods that involve non-conventional textual representations as historical evidence. These textual representations include poetry, travelogues and narratives around non-monumental everyday urban places, all of which are often ignored in conventional history writing. Conventional approaches to historiography are normally single-layered and limited, and contain gaps or ‘absences’ of distinctive local historical themes and spaces that are smoothed over by grand narratives. The alternative method in historiography suggested in this thesis emphasises the need for closer ties between history and literary criticism. It interprets literature in relation to knowledge, and it discloses their philosophical connections to the ‘overlooked’ meanings in urban history. Although the alternative method comprises strong links to literary analysis, the thesis seeks a combination of both scientific and speculative philosophies, and an addition of extra concepts, towards the generation of specific historiographical concepts and themes. Baghdad provides an excellent vehicle to investigate the general problem of historiography, with its complex history of conquest and colonisation, its long history of creative writings and the vague representation of its urban spaces in current historiographical studies. Although this thesis explored the entire history of Baghdad, the period of interest is the Mamluk period between mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. In addition to the transformation and change that shaped Baghdad’s urban history, this period significantly produced rich poetry and historical narratives that embraced plentiful themes of the urban development of the city, which have been overlooked in conventional historiography. These themes include the measures of beauty of Baghdad, the attractive and interlocking qualities of the Tigris River, Karkh region and markets, the multiple meanings of gardens and learning centres, and the social and leisure significance of houses. The thesis focuses on the poetry of the prominent scholar and poet Sheikh Kadhem Al-Uzari, the historian and religious scholar Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Al-Suwaidi, and the poet and chief of the writing bureau in Baghdad Sheikh Saleh Al-Tamimi, in addition to a number of texts by other scholars in that period. The thesis also focuses on the travelogues of mainly four travelers who wrote significant observations of Baghdad during this period, namely; the surveyor Carsten Niebuhr, the entomologist Guillaume Antoine Olivier, the British resident Claudius Rich and the traveler and writer James Silk Buckingham.The thesis also refers to the writings of philosophers such as Edward Said, Hans Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault for philosophical frameworks to outline the alternative method of interpretation of these texts. The analysis of poetry and narratives composed by Baghdadis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of travelogues of the same period, is ‘another’ method in historiography that is intended to support and complement the existing understanding of the city’s history, and to attain a more dialogical interface with the past. In this way, historiography becomes a more critical influential discipline in historical studies

Life-writing in the History of Archaeology

Life-writing is a vital part of the history of archaeology, and a growing field of scholarship within the discipline. The lives of archaeologists are entangled with histories of museums and collections, developments in science and scholarship, and narratives of nationalism and colonialism into the present. In recent years life-writing has played an important role in the surge of new research in the history of archaeology, including ground-breaking studies of discipline formation, institutionalisation, and social and intellectual networks. Sources such as diaries, wills, film, and the growing body of digital records are powerful tools for highlighting the contributions of hitherto marginalised archaeological lives including many pioneering women, hired labourers and other ‘hidden hands’. This book brings together critical perspectives on life-writing in the history of archaeology from leading figures in the field. These include studies of archive formation and use, the concept of ‘dig-writing’ as a distinctive genre of archaeological creativity, and reviews of new sources for already well-known lives. Several chapters reflect on the experience of life-writing, review the historiography of the field, and assess the intellectual value and significance of life-writing as a genre. Together, they work to problematise underlying assumptions about this genre, foregrounding methodology, social theory, ethics and other practice-focused frameworks in conscious tension with previous practices

The Thirties and Forties from bellow: Social History and recent historiography about the Second Republic, the Civil War and the first postwar period

This article revisits what has been written about the Spanish Second Republic, the Civil War and the postwar years from the point of view of social history. Its objective is to reflect on the presences and absences of that way of writing history in the last decades and on how our ways of writing history change over time. The text argues that social history played an important role in the origins of Spanish historiography on the Second Republic, the Civil War and the postwar period; that since the 1990s it has been renewed but its prominence has been greatly diminished; and that, as shown by his newfound spirit in the post-war study, the «social» approach, renewed and refined from previous burdens and problems, can still be very useful and even boost the critical study and representation of our recent past. </div

Historiography after Revisionism. Remarks on Pomian’s Idea of Writing History

Krzysztof Pomian’s works on history are one of the most interesting theoretical achievements of contemporary humanities. Being one of the prominent revisionists, Pomian took part in an important period of Polish history. Revisionist movement has also played an important role in shaping some basic ideas of Pomian’s later work. Article shows the meaning of revisionism in Polish tradition concerning historiography, and more specifically the meaning of Pomian’s ideas on historiography

Structuralist Legal Histories

This is a contribution to a symposium titled Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought. The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography

Making financial history: The crisis of 2008 and the return of the past

The past does not simply provide conditions of possibility for capitalist finance; it also serves as a vital resource for those who might seek to understand or negotiate it in a particular present. However, scholars of finance and crisis have overlooked this point at precisely the same time that they themselves have sought to find clues or lessons in financial history. This article provides a reading of how and why the past has come to acquire such a strange presence within contemporary capitalism. Following Michel de Certeau, it approaches historiography as an operation, focusing on how the past has figured within three distinct but related fields of social science – namely, financial economics, economic history, and constructivist political economy. It demonstrates how each of these fields has been structured around an exclusion of the recollected past as an input into historical process, and argues that this has been revealed by the discursive response to the crisis of 2008, which in turn should be understood as a breakdown in the machinery of capitalist historiography. It concludes by suggesting that in order to grasp the potential productivity of such a breakdown, scholars of the global economy should begin to make a place for ‘the practical past’ within both their visions of history and methods of historical research

Globalizing Hayden White

This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Greca under the same title of ‘Globalizing Hayden White’ at the III International Network for Theory of History Conference ‘Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History’ held at Södertörn University, Stockholm, in August 2018. In order to pay homage to Hayden White’s life work 5 months after his passing we knew that what was needed–and what he himself would have wanted–was a vibrant intellectual exchange. Our ‘celebration by discussion’ contains elaborated and revised versions of the presentations by scholars from China (Xin Chen), Latin America (María Inés La Greca, Veronica Tozzi Thompson), United States (Paul Roth), Western (Kalle Pihlainen) and East-Central Europe (Ewa Domańska). We took this opportunity of gathering scholars who represent different parts of the world, different cultures and approaches to reflect on White’s ideas in a global context. Our interest was in discussing how his work has been read and used (or even misread and misused) and how it has influenced theoretical discussions in different parts of the globe. Rather than just offering an account as experts, we mainly wanted to reflect on the current state of our field and the ways that White’s inheritance might and should be carried forward in the future.Fil: Domanska, Ewa. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; PoloniaFil: la Greca, María Inés. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. Departamento de Metodología, Estadística y Matemáticas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Departamento de Filosofía; ArgentinaFil: Roth, Paul A.. University of California at Santa Cruz; Estados UnidosFil: Chen, Xin. Zhejiang University; ChinaFil: Tozzi, María Verónica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. Departamento de Metodología, Estadística y Matemáticas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Departamento de Filosofía; ArgentinaFil: Pihlainen, Kalle. Tallinn University; Estoni

The historiography of the Black Panther party

This article examines forty years of historical writing on the Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that this historiography has now reached maturity. It evaluates key publications on the BPP, splitting the historiography into three periods. The first phase, the article asserts, was dominated by accounts written by participants and observers of the BPP in action. These offered insight into the personalities of the BPP leadership but included relatively little on other BPP members. They were supplemented by a collection of friendly academic studies, a number of which emphasized the role of the FBI in precipitating the BPP's decline. The article identifies the 1994 publication of Hugh Pearson's biographical study of Huey P. Newton as the beginning of a second phase. Pearson's work, which built on a collection of accounts written by observers and right-wing writers during the first phase, precipitated an outpouring of new studies that opposed its conclusions. These works overwhelmingly focussed on individual BPP chapters and the experiences of the BPP rank and file; they were generally friendly towards the party and often appraised the BPP's actions through the 1970s. A second wave of participant accounts also emerged in this period which offered a more personal interpretation of the BPP's decline. A third period emerged in the early 2000s that abandoned the obsession with Pearson's study and focussed instead on the BPP's contribution to African American and American culture beyond its political program and violent image. The article reveals the paradox at the heart of the local approach, one which recent studies addressed in their focus on the BPP's Oakland chapter and their return to a tight chronological approach that focussed on the BPP's peak years. It concludes by noting the remaining omissions in the BPP's historical record and anticipating further studie