[feralimal]

That's a refreshingly honest reply! Thanks!

This is why I said that history is an interpretative act. I don't have an issue with the making the best of a past that is hard (impossible?) to discern. And that while our subject matter might be the past, we ourselves are in the present and express our understanding from our own biases and understandings - we talk ourselves into the past, in a way.

What I object to is the indisputable tone - this happened, these are the reasons, etc. It gives the reader the impression of knowledge, but this is an illusion, possibly a dangerous one. It conveys none of the reasoning, jumps and ambiguity that, I think, are the main part of these sorts of investigation.

Personally I would rather have the ambiguity, referring to source material, and try to develop a theory given the evidence - evidence-driven theories. I don't mind if there is no overarching narrative to explain it all. But it seems to me that professional historians feel empowered to present exactly that sort of a narrative, sometimes whether or not it is really supported by the evidence.

[benbreen]

Totally agree. When reading history, you can and should substitute an invisible "According to the limited sources I consulted, and modulo their biases/mistakes/oversights, it seems to me the best interpretation of the given data that..." before every statement. Virtually no professional historian is going to claim to be 100% certain of any interpretation they make. It's often the case that more you dig into sources, the less certain you get. (Which is why almost every academic history paper's argument boils down to "this [person/event/era] turns out to be more complicated than we thought").

Hayden White has written a lot about this, specifically in his book Metahistory. You should check it out if interested! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metahistory:_The_Historical_Im...

I also really like Fernand Braudel on events as a kind of epiphenomena of history, the misleading surface disturbances underneath the actual, barely-discernible patterns.

[feralimal]

I've looked into this a bit more, specifically reading this essay:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244014542585

which seems a fair synopsis for me, of Hayden White's position in Metahistory. I thought this quote was interesting:

"In this climate, White (1966) believes that the duty of the researchers in present time is to transform the historical studies so as to liberate the present from the burden of history and to make the historical studies fit in the aims of the community. Seen in this light, history is not seen as a fixed ultimate entity that cannot be touched and that the historians have to accept it as it is. However, the historians should refuse to study the past as an end or ultimate being but contribute to offer some solutions for the problems of the present, which the professional historiography is unable to achieve."

I liked the general analysis that it seems White provides, but I don't like the moral relativism that is implied in the quote above. Why is it a historian's job to provide solutions for the present? What special values do they have? I don't like post-modern, moral relativism - where 'my truth' is the same as 'the truth'.

My position is that our knowledge of history is imperfect, that we cannot know the past. But a single past really did occur. Rather than express the evidence and express their reasoning for what that means, when historians apply narratives over the evidence they are covering an mystifying the past. This is to say I am receiving negative knowledge - I am receiving an informed but biased view that I will find it hard to unpick. And that is all history afaik! So little primary evidence, so many books and articles!

[feralimal]

Metahistory! That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'll take a look and thanks for the recommendation :)