I think there are definitely more voices and perspectives than ever before- which is incredible! But so much of this isn’t people’s private thoughts, they’re online for the world to see and as you mentioned that changes how we write and how we censor ourselves. As a historian I’d love for everyone to keep their own private journal and pass it down through the family. And also please write about the boring stuff. I love the mundane. There’s something about reading a diary from 200 years ago and the writer is complaining about her annoying neighbor or what she ate for breakfast.
History is broken, actually. Up until approximately 2000 everything fit into a grand narrative of economic and social progress that on average expanded the rights all people should enjoy and empowered an ever expanding circle of different personal identities. But nobody believes in this consensus anymore. Human rights are just empty rhetoric. People are no longer content to be poor in societies with multibillionaires. The rights and respect accorded to gays are being withdrawn and the maximalist claims of trans identitarians are being rebuffed. Half of society demands rituals be observed to apologize for stolen land while the other half does not accept the concept of settler colonialism. Part of the job of history is to make sense of all this and tell us where we're going by explaining how we got to the present moment. There are numerous works by brilliant historians that can tell us how we got to the American-led postwar liberal consensus, or how this consensus broke down, but to my knowledge, no historian has offered a new synthesis that hints at where we are going. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
I work with fragments, half sentences, and so many gaps. Sometimes I have dates, many times its a date range of a year, or years, sometimes decades, but through comparison and accumulation of these fragments across regions and over time patterns emerge and occasionally certainties. I try therefore to be transparent about methodology and the evidence, and try to ensure the reader is able to follow why I've reached the conclusions I have.
Historical truth is iterative, and each generation depends on what has been done before and unravels it, sometimes completely, sometimes a shift in tone or angle, or asking new questions and in doing so remaking the world. What I don't do and historians can't do is ignore facts that don't fit. And as historians we need to be mindful that there are somethings we won't ever know, and the narratives we tell are nearly always provisional. One issue we are dealing with is that too much history was constructed by men, for men and in Europe primarily from sources written by religious men. With all the difficulties that entails, simply looking for women has transformed what we thought we understood. It's a real pleasure to watch that Victorian/20th century edifice being dismantled, rebuilt, re-evaluated and enriched by other stories, perspectives and questions. We live in a golden age of historical writing.
This is definitely I’ve thought about as well!
How do you feel about it? Do you think we are?
I think there are definitely more voices and perspectives than ever before- which is incredible! But so much of this isn’t people’s private thoughts, they’re online for the world to see and as you mentioned that changes how we write and how we censor ourselves. As a historian I’d love for everyone to keep their own private journal and pass it down through the family. And also please write about the boring stuff. I love the mundane. There’s something about reading a diary from 200 years ago and the writer is complaining about her annoying neighbor or what she ate for breakfast.
History is broken, actually. Up until approximately 2000 everything fit into a grand narrative of economic and social progress that on average expanded the rights all people should enjoy and empowered an ever expanding circle of different personal identities. But nobody believes in this consensus anymore. Human rights are just empty rhetoric. People are no longer content to be poor in societies with multibillionaires. The rights and respect accorded to gays are being withdrawn and the maximalist claims of trans identitarians are being rebuffed. Half of society demands rituals be observed to apologize for stolen land while the other half does not accept the concept of settler colonialism. Part of the job of history is to make sense of all this and tell us where we're going by explaining how we got to the present moment. There are numerous works by brilliant historians that can tell us how we got to the American-led postwar liberal consensus, or how this consensus broke down, but to my knowledge, no historian has offered a new synthesis that hints at where we are going. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
I work with fragments, half sentences, and so many gaps. Sometimes I have dates, many times its a date range of a year, or years, sometimes decades, but through comparison and accumulation of these fragments across regions and over time patterns emerge and occasionally certainties. I try therefore to be transparent about methodology and the evidence, and try to ensure the reader is able to follow why I've reached the conclusions I have.
Historical truth is iterative, and each generation depends on what has been done before and unravels it, sometimes completely, sometimes a shift in tone or angle, or asking new questions and in doing so remaking the world. What I don't do and historians can't do is ignore facts that don't fit. And as historians we need to be mindful that there are somethings we won't ever know, and the narratives we tell are nearly always provisional. One issue we are dealing with is that too much history was constructed by men, for men and in Europe primarily from sources written by religious men. With all the difficulties that entails, simply looking for women has transformed what we thought we understood. It's a real pleasure to watch that Victorian/20th century edifice being dismantled, rebuilt, re-evaluated and enriched by other stories, perspectives and questions. We live in a golden age of historical writing.
Just a thought, in a way the censoring of Queen Victoria’s diaries tells us something of that age, probably not that easy to figure out what
Very true! It also has left a bit of mystery around her life, particularly about her relationship with Mr. Brown!