ABSTRACT
Numerous are the books and articles that seek to address the problem of how we write history. The extent of this literature reflects the anxiety historians feel about their work as it becomes the voice of authority, the lens through which the reader sees a particular moment of the past. Epistemology can rouse passions rarely seen otherwise in the historical profession. The awareness that the scholar of the present is the interpreter of the past, that his or her words guide the reader in an alien world, leads to a self-conscious wondering about the questions that are being asked, the ways in which they are addressed, and the form in which they are answered. The nineteenth-century idea that the past could be represented “as it really happened,” that the scholar can stand back and let the source material speak for itself, unfortunately may not be dead. However, rather than being the ideal method, it can now only be regarded as one paradigm in historical research, the validity of which needs to be argued (Novick 1988). From the outset I can state that this book is written with the conviction that the scholar’s own historical condition determines the account that is being written, that objectivity is an elusive ideal, and that the questions asked and models and interpretative frameworks employed are determined by the scholar’s contemporary concerns rather than by the sources investigated.
