ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies provides a much-needed critical introduction to the major historians and philosophers together with the central issues, ideas and theories which have prompted the rethinking of history that has gathered pace since the 1990s.

With twenty-nine new entries, and many that have been substantially updated, key concepts for the new history are examined through the ideas of leading thinkers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Croce, Collingwood, White, Foucault and Derrida, and subjects range over class, empiricism, hermeneutics, inference, relativism and technology.

New entries for the second edition include:

  • Carl Becker
  • Frank R. Ankersmit
  • Jean-Francois Lyotard
  • gender
  • justified belief
  • the aesthetic turn
  • race
  • film
  • biography
  • cultural history
  • critical theory and experimental history.

With a revised introduction setting out the state of the discipline of history today, as well as an extended and updated bibliography, this is the essential reference work for all students of history.

chapter |8 pages

History today: critical perspectives

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES The empirical foundation: realist history Modernism, as the product of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, produced the dominance of certain ways of thinking about how we create knowledge. Postmodernism in the late twentieth century

chapter |10 pages

The postmodern reversal: the real end of history or the end of realist history?

Recent variants of constructionist history, like the New Cultural History and post-feminist gender history, have grown not only as the result of the deliberate acts of the historian behaving like a highly self-conscious author, purposefully borrowing ideas and concepts from other disciplines (like

chapter |122 pages

Conclusion

Deconstructive or post-empiricist history is most clearly manifest in its anti- modernist assumption that ‘proper’ history is overdue for a rethinking of its metaphysical status. Writing the-past-as-history is not only about epistemology, nor less about procedures. Post-empiricist history is an ontological issue. The historian is an author in a particular state of existence not an impersonal observer

chapter |94 pages

Further reading