ABSTRACT
There are three powerful arguments for storytelling in history. One springs from the discipline of history itself, one from cognitive psychology and one from pedagogy. History is the imaginative reconstruction of the past using what evidence we can find. Historical evidence is often fragmentary or incomplete. Historians use their imagination in constructing or reconstructing their understanding of past peoples, events and cultures. Much history is concerned with creating narratives of past events from evidence. There is inevitably selection and ordering of events to make a coherent whole and an interpretation of events. Narrative is a fundamental part of history, most apparent in the final products of historical processes, the written accounts of past periods, events and people. However, there is more than this to narrative within history. There is a wealth of theory on narrative, far too much to detail here (for a brief summary, see Rosen, 1988). One of the central tenets of this book is that history is an umbrella discipline (Cooper, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, Cooper 2000). Stories, like songs, dance and music, are part of every culture, past and present. Anthropologists understand the importance of stories in a culture; as part of their discipline, they have to know the stories of a culture, who tells them, when and how (Rosen, 1988).
