ABSTRACT
The words ‘history’ and ‘events’ are closely associated. Two of the key entries provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, define ‘history’ as that ‘branch of knowledge which deals with past events, as recorded in writings or otherwise ascertained’ and as a ‘series of events (of which the story is or may be told)’. Yet if the notion of history as interpreting flows of events is largely taken for granted – at least, in popular conceptions of the nature and purpose of historical study – the practice of studying the history of events, defined as specially organised and nonroutine temporary gatherings, has seldom received close scrutiny. This, of course, is not to say that scholars have ignored the provenance of specific types of
events or have failed to recognise their wider historical context (e.g. see Shone and Parry 2001: 8-16; Berridge 2007: 5). For example, there are considerable literatures on events such as World’s Fairs, circuses and arena spectacle, princely pageants, celebrations of political revolution, public executions and sporting mega-events (Gold and Gold 2005). Moreover, given that many events are defined by occurrences such as anniversaries, it is rare for accounts of their development to lack a historical dimension. Even recently founded events attract narratives that seek to situate them deep in local, regional or national tradition owing, at least in part, to reasons that mirror the benefits (including economic) that close association with the past is felt to confer (Lowenthal 1985: xxiii). Nevertheless, most researchers have treated the crafting of event histories per se as being largely unproblematic. Certainly, there have been relatively few attempts to connect them with the growing scrutiny of what Burrow (2009: xvi) recognises as ‘the plurality of “histories” and the interests embodied in them’. Against that background, this chapter examines the contribution that explicit analysis of
historical writings can make to the study of events. In particular, it explores two related propositions. The first concerns ‘narrative’, understood here as a structured account, rendered in textual form, of a sequence of events that occurred in the past. We argue that the history of events per se, like other forms of history, puts forward narratives that are shaped by their authors and by the contexts in which those authors are situated, rather than offering value-free and ‘objective’ accounts of reality. This point is substantiated in the next section by reference to histories that derive as much from the world of practice as from the writings of academic
historians, culminating in a case study that shows how ideologies have influenced the narratives put forward over time in official histories of a specific event: namely, the Festivals held annually at Salzburg in Austria since 1920. The second proposition concerns ‘narration’, or the way in which the story is told (Munslow 2007: 4). Here, we argue that understanding of the history of events would benefit from more explicit recognition of the ways in which that history has been, and could be, written. To develop that point, the latter half of this chapter draws examples from the history of the modern Olympic Games both to identify the prevalence of a dominant discourse and to indicate the insights available from alternative historical approaches.
