ABSTRACT
Texts on the nature of history abound, and a good many of them have been written in defence of reconstructionist approaches to it. Because reconstructionist historians view history as essentially a methodology rather than an epistemology, there is a surfeit of handbooks and ‘how to do it’ texts. We have included two extracts from such texts in this book, the most well known being Geoffrey Elton’s Return to Essentials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In addition, Deborah A. Symonds’s chapter ‘Living in the Scottish Record Office’ from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Reconstructing History (New York and London: Routledge, 1999) comes from a book collection that attempts to defend such an approach. Two classic examples of reconstructionist barnstorming of the past thirty-five years are Geoffrey Elton’s now somewhat antiquarian The Practice of History (London: Methuen, 1967) and Jack Hexter’s The History Primer (London: Allen Lane, 1972). By definition, such texts defend the belief in the correspondence of past event and present word, and are usually written in the assumptive mode, following the example of long-lived history methodology texts that reflect the nineteenth-century obsession with telling the past as it really was. The most notable example is Introduction to the Study of History by C.V. Langlois and C. Seignobos (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966). Most recently, we find Arthur Marwick’s The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), which is the latest incarnation of his book The Nature of History (London: Macmillan, 1970). Marwick is reconstructionism personified.
