ABSTRACT
Academic histories are produced by writers who put the historical method to use. Historians disagree about the kind of knowledge that the historical method is capable of producing. The ‘rules’ for writing history are socially determined and contingent. The selection of facts, emplotment strategy, figurative styles and rhetorical tropes all require the historian to make subjective judgements and interpretations based upon their interests, opinions and conceptual schemas. The realist model of historical knowledge has in effect elided the subjectivity, ideologies and diverse functions inherent in all histories. The core rules that constitute the historical method as it is relate back to the empiricism of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century development of history as an academic subject as it was taught in European universities. The most powerful rejection of the belief that historians have ever known about the past objectively or ‘as it happened’ has come from forms of postmodernist thinking.
