Facts Do Not Speak for Themselves: The Challenges to Historical Empiricism and Their Impact on the Teaching of Historical Methodology
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Date
2022-01-01
Type of Work
Department
History
Program
Historical Studies
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Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan thorugh a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan thorugh a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
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Abstract
For the last century, there have been within the Anglophone historical profession ongoing epistemological struggles surrounding the issue of "objectivity” in historical interpretation. I cover the three great controversies within this debate: Herbert Butterfield’s critique of "Whig history” in the 1930s and then his own retreat from this early position in subsequent decades; E. H. Carr’s dispute with G. R. Elton in the 1960s; and the polemical battle between Keith Jenkins and Richard Evans in the 1990s. Across this time, historians’ views have generally become more epistemologically skeptical across an empiricist-postmodernist theoretical continuum, where traditional historians occupy the empiricist side, and feminist, subaltern, post-colonial, Marxist and postmodernist historians express in varying degrees the "relativist” or postmodernist side. I then survey a selection of undergraduate historical guides and manuals, in order to determine how historians have incorporated the evolving epistemological debate into the methodological instruction of their history students. My findings are that the guides generally fail to incorporate the epistemological innovations and insights of the last half century into their descriptions of historical methodology, and that the texts are themselves are internally inconsistent as to where they stand on the empiricist-postmodernist continuum. I conclude that the instructional guides suggest that the profession has not successfully adapted its methodological instruction to the challenges of epistemological postmodernism.