In Defence of History

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Evans is an expert on modern German history, and he wrote a three-volume history of the Third Reich. I kept wanting him to be more precise on just what constitutes a 'fact' and how 'evidence' is evaluated. The “manipulation and distortion of the historical record” by Irving is key to understanding the importance Evans placed on a grounding of history in facts.

though no reason is given for this claim (perhaps it has something to do with the logocentrism of supposedly absolute origins? Antara caranya adalah dengan meneliti ribuan dokumen sejarah yang menggunapakai istilah-istilah tersebut dan menangkap nuansa-nuansa berbeza yang dibangkitkannya. This is a conscious attempt to focus his argument against those whom Evans considers the prime offenders of hyper-relativism. On erinevate vaadete tutvustamisel ka ysna mõõdukas: ehkki raamat on suunatud eeskätt vastama postmodernistlike mõtlejate kriitikat (eelkõige, et objektiivset ajalootõde pole), ei ründa Evans neid mõõdutundetult (viitab, et mitmed nende toodud uuendused on olnud ka kasulikud) ega ripsuta yleliia tiiba ka hyperempiirilisust võimalikuks pidavate konservatiividega (ehkki sedastab, et ajaloolise tõe – olgu see pealegi osaline või subjektiivsusest teatvalt mõjutet – leidmine on õigete meetoditega võimalik). But when postmodernism arrived on the scene some time ago, the cry to make history more like literature was a reaction to history’s tendency at the time to avoid narrative and stick to themes.It saves Evans from any troubling inquiry into the epistemological consequences attending a possible correspondence or adequation or correlation between reality and representation (including the immensely tricky question of where anyone might actually have to be placed so as to assess just where reality ended and representation began). However there is a sense that Evans is supportive of Elton’s idea that a historian must “subdue his imagination to the controls which scholarship provides” , which particularly comes across in his handling of the Abraham case.

Instead, he says of hyper-relativists that “somebody’s got to take them on at their level” and so this book is perhaps better understood as a blow in a historiographical street-fight than a sober reflection on philosophical traditions. It was written in 1997 and it is amazing to see how little has changed in the controversy and how things have gotten even worse. Dismissed in a single sentence and a bizarre one at that, to the effect that 'master-narratives are the hegemonic stories told by those in power' (p.This descent into post-truth can be halted however, by Evans’ reassertion that “today we need to say, again, that there is such a thing as the truth and you can find it out” .

Mulanya adalah Leopold Von Ranke (1795-1886) yang mempasakkan bidang sejarah pada fondasi yang mandiri.For my own part, I remain optimistic that objective historical knowledge is both desirable and attainable. He has little patience with those who seek to defend deniers (on grounds of free speech, mainly), maintaining that to be a historian worthy of being taken seriously, it is necessary to respect the truth. Evans ascribes to him a hyper-relativist position that, according to Rick Roderick,* is mere "popular mythology", a (coarse) distortion of Derrida rather than Derrida himself. Penulis tidak segan untuk menamakan soldadu-soldadu pascamodenis yang ditujukan permusuhannya: Hayden White, Dominick La Capra, Beverly Southgate, Keith Jenkins. Evans begins by advancing what seems to him incontrovertible: 'present reality can be felt and experienced by our senses' (p.