The History of Preservation as a History Worth Preserving: William Sumner Appleton and His Work at Jackson House (original) (raw)
Related papers
Considering the Imperative: Why is History Worth Saving?
Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto, 2017
One paper in the work Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto. The paper, and the collective short book, comes out of a Historiography seminar in Spring 2017 at the University of North Dakota, while the impetus to this little book was the defunding of the Graduate History Program at the University after the Spring semester. Written towards a general audience, my paper approaches the questions of "how" historians work, and "why" historians work is important. Those interested in the other essays in Defending History can find the complete book thru the website link below.
Can Historians Handle the Truth
CAN HISTORIANS HANDLE THE TRUTH? PHILOSOPHICAL POLEMICS AGAINST HISTORY AND THE HISTORIANS Tiberiu Popa There is a significant thematic continuity in Aristotle, Seneca and Sextus Empiricus with respect to their assessment of the merits of historiography. In so far as Seneca’s and Sextus’ approaches indicate an agreement with Aristotle, we can speak of a sort of gradually unfolding process of networking, reception and argumentative retooling over several centuries. All three share a blanket negative assessment of history. Moreover, all three ignore or omit crucial and rather obvious aspects of major historical works (whether it is the aspiration to universal insights or quasi-laws of human behavior; efforts to formulate criteria for truth; the historians’ efforts to articulate and apply methods of inquiry). The motivations are different, but these three thinkers share the general attitude that philosophical concerns (mainly metaphysical, but also epistemological in Aristotle; mainly moral in Seneca; overtly epistemological, but ultimately moral in Sextus) are more worthwhile than historical research. Seneca’s and Sextus’ vigorous polemics against history and the historians borrow a page from the polemics deployed by the historians themselves against each other, and likely rely – in addition to their own philosophical convictions – on their acceptance of popular perceptions and on the keynote struck centuries earlier by Aristotle’s signal treatment of history.
Archiving otherwise : some remarks on memory and historical responsibility
Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae Volume 31 Number 2, 2005
This essay seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion on memory, historiography and archiving by engaging Jacques Derrida’s influential book Archive fever: A Freudian impression. The first part of the essay deals with Derrida’s reflections on the word ‘archive’, as well as his discussion of the possibility of the destruction of the archive through the death drive and his argument about the archive and the openness towards the future. The rest of the essay aims, in conversation with Derrida, at reconfiguring archival passion as a passion for the past, a passion for justice and a passion for the future.
History Workshop Journal, 2007
3. The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden WHITE1
History and Theory, 2005
Hayden White wants history to serve life by having it inspire an ethical consciousness, by which he means that in facing the existential questions of life, death, trauma, and suffering posed by human history, people are moved to formulate answers to them rather than to feel that they have no power to choose how they live. The ethical historian should craft narratives that inspire people to live meaningfully rather than try to provide explanations or reconstructions of past events that make them feel as if they cannot control their destiny. This Nietzschean-inspired vision of history is inadequate because it cannot gainsay that a genocidal vision of history is immoral. White may be right that cultural relativism results in cultural pluralism and toleration, but what if most people are not cultural relativists, and believe fervently in their right to specific lands at the expense of other peoples? White does not think historiography or perhaps any moral system can provide an answer. Is he right? This rejoinder argues that the communicative rationality implicit in the human sciences does provide norms about the moral use of history because it institutionalizes an intersubjectivity in which the use of the past is governed by norms of impartiality and fair-mindedness, and protocols of evidence based on honest research. Max Weber, equally influenced by Nietzsche, developed an alternative vision of teaching and research that is still relevant today. Little did I imagine, on October 13, 1995, when I sat on the floor in a crowded seminar room in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California at Berkeley, that one day I would be crossing swords on these pages with the guest speaker, Hayden White. He was, and remains, after all, the most influential critic of the discipline of history over the past forty years, a thinker whose dissections of its conceits, as elegant as they are erudite, have forced historians to reflect critically on what they do. If they have often responded defensively, literary scholars and philosophers have welcomed his apparent skepticism, a pattern of reaction that recurred with his talk, "The First Historical Event: A Rhetorical Exercise," hosted by the Department of Rhetoric. While we few interlopers from the Department of History squirmed uncomfortably, the sophisticated graduate students in comparative literature and rhetoric chortled as they learned that historians believed they "find" the past ready-made in the archives. Had we not heard the news that reality, past and present, was a "construction"? It is fascinating to learn what colleagues down the corridor really think of what you do. The disci-1. I thank Neil Levi and Geoffrey Brahm Levey for critical comments on an earlier draft.
Historians and Archivists: Two Disciplines Working with the Same Papers
Abstrak " Everybody knows of the problems between a man and a woman, between a pianist and the musician or singer who has to be accompanied. Most of you (…) will agree that a similar conflict exists between the archivist and the historian " (De Rooij, 1989: 49). Sejarawan Belanda Piet de Rooy menggunakan kutipan di atas dari seorang arsiparis, Van der Meiden, dalam sebuah artikel dimana ia secara terbuka mengungkapkan pengalamannya sebagai seorang sejarawan dalam penelitian yang menggunakan record. Dia menyampaikan hubungan cinta-benci antara arsiparis dengan sejarawan. Cinta mereka tentu saja tidak menjadi lebih besar pada masa lalau, bahkan dapat dikatakan bahwa kearsipan (atau ilmu kearsipan) dan sejarah saling terasing satu sama lain. Dalam artikel ini, saya ingin menyampaikan gagasan saya tentang hubungan ilmu kearsipan dengan sejarah. Secara kasar, saya akan membuat sketsa tentang bagaimana hubungan antara kedua disipilin, sebelum menyampaikan bahwa tidak satu pun dari mereka yang dapat bekerja tanpa peran yang lain, dan bahwa kearsipan dapat memberikankontribusi yang lebih baik dalam menggunakan informasi historis. Oleh karena kontribusi penting Belanda pada masa lalu (terutama pada akhir abad ke-19 dan awal abad ke-20) dalam perkembangan ilmu kearsipan, oleh karenanya saya tidak segan untuk mengawalinya dalam perspektif Belanda. From munimenta to monumenta In order to understand the relationship which has grown between archivists and historians we have to go back to the early days of the modern society. I will start with an example in The Netherlands, my home country. Until 1795 the Netherlands were a decentralized country, with almost independent cities and provinces. This changed dramatically in 1795, when the French armies marched in. For the first time in history, the Netherlands became a unified, central state. The new constitution of 1798 had near enough demolished the old state building down to the last stone, and the administration, in the words of the Dutch historian H. Brugmans was decentralised " to an absurd degree " .(Brugmans, sa: 90-1). The old " archives and state papers " no longer had much meaning for the continuity of the administration. The old archives from before the turnaround then became a collection of historical sources in the first place. The munimenta, or the legal proofs of the old days, were downgraded to monumenta or memory aids as the first Dutch professor in archivistics J.L. van der Gouw, called them (Van der Gouw, 1980: 497-514). And they have retained that status since then. That downgrading formed at the same time, however, the starting point of a development which, a century later, was to lead to a professionalized and institutionalised scientific historic enterprise (Dorsman in Tollebeek, 2002: 159-76). The basic material for the scientific historical research was provided by the historical sources. In the eighteen twenties the German historian Leopold von Ranke gave a significant impulse to the professionalisation and scientisation of historical studies. He rejected every form of historiography which was not based on primary sources (Iggers, 1997: 24-35). The sources had to show " how it had really been " , as he wrote at the age of 29 in the foreword to his first book (Von Ranke, 1824). He wanted to observe the past from inside (Geyl, 1954: 12 and 14). And that was, in essence, what was new in the treatment of history. The narrative chronicle gave way to the reconstructed past on the basis of archival material (Iggers and Powell, 1990).
The Heroic Study of Records: The Contested Persona of the Archival Historian
The archival turn in nineteenth-century historical scholarship – that is, the growing tendency among nineteenth-century historians to equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research – not only affected the profession’s epistemological assumptions and day-to-day working manners, but also changed the persona of the historian. Archival research required the cultivation and exercise of such dispositions, virtues or character traits as carefulness, meticulousness, diligence and industry. This article shows that a growing significance attached to these qualities made the archival turn increasingly contested. As the case of the German-Austrian historian Theodor von Sickel and his critics shows, it was not the necessity of archival research as such on which historians in late nineteenth-century Europe came to hold different views. Sickel’s critics were rather concerned about the potentially detrimental effects that the increasingly philological ethos of archival studies could have on the historian’s character. What was primarily at stake in late nineteenth-century debates on the gains and losses of increased commitments to archival study was the persona of the historian – his character traits, his dispositions and the virtues and skills in which he excelled.