Telling histories or accounting for aspects of the past: A historiographical choice in a European historical perspective

R. Torstendahl

Uppsala University, Department of History, Uppsala, 751 26 Sweden

E-mail: rolf.torstendahl@hist.uu.se

Received April 12, 2021

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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DOI: 10.26907/2541-7738.2021.3.9-20

For citation: Torstendahl R. Telling histories or accounting for aspects of the past: A historiographical choice in a European historical perspective. Uchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta. Seriya Gumanitarnye Nauki, 2021, vol. 163, no. 3, pp. 9–20. doi: 10.26907/2541-7738.2021.3.9-20.

Abstract

The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences.

Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.

Keywords: narration, telling, evidence, inference, theory of history, philosophy of history, historiography, representation, construction, memory, source criticism, postmodernism

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