History as Science v. History as Art; White-Moses Debate - Kelly

This is late, because I'm always late.. but in fairness I wrote it on Friday and just forgot to post it until discussion today. I'm working on JST or TST (Jewish Standard Time, Theater Standard Time, you get the idea), so roll with me and I promise to be less remiss in my postings.

I agree with Chris, that our generation of scholars, growing up after the cultural-turn, literary-turn, post-modern-turn, struggle less with the understanding of our own subjectivity. We work within the recognition that we are subjective, thinking creatures that carry with us our own personal baggage/privilege. As academics, the challenge is to be aware of and work with the societal, cultural, and personal influences on the creation of our selves and our work. We are aware that we are writing (constructing) history through the interpretation of data, not through some objectively inspired revelation of the "true past". We are intimately caught up in the literary resurrection of the dead, whether the deceased be people, time, places, or ideas.

I think there is something to reclaiming History as an Art/Humanities. Although there are issues with White's ultimate dream of the "better narrative" rising to the top and essentially beating out all other options (i.e. Holocaust deniers would be ignored and written off when their narratives of the Holocaust are placed against better-written, better-defended versions produced by assumably historians or other scholars of the period), I think there is something to reclaiming a use of an artistic writing style and non-obfuscating language. As someone who studies the Holocaust, I think White does have a valid point when he raises the issue that we can unearth more and more facts about the Holocaust, but do they necessarily, especially at this point, make the atrocities any worse? They flush out the details of this particular genocide, but do they inform us on a deeper level? As someone in the field I think, "Of course! Give me details..." but stepping out of historian mode I'm left wondering, "What good is the produced information regarding this atrocity is all is does it reproduce that data?" And I think that's what White is getting at: we as historians try to gather and contextualize events in a way that will *hopefully* give some deeper insight into the human experience in a particular historical context. Moses' example of reexamining Israeli/Palestinian history in an attempt to create a bridging narrative and try to mediate a currently explosive and deadly situation answers that question very nicely. We work to bring peace today and build a better tomorrow. But this then leads me to ask, "What about those fields like Classical or Ancient Studies? Or research on women in convents in the 10th century?" How does a historian approach a subject matter of no immediate relevance to the present and still justify its relevance as a subject area without falling into facts-for-fact's-sake or writing too much of the present back into the past?