Rethinking History

Author: Keith Jenkins
Publisher: Common Books
Publication Date: 2006-08-01
Features: ◎Brand-new revised edition. Includes Keith Jenkins' interview records◎Historical methodologyThe best introductory book Lu Jianrong/Gu Weiyin◎Introduction. Reviewing What is history? Is it possible to say what really happened in the past? Is it possible to achieve objectivity? What are historical facts? What is prejudice? Should historians discover and remove prejudice? Can we possibly understand the thoughts of the ancients? Is history a science or an art? Living in a postmodern world, how do we re-examine and produce history? "History is a mobile, problematic discourse. On the surface, it is a face of the world—a past. It is created by a group of workers with a current mindset (in our culture, most of these workers are paid). They adopt recognizable ways of working—in epistemology, methodology, ideology, and practical operation. Once their works are disseminated, they will be used and misused in a series of logical infinities, but in practice, they usually correspond to a series of existing power bases at any given time, and along a spectrum from all-powerful to irrelevant, constructing and spreading various meanings of history."—Keith Jenkins This book reconsiders the definition of history from a postmodernist perspective, exploring the interactive relationships between history, the past, truth, prejudice, evidence, and power struggles. The author, with concise and sharp dialectics, directly targets the myths of traditional historiography, helping readers to re-examine and produce history with a historical, skeptical, and critical self-awareness in a postmodern world.