Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- The Authors
- Part One The State of the Art
- 1 State of the Art: An Introduction
- 2 “Revising Postrevisionism,” Or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History
- 3 New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations
- 4 The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure
- 5 Commentaries
- Part Two The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941
- Index
3 - New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- The Authors
- Part One The State of the Art
- 1 State of the Art: An Introduction
- 2 “Revising Postrevisionism,” Or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History
- 3 New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations
- 4 The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure
- 5 Commentaries
- Part Two The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941
- Index
Summary
Read almost any assessment of the state of academic history and the diagnosis appears grim. Historians have been writing more specialized and sophisticated accounts of ordinary people, social groups, local communities, and diplomatic events than ever before, but hardly anyone is interested in them. Whereas history was once the common coin of intellectual and political discourse, Thomas Bender notes, “today's journalists, writers, and intellectuals, to say nothing of political leaders, seem little inclined to attend to the work of our profession.”
Since Bender wrote those words, the situation has worsened. The debates over multiculturalism and political correctness augment public skepticism and divide our own ranks. Postmodernist writers and the practitioners of cultural studies question our capacity for objectivity, rejoice in deconstruction, and celebrate fragmentation. Rather than finding inspiration for an “empirical” or “scientific” history espoused by Leopold von Ranke or Karl Marx, they look to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. They are concerned with discourses rather than subjects, structures rather than actions, process rather than agency, the construction of meaning rather than the definition of experience. “History,” write Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, “has been shaken right down to its scientific and cultural foundations at the very time that those foundations themselves are being contested.” But a reaction is also visible. Some historians lament the descent into discourse; others decry the sentimentalism of culture. Almost every subdiscipline bemoans its marginality.
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- Chapter
- Information
- America in the WorldThe Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, pp. 63 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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