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SOCIAL HISTORY AS "SITES OF MEMORY"? THE INSITUTIONALIZATION OF HISTORY: MICROHISTORY AND THE GRAND NARRATIVE
| By Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon |
The Reykjavik Academy |
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Flashbacks
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In 1976, to mark the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the Journal of Social History (JSH) put out a special volume containing a number of articles on the status and position of social history within the academic world. Among the contributors was Theodore Zeldin, professor at Oxford in England, who presented an overview of the advances made within the discipline over the first three quarters of the 20th century—including the following piece of sound advice for aspiring scholars:
I believe that the history you write is the expression of your individuality; I agree with Mommsen that one cannot teach people to write history; I believe that much more can be gained by encouraging young historians to develop their own personality, their own vision, their own eccentricities, than by setting them examples to follow. Original history is the reflection of an original mind, and there is no prescription which will produce that.1
In the year 2002 I spent a happy term as a Fullbright Scholar in the USA, teaching and doing research at my old university, Carnegie Mellon. It was wonderful to get the chance to renew my acquaintance with the faculty that had had so great an influence on my attitudes and opinions on history. On top of this, I had the unexpected opportunity of observing the selection process in the course of appointments to two posts within the department. This was, for me, especially welcome as I had, from the time I completed my doctorate at the end of 1993, kept an interested eye on the job advertisements in Perspectives and been struck in most cases by how standardized and restrictive they had become. My impression was that universities seemed always to be looking for scholars of the same type, equipped with the same kind of expertise (in their own particular areas)—scholars who would be able to teach so or so many courses, who would be able to fulfil certain academic roles laid down by all the schools; individuals who were, to a greater or lesser extent, all cast in the same mold. |
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The social historians called in for interview were, without exception, admirably capable individuals, apparently endowed with great academic qualities. However, also without exception, they all seemed to wear the selfsame colors as the scholars specified in the job advertisements: they all delivered lectures that sounded as if they had been written by the same person. Their treatment, ideas, presentation, research questions and conclusions were strikingly similar, and there was no easy way of saying what had come from which of them, however different the actual subjects being treated. |
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I asked one of the professors at the school why they never advertised for people who might be considered "flaky", who had ideas that were out of the ordinary and who set themselves up against received thinking within the discipline. I recall that the professor in question seemed not to understand what I was getting at and failed entirely to see the point behind my question. |
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