Historical Narratives, False

Background

Traditionally, narrative was the chief rhetorical device used by historians, representing a way of writing history that followed certain recognized conventions. Historical narrative is organized in a chronological manner, so that events that occurred first in time are placed first in the recounting. In addition, historical narrative typically concentrates on the transmission of a single, coherent story. Eschewing the analytical for the descriptive, historical narratives present what has happened in a manner that explains how and why events occurred. Traditional historical narrative has focused on individuals and their actions, not abstract conditions or situations. Finally, historical narrative has focused on the particular and specific, as opposed to the communal and statistical.

Historic narratives for generations focused on diplomatic, economic, and political history. Beginning in the 1960s, history as a discipline began to move away from the traditional historical narrative and to embrace more of a social science model of analysis, which had its roots in the 19th-century German and French approach to the field. This new approach to history, referred to as social history, disdained the traditional approach and instead used demographic, statistical, and other information to craft its analysis. While the number of political historians typically made up approximately 50 percent of those in academic positions, recent estimates show this proportion has fallen to approximately 30 percent, while those identifying as social historians has increased to over 40 percent.

[Page 444]A variety of approaches fall under the term social history, including African American history, Chicano history, ethnic history, gender history, history of education, history of the family, history of medicine, labor history, rural history, and women's history, Rather than examining actors and events, social history focuses upon classes and movements, conflicts and revolutions, family and education, inequality, leisure and work, mobility and other such phenomena.

Rather than using narrative, social history instead emphasizes analytical approaches similar to other branches of the social sciences, focusing on quantifiable sources rather than examining events and heroes. In addition to those mentioned above, a variety of other historiographical approaches exist, including comparative history, environmental history, ethnohistory, history of religion, intellectual history, local history, oral history, public history, and quantitative history, among others.

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