Kevin writes:
>> But surely walking any particular dog is an historical event for any
>> conscious participant, witness or person who hears/learns about it (?).
>> No? What am I missing? Is there a hierarcy of events that can count as
>> history? Who decides?
>>
>> Sorry to be unclear.
History... as with all academic discussion , can be a battlefield. There
seems to be a battle in the UK at least, between recosntructionists
(history= evidence + inference) and deconstructionists ( and those who
follow heretical French Po-mo writers) There is a long "history" of
interpretation. I for one have always appreciated E.H. Carr's phrase
"History is made in the writing" (which seems to support Helena's
assertion).
There is a useful discussion in the forum pages of History in Focus which
takes reviews a number of perspectives from highly postivist (such as
Markwick) through Marxists to post modernist interpretations based around
the 40th anniversary of Carr's "What is History" on
http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/index.html
Martin O
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