Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.
Username: Oisín
Date: 2020-06-21 16:24:23
Reaction Score: 2
Welcome back! Will you be putting your book online?
Thanks!
My university has a fund to pay for books to be made available online under an open access licence, so hopefully yes, once it is printed it will go online. It's a long way of yet, though. I've been at it for over two years and I won't finish the manuscript until the end of the summer and then there is a year of peer review/editing/printing etc. In the meantime, if you are interested at all, this is an article I wrote last year that touches on some of the subjects the book will cover (
SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals)
I thought Oisin was barraged, and that collectively it wasn't necessarily our finest moment. But this is a public forum. And Oisin was gracious and willing anyway.
Personally, I got a lot out of the exchange. He explained that historians undertake an interpretative act, for the people in the present. He said he had a lot of work on, re-interpreting his area of history for people of colour and other marginalised people.
This said to me that it's not about uncovering truth. It's about creating narratives that appeal to modern ears.
It would have been interesting to see the penny drop, and for him to throw his hands up in despair or joy, as the scales fell from his eyes. I don't think that was on the cards though! Maybe we sowed some seeds though?!
Ultimately, I was just happy to better understand his aim in being a historian. That he sees it as his role to create narratives for folks about the past. He is literally an authority for the masses. Well, anyone can do that - that sort of interpretative history is just serving the current agenda of TPTB.
For me, it's more about how can I better understand the past (and I accept that understanding will be far from perfect) in order to give a better understanding of the present, in order to get closer to truth. And it was a genuinely valuable exchange! As good as could be really!
Personally, I got a lot out of the exchange. He explained that historians undertake an interpretative act, for the people in the present. He said he had a lot of work on, re-interpreting his area of history for people of colour and other marginalised people.
This said to me that it's not about uncovering truth. It's about creating narratives that appeal to modern ears.
Hi Feralimal,
I’m glad I could help, but I think you have misunderstood what I meant. I probably didn’t explain it very well, so I will have another go:
Doing history is an interpretive act, but not in the way I think you think I mean. It is not about putting a different spin on some set of preestablished facts. You have to think about how we understand the past. We weren’t there, so how can we understand it? The truth is that, because we weren’t there we will never fully know every detail about something. In fact, even if we were there our memory and perspective distort the events, so different people remembering the same event remember different things. I do a lot of oral histories and this is a very common issue – who started a fight, were people pressuring someone to do something –so many things depend on a person’s subjective interpretations of their experience.
So, what a historian does when they find something out, is that they try to collect as many clues about it as they can, to understand as much of the wider context and see how it fits, or doesn’t fit, into that context. Then using all of that surrounding information they try and interpret what they have found and reinterpret, where necessary, the things around it. I’ll give you a small example from my own work:
Previous histories of prisoners in Ireland has focused on political prisoners, the term given to militant Irish republicans imprisoned for involvement in organisations like the IRA during The Troubles. So when, in the past, historians wrote about a period of unrest in the prisons in the 1970s and the shift from liberal penal reform to a more militarized, security obsessed, prison expansion, they focused on the hunger strikes and escape attempts by the politicals and they said that that was what had caused the shift. I wanted to find out if ‘ordinary prisoners’ (ie. non-political prisoners) had also engaged in protests and if that had made a difference. So I went back through old newspapers, court documents, government memos, and interviewed people who had been in prison at the time and found that from 1973 to 1977 there was a prisoners union that organised sit-ins, hunger strikes, riots and court cases against both the prisons and prison officers. Using all of this new evidence, I was able to reinterpret several documents that had been written about before, in the context of the politicals, and reassess/reinterpret the history of the Irish prison system, showing that the ordinaries had not just been passive subjects in the development of the prison system.
So, basically, yes, doing history is an interpretive act but we don’t reinterpret for the sake of appealing to modern ears, we interpret in the light of new sources and in order to create a more nuanced understanding of our history.
