History and morality / Donald Bloxham.
Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. 'History and Morality' draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insigh...
Saved in:
| Online Access: |
Full Text (via ProQuest) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2020]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. 'History and Morality' draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insights as a practicing historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualisation, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham's book investigates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. The author argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work, historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past - responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors' own terms and to portray the impact of those actors' deeds - but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in 'History and Morality' has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780192602329 0192602322 9780192602312 0192602314 9780191890833 0191890839 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Source of description: Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed August 4, 2020) |