The New Narrative History: How New? How Narrative?

Abstract

Once again, there are wars and rumors of wars in the realm of historians and not just along the outer marches. Members of the profession are openly debating the health of their discipline, and concluding that it has lost far too much of its vibrancy and direction. To be sure, the outward signs continue vigorous. Quarterlies roll off the press with merciless regularity, while monographs proliferate like coathangers in bedroom closets. Even the tardiest book reviews appear in enough time for the volumes they praise to be acquired cheaply in remainder. Yet the uneasiness persists. The impressive advances of a decade ago seem somehow to have faded into a cloud of detail that verges on the antiquarian, concludes New England colonialist. Historians do not value popular history and fail to reward it, laments a nineteenth-century specialist. Researchers are tending to apply more powerful tools to smaller and smaller subjects, warns a twentieth-century historian. Perhaps the most touching acknowledgment of the crisis has come from a social scientist who recently called for livelier historical writing by noting, without the slightest apparent satirical intent, that one of the pressing tasks of social historians is to bring their dissemination capacity into closer alignment with their research success. 1 Surely this is a sentiment which we may all approbate in the extreme. In any case, the remedy most often proposed in the current crisis is a return to narrative history. In 1979 Lawrence Stone noted the resurgence of such history: descriptive rather than analytical and [whose] central focus is on man, not circumstances. It therefore deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical.... It is narrative directed by some pregnant principle,' and which possesses a theme and an argument. In 1981 Bernard Bailyn made eloquent use of the American Historical Association's annual bully pulpit to call for histories written with broader vision and greater coherence. Monographic research, he concluded, ultimately prove to be only as important as the historians can make it who will day use the results . . . to write, not research reports, but history - that is, narrative accounts of large segments of the general story that help explain how

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.