ABSTRACTContemporary theory of history struggles in finding a new research agenda ‘after narrativism.’ One such theoretical example is Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography. This essay argues that Kuukkanen’s position falls within the ambit of his own criteria of narrativism, namely constructivism, representationalism, and holism. Yet, at the same time, Kuukkanen’s reconstruction of narrativism raises serious questions concerning its adequacy. This inadequacy, in connection with Kuukkanen’s view that history books argue for certain theses, leads to some sort of essentialism and ‘isolation’ from the relation between the narrative on the one hand and the historian and the reader on the other. What is more, the main thesis of Kuukkanen’s book is untenable on the basis of the examples to which he refers and lacks concrete instances of informal reasoning in history. As a result, a truly narrativist insight into the specificity of history books paradoxically goes unrecognized and Kuukkanen’s model appears prenarrativist at its core.

ABSTRACTThis is an exchange between Herman Paul and Ethan Kleinberg on Kleinberg’s book, Haunting History. The exchange revolves around the question: Are historians ‘ontological realists’? That is, do historians generally take the past to be a fixed and immutable object – ‘definitive, knowable, and stable’? Paul argues that historians do not necessarily hold consistent ontological beliefs. When facing the specter of Derridean deconstructivism, they may well invoke the image of a fixed, immutable past. But this does not imply that historians are ontological realists on all occasions: it is well possible that they respond quite differently to old-fashioned positivists than to Foucault- or Derrida-inspired theorists of history. In his rejoinder to Paul, Kleinberg argues that the ontological realist position historians hold is more stable than their context-specific commitments might suggest. This can be seen in response to the perceived threat of French theory in general and deconstruction in particular but also in the published works of most academic history. He contends that if Swidler’s concept of ‘cultural vocabularies’ is apt in regard to these specific commitments, as Paul suggests, it demonstrates the inadequacy of the ontological realist approach to the past and precisely why historians should look to a deconstructive one.

ABSTRACTOnly apparently a house, a domicile, an address, the Archive has never been a neutral place. As social theorists have argued at length, not only do archives dutifully collect and safeguard (certain fragments of) the past but they also produce what can be enunciated. They shape the historically thinkable and the politically utterable. But not all are welcome in such dwellings. In this article, I argue that Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive, functions as a microcosm of today’s Egypt and circumscribes the questions that historians as well as the public are allowed to ask. In ethnographic form, I explore the practices that regulate who is allowed into Dār al Wathā’iq, what can be accessed once the researcher sets foot past its door, and how such archival experience unfolds. I claim that the archive itself can morph into a locale of every-day surveillance and arbitrariness. Archival fieldwork is not an impartial practice. It should be acknowledged as such given the peculiar challenges and possibilities with which it confronts researchers as they stumble along in and out of the archives.

ABSTRACTThe paper reconstructs the invention of the loose file system in German psychiatry in the early nineteenth century as a special case of medical and juridical relationship. The loose file allows the gathering of all information of the treatment of the respective patient in one folder, which enables it to be reordered for the different ways of reimbursing care, providing cure, and to store the patient’s file for re-use in the case of re-admission. Psychiatry was the first discipline to introduce the new filing system. The reason for this was not, I argue, a medical one. Legislation and juridical debates about the status of the mentally ill person prompted a new admission procedure. The new Prussian General Law Code required a formal ‘declaration of lunacy’ which was negotiated in a regular trial. ‘Lunatics and raving mad persons’ came under the ‘special supervision and preventative care of the state’. The legal procedure produced questionnaires, reports and protocols which drove the patient-related record keeping in the psychiatric departments.

This article studies the history of a single word and its movement from pre-Islamic Arabia to the languages of modern Europe. It focuses on the key moment of the early nineteenth century when the Arabic ‘ghazwā’ served as the root and model of the French ‘razzia’ in the early Algerian colony. Tracing the history of the ghazwā through Islamic history and its subsequent emergence in Romance forms, the essay is comparative in the sense that it asks what happens in the movement of ideas and practices through loanwords. It suggests that the violence of modern empire was linguistic in a sense which encompasses the connections between thoughts, words and deeds, whilst critiquing literatures on lexical borrowing which tend to assume the innocence of linguistic exchange. A broader conclusion on transnational history is essayed through a consideration of the razzia in the context of the so-called ‘langue franque’: that métissage of Romance languages and Arabic which prevailed amongst traders across the Mediterranean in the early modern period, and which disappeared in the imperial Mediterranean of the nineteenth century.

This article revisits Hayden White’s claims about historical representation and interpretation as they apply to the historiography of the Holocaust. It engages with the recent work of three theorists of history, all of whom are to a greater or lesser extent indebted to White: Kalle Pihlainen, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, and Paul A. Roth. In particular, I examine Kuukkanen’s ‘post-narrativist philosophy of historiography’, which regards history as constructed – there is no truth in terms of correspondence – but at the same time as a rational enterprise, thus disallowing interpretations that do not conform to established and shared disciplinary rules. Kuukkanen looks to the historiography of World War I for his examples, while here I turn to the Holocaust as a powerful test case for theory of history. The article concludes that ‘rational constructivism’ leaves the problem of adjudicating between competing narratives which meet the criteria to be considered as ‘rationally constructed’ unanswered and argues that this state of affairs – which means the permanent impossibility of closure – should be approved of rather than worried about.

This essay explores the #sota39 project by the Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE. The project is a chronological representation of the Finnish Winter War produced for the social media platform Twitter. The project remixes authored material with content produced by the project’s consumers to provide a multivocal representation of a seminal historical era which seems to excel in invoking experience to its readers. How can historical characters be transfigured to relive 105 days of national crisis, after 70 years of its passing, through a strict chronology and on a social media platform, in a manner that connects with contemporary media consumers and still maintains its relevance as a historical project? The social media form is radical for historians, yet well suited for presenting chronologically proceeding events. The authors consider #sota39 to be an example of a well-made and successful experimental history project. In this essay our attention is not in the content of #sota39 but in its experimental format, use of historical sources and the historiographical consequences. This paper analyzes the complexities of the #sota39 project to fully appreciate its nature as a historical endeavour and to understand the possibilities and support it offers traditional history in the digital era.

The Impact of History, edited by Pedro Ramos and Bertrand Taithe, is a collection of 12 articles by various authors, on the impact of history, particularly with regard to public histories, national...