THE NEW HISTORY AND THE OLD
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1987
209 pp., $20.00
In a series of modulated, carefully argued essays written over the past decade, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has traced the contribution of contemporary historical studies to the cultural crisis of our time. By abandoning the traditional purposes and methods of history and replacing them with a so-called New History, contemporary historians have lent themselves to an assault on the fundamental values underlying Western civilization. The cultural implications of the New History, despite its having come to dominate the profession, have been obscured by its practitioners and either ignored or denied by other historians. It is accordingly of considerable importance that Himmelfarb has taken time from her distinguished work in British intellectual history--she is the author of Victorian Minds, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, and The Idea of Poverty--to critique new historical vices and defend old historical virtues.
What the New History studies
The New History is probably best defined by what it opposes. In the first place it rejects the narrative of nations and their leaders offered by historians since Herodotus and Thucydides. In place of great matters it offers the minor, the peripheral, elevating local communities and humble individuals (the "inarticulate"). Second, in its purer forms the New History holds in contempt history's great men and ideas, nation states, and major political development such as the rise of representative government. Indeed, the new History regards the very study of the greatly significant as a succumbing to the tyranny of elites and elitism. Finally, for some new Historians, the methods of traditional history such as adherence to causation and chronological sequence represent forms of tyranny.
The new historical approaches are many and varied. "Where the old history typically concerns itself with regimes and administrations," Himmelfarb writes,
[with] legislation and politics, diplomacy and foreign policy, wars and revolutions, the new history focuses on classes and ethnic groups, social problems and institutions, cities and communities, work and play, family and sex, birth and death, childhood and old age, crime and insanity. Where the old features kings, presidents, politicians, leaders, political theorists, the new takes as its subject the "anonymous masses." The old is "history from above," elitist history," as is now said; the new is "history from below," populist history."
But if the subjects of the New History are varied, they are united by a single determination to reverse the purposes and values of traditional historical study. In studying small communities and the popular superstitions of their inhabitants, New Historians are rejecting the nation state and the systematic political thought of its elites. Study of the family, its "mating customs and eating habits," inasmuch as it focuses on the smallest community of all, can be the largest rebuke to large concentrations of power.
In similar ways, the methods used to study common
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