The writer and historian Jill Lepore has penned a great piece in the 23 November 2020 issue of the New Yorker (posted online 16 November). Her focus, in "Will Trump Burn the Evidence?", is the politics of historical records and archives. It's a great, topical essay that captures some of the anxiety about how the … Continue reading That They Can Gain in Judgments
Tag: forensic history
A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards
In 1994, the legal scholar John Phillip Reid published a somewhat cynical article on forensic history in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. It contains some real zingers on the intersection between law and history, how practitioners of each perpetrate mutually abusive disciplinary transgressions, and the meaning (and substance) of forensic history. Here are … Continue reading A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards
Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined
I've been digging into the use of Pearl Harbor analogies in America's response to the 9-11 attacks - and, because of a curious twist in the political landscape in 2001, I've been looking a little more closely at a well known study of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford … Continue reading Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined
Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane
Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like "research" and "information", and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It's a world in … Continue reading Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane
Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened
In his much quoted critique of medieval historiography, R.J. Collingwood noted that historians, ... in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God's and not man's, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man's actions in order … Continue reading Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened
