Are there any other historians around here...

Are there any other historians around here? I think it's common knowledge for us that History as a discipline and knowledge (with the rest of humanities) is in a deep worldwide crisis. We have many high ranking historians like Gumbrecht (who I don't like at all) promulgating that History as a practical knowledge is useless and there should only be in the Universities a very, very small number of philosophers and historians, closing the spread of the knowledge even further than it currently is; in other words, the spread of this knowledge and its functions (critical thought, social cohesion, cultural understanding) shouldn't even be considered as part of the historian's job. This is one of his main solutions to solve History's crisis and is a very popular perspective, which I hate.

In other words, do you agree with Gumbrecht? Do you disagree? Have you even heard about this? In my personal and professional opinion, the job of the historian is to find new methods to bring a historical thought to the masses, to make the people critical of their world, government, religions, corporations, social and cultural struggles, etc. This way, it'd be a lot more difficult to control them and they could choose the options that'd benefit them a lot more, instead of other people. And that's what I've been trying to do but, well, it's pretty hard when the masses don't think that History has any function besides "boring dates and names."

Nevertheless, I'm still trying to give my best with this perspective I have of History.

Pic kind of related, it's one of Mexico's biggest historical traumas, together with the American intervention of 1846.

I only dabbled in history as an undergraduate, so I don't really have a professional opinion. It's always been a personal interest of mine. I'm not really privy to the issues of professional historians and so forth and I've never heard of Gumbrecht before, but from your explanation it sounds like he's something of an academic purist. Would that be accurate? It sounds like wants historians to become akin to monks sequestered in their abbey, minimizing contact with the laypeople so they can remain focused on their calling. If I base my understanding of the issue off of that analogy I can understand the merits of his argument, but if I'm wrong I'd like to know in greater detail what exactly he's in favor of.

It's so rare to get real, professional discussion on this board.

I'm a recent history graduate specializing in modern history at Oxford. And I can tell you the state of history as a discipline is complete shit.

I shit you not, every fucking woman currently graduating wrote a dissertation on feminism or gender perspectives. Objective, unbiased research is dead. And most publications outside academia are just vulgarized, commercial and simplified pieces of sensationalized shit

In more or less words, you could say that. Gumbrecht is a Historian currently at the University of Standford and if you can find the speech he give in one of this visits at the University of Osnabrük in Germany, then you can make yourself an idea of what he wants about History and Humanities, less budget for humanities and more complex thought among fewer historians/philosophers.

Objective unbiased research? Well, I can tell you that objective History has never existed. Sure, you have attempts like Positivism in the XIX century and Historical Materialism, or the first generations of L'école des Annales, but if the 1968 experience taught us with Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certau and Paul Veyne, is that history cannot be objective, at most impartial, and it is written from a specific point of time by a specific human being, the historian, who writes based on his personal experiences, cosmovision, social class and other variables that make is work more of an interpretation of History.

>the postmodernism argument

Yeah, to a certain extent. Of course everybody has biases and perspectives, but the goal of objective research and a objective reality isn't negated by this.

I personally do research on the second world war; could I not objectively say that the Holocaust happened, and that Hitler intently tried to eradicate certain social groups such as gays, gypsies, jews, etc? I have the historical sources for these claims, but according to your postmodern belief I still can't objectively claim that it really happened.

Not having any luck finding a video of that speech, mostly just videos about his latest book. But since I was in the general ballpark of understanding what he's about I'll say this on it: what purists usually desire in making their interests more obscure and inaccessible to the public is a lack of "contamination" of unwanted ideas or influences on the discipline. In this case, probably things like "pop history" or the politicization of historical research, essentially turning historians into propagandists or pundits for modern politicians. You could see as cutting down on the number of historians as similar to an armadillo curling up into a smaller, harder target in order to protect itself. Less historians means fewer points of entry for corruption to enter the discipline, leaving only those with a "pure" interest in history and no conflicts of interest.

Of course, there are demerits to this point of view which you brought up in your own perspective. In cutting off historians you make the work they do less relevant and useful to the public, and if you believe, as you do, that such work does have real, important benefits then it would be a great loss to society to reduce the number of historians and the funding they receive.

All that said, I tend to agree with you that the dissemination of knowledge is very important in preventing tyranny. Literacy makes it that much harder to keep people oppressed because it is the gateway to knowledge. But I feel like the appreciation of liberty has atrophied greatly over the last century. People do not seem to understand just how rare and precious it is to live so freely, and how precarious a thing it is to slide back into elitism.

Now, no need to be immature about this, you know it's hard to have a discussion with 2000 characters or less, that's why I don't like Twitter or even use it. You need to understand that there is a difference between postmodernists like Lyotard and those who are part of the Linguistic Turn like the historians I mentioned. The first ones assume that you can interpret everything, the second ones understand that there are some truths, some numbers and dates that are the pillars that support our historiography.

I've never discredited Economic History, Historical Materialism (Marxism applicated in history) or L'école des Annales, in fact I'm an avid reader of these perspectives, especially Historical Materialism, however, the thing I did say was that they are not objective. Sure, you have some concepts that are difficult to interpret too wildly, like social class, poverty, imperialism, economy, war etc. but the interpretation doesn't come from these concepts, is what you do with them.

Example, 2nd of February of 1848, the signature of the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that sold half of Mexico's territory to the United States, this is a fact. Where does the interpretation come from? To understand the implications of this signature. Was it a just war, or the invasion of a strong country to a very weak and unstable nation? You need the strong foundation of facts to support your narrative and your ideas, but those ideas are the interpretation.

Yeah and I completely hate elitism in History or Humanities, the same way I hate the practice of right or left wing ideals without any real foundation, without any kind of readings or thought on what they are doing, just sheeps following what they're told.

The balance between these two is what, in my opinion, would make our societies a lot more fair.

Daily reminder that history is a hobby, not a trade. I'm sorry you fell for le Historian meme.

History is very important because can explain many modern events. Main reason of crysis - censorship which force state legends and propaganda.

>Main reason of crysis - censorship which force state legends and propaganda.
No, that's a very big oversimplification and you're forgetting many variables, like the contemporary educational systems, the impact of globalization and the importance of History in the current social perspective.

That could be right, if it was in the 1930s in Europe.

You just got bodied by knowledge of History's contemporary situation and well-constructed arguments, son.

Looks like Oxford is not that big of a deal.

Why are history experts almost always wrong when talking about contemporary events (by comparing them to past events)? For example when they labelled Trump as fascists.

*Trump and his supporters, I mean.

History experts? I'm going to need names. Now, if you want to know my approximation, is because Trump has certain elements of populism and in his rallies people were getting pretty worked up with stuff like the wall and such.

Now, I'm aware that this is not a very long answer or a satisfying one, but let me ask you this, why did you have to bring Trump into this discussion? It has NOTHING to do with American politics.

>History experts
So, not historians?

>Now, if you want to know my approximation, is because
This is really annoying English.

History is a political tool to promote ideology. You are a fool if you think it could be anything else.

yeah I'm incredibly worried about my dissertation on early modern scottish linguistics being used to push forward a political agenda

you dope

Well it is based upon this logic

> If you want to embrace the future, first embrace the past

The modern historian's job is to interpret the past through the lens of contemporary politics, so continuity can be established between the present regime's ideology going forward, legitimatizing continuity. This is inherently wrong in my opinion, the worst propagators of falsehood are the English and their historical history through the lens of the Glorious Revolution.

Is that all you can come up with?

What he tried to say (but was incredibly ineffective at doing so) was that history is a tool to create a cohesion between certain populations, to construct the idea that they are part of the same identity or ethnic group. Benedict Anderson wrote a great work around this idea, a book called "Imagined Communities." Eric Hobsbawm also worked a bit of this idea in his book "Nations and Nationalism Since 1780". If you're interested, you should check them out.

I agree that it's a terrible practice, however, it's a very natural one among states. Official History, the one taught in schools is pretty much that, a History built to teach the population to support the hegemonical groups in the exercise of power.

You could say that every institution has its own historiography built to support itself, (states, religions, ideologies and practices like marxism, feminism, capitalism) but that's normal, all have narratives that sustain them. If you read Hayden White's "Metahistory", you can see that even in the XIX century, where the idea of making History a science was at its strongest, historians of the time had literary (related to literacy) elements that exuded ideology, not very scientific.

I can't find the name, but my history professor in a class focussed on Nazi Germany said there were concerning similarities between Trump's campaign and the rise of Nazism. She doesn't appear on the department's webpage and my transcript and class history don't show the names of my professors.

I'm not saying it was aliens.

But it was aliens.

So we go from "history experts", to your History teacher. I hope you take this advice, but it's never good to generalize. I'm sure your teacher has her reasons, arguments, and logic for why she said that and yes, Trump has certain parallels to populists governments in the XX century, but for you to say that ALL history experts think the same way, well that's wrong.

I disagree with the douchefaced bag of dirty sockd who says that we shouldn't know history. They don't want us to know history because its repeating itself. In so many ways. I got in trouble for telling someone to googe the original progressive movements tactics.

In a way, I certainly understand why a person would like to take history out of the equation for normies.

The fact of the matter is, for your average retard, history isn't an interest or even an intellectual endeavor so much as it is a tool he uses to "oppress" others. Hell, they're not even learning any kind of cohesive history. Unless you're in university, you're just learning your own country's history, which is tantamount to indoctrination.

What exactly gives someone the right to decide what goes into German history, or British history, or whatever? They're completely imaginary accounts.

It's kind of amusing how much I sound like an SJW, but the truth is, I see so many retards abusing history to their own ends while thinking they're historians because they've been taught a few lines in school or watched a documentary, that it drives me insane.

History and politics are just two of those things. You wouldn't see a normal person watch a show about livers and suddenly going about transplanting livers. But somehow these mongs have no problem thinking they're political and historical wizards that know everyone's proper place and what should go on in the world.

And this goes a thousand times more for subhuman places like China or Japan, where they're literally taught a mythos rather than any kind of real history. They're not just diving events arbitrary, they're willfully omitting some altogether or lying about others to suit their agenda.

>>It's kind of amusing how much I sound like an SJW
Please don't say this, it makes your post look rather childish, it's not "SJW" to understand the political use of History.

>And this goes a thousand times more for subhuman places like China or Japan, where they're literally taught a mythos rather than any kind of real history.

What? what are you talking about? If you mean historical mythos of national heroes and events, then all States have those. Even if the event happened or that person actually lived, they most likely have a mythology surrounding them to make them great in the eyes of the people.

Yeah, people study a little portion of history then think they know everything.

Maybe, but oppressed is a word that has been completely abused by SJWs now, and I can't even hear it without thinking about some ugly fat feminist.

>What? what are you talking about? If you mean historical mythos of national heroes and events, then all States have those. Even if the event happened or that person actually lived, they most likely have a mythology surrounding them to make them great in the eyes of the people.

To the same degree? I rather doubt that. I don't see Germans painting Hitler in a positive light, do you?

I'm not saying Europeans don't do this at all; it's clear that we do, to the extent that we try to present the halfway decent guys in a positive as light as possible. But there's a world of difference between that and, say, pretending the Holocaust never happened.

Like I said, Germany and Japan are both good example. Germany stresses their moral failures, and make it known to those growing up that they fucked up. In Japan, they're taught that they were the victims, and that what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are unforgivable, and deeply undeserved, crimes.

And then you have the Chinese government that's actively destroyed sites and tried to put aside findings because they didn't suit their purposes of presenting an eternally united and homogeneous China. And those are just the examples we know about NOW. Imagine what else they've done during the long Red years.

Probably, but in the case of Japan, I'm sure that sooner or later, there will be (and I know some people in this board misuse and hate this concept for reasons I don't quite understand) a historical revisionism of WWII Japan. Not only that but in some decades, it's possible that historians will rethink certain concepts of the concentration camps, for example, the fact that there were more communists in those camps than Jewish.

It's difficult to think of the case of China unless there's a Revolution inside the Communist party that would open the party to a more open thought, similar to what happened in the USSR.

That was my first post in the thread, but compared to anyone in the thread it seems fair to say that a professor who focussed on studying Nazism should qualify as an expert, or at the very least a professional. Perhaps not an expert in the academic community, but an expert for pleb purposes.

Of course it's foolish to extrapolate one person's opinion to be the opinion of the entirety of history academia.

Alright, sorry about that. However, as I said, both Trump and Hitler share populists characteristics, which is why your teacher's interpretation is that Trump's presidency is similar to the raise of nazism and other people can see those parallels too.

You could all disappear at once and there would be no crisis.

Oh yeah? If there were no History students, who would do all the monstrously overpaid pointless graduate jobs that companies conjure up to get tax cuts?

>And then you have the Chinese government that's actively destroyed sites and tried to put aside findings because they didn't suit their purposes of presenting an eternally united and homogeneous China.
Source? The PRC promotes a multicultural narrative of Chinese history

western education is a joke, no wonder its in "deep crisis" there

meanwhile in the real world, more and more archives are accessable and historians cant wait to get those juicy hidden datas

not to mention technology allowing us to revise and question things we thought are unquestionable

ppl are curious and will be always curious about the past, so they can learn from it for the future

>Are there any other historians around here?
If you'd been here before you'd know the answer to that. Veeky Forums doesn't read, Veeky Forums doesn't study. Veeky Forums watched youtube videos and listens to podcasts and look at memes and charts made on /pol/. Start asking questions about the university and you'll set off a lot of rants about girl germs and jewish conspiracies.

What's the "real world".

I'm not going to lie, I almost never been on Veeky Forums.

Someone could easily turn this into justification to separate the UK by using your paper as proof that Scots remained linguistically and therefore culturally distinct from England and Wales even in recent history. Or if you conclude that they were very similar it could be used to justify the opposite, saying Scottish national identity as it exists today is a modern invention in an attempt to delegitimize it.

I've had BA in history, but I have decided to go another way for my Masters. I'm not interested in doing research or teaching.

In my country (eurofag), there has been a massive down prioritization of the humanities. Less funding, less focus and shit talking politicians. The primary charge against the humanities is that they don't help graduates get jobs and they don't teach anything employers (think they) want. I kinda see this is a consequence of the global economic arms race. Nation states are feeling the pressure of the up and coming East, and anything that doesn't have a profit/productivity measure you can quantify is useless.

I sometimes also wonder whether the research and whats trending in academia has become so alien to the average guy that they just kinda shake their heads.

That's because you're educated and have a career. Most people here are dropouts or never attended college in the first place, most of what they know about history they got off wikipedia or like that guy said, youtube videos.

>tfw shitposters will be on the front lines protecting history.....and unfortunately humanities.

Well one way to look at it is that the study of the humanities, art, history, literature, philosophy, and so on, has historically been the domain of the elite. It is essentially the mastery of culture. And it used to be much more difficult. Time was you had to speak several languages and be willing to travel to far away lands to get a complete cultural education. Now we just have the internet and most everything is translated into local dialects the world over. Back when only the elite could study culture it meant having access to rare tomes and having free time necessary to read and understand them. Now there are a multitude of copies of all the ancient texts and no end of illuminations by thousands of scholars that you can access to help you understand them.

And the end result of all this is, I think, a devaluation of the humanities. It was once an elite pursuits, but is now made very easy, and now that the common man is able to pursue the humanities at his leisure he realizes it was never very helpful to his needs as a working person in the first place.

>it was never very helpful to his needs as a working person in the first place

Most definitely. A lot of average people you talk to have a hard time understanding the value of a subject as history. They often don't see the value in it. Can you make money doing it? What do you produce when you study history and how does it help us get richer?

A huge issue with the humanities is also that there isn't a single type of job out there that is obvious for humanities student. The struggle of History graduate is that he has to justify his worth to an employer constantly, and he has to fight to carve out a niche for himself. It's very different from fx. an accountant who graduates and can now perform a very specific series of job functions.

A LOT of humanities graduates struggle deeply with this and end up doing jobs that have nothing to do with their degrees. It's a basic uncertainty that many people don't handle very well.

As someone who's currently studying political science, it always feels like the university strives towards very specific agenda's and ideas rather than exploring a variety... at least when it comes to contemporary topics. Many professors have no issue discussing the politics of the past with various perspectives, but they're much more narrowing and patronizing when it comes to discussion of modern topics.

To me, it feels like universities are often preoccupied with proselytizing certain perspectives than trying to understand them more broadly. I'm not sure how applicable this is to the study of history but it's an issue that often bothers me about modern education in general. I get that the education of the past has always been patronizing and narrow to a degree, but often times it feels like dissenting thought is frowned upon. You do better in school by following a set of ideas rather than express your own.

This is a cliche belief I've always detested. While there is truth to the idea, History is not easy to predict and nothing in the modern world is exactly the same as it is in the past. It's this mindset that leads people to believe that some vague similarities Trump have to Hitler make him a Nazi.

I personally believe the value of history is important for understanding a region's beliefs, culture, and political landscape.

I study history and I'm thinking of stopping until I can move countries. Basically if you study history in South Africa, you ONLY study black contributions to the world. In first year, we did a little bit of middle eastern history and the age of enlightenment but since then it's mostly focused on "afro-centric" history and as the only white girl in my class, when all you study is colonization and apartheid and why whites are shit people. It kind of sucks

I'm sorry, can you repeat that?

>In other words, do you agree with Gumbrecht? Do you disagree? Have you even heard about this?
I have never heard about this, but I think it's fucking retarded. And for that matter, the whole history faculty of my uni would most likely laugh at the concept, since all professors pump out books for both amateurs and professionals at astounding rates.