History and Morality

by Donald Bloxham

Overview

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insights as a practicing historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualisation, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham's book investigates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. The author argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work, historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past - responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors' own terms and to portray the impact of those actors' deeds - but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in History and Morality has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192602329
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	07/02/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Donald Bloxham has taught at Edinburgh University since 2001. He was appointed Professor of Modern History in 2007 and given the established Richard Pares chair of history in 2011. Beyond his work on the history and philosophy of the discipline of history, he is a specialist in the study of genocide and of the punishment of perpetrators of genocide. His book The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (OUP, 2005) won the Raphael Lemkin Prize for genocide scholarship. He has also been a recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and is currently on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Contemplating Historical Actors in Context
2. Writing History: Problems of Neutrality
3. Justifying Judgement on Things Past
4. History, Identity, and the Present
Bibliography of Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

"Bloxham's book is a call for nuance and self-awareness, arguing that moral judgement is not only important, but is actually inescapable. What matters is how we deploy it - and that we are conscious of doing so." — Jonathan Waterlow, H/Sz/Kult

"It is all too rare that a scholarly book - the product of decades of research and careful thought - emerges at precisely the moment when it is most needed ... Masterfully spanning multiple academic disciplines, Bloxham takes us back to the very foundations of Western thinking, charting the development of our conceptions of core values like 'truth', 'justice', 'responsibility', and 'guilt' ... History and Morality will be immensely useful not only for a generation of historians wary of making value judgements about the past, but also for a new generation who, in their drive to bring morality back into the picture, are sometimes too hasty to appreciate the importance of context and the pitfalls of anachronism." — Jonathan Waterlow, H-Soz-Kult

From the Publisher