Ann Curthoys, John Docker. The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History

What is history? Our question is more limited: is history fiction? And ask about problems of historical truth, the relationship between the historian and the past, and questions of fact, value, and interpretation.



History is history, and fiction fiction, and the two have nothing in common. On the basis of a notion of fiction as that which is the product purely of invention and imagination, that which makes knowledge insecure, these respondents (usually historians themselves) see history as fiction’s antithesis. So, can historians tell the truth about the past? Should history be written for the present or for its own sake? Is it possible to see the past in its own terms? Should we make moral judgements about people and actions in the past? Are histories shaped by narrative conventions, so that their meaning derives from their form rather than the past itself? One of the aims of this book is to show how historians have always pondered the problem of historical truth, and have always markedly differed over how to achieve it.
TOC
1 Herodotus and World History
2 Thucydides
3 Leopold von Ranke and Sir Walter Scott
4 History, Science and Art
5 Has History any Meaning?
6 History in the Light of Catastrophe
7 The Linguistic Turn
8 The Feminist Challenge
9 Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
10 Anti-Postmodernism and the Holocaust
11 History Wars



and ES Mirror