Historical literacy includes knowledge of the content of historical events and the historical analysis. Historians should be able to identify problems, which people in the past had faced and to come to corresponding conclusions about actions which have been undertaken. In world history it is especially a challenge as the societies differing from our own, face other sort of problems and come to other sort to decisions concerning those problems.
In identifying history it is not always concerned with events of a world scale only, where history could be written in the form of a biography, event, movement or epoch. This paper analyzes history based on three works, “Experience” by Joan W. Scott, “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation “ by Hayden White and the way the interpretation of history through these works can be related to some modern aspects.
Analysis
If identifying history through the work of the aforementioned authors, it should be noted that they are considering history from different perspectives although in general they do not contradict each other. To characterize history from the work of each author with one word based on the aspect that is considered the most through their works, history in Scott’s work as the title implies will go as “experience”; in Benjamin’s work it will be “reflection” another word could be “explosion” and Hayden’s work is analyzed by the word “discipline”.
In Scott’s “Experience” the vision of history was presented through various excerpts of works by other author’s in which she tried to come up with unified idea that the history is a documented experience that brings evidence that “has drawn attention to dimensions of human life and activity usually deemed unworthy of mention in conventional history.” The use of the term experience can be free of authority as the author mentions the works of Collingwood where an author is his own authority in reenacting past experiences.
Another definition of experience was mentioned through the works of Thompson where his notion of experience combined ideas of “external influence and subjective feeling.”
In Hayden’s work, history as a study is a discipline that is based on theoretical rationale provided by “interpretation, narration, and understanding”. The purpose of such discipline is determination of the “facts history, by which to assess the objectivity, veridicality, and realism of the philosophies of history”
Benjamin’s work although filled with quotes has his unique identification of history in which he sees it as “a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now.” In this definition the approach of the historians is to take out one moment or period which he called “zero-hour” from the flow of time to analyze “a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work”
Considering these visions of history, if we take some representation of a historical event represented in modern form such as the film “Brave Heart” for example. The history of the film would be more suited to the definition of Scott as an experience, where although the film might have some historical inaccuracies the screenwriter was impressed by the Blind Harry’s poem more than the historical source, where the poem is the external influence combined with screenwriter Randall Wallace’s “subjective feeling”.
In considering the work of Hayden the aforementioned film would not fit into his definitions, although the interpretation and the narration are present in the cost of understanding the history. In Benjamin’s work Randall Wallace took the zero-hour which is the rebellion of William Wallace to describe a “specific life” which is First War of Scottish Independence out of a homogenous time which is the period of time where Scotland was occupied.
Works Cited
Scott, Joan W. Experience. New York: Routledge, 1992.
White, Hayden. “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation.” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (1982): 113-137.
Walter, Benjamin. On the Concept of History. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974.
Anderson, Lin. “Braveheart: From Hollywood to Holyrood.” Luath Press Ltd. (2005): 27.