History Manifested: A Commentary on continuity, disruption and the production of history

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This article refers to:

History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. White, The Practical Past, 47–8.

^2. In addition, as Spiegel notes in her essay on his work, rupture and discontinuity have long been central, if somewhat paradoxically rooted, in White's thinking about history. Spiegel notes that in his earlier essays, White argued that his analysis of the tropes of the historical genre was meant to allow historians to embrace the essential discontinuity of the human condition, even while retaining a sense of “progress” in historical understanding. Spiegel, “Above, About and Beyond the Writing of History,” 497, 501.

^3. At the end of The Practical Past, White questions the possibility of a continuity in both substance and appearance (101), but recaptures it through the notion of “practice” (102). It is also in this sense that I understand the idea of continuity (and as a consequence of disruption) – as performative reiterations, echoes, re-enactions by actors conscious of a past. On this understanding of continuity and change see Sewell, Logics of History.

^4. White, The Practical Past, 62.

^5. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 11–12.

^6. In the interests of full disclosure, and self-promotion, these ideas are at the heart of a volume I recently co-edited: Taithe and Pinto, The Impact of History?

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Pedro Ramos Pinto

Pedro Ramos Pinto is Lecturer in International Economic History at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity Hall.