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ABSTRACT
This article proposes a story of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice since its founding in 1997. It analyses the journal’s contributions to historical theory and practice in the past, examines the situation in the present and projects some challenges for the future. It focuses on the idea that the original ambitious project proposed by the founding editors has led the journal to engage with an essential tension between tradition and innovation, along with another tension – between theory and practice – deliberately generated by its editors. It argues that one of the decisive contributions of the journal has been to encourage historians to innovate and experiment without falling into a sterile utopianism. This way, historians may come to terms with new ways of representing history via digital platforms without necessarily rejecting the traditional prose-narrative genre.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This is based on a private email from Keith Jenkins to Kalle Pihlainen (3 October 2018), with express permission to use for this account.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jaume Aurell
Jaume Aurell is Professor at the Department of History in the University of Navarra (Spain). He specializes in medieval history and is finishing a book on the practice and symbolic meaning of the ritual of royal self-coronation in Medieval Europe. He is the author of Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (University of Chicago Press, Citation2012) and Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (Routledge, Citation2016). He has edited the themed issue Rethinking Historical Genres in the Twenty-First Century (Rethinking History 19 [2], Citation2015).