Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
… history only becomes interesting to the general public by being corrupted, by being adulterated with sweet, unwholesome stuff to please the popular palate.
J. R. Seeley, ‘History and Politics IV’, Macmillan's Magazine,41 (1879)I am fully convinced that it is not conscious lying … but a strange mental and moral twist.
Edward A. Freeman on J. A. Froude, 27 April 1879 (letter to J. R. Green)Making history a science not only involved the expression of a method that historians could ascribe to at will. For history to become a true science, the scientific method had to become a communal method – a mos communis – that would in essence form the very basis of a professional discipline of history. Making the inductive scientific method the method of history would involve a fair amount of disciplinary acts in the form of epistemic boundary maintenance. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the boundary work of scientific historians seemed to focus on separating their inductive endeavour from Buckle's more philosophical and deductive project. As we have seen, however, historians promoting history's more artistic sensibilities also criticized Buckle's science of history as a way of rejecting history's scientific status entirely. What is more, such historians tended to promote a way of writing and teaching history that was much more popular with students and the reading public than was the fact-based approach advocated by the likes of Stubbs and others.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Science of History in Victorian BritainMaking the Past Speak, pp. 73 - 94Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014