Why Bother with History?: Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Motivations

In the wake of heated debates on the nature of history, `Why Bother With History?' considers its very purpose: why should we bother with it anyway? At a time when the subject is under threat both from political `modernisers' and from some postmodernist theorists, Beverley Southgate argues for an increasingly important role for a revitalised historical study.

Rejecting ancient and modern aspirations to a history `for its own sake' produced by supposedly objective and attached authors, Southgate proposes rather that historians' importance lies in their own moral standpoint. Their story of the past facilitates the future we desire.

Focusing on history's relationship with:

Psychology

Politics and Power

Religion

Education

Postmodernity

and using global examples from the ancient world to the present, this book is timely and inevitably controversial, challenging many of the assumptions of modernist history.

Beverley Southgate is Reader Emeritus, University of Hertfordshire. His many publications include `History: What and Why?' (1996).

. Why Bother With History? argues for an increasingly important role for a revitalised historical study. Examining the motivations of past historians, the author rejects the ancient aspiration to a 'history for its own sake' and argues that historians' importance lies in their own adoption of a moral standpoint, from which a story of the past can be told, that facilitates the attainment of a future we desire. Inevitably controversial, in that it challenges many of the assumptions of modernist history, this is an interdisciplinary book, which draws in particular on psychology and literature.

.Why Bother With History? argues for an increasingly important role for a revitalised historical study. Examining the motivations of past historians, the author rejects the ancient aspiration to a 'history for its own sake' and argues that historians' importance lies in their own adoption of a moral standpoint, from which a story of the past can be told, that facilitates the attainment of a future we desire. Inevitably controversial, in that it challenges many of the assumptions of modernist history, this is an interdisciplinary book, which draws in particular on psychology and literature.

1. History for History's Sake

2. History and Historical Examples

3. History and Psychology. Identity: Memory and Forgetting; Meaning and Purpose

4. History, Politics and Power

5. History and Religion

6. History and Education

7. Postmodernism, History, and Values

8. Postmodern History and the Future