Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: HistoryTo mark its one-hundredth issue, the prestigious journal Past and Present commissioned Jacques Le Goff to carry out a survey of the articles it had published between 1959 and 1982.Based on the subject-matter of these articles, Le Goff concluded that the attention of the journal-Britain's equivalent of Annales -had been overwhelmingly focused on the sixteenth-to nineteenth-century period.As with antiquity and (to a lesser extent) the Middle Ages, the twentieth century had been "somewhat neglected, " accounting for just over 7 percent of all articles, with the years aft er 1945 being especially underrepresented. 1 Th is refl ected the persistence of a disdainful attitude toward the study of the recent past among professional historians, including historians of modern British politics.Citing temporal proximity to the subject matter and unavailability of still-to-be released archival sources, scholars appeared content to surrender the fi eld to political scientists and journalistic amateurs.Happily things have since changed, and the historiography of twentiethcentury British politics can now be described as fl ourishing.Th ere are a number of reasons for this, but key enabling factors have been the advances made in the study of oral history, the waning of the narrow-minded "cult of the archive, " and the growing realization that there is not necessarily any positive correlation between historical "objectivity" (assuming this is possible or desirable) and temporal distance.One notable indicator of the growing interest in twentieth-century political history has been the success of the Institute I am grateful to Arthur Burns for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Source: Journal of Policy History
Author: Paul Readman
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2154145347