Journal ArticleDOI
Narrative History and Theory
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This paper argued that history examines particulars and "attend to concrete detail, while theory attends to general rules and screen[s] out the exceptions." But history is frequently labelled an idiographical discipline as opposed to a nomothetic one, that is, a discipline whose knowledge objects are particular, individual and specific rather than classes of phenomena which are abstracted and subsumed in generalisations about trends, patterns and causal determinations.Abstract:
I am a narrative historian. By narrative, I mean the telling of a story to explain and analyze events and human agency in order to increase understanding. As a narrative historian, I have not made extensive use of theory in my analysis of past events. In fact, in the past I consistently rejected theory, considering it more of a hindrance than a help. The historian Geoffrey Roberts stated, “History is frequently labelled an idiographical discipline as opposed to a nomothetic one, that is, a discipline whose knowledge objects are particular, individual, and specific rather than classes of phenomena which are abstracted and subsumed in generalisations about trends, patterns and causal determinations.” In this vein, it was my view—as Peter Burke noted—that history examines particulars and “attend to concrete detail,” while theory attends to “general rules and screen[s] out the exceptions.”read more
Citations
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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Uses of History in History Education
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a compilation thesis which contains an introductory chapter and four original articles, which all concern aspects of how historical culture is constituted in historical me... The studies comprising this thesis all concerned aspects of historical culture.
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Knowledge mobilisation and the civic academy: the nature of evidence, the roles of narrative and the potential of contribution analysis
Jon Bannister,Anthony O'Sullivan +1 more
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Living Legacies: A Historical Analysis of the Atlanta Nine Who Desegregated Atlanta Public Schools
TL;DR: Crawford et al. as discussed by the authors explored and document the missing voices of Atlanta's 1961 school desegregation movement and provided an analysis of the students' experiences using historical research.
Practical Paternalism: G. Gunby Jordan's Quest For a Vocational School System in Columbus, Georgia
TL;DR: G. Gunby Jordan, a southern industrialist, banker, and philanthropist, became one of the forefathers of modern vocational educational practices in the United States.
References
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Journal Article
The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
TL;DR: This paper argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Journal ArticleDOI
Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity
TL;DR: The authors argue that a narrative account is an extension of one of the primary features of a historical account, which is the community of form of a narrative history, and that the discontinuity between a narrative and reality is not due to lack of evidence or of verisimilitude, but rather to the fact that any narrative account will present us with a distorted picture of the events it relates.
Journal ArticleDOI
Can histories be true? Narrativism, positivism and the "metaphorical turn"
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that the theories of narrative explanation can also be analyzed as inversions of positivist covering-law theory, replacing it by an indefinite multitude of explanatory strategies.