The Rhetoric of History

Bibliographic Data

ID5077331
AuthorsJ H Hexter (corresponding author)
Year1967
Volume6
Issue1
Pages3
Publication date1967-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2504481
OpenAlexW2316322284
LanguageEN
Citations received16

If I had entitled this paper Footnotes, Quotations, and Name-lists, readers would, I fear, pass rapidly to the next contribution. But since I am going to discuss footnotes, quotations, and name-lists, I owe some explanation as to why I chose so odd and apparently incoherent a set of subjects, linked only by the fact that historians but not only historians use them. I have long been interested in what goes on between the time an historian says to himself: Well, I guess I understand this matter about as well as I ever will, so I may as well start writing, and the time he lays down his pen ruefully beside a stack of scrawled pages and says: Well, it's a damned bad job, but it's about as good as I can do, so that's that. In the intervening time the historian has been trying to find suitable ways to impart to others what he believes he understood; he has been writing history. This activity once had a name; it was called historiography. In recent years that name has been ruthlessly misappropriated, and its meaning drastically altered. Historiography has been used to designate the history of what at one time or another historians have written about the past. Thus understood, it is a special kind of intellectual history or a branch or perhaps a twig of the sociology of knowledge. I am simply reappropriating the term to its original use, since there is no other single term to describe the process of writing history. On the face of it, the outcome of writing history, the rhetoric of history, is unmistakably different from the rhetoric of, say, physics or lyric poetry. Whatever an historian may profess that he is up to when he writes history, the result of his activity, an article, say, in the American Historical Review, does not look at all like an article in the Physical Review or an epic poem or a sonnet. Indeed if it does look like either a physicist's paper or a poet's sonnet, its chance of publication in the American Historical Review is fairly slim. And since the serious commitment of craftsmen is better revealed by their common activity than by their often idiosyncratic individual professions of intent, from the look of what they write it appears that historians are committed to writing in a different way, committed to a different rhetoric, from what science as exemplified by the physicists, or belles lettres as ex

Art · Chose · Epistemology · Historiography · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Reflexive pronoun · Rhetoric · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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