Paperback
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Rethinking History addresses the question, "what is history?" with both an introduction to some of the debates surrounding that question, and a polemic. Its polemical thrust takes issue with an empiricist approach to history that fetishizes "the document" and "the facts," and considers that the past can be objectively known. Keith Jenkins challenges this conventional approach which fails to call into question the conditions of its own making, its own subservience to unrevealed interests, its own historical moment, and which excludes wider epistemological, methodological, and ideological practices that mediate the past into history. Jenkins advocates instead a history that overtly calls attention to its own processes of production and indicates the constructed rather than found nature of its references.
Keith Jenkins examines the question of what history is, in both theory and practice, and applies the resulting definition to the range of problems commonly met by students of history and historiography. The final chapter reflectively contextualizes the book's conclusions. Concise and well-argued, Rethinking History aims to develop in its readers a historicist, skeptical, and critical intelligence that grasps the possibilities of history in the postmodern world.
