A01=Henry Rousso
academia
america
atonement
Author_Henry Rousso
britain
Category=NHB
commemoration
conflict
contemporaneity
contemporary history
current events
distance
england
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
experience
france
germany
guilt
historicity
historiography
journalism
knowledge
memorial
memory
mourning
narrative
national identity
nonfiction
objectivity
past
present
proximity
reporting
scholarship
subjectivity
testament
theory
united kingdom
Product details
- ISBN 9780226165233
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jul 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The writing of recent history tends to be deeply marked by conflict, by personal and collective struggles rooted in horrific traumas and bitter controversies. Frequently, today’s historians can find themselves researching the same events that they themselves lived through. This book reflects on the concept and practices of what is called “contemporary history,” a history of the present time, and identifies special tensions in the field between knowledge and experience, distance and proximity, and objectivity and subjectivity.
Henry Rousso addresses the rise of contemporary history and the relations of present-day societies to their past, especially their legacies of political violence. Focusing on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he shows that for contemporary historians, the recent past has become a problem to be solved. No longer unfolding as a series of traditions to be respected or a set of knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, history today is treated as a constant act of mourning or memory, an attempt to atone. Historians must also negotiate with strife within this field, as older scholars who may have lived through events clash with younger historians who also claim to understand the experiences. Ultimately, The Latest Catastrophe shows how historians, at times against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.
Henry Rousso addresses the rise of contemporary history and the relations of present-day societies to their past, especially their legacies of political violence. Focusing on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he shows that for contemporary historians, the recent past has become a problem to be solved. No longer unfolding as a series of traditions to be respected or a set of knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, history today is treated as a constant act of mourning or memory, an attempt to atone. Historians must also negotiate with strife within this field, as older scholars who may have lived through events clash with younger historians who also claim to understand the experiences. Ultimately, The Latest Catastrophe shows how historians, at times against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.
