Earlier today I wrote, "Historians are concerned with what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, and less with how people may now feel about it."  

Upon reconsideration, I'd like to offer a correction.  The issue of how people today feel (about what happened, how it happened, and why it happened) is indeed an appropriate study for cultural historians, especially when there is an apparent distance between what the historian takes as factual and the specific slant of a contemporary view.  For instance, it is appropriate to study the cultural history of holocaust denial, not as it affects our understanding of the holocaust itself, but as way of understanding how a pseudohistorical school of thought came into being.

Historiographical theory indicates that all interpretations are framed by the writer's broad understanding of things (the hermeneutical critics call this the horizon of understanding), which is culturally constructed.  This gives rise to the metanarrative--a general pattern of interpreting history (consider, for instance, the old histories of "cavalier" Virginia, and the histories dominated by the Turner "frontier" model).  It could be argued that some participants in the recent discussions are working with a neoConfederate metanarrative that revives the notion of the civil war as northern aggression and reads the central issues as constitutional.  To maintain the last argument, it is necessary to consider the constitution as a fixed quantity (aligned with 20th/21st century notions of constitutional law), and to make judgments retroactively and anachronistically, rather than an ongoing body of law evolving through amendment, test, and interpretation.

Enough for now.

Cheers -- Kevin Joel Berland




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