The old-fashioned concept of the historian’s task was that he (rarely she) “described what really happened in the past.’ This notion, though still widely held, has been exploded by theoretical developments which have occurred largely outside the field of history itself. Windschuttle cites this 1991 description of a compulsory honors seminar in history: First elaborated and disseminated by whites who hate their own intellectual traditions, this new “history” is a powerful weapon in the hands of anyone whose only interest is the exercise of power in the name of his own group.įor those outside the university, it is difficult to imagine that the queen of the humanities could be dethroned. Windschuttle only touches on this, the destruction of history is a central element in the destruction of the thinking, culture, and people of the West.
The Killing of History is a description of what is happening in history departments and a stinging critique of the thinking that drives it.Īlthough Mr.
Windschuttle’s fear - reflected in the title of his book - that current thinking could completely transform and falsify the way we understand the past. Windschuttle, this way of thinking is now rampaging through virtually every history department in the English-speaking world, discrediting the traditional, fact-based view of history and the die-hards who still practice it. Known by such names as “postmodernism,” “deconstructionism,” or “universal history,” the new intellectual fashion holds that since the past is unknowable, history is no more real than fiction - that what used to pass for history was nothing more than the expression of the unconscious biases of historians.Īccording to Mr. Now, according to the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, a powerful new movement is undermining the very foundations of the academic discipline of history. We have taken for granted their pioneering insight that history should not be myth or fairy tale but - to the greatest extent possible - the truth. Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6įor most of the past 2,400 years, Europeans have understood history much as the Greeks did: as an effort to understand what really happened. ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’
‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past, Keith Windschuttle, Simon & Schuster, 1997, 298 pp.
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