Abstract
Most history books are in narrative form. They tell a story, and show the movement of people and events through time. Usually, though, that is not all they do — they also offer analysis and description. Analysis helps us understand why things happened as they did; it enables us to draw conclusions and comparisons, and to make some generalisations. Description helps the reader imagine what places, things and people in the past looked like, how people moved and talked and acted, how they worked, did politics, played sport and cared for each other. Those histories that at first glance seem to be in another mode, to be non-narrative history, such as works of historical argument and large-scale generalisation, usually still have a strong component of narrative somewhere inside them.
Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete.
PETER GAY, STYLE IN HISTORY1
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Notes
Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 189.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1963]).
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Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
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John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A family story from early America (New York: Knopf, 1994).
Martha Hodes, The Sea Captains Wife: A true story of love, race, and war in the nineteenth century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), available at <http://seacaptainswife.com/>
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Donald J. Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet baby boomers talk about their lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006);
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Gerald M. Oppenheimer, Shattered Dreams? An oral history of the South African epidemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Patsy Cravens, Leavin’ a Testimony: Portraits form rural Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 80.
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© 2011 Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath
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Curthoys, A., McGrath, A. (2011). Narrative, plot, action!. In: How to Write History that People Want to Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30496-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30496-3_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-29038-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30496-3
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