Historiography and Historians Practice Flashcards

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the key historians, works, and concepts from the lecture notes on historiography including von Ranke, Carr, Lyotard, and the Australian History Wars.

Leopold von Ranke ($1795–1886$)

A German academic and devout Lutheran who professionalised history as an academic discipline by pioneering the university seminar system and rigorous archival methods.

Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations, $1494–1514$ ($1824$)

Key early work by von Ranke reflecting his reaction against earlier moralising and story-driven historical writing.

History of the Popes ($1834–36$)

A work by von Ranke that reconstructed the Papacy's authority using original Vatican and Venetian diplomatic archives, avoiding secondary moralised retellings.

Wie es eigentlich gewesen

A phrase meaning "as it essentially happened," representing von Ranke's explicit aim to show the past without moral judgement.

Source Criticism

The rigorous training von Ranke provided to students in his university seminar system, focusing on the use of primary archival material like diplomatic dispatches and eyewitness accounts.

E.H. Carr ($1892–1982$)

A British diplomat and academic who challenged empiricism, arguing that history is always shaped by the historian's own present-day context.

What is History? ($1961$)

Carr's key work in which he describes history as a continuous "dialogue between the past and the present."

Carr's Fish Metaphor

The theory that facts are like fish in an ocean; what a historian "catches" depends on where they fish and what tackle (facts) they choose to use.

A History of Soviet Russia

Carr’s $12$-volume work, cited as a weakness because his pro-USSR sympathies allegedly led him to downplay Stalin's atrocities.

Jean-François Lyotard

A French philosopher and postmodern theorist who reacted against Enlightenment belief in reason and progress.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge ($1979$)

Lyotard’s work which defines postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives."

Grand Narratives

Universal explanations such as progress, Marxism, or nationalism that claim to explain human experience; Lyotard argued these should be treated with scepticism.

Little Narratives

Localized interpretations of the past that Lyotard prioritised over universal "grand narratives."

Keith Windschuttle

A conservative historian and contributor to Quadrant who challenged accounts of Aboriginal frontier violence following the Mabo and Wik decisions.

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History ($2002$)

Windschuttle's work where he recalculates the Tasmanian frontier violence death toll down to $118$ killed using official documentary records.

The History Wars

The intellectual conflict between historians like Windschuttle and Reynolds regarding the interpretation of Australia's colonial past and frontier violence.

Henry Reynolds

A historian who taught at James Cook University and pioneered the use of oral history to present Indigenous perspectives in Australian historiography.

The Other Side of the Frontier ($1981$)

Reynolds' work that reconstructed frontier conflict as organised Aboriginal resistance using both colonial reports and oral tradition.

The "Great Australian Silence"

A term used by Reynolds to describe the historical erasure of Indigenous experience from the Australian national story.

Black Armband History

A critical framing of Australian history focused on colonial injustices, which Windschuttle sought to counter with a "three cheers" view of settlement.