Democratic History

Title: History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story - Joan Wallach Scott

What does the word ‘Crisis’ seem to signal?- An emergency?

Pg 680-81, paragraph 1-4:

• What does the author say she means by “politics”? When the author says the word ‘politics’, she defines it as formal operations that contest the orthodox and the power that is set up. (Scott, 680)

• What does she mean by “history”? History is a concept of what we know about what happened in the past, set up by historians. (Scott, 681)

• What does she mean when she says she is rereading Freeman? She is rereading freeman because she is now seeing it in different terms. While Freeman thinks that history was always about politics, Scott thinks that history is inherently political.

What is Scott saying in the paragraph that opens “Rather, I am talking about the process"?

Scott is saying that history isn’t just something random, just because it isn’t an objective, neutral science, its stating that everything that in history that happens, its the historian’s jobs to accurately document and verify what happened, and arent objective but subject to change (Scott, 690).

Scott’s arguments:

• What is Scott’s problem with Himmelfarb? (689,691)

Scott’s issue is that Himmelfarb is one of the historians who enforces the orthodoxy of how history should be told (Scott, 689). Himmelfarb also believes that deconstructionists revolves around the debate on ‘subjective’. Scott disagrees with the critiques on decontructionists because she believes that deconstructionism is necessary to be able to analyze history (Scott, 691).

When scott says history is an interpretive practice, she is trying to tell us that history is very subjective, and that there may be new discoveries or different perceptions.

Scott says that unlike an orthodox history, democratic history, there can be different stories on what happened this is important for history because we can find more accuracy on events that happened.