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Why is Empathy the central skill?
The
fetishization of dates, a
leitmotiv in the criticism of the ‘New History’, privileges great
events and foregrounds the state at the expense of civil society,
elevating public over private lives. It puts a premium on that age old
stand by of the crib books – the ‘turning point’ or
‘water-shed’. It devalues, or ignores entirely, those more molecular
processes in which domestic life and personal identities are shaped...
…the starting
point of the ‘new history’ – a ‘skills’ approach based on the
critical reading of documents and original materials – is one which the
research historian is likely to find sympathetic. It focuses, in a way
history has often failed to do, on subjectivity – or what the Annales
school in France calls mentalités;
and it has a place for the kind of subject, e.g. seventeenth-century
witchcraft, which the finest modern scholarship has opened up to
historical enquiry. It leaves space, as any child’s history should –
in a country where Dickens is favourite reading and Hogarth a father of
national art – for the comic and the grotesque. In terms of examination,
the desire to test children on what they can find out rather than on what
they can remember seems admirable.
On Empathy and
‘History from below’ in the classroom from ‘History’s Battle for a
New Past’, The Guardian 21 January 1989 by Raphael Samuel.
Island Stories,
Unravelling Britain
Theatres of Memory, Volume
II p. 198
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