Úvod
Foreword

Author(s): Jiří Suk, Jiří Hanuš
Subject(s): History, Methodology and research technology, Editorial
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: foreword; historical interpretation;
Summary/Abstract: The idea for this book came from the pleasure we derived from reading another publication – the Czech edition of In Defence of History (Argo, 2019) by the well-known British historian Sir Richard J. Evans. We were inspired by many things including a passage where the English historian describes his own work on the cholera epidemic in Hamburg and its “interweaving narrative and causal argument” (p. 130, London 2012). Evans describes how he gradually approached the final structure and how he searched for the right way to best explain the story and its causes: in the end he decided against a simple chronological story and instead created twelve parallel causal narratives which he skillfully interweaved in order to explain the causes of this phenomenon. He also used a large number of sources while simultaneously being able to generate a growing sense of suspense and excitement. He later talked about his approach in general terms: “Most historical narratives consist of a mixture of revealed, reworked, constructed and deconstructed narratives from the historical past and from the historian’s own mind. We start with a rough-hewn block of stone, and chisel away at it until we have a statue. The statue was not waiting there to be discovered, we made it ourselves, and it would have been perfectly possible for us to have made a different statue from the one we finally created. On the other hand, we are constrained not only by the size and shape of the original stone, but also by the kind of stone it is; an incompetent sculptor not only runs the risk of producing an unconvincing statue that does not much resemble anything, but also of hammering or chiselling too hard, or the wrong way, and shattering the stone altogether.” (p. 133, London 2012)

• Details
• Contents