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English
Oxford University Press
09 July 2020
Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insights as a practicing historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualisation, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham's book investigates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. The author argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work, historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past - responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors' own terms and to portray the impact of those actors' deeds - but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in History and Morality has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians.
By:  
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 161mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   614g
ISBN:   9780198858713
ISBN 10:   019885871X
Pages:   336
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Introduction 1: Contemplating Historical Actors in Context 2: Writing History: Problems of Neutrality 3: Justifying Judgement on Things Past 4: History, Identity, and the Present Bibliography of Works Cited

Donald Bloxham has taught at Edinburgh University since 2001. He was appointed Professor of Modern History in 2007 and given the established Richard Pares chair of history in 2011. Beyond his work on the history and philosophy of the discipline of history, he is a specialist in the study of genocide and of the punishment of perpetrators of genocide. His book The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (OUP, 2005) won the Raphael Lemkin Prize for genocide scholarship. He has also been a recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and is currently on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Reviews for History and Morality

Not since the days of Cambridge don Herbert Butterfield has an Anglophone historian so interestingly taken up the history of his own discipline and the problem of historical judgment the way that Donald Bloxham does in these twin volumes ... Bloxham should be praised * Samuel Moyn, Intellectual History Review * These works of outstanding scholarship are of value to anyone curious to consider the uses and pitfalls of history in a present forever parasitic on the past. * Alexandre Leskanich, TLS * Bloxham['s] digressions and byways are often as rich as the main thread of the argument...History and Morality ought to achieve wide readership. * Professor Daniel Woolf, Queen's University, Reviews in History *


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