Postmodern Purpose

The purpose of cultural historians like Darnton and Trouillot is to discover truths buried by the sands of time.  Like all postmodernists they have a political stance, but that motivation is more understated than that of gender theorists like Poovey, Scott and Boydston or Black historians like Roediger or Crenshaw.  Unlike classical historians who wrote to glorify the nation and promote its values, cultural historians write to reveal hidden truths.  Despite the emergence of a variety of postmodern historical methods in the twentieth century, political histories in praise of mainstream national heroes remain popular today.  John Tosh recognized this trend when he wrote, “The study of history has attracted more than its fair share of conservatives concerned to invoke the sanction of the past in defense of institutions threatened by radical reform, or quite simply to find a mental escape from the disorienting impact of rapid social change around them.”  The purpose of postmodern historian is not to make things up in order to tell history the way he/she wishes it were, but to dig through the rubble of the past to gain insight into obscured truths about humanity from new perspectives.  Tosh has written some excellent cultural history from an admittedly white male perspective.  This is different from positivist history in which the Eurocentric male viewpoint masquerades as objectivity.  Tosh wiselynoted, “Sources have to analyzed for forgery, the author’s bias has to be detected and taken account of, and historians need to know how to spot when material has been removed from the record or covered up.  Digitized material is not exempt from these procedures.  The archive itself – traditionally regarded as authoritative – is increasingly scrutinized for ideological distortion.”¹

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[1] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 98.