The Linguistic Turn in History: What Words Do to the Past
How poststructuralist philosophy revealed that historical language doesn't just describe the past—it shapes what we can know about it.
Postcolonial Challenges: Can the Subaltern Have a History?
When archives are weapons of empire, what histories can we hope to recover?
Microhistory's Gamble: What One Life Can Tell Us About a World
How studying one obscure miller can reveal the hidden structures of an entire civilization
The Annales Revolution: How Structure Replaced Event in Historical Thinking
When French historians stopped studying kings and started studying climate, time itself became a theoretical problem.
Memory and History: Partners or Rivals in Knowing the Past?
Two ways of knowing the past—one preserves identity, one pursues truth. Their tension might be a feature, not a bug.
What is a Historical Fact? The Surprisingly Difficult Question
Historical facts are not discovered in the past—they are constructed in the present through inference from fragmentary evidence.
Presentism Reconsidered: Should We Judge the Past by Present Standards?
Moving beyond false dichotomies to understand when and how historians can legitimately evaluate past actors while preserving contextual understanding.
Causation in History: Why Things Happened Versus How They Came About
Unpacking the logical architecture of historical explanation—what it means to say one thing caused another in the unrepeatable past
Gadamer's Horizon: Why Your Present Shapes What You See in the Past
How your historical moment enables rather than distorts your encounter with the past
The Narrative Turn: How Stories Shape What We Call Historical Truth
Hayden White revealed that historians don't just find meaning in the past—they create it through the narrative structures they choose.
Collingwood's Re-Enactment Theory: Thinking the Thoughts of the Dead
How historians reconstruct the reasoning of people long dead—and why perfect mental access remains impossible yet worth attempting.
Archives as Power: How the Past Gets Preserved and Silenced
Why some voices echo through centuries while others vanish—the hidden politics of historical preservation.
Why History Cannot Be Objective: The Unavoidable Role of Selection
How the infinite past forces every historian to choose, and why that choice shapes everything we think we know about history.
The Problem of Other Minds in History: Can We Know What Anyone Really Thought?
The philosophical puzzle every historian must confront: how we can make defensible claims about minds separated from us by time, culture, and the unbridgeable gulf between all conscious beings.