This post was written by Madisson Brown, a PhD Candidate, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London

In this animated lecture on 22 February, Hayden White – Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz – discussed what it means to think historically. This was part of a series of events at Birkbeck College featuring White. Blogs on the other events can be read here and here.

With the danger of oversimplifying what was a wide-ranging and entertaining lecture, White suggested two aspects needed to be considered when thinking historically: 1. Contextualising sources. 2. The process of writing. The two are inextricably linked and together they make up the historian’s craft.

The first aspect – contextualising sources – familiar to any history student who’s taken a ‘research skills’ course, or read one of the numerous books on historical methodologies. White used Saul Friedlander’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (2007) to demonstrate how this works in practice. White described how Friedlander opens his book with a detailed discussion of a single photograph. The image – which White displayed on screen – shows David Moffie receiving his doctorate in medicine. On his left sleeve, Moffie has a Jewish star that is inscribed with ‘Jood’ – ‘Jew’ in German.

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This post was written by Guy Beckett, a research student in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology

The final day of Hayden White’s public masterclass began with a promise to “bring order to the wandering improvisation” of the previous two days. Considering ‘What’s wrong with mixing fact and fiction?’ White once more headed straight to the limits of the question, taking up the topic he and Carlo Ginzburg first debated in 1989 – how to write a history of the holocaust that rejects the closed narrative structure embedded by the Nazis (final solution). For White asking whether there are “any limits on the kinds of story that can responsibly be told” about the holocaust has become a way to consider the broadest questions about the writing of history. In the heyday of post-modernism this was a lively and crowded debate – a conference at the University of California in 1990 (collected in Probing the limits of representation, Nazism and the “final solution” (1992), edited by Saul Friedländer) brought White and Ginzburg face to face with major thinkers of the day such as Perry Anderson, Martin Jay, Dominick LaCapra and Geoffrey Hartman.

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