Transformations in Historiography: from elite history toward a history of the marginalized

Abstract

For a long time, the expression “hero’s complex” has been accepted as conventional wisdom within the very soul of historical knowledge. Over the passage of time, it evolved into a sort of talisman or joker card capable of interpreting the course of all events in history. Yet, during the period between the two World Wars and following them—the period of foundering modernity—it became characterized by the presence of an intellectual effort that sought to critique this black mark left upon the field of historiography, and at the same time to offer a new methodological approach to the study of history: a methodology that reconsiders the experience of the marginalized and reinstates their historical standing both as actors on the stage of history and participants in its dramas, as well as silent victims of history condemned to languish in the darkness, far from the light of historical analysis. This is something clearly embodied within the theses of the British school. One such thesis is history from below, which grew forth from the Annales school and strove to grant all people the right to historical citizenship. For this accomplishment to be possible, the School shifted away from traditionalist inclinations and toward an interdisciplinary doctrine. This research paper seeks to highlight the British school and its strengthening of an exceptional scientific tradition—history from below—within the field of historiography. We also attempt to analyze the nature of the relationship between the School’s scholastic inclinations and the extent to which they are impacted, on all levels, by the massive transformations humanity has witnessed over the last century, not to mention interrogating some of the cognitive and communicative entanglements between this historical trend and other disciplines of knowledge.