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Ghasemi "Revisiting History in Hayden White's Philosophy" Sage Open DOI:10.1177/2158244014542585 (Open Access) asserts strongly that non-post-modern historiography attempts objective grand narratives.

Are Ghasemi and White correct in characterising non-post-modern historiography in this way?

Ghasemi and White both seem to produce an idea of the "professional historian" who is guilty of all the crimes of Whig History, and none of the actual practices of professional historian's approach to texts.

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  • Doesn't all non-post-modern human thought attempt grand narrative? Is the real distinction between the professional historian's (formalized) approach to texts and the amateur attempt to use narrative to make sense of the past?
    – MCW ♦
    Commented Sep 9, 2014 at 10:42
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    Why must the attempt to find narrative thread a la modernism automatically be bad old "Whig History"? Post modernism is useful for showing the inherent limits of fitting everything into an overarching paradigm, but modernism's penchant for narrative and pattern-recognition has a valuable place in comprehension. It seems like they have set up a straw-man of a "bad modernist" instead of recognizing that responsible historical work can also be done that way.
    – Mike
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 1:47

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