Talk:Narrative history

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I really wanted an article up for this concept because I believe it is very important to understanding history. It's my hope that an acredited historian will now flesh out the article and fix any error(s) I may have committed out of naïvety.

Naufana 03:39, 17 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Who are "such historians"?[edit]

Historians who use the modern narrative might say that the traditional narrative focuses too much on what happened and not enough on why and causation. Also, that this form of narrative reduces history into neat boxes and thereby does an injustice to history. J H Hexter characterized such historians as "lumpers". In an essay on Christopher Hill, he remarked that "lumpers do not like accidents: they would prefer them vanish...The lumping historian wants to put all of the past into boxes..and then to tie all the boxes together into one nice shapely bundle." This wording is ambiguous. Its not clear if "such historians" that Hexter is referring to are those following the "modern narrative" or those following the "traditional narrative". More broadly, the whole section is very vague, and relies too much or telling us what one historian thought of another historian, without actually explaining who these are, what they claimed, and why they are relevent. Iapetus (talk) 13:35, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]