The New Cultural History – and You
Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez introduces a distinctive method of engaging with the past.
The past, we are often told, is a foreign country. We may add that History is a passport that allows as to visit that country. The trip will necessarily be short, so everything that we learn has to be understood as just a small part of what actually happened. Our experience in the past will be fragmentary. Like any traveller, we have to avoid seeing what we expect to see, leaving behind our prejudices and pre-formed opinions. Since nobody can completely accomplish this, and we always perceive reality through the prism of our own experience, every successive visit to the past will reveal different things. This doesn’t imply that we cannot make well documented and soundly reasoned History, only that the past continues to change as we change.
Types of History
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