The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past - Softcover

Keith Windschuttle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1893554120 ISBN 13: 9781893554122

Publisher: Encounter Books, 2000

Synopsis

A huge success in hardcover, The Killing of History argues that history today is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for or training in the discipline. He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

About this title

Review:

Australian scholar Keith Windschuttle is one of the fieriest participants in the debate about the practice of history. In The Killing of History he decries the growth of so-called cultural studies in place of the old-fashioned facts-and-chronologies approach. Windschuttle's passion sometimes carries him a bit too far, but he lands many solid punches, such as when he takes on the heavily published French scholar Michel de Certeau, who has called writing a tool of the power elite. "For someone who thinks writing is a form of oppression," Windschuttle twits, "he has done a lot of writing." Elsewhere Windschuttle attacks efforts to explain away such matters as human sacrifice among the Aztecs, saying that to accept such behavior is akin to "accepting the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as equal but different."

About the Author:

Keith Windschuttle has been a lecturer in history, social policy, sociology, and media studies at a number of Australian academic institutions. He is author of five other books on issues in Australian society and lives in Sydney with his wife and two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1893554120
• ISBN 13: 9781893554122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298