Metahistory proved to be both controversial and highly influential. In the preface to the book’s 40th-anniversary edition, White wrote:Īfter long reflection, it struck me that none of the historians of historiography that I knew had taken seriously the fact that historio graphy was first, necessarily, and most obviously writing, which is to say, inscription, of words or signs incised or laid upon a medium and which, by that process of inscription, are endowed with a power both material and spiritual, a power to at once “fix” things in time and seemingly reveal their meaning for their own time and for our own. At a time when intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were challenging ideas of scholarly objectivity, Metahistory argued that history was above all writing, that its form was vital to its content. White developed this line of thinking in full force in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. His 1966 essay “The Burden of History” interpreted history as storytelling, contending that without attending to the craft of writing the discipline would fail to keep up intellectually with other scholarly fields. He quickly gained renown as a scholar who viewed history as an art as much as a science, arguing that writing history was a matter of crafting narratives as much as assembling facts.

From there he went to the University of Michigan, earning a doctorate in medieval history in 1956.Īlthough trained as a medievalist, during his long and illustrious career White focused on modern European intellectual history and historical theory. He joined the Navy at the end of World War II, and after his service enrolled in Wayne State University on the GI Bill, earning a BA in history in 1951. Young Hayden spent much of his childhood going back and forth between the two areas. He spent his early years in Tennessee then his father moved to Detroit in search of jobs in the auto industry.

White was born on July 12, 1928, in the town of Martin, Tennessee. White, a leading intellectual and theoretical historian whose magnum opus Metahistory (1974) helped pioneer the linguistic turn in modern historiography, died on March 5, 2018, at his home in Santa Cruz, California.

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