A couple of things struck me about the Iggers reading. The first was the fact that history didn't emerge as a professional discipline until the early nineteenth century. I never realized this was the case. I've been exposed for so long to histories written before that time--classical Roman histories, the British histories of Hume and Gibbon, the early histories of the French Revolution studied by Marx, and so on--that I always implicitly assumed that history had been one of the academic disciplines for more or less as long as there had been academic disciplines. Iggers devoted extremely little space to discussion of history as practiced before Ranke, and I would be interested to hear more about the way history was viewed by academia before that time--for example, how David Hume, as an academic, conceived of his project in writing a history of Britain and how that conception differs from a nineteenth or twentieth century professional historian going about the same task, not in terms of methodology but in terms of the intended place of the work in academic literature.
The other thing that struck me was the concept of history as a discourse defined by certain methodologies rather than as an attempt at a 'true story,' so to speak. As a philosophy major who's studied primarily twentieth century thought, I've had a lot of exposure to post-structuralist ideas about discourse and writing, and much of this thought has been very influential on me (particularly Foucault, but also Derrida and other thinkers with a more limited political scope like Laclau and Mouffe). I accept a lot of these ideas, or at least find them useful, but I guess I had just never thought about historical writing in these terms. Not to say that I have been uncritical of notions of historical 'truth' or that I've ever accepted anything like a correspondence theory of truth, as a history major I've had plenty of cause to think about these things, but the application of discourse theory in particular to history, for whatever reason, is not something I've ever thought about and that notion (suggested by the overview discussion in the introduction to the Iggers book, I guess, as I haven't got to the third section yet) struck me as really cool. Makes me wish I had time to explore some of the post-structuralist-ish texts Iggers refers to in that introduction! Some day I will do so.
