Hayden white interpretation in history

Hayden V. White was born in Martin, Tennessee on July 12, 1928. He enlisted in the Navy near the end of World War II. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Wayne State University in 1951 and a master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1952. After spending two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship researching church reform in the Middle Ages, he received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1956. He taught at several universities including Wayne State University, the University of Rochester, Wesleyan University, Stanford University, and several campuses of the University of California system. He wrote several books including Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, The Practical Past, and The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory 1957-2007. He died on March 5, 2018 at the age of 89.

Hayden White: An Introduction

The purpose of history is often described as revealing the ‘truth’ about the past. Hayden White, one of the most important figures of the last century in the historical discipline, helped to undermine this idea. He did this by comparing historical writing to the writing of literature, noticing that there are many similarities between them. Therefore, this makes it hard for the historian to write anything significant without obscuring ‘what really happened’. Naturally, this has led to White becoming a divisive theorist among historians. Herman Paul believes that White emerged as a passionate rebel against scientism and a defender of humanist values. However, after the publication of Metahistory, Eric H. Monkkonen suspected that only a handful of historians would actually concur with his theories.  As a prolific writer for over 40 years, this article aims to serve as an introduction to some of White’s key ideas, while arguing for the continued relevance of his work for the modern historian. This will be done by looking at

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