《历史学宣言》读后感精选10篇

　　《历史学宣言》是一本由乔·古尔迪 / 大卫·阿米蒂奇著作，格致出版社出版的171图书，本书定价：平装，页数：2017-3，文章吧小编精心整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

　　《历史学宣言》读后感(一)：张洪彬：近代史研究的困境与曙光

　　张洪彬：近代史研究的困境与曙光

　　张洪彬（《学术月刊》杂志社）

　　2017-12-11 12:25 来源：澎湃新闻

　　近代史领域的“信息超载”，指的是过于丰富的文献，即便是最聪明、最勤奋的研究者穷尽一生也不可能完全阅读，也没有人敢说自己读完了近代史的重要文献，其结果是绝大多数的研究者都无力从整体的视角来理解近代史，更无力以此为基础对未来的发展趋势作出判断。近代史领域的“信息超载”，一方面是因为近代历史去时未久，留下来的资料本来就多，另一方面是因为大量文献被电子化并通过网络共享，这些电子资源的获取成本相较于购买图书、查询档案小得多，还有一个重要原因则是因为史学理论和方法论的多元化使得许多原来看起来不成其为史料的材料也成为史料甚至还可能成为重要史料。举例来说，在革命史一统天下的时代，大概没人会把记载晚清城市如何处置粪便的材料当作史料来严肃对待，可能也不会有人把舞厅的记录和描述当作文献来看，但是随着社会生活史、城市史、卫生史、新文化史、女性史学等研究领域的开辟，这些统统都可以成为史料。这些新领域的开拓并不一定是对原来革命史学的补充，也可能是否证、改写、纠偏，历史画面的丰富很可能让我们意识到原以为是主干的历史演进不过只是枝叶而已，因此你不能理直气壮地说我只需要抓住主干，不了解枝叶也不要紧。总之，近代史学界现在很难说有公认的主干，也很难开列出一个近代史学界公认的必读书目来。

　　此外，近代以来的中国史学规范深受乾嘉汉学和兰克史学的影响，对材料的扎实程度、证据链的细密程度有明显高出欧美史学的要求，给个人的推理、想象和诠释留下的空间要小很多——一个重要的表现就是中国近代史界的同行评审极端强调一手文献，拒绝单一文献，对理论、方法论和相关研究的重视程度则远逊于欧美同行。

　　一方面是“信息超载”，一方面是对举证细密程度的高要求，其结果就是缩小论述的范围，集中笔墨描述和分析特定的人物、事件，时限也尽可能控制在较短的时段里，如此方能尽量避免漏洞和硬伤，以至于不少学者一辈子工夫都花在某个人物或某一事件的研究上。我们今天可以看到一些专题论文对史料的挖掘甚至达到了涸泽而渔的程度，对特定的人物和事件做了非常细密的史实重建工作，提供了极为丰富的历史细节，我们一方面佩服他下了不少苦工夫，另一方面却看不出这些苦工夫的目的和意义是什么，因为不少文章基本没有论点，没有刷新人们对重要问题的看法，对于我们理解中国近代史的演进助益甚小，遑论对理解中国的历史、现在和未来有何帮助。

　　不少研究者拒绝他人对自己的研究做任何联想，在遭遇质疑的时候往往会辩护道：我讨论的是某人在某事上的作为，其他人我没有研究过，真不敢说一定也是这样的。这固然是智识上的谦卑、诚实和严谨，但另一方面也显得非常无奈，知识的价值大小与其可迁移性有密切关系，如果史学生产的知识注定只能是特殊性的、不可迁移的，其价值就相当可疑。如果关于特殊人事的知识生产无助于改善我们对更长时段历史演进的看法和理解，如果它不具备较为重要的解释意义和反思意义，读者为什么要浪费时间去了解一个死人的所作所为。有人的回答是，这个题目没有人研究过，我填补了空白。这种回答是完全无效的，因为不是所有的空白都值得填补，这是一个显而易见的道理。这样的研究其实是没有读者的，作为一个知识生产的产品，它是没有市场的，也没有理由用纳税人的钱来为这样的研究买单。

　　信息超载的另一个后果是，每个学者在做自己的专题研究时，通常不需要去阅读与此专题研究不直接相关的研究，以至于同样是中国近代史研究的从业者彼此读不懂文章，研究近代经济史的人读不懂思想史，研究近代思想史的人没有能力判断近代社会史的论文，更为甚者，研究章太炎的不读严复，也无法对严复研究论文做出有效的判断。研究领域高度相关的同行学者尚且不互相阅读作品，同行评审难以有效开展，学术会议常见鸡同鸭讲的情况，又怎能指望有多少读者呢？

　　与历史学尤其是近代史学界相反，今天敢于通贯地讨论长时段历史的，敢于去讨论大问题的，反倒是哲学、社会学、政治学等领域的学者，不少人努力去解释宏观问题。从历史学对证据的高要求来看，他们提供的证据可能很难构成比较严密的证据链，他们的证据甚至不过是从他人的二手研究中扒过来的。这让许多历史学者甚为瞧不上，但是又羡慕他们获得更多的阅读和掌声。读者、社会和政府永远都需要学者对重要问题做出回答，历史学者拒绝承担这样的职责，把领地拱手相让，也怪不得历史学被边缘化。

　　作为一种折中方案，比较可取又可行的史学训练往往强调以小见大，从具体个案折射广阔的历史画面。但是问题在于，有什么理由说自己选择的个案具有代表性，从而可以从个案看出广阔的历史画面？即便是说透过个案看出时代变迁的主流趋势都可能遭到质疑，因为既无整体图景为前提，又如何可能判断何为主流何为支流。从严格的逻辑来讲，我们真的很难为个案研究的代表性做出有力的辩护。所以，在信息超载的前提下的“以小见大”，严格地说，都不过是自我宣称而已。

　　特定的人事总是需要放到整体性的历史画面和大的历史脉络中去理解才可看出其意义，所以即便是开展专题研究，作为背景知识的整体性画面和大的历史脉络仍然是必需的。笔者近年写作专题论文的时候，最感困难的就是描绘整体画面、铺垫时代背景、交代大框架，怎么写都是几十年前的陈词滥调，让人望而生厌，怎么写、怎么改都不满意。如果基于经典的二手研究来做概述，外审专家往往会批评说，轻易地采用既有研究为论述起点，不可接受；如果择取特定的原始文献来分析和描述时代背景，往往又遭遇这样的质疑：你怎么确定这几个文本能代表时代氛围、整体图景？老实说，我回答不上来，怎么都缺底气。

　　这并不只是我一个人的独特困境，最近读到美国和英国的两位年青历史学家写作的、在欧美史学界很有影响的《历史学宣言》（英文原版于2014年10月通过剑桥大学出版社公开上网，后出版纸质版；2017年3月出版中译本），发现这在一定程度上也是西方史学界的共同困境。该书指出，从1968年以来的三十余年间，西方历史学界都习惯于在短期历史的框架下寻找素材，“其短视程度堪称历史之最”。在一项以1880年以降的8000篇历史学专业博士学位论文为抽样范围的统计中，1900年论文涵括的历史时限大约为75年，到1875年，其时限缩短至30年左右，“5至50年的生物时间尺度遂成为历史研究入门的模本”。史学界养成了“只求时段缩短、文献精益求精的习惯”，目标是“对越来越少的东西知道得越来越多”，“其结果是，文献愈不为人知、愈艰涩难解，便愈被人看好，因为孤僻的文献方显史家治史的功力”。1981年，时任美国历史学会主席的伯纳德·贝林感叹道：“历史研究同时朝一百个方向长出分枝，而彼此之间根本没有任何协调……想要实现整体的综合，哪怕是有限的某些地区，都是完全不可能的。”无穷无尽的细节却不能结成网或块，非专业读者甚至史学同行也看不到这些细节的意义和价值，“史学界只顾彼此交谈，话题越来越窄，时段越来越小”，史学遂难逃被边缘化的厄运，而“以长时段思考历史与未来在专业史学之外极为流行”，比如自然科学界、经济学界、政治学界。

　　该书作者认为大数据和数字人文的迅猛发展使得克服信息超载在不远的将来成为可能。“主题模型软件能够用机器快速阅读大量的政府报告或科学文本，然后反馈数十年甚至数世纪以来人们的学术关切和观念变化的基本事实……许多这类的软件能够把大量的文献记录迅速转化成可视的图示或图表，否则数据量太大根本难以读完”。该书作者之一、美国布朗大学历史系助理教授乔·古尔迪牵头的团队在2012年夏季推出了一款叫做Paper machines（纸机）的文本挖掘软件，“专供学者全面梳理大宗纸版文档之用，尤其适合档案极其丰富的20世纪的跨国研究”。类似于此的大数据处理软件在西方正在陆续开发中，我们完全有理由相信，将来我们可以借助某些工具挖掘文献，迅速地定位文献中的特定部分，生成词频变化图表，甚至在文献之间建立起时间或逻辑的关联，生成大事年表，研究者在此基础之上再来判断和分析文献的来源和文献作者的价值立场、细读文本深层含义。历史学家从过于繁重的文本挖掘工作中解放出来，可以把更多时间和精力用于文献的深入解读和创造性思考中。新工具可以在很大程度上增强史学家综合大量信息的能力，从而在一定程度上克服信息过载的困境。

　　该书作者畅想，“如果历史院系能够培养出研究工具的设计者和大数据的分析师，那就等于把史学专业的毕业生塑造成知识生产的尖端人才，在学院内外都将大放光彩”。中国近代史一方面有着海量的原始文献需要挖掘和爬梳，另一方面也有着数量庞大的二手研究需要整合，此外，越来越多学者意识到中国近代史需要置入古今嬗蜕、中西交冲的框架中来理解，对古今中外的相关知识当然知道得越多越好，因而显然更多地面临信息超载的困境，也更为急迫地需要探索如何克服信息超载的困境。不克服信息超载的困境，近代史学界怎能把被政治学、社会学、哲学等学者抢走的地盘夺回来，怎敢重新思考长时段历史，怎敢回答社会最为关心的大问题？相较于依靠图书馆和资料卡片做研究的时代，今天的中国知网、读秀以及近代期刊全文数据库等已经给了我们很多的便利，但是要克服信息超载的困境，仍有很长的道路要走。在不久的将来，历史系是否有可能把数据挖掘能力的培养也纳入培训体系之中？史学与情报学、信息技术的结合，在何时可以提上日程？史学界、图书馆、出版界和信息技术公司要怎样才有可能联合作战，开发庞大的数据资料库以及高效的信息挖掘工具？国家的科研基金、出版基金是否有可能资助产生大容量的、有统一架构的、互相补充和兼容的文献数据库？谷歌学术、百度学术这样的搜索引擎工具，什么时候可以把信息抓取的触角深入到全网的史料数据库和大量图书资源的内部？

　　乔·古尔迪、大卫·阿米蒂奇著《历史学宣言》，孙岳译，上海：格致出版社，上海人民出版社，2017年3月第一版，42.00元。

　　《历史学宣言》读后感(二)：Why Politicians Need Historians

　　Why Politicians Need Historians

　　David Armitage is the Lloyd C Blankfein professor of history at Harvard University. His new book, co-authored with Jo Guldi, the Hans Rothfels assistant professor of history at Brown University, is Th e History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press)

　　Few policymakers today seem interested in lessons from the past. Their short-termism will fail to the new megatrends.

　　For much of the past 40 years, historians on both sides of the Atlantic have been trained to detach themselves from the supposedly distorting imperatives of “relevance”. They have addressed their work to other historians more than to the wider public. When they have reached out, it has rarely been to shape public policy. It is time to overcome that fastidiousness.

　　History has played little role in policy-making for at least a generation. It made news when in 2012 the then British foreign secretary, William Hague, raised the profile of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s in-house historians by moving them into the FCO’s main building on Whitehall. “They were languishing in a basement,” Hague said, “and now the light is shining on their books.”

　　The FCO’s in-house staff of full-time historians proudly declare on their website that they “provide a long-term, policy-relevant perspective on international issues, and contribute to the collective knowledge and understanding of the FCO and British foreign policy”. Hague, no mean historian himself – the author of well-received biographies of Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce – recognized their usefulness. “People enjoy history. They see the relevance of it. It informs our policies.” No other government department makes such systematic use of historians to form policy. And few professional historians seem to want to be enlisted into the policy process.

　　More “evidence-based policymaking” has been a battle cry since the 1980s. yet as the sociologist Pamela Cox argues, what counts as evidence has been quite narrowly defined: either “what works”, derived from the model of clinical trials of drugs, or “what is most-effective”, inspired by the audit culture of public services. There is little sense that the kinds of evidence used by historians can be a basis for policy: documentary records, archives or serial data, for instance. They might reveal what “worked” but not what is most-effective. When it comes to forming political or administrative decisions, the future will get much more attention than the past.

　　One benefit of historical perspective is learning that it wasn’t always that way. For centuries, even millennia, historians advised rules, enlightened citizens and shaped policy. They really long view would go all the way back to Thucydides, drawing themselves lessons about human nature from the conflicts among fellow Greeks, or even as far as Cicero, for whom history was the “guide of life”.

　　A medium-term view would light on the Regius Professorships of History in Cambridge and Oxford, founded in 1724 by George I to equip young gentlemen with knowledge of “Modern History and… Modern Language” they might need as diplomats, or on the late-Victorian holder of the Cambridge Regius chair, JR Seeley, who thought history was nothing less than a “school of statesmanship”.

　　In the 20th century, historians shaped local government, steered the course of empires and advised presidents. The Fabian historians Beatrice and Sidney Webb spearheaded the London Programme, a plan for London’s future housing, a plan for London’s future housing, transport and water needs, using expertise they gained co-authoring a multivolume history of English government since the middle ages. Sidney Webb also served as secretary of state for the colonies and as secretary of state for dominions in Ramsay Macdonald’s second Labour government.

　　The mid-1960s were the high-water mark for historians in public policy. In the US, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr became the court historian of John F Kennedy’s Camelot as a presidential adviser, and the radical historian of American foreign relations William Appleman turned down the chance to steer Latin American policy for the Kennedy administration. (At least he was asked.) The last historian seconded to the White House was Eric F Goldman, a professor of American history from Princeton, who was a special adviser to Lyndon Johnson in 1963-66. In 1965, a historical section was added to Britain’s Treasury but its operations were wound up in 1976, “after its early advocates moved on and the relevance of its work to the ‘man at the desk’ became subject to concerted challenge”, as the historian of public policy Alix Green has observed.

　　The near-universal retreat of historians from the formation of high-level policy is both a product and a cause of the endemic short-termism of our times. When the FCO historians describe their work as both “long-term” and “policy-relevant”, they state something of an oxymoron for policymakers. To be “policy-relevant” is almost by definition to focus on the short-term, as quarterly reporting, brief electoral cycles and planning horizons of at most five years determine almost all aspects of public life.

　　hort-termism is an increasingly inadequate way to face up to contemporary national and global challenges. The hot new term for these problems is “megatrends”. Mathew Burrows, a former analyst for the US National Intelligence Council (holder of a PhD in history), has diagnosed various “megatrends that will undo the world” in his recent book, The Future, Declassified. These include struggles over natural resources, the ballooning global middle class, exploding healthcare costs for ageing populations and mounting threats to privacy and data protection.

　　The Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations – an international panel of experts – identified a similar range of megatrends for coming decades in its 2013 report, Now for the Long Term. Their motto might be the line they quote from former French premier: to govern is to foresee. Better advice would be Winston Churchill’s: “The longer you can look back, the further you can look forward.”

　　Historians, taking a term from the great French practitioner of their craft Fernand Braudel, would call this the long duree. The long view will allow us to ask about the rise of long-term complexes over many decades, centuries or millennia and to distinguish what is temporary or contingent from what is enduring and cumulative among our current global discontents. It can also reveal alternative strategies from past societies. This can liberate us from the assumption that history can be reduced to path-dependency, as some economists might argue.

　　The future need not run in the ruts of the past. It is possible to jump the tracks and take a new direction. Only by delving deep into the past can we hope to proect ourselves imaginatively any meaningful distance into the future.

　　A recent example of how taking the long view can transform public debate is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty has shown that standard analyses of the relationship between booming capitalism and declining inequality rested on short-run data collected in the historically anomalous decades after the second world war. His analysis of more than 200 years of data on western incomes reveals instead that inequality within societies is more likely to grow than contract and it has been accelerating since the 1970s. This finding has profound implication for tax policy, social welfare and social cohesion more generally. But the pattern only emerged when the long-run trumped the short-term. Not for nothing has Piketty called his book “as much a work of history as of economics”.

　　Debates on climate change also reflect the advantages and limitations of historical perspective. On the one hand, Barack Obama’s former undersecretary for science in the US energy department, Steven Kooning, has recently argued for humility about future policy because we lack long-run data about the role of the oceans in climate change: precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past two decades. On the other hand, historical economist Anil Markandya has shown that environmental regulation in 19th-century Britain did not have any serious impact on GDP per capita, overturning the orthodoxy that there is a necessary trade-off between growth and environmental protection. Meanwhile, French historians Sabine Barles and Gilles Billen have examined Paris’s “nitrogen footprint” to show how urban managers there invented sustainable practices for recycling waste in large cities: there are precedents relevant to practice and policy today.

　　Historical thinking – and not just by those who call themselves historians – can and should inform practice and policy today. The Cambridge-based History & Policy network has been notably successful at creating dialogue between historians and civil servants and at getting its evidence-based position papers on topics such as pension reform, women’s participation in politics and the governance of Northern Ireland into public discussion. Elsewhere, units staffed by trained historians investigate and adjudicate land claims by First Nations people in Canada and by Maoris in New Zealand, leading to radical revisions of the social contract in both countries. And in the recent debates on Scottish independence, the views of historians on the past and the prospects of the union carried unusual weight even if, as Scotland’s leading historian Sir Tom Devine quipped, “the future is not my period”.

　　History should not be just affirmation, like Michael Gove’s myth of a single “national past”. Nor should it be entertainment: merely something “people enjoy”. It is a critical science for questioning short-term views, complicating simple stories about causes and consequences, and discovering roads not taken. History can upset the established consensus, expand narrow horizons and, in Simon Schama’s words, “keep the powerful awake at night”. In that mission lies the public future of the past.

　　《历史学宣言》读后感(三)：Longue-durée history学派的宣言与纲领

　　本以为会是一本艰深的理论书籍，特意带在旅途中慢慢啃，翻开一看才发现是确实是名实相符的“宣言”，很简单通俗甚至有点夸张而煽情，四个章节依次回顾了Longue-durée history（长时段历史）理论的兴起（几乎等同于年鉴学派的发迹史）、Longue-durée history理论的没落、当代全球问题对Longue-durée history理论回归的需求和Longue-durée history理论如今可能回归的客观条件。

　　书中的核心词Longue-durée history并不同于macro-history，正如词源所示，两位作者只论及了时间概念上的长距离考察，把跨地域空间的历史考察（即比较史学）排除在外，这就削弱了他们“宣言”的强度。

　　两位作者对Longue-durée history充满了期待和野心，他们试图让史学在社会科学中扮演数学在自然科学中的地位，二人的以古鉴今、以古知今的“经世致用”思想极为浓厚（正是因为我与二位作者在史学基本功能和职责认识上的分歧，让整本书在我看来都是略显可笑的），他们渴望史学在解决20世纪70年代以来的环境危机、公共治理和社会不平等加剧这样的重大问题中发挥核心指导作用，甚至呼唤史学家背景的政治领导人出现。

　　本书英文原版在网上已免费发布，读者诸君是否认可两位作者的观点，问问自己能否同意以下几个观点吧：1.宏大叙事是普遍可靠且必须的；2.研究历史的根本价值是指导当下与未来；3.在解决当今全球面临的热点问题中，历史学能够发挥何种作用，能够发挥比其他学科更有效的作用吗，比如经济学和社会学？