Re-thinking History (Routledge Classics)

At only 84 pages long, this is a very small, slight paperback, but still not really worth the hour or so it took me to read. Jenkins warns you at the beginning that his work is a polemic, and he's not lying. He sets about to undermine the entire approach adopted by most western academic historians to the subject, especially through his use of postmodernism (a word which still makes many history professors shudder). I agree with some of his points, but his tone is arrogant and patronising; good for challenging you and making you think, but not in the way that Jenkins intended it.

Postmodernist history's bible. Jenkins makes good points (like postmodernism does) but (like postmodernism does) goes too far.

I took some notes as follow:
* History claims to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) - It makes History the discourse it is.
* What can be known and how we can know, interact with "power".
* Even the most empirical chronicles has to invent narrative structures to give shape to time and place.
* HISTORY is never for itself; it is always for someone.
* Truth is a self-referencing figure of speech, incapable of accessing the phenomenal world: word and world, word and object, remain saparate