Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/26467

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Title
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat, The Historian's Craft and World War II: writing and teaching contemporary history
Author/Creator
Morpeth, Neil
Description
The roles of small and great books, and passionate yet well-considered writings in the general education of a "college" or "university" trained teacher are questions which should be turned back upon the historian as teacher and writer. Where resides the historian's classroom? Who are the students and how do (and did) teachers come to be? What subject matter should be used to prod and provoke an often dormant humanity awake? Professor Marc Bloch's work, his passion for history's roles and its voices from the past speaking to the present, had a Renaissance in the cauldron of World War II. Bloch's commitment to teaching and writing history, teaching about the forceful, or surprising and shocking, "presences" of history's supposed past-tense experiences, remains seminal to the historian's craft. Bloch's own voice from the past was forged in an intensity of present-time experience. Reflection was searing experience. Memory was "now" and remembrance was an accident of preservation for futures then unknown. These futures need to know of the experiences of former, fragile, personal and generational memories if the very same futures were to be lived more surely and securely. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft (or, more accurately, Explanatory Defence for History or Craft of the Historian = Apologie pour l'histoire, ou Métier d'historien, original French title and abbreviation = A.P.H.), remains a vindication of the human-centred, purposive roles of history in a general education. Moreover, this general education can now be said to cover (if not embrace) the broad sweep of "secondary schooling" experiences. This sweep of schooling and post-schooling experiences is beginning, however tentatively and problematically, to extend itself into worlds of work, the futures of work and the academic futures or courses (what once might have been termed optimistically "the progress") of higher education: the arena of tertiary and university education.
Relation
The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms Vol. 10, Issue 3, p. 179-195
Publisher Link
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770500084820
Date
2005
Publisher
Routledge
Keyword(s)
Marc Bloch;  teaching history;  The Historian's Craft;  tertiary education;  Strange Defeat
Resource Type
journal article
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/26467
Identifier
ISSN:1084-8770
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Subject
"The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms"
 
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