Transition To The New Historiography From Ranke History

The aim of this dissertation is to examine the epistemology, methodology and the purposes of history knowledge between the shift from Rankean Historiography to New History, and try to find ways out of the adversities of history nowadays. The author thinks that today's history faces three problems: At first, the industrial society ignores history knowledge, and regards it useless to daily life. Secondly, the post-modernism impacts the traditional value of history to search for Realities. At last, History asks for aids form the methods of social sciences, and also gets into the crisis of being divided by them. Those three questions ask history itself: Is history useful? Can history tell the realities? How can history unite the social sciences and be independent of them. These problems must be considered in the field of history nowadays. The best method to solve them is to find the answers from the discussions of the predecessors. From Ranke to New History is the important process and era that provides the messages to check the crisis of history and to find out the solutions of it.After the introduction, this dissertation contains three main parts: "the epistemology of history", "the historiography of history" and "the purposes of history".The first part discusses "Epistemology": From Rankean pursuit of the "objective reality" to what Robinson thought history as human "memory", and even the post-modernism disintegrating between the text and realities, the author asserts to adapt the "evidence principle" that the law court uses as a standard to discern what is real, and then to deconstruct the imagination and interpretation of historians out of the historical knowledge, that will make the readers know how to judge the nature of historical knowledge, and then it can form an intellectual chain of the process of "argument and persuasion". From the perspective of pragmatism, this will solve the problem of epistemology between objectivity and subjectivity.The second part discusses "Methodology", including textual criticism, archeology, and anthropology those methods that restore the historical realities, and how the speculative philosophy of history work to frame the whole history, and the application of the methods and theories of sociology in history.The third part discusses "the purposes of history". Besides the pursuit of "reality" in textual criticism, the author also offers the function of "Lessons" and "Understanding the present and predicting the future", and then discusses "The use and abuse of collective memories" and "How to cultivate the human spirit". This dissertation does not only discuss "why" history contains these functions, but also tries to account for "how" history can have such functions.In the conclusion part, the author sums up what we discuss before. After the comprehensive survey of modern Western historiography, its intellectual tradition of objective knowledge is different from the orient tradition of subjective cultivation. Since it is inevitable to exclude the historians' ideas out of the realities, the craft and the cultivation of the historian is the key to the success of historical knowledge. The author brings up what Zhang Xue-Cheng in Qing Dynasty emphasized the Four Virtues of historian with the achievement of Western modern historiography in the first part of conclusion. It is important for achieving the excellent historical writings to demonstrate what writing skill, knowledge, intentions, and insights the historian must have. Moreover, the author thinks, the historical knowledge must be constructed on "the organic arrangement of Content, Methods and Purposes", and the transmission of historical knowledge must form "an intellectual chain among the interaction of Reality, Historian and the Readers". If we can build these two chains of historical knowledge soundly, we can solve those three adversities of history that we mentioned above.