Writing History -- the rhetorical tropes

Tim Burke over at Cliopatria has a neat post on the rhetorical hooks used by historians, both scholarly and popular to attribute significance to their work. They are:

1. Something that you didn’t think has a history does have one (example: Foucault)

2. The history that you think you know is wrong (revisionism)

3. Your life in some important way is determined by the history I am writing about

4. Your life in some important way is NOT determined by the history I am writing about, contrary to your assumption: the past is a foreign country

5. Past is prologue; history as a guide to future action; history as a data set for predictive social science

6. Past is NOT prologue: history as clarifying how a present crisis is unique to the present; history as confounding social science

7. Illumination of the self: we can identify with individuals or whole cultures in the past and in that identification discover what is universal or expansive in ourselves

8. Illumination of the other: we can find in the past radically different or alien individuals, modes of life, etc., that help understand the plasticity and diversity of human experience

9. History as heritage: some particular past provides you a sense of identity and meaning either by serving as exemplar or as the primal source of important ritual and tradition; history is memory-work

10. History as narrative: history is just about telling good, compelling stories that are entertaining or provocative; stories for their own sake.

Read the posting here.

The question I have is, are these just expositional tropes, or do they represent the writers' deep understanding of what history is?

Tim Burke, who teaches at Swarthmore, is one of my favorite young history bloggers. His observations, whether I agree with them or not, are almost always thought-provoking. Visit his blog Easily Distracted here.