The Historian as Pedagogue: On Hayden White’s Practical Past

With all the panic about how the contemporary political and media landscape is awash with ‘fake news’, and the attempted response to that through fastidious ‘fact checks’, the late Hayden White’s lifelong exhortation to consider history as stories crafted by historians using fragments of the past must surely seem untimely. In his final scholarly intervention, White doubles down on this line, urging historians to consider practical uses of the past beyond the cloistered confines of disciplinary History (with a big ‘H’). Drawing on my experiences as a teacher in higher education, I want to show how practical pasts are regularly constructed: we are always selecting from fragments, stringing together facts, amplifying dramatic scenes, and muting minutiae. In other words, given the constraints of time and space—not to mention attention spans and working memory—teaching obliges us to treat the past in a practical manner.