White was the sole plaintiff who sued the chief of police alleging covert and illegal intelligence gathering by police officers registered as students. He challenged covert intelligence gathering on college campuses by polices officers. In addition to his teaching and writing, his claim to fame was also a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department in 1975. He retired as professor emeritus at the History of Consciousness Department of the University of California, but prior to that he taught at the Comparative Literature Department of Stanford University. White was one of those versatile professors and writers who straddle many fields. For White, the use of ‘narrativity’ made history successful because it is the narrative value that enables history to become meaningful.
This idea had an important implication for how history was understood and written, as now the possibility of objectivity or the attempt to create a ‘truly scientific history’ was almost eliminated. He detected a heavy influence of literary writing on historiography which, according to White, shared a strong reliance on narrative for meaning. These strategies may include explanations by argument, emplotment, and ideological implication.
He introduced terms such as ‘emplotment’ into history writing and argued that various strategies of explanation mark historical texts. With dozens of articles, books, and essays to his credit, White was one of the most prominent names in the historiography and philosophy of history of the second half of the 20 th century.
Hayden White who died on March 5, 2018, at the age of almost 90, was an American historian who discussed historiography with a tinge of literary criticism. If you are a serious student of history, just retelling events does not satisfy you a better understanding of history is gained by looking into how it is written. One historian and critic who tackled these issues throughout his life died earlier this month. Nasir Abbas Nayyar’s article, ‘Fiction as alternate history’, which appeared in these pages on March 11, brilliantly discussed how imagination in literature, and analysis in history portray events differently.
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