Theresa Wellington- McGilton
9 February 2021
Spatial History
Response Paper 4
Spatial History
Chapter 66, “Spatial History” by Paul Carter is a very interesting piece of writing. It discusses how historians believed that events unfolded because they were always meant to all the while never referring to place or people. Carter then explains why that is not so.
He starts the piece off by looking at it from the historians perspective and how they compared history to a theatrical performance. He says that history itself is the playwright, and the historian is merely a copyist. He goes on to explain that, “this cause and effect narrative history is to make you think that events unfold according to a logic of their own. They refer neither to the place, nor to the people” (Carter 376).
The book that this chapter was taken from is written against the topic above. “It is a prehistory of places, a history of roads, footprints, trails of dust and foaming wakes… Against the historians, it recognizes that our life as it discloses itself spatially is dynamic, material but invisible (Carter 376). It goes on to discuss how cultural space has a rich history and you can tell from its historical documents such as letters home, journals of explorers, maps and more. What I gathered from this reading is that history is not the ‘main character’ but relies heavily on spatial history.
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