The Role of the International Congresses of Historical Sciences in Shaping the Scholarly Repertoire of the Global Community of Historians, 1900 to 2022
Abstract
The paper examines the role of the International Congresses of Historical Sciences in the functioning of historical scholarship worldwide during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To explore the relationship between the work of these global forums and the broader trends in the evolution of historical scholarship, the study applies a repertoire-based approach, which makes it possible to analyze the congresses’ contribution to shaping the scholarly repertoire in the field of history. The paper considers the influence of the International Congresses of Historical Sciences on the formation of the organizational, theoretical, methodological, and thematic repertoires of the global research community of historians. It argues that the emergence of this form of academic communication was driven by the need to develop a crisis-response repertoire aimed at overcoming the organizational and theoretical-methodological crisis in historical scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to analyzing the impact of the geopolitical upheavals of the period on the transformation of the repertoire of the global historical community. The paper stresses that the emergence of the congresses as a communicative space for generating new repertoires took place with the active support of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, and that this institution’s close involvement in organizing and hosting the forums enabled it to bring together scholars from diverse countries in the search for ways to overcome the crisis in global historical scholarship. The paper concludes that the International Congresses of Historical Sciences played an important role in establishing what may be called a “horizontal” model of scholarly communication and in developing transmission mechanisms for the organizational and research practices of the global historical community. In particular, it is shown that the congresses facilitated the transition from the positivist model of historical writing to anthropologically oriented “new history” and helped to legitimize new problem fields in historiography worldwide.
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