For a Professional and Civically Responsible History: The First Years of the “Nueva Escuela Historica”

Abstract

The “Nueva Escuela Historica” brought together a group of Argentine historians, from the second decade of the 20th century, who, with a wide institutional deployment and important diffusion projects, sought to define precisely the margins of the discipline. The article advances in the exploration of some of the conditions that are established for historical knowledge during the first years of these school, it considers the historiographic assumptions that are being established and articulates them with the pretensions of assigning a leading role to the discipline in the political life of the nation. In this articulation, the question of the nation became protagonist and, together with it, the possibility of recognizing there the deployment of a specific consideration of temporality, which reconfigures the conceptual framework, basis for the understanding of the history. In the light of these rules and conditions, the article focuses in particular on the account of colonial history as a history elaborated in and for a present. It is recognized how those historiographic norms are exercised there and how, in tune with the possibility of thinking from a new time frame, the historian becomes the authorized agent for the design of subjectivity required by the nation.