A burden that is still heavy

Abstract

It may be no exaggeration to say that Hayden White’s best-known writing after Metahistory is the essay “The Burden of History,” first published in 1966 in the journal History and Theory. According to Robert Doran, this article became “a kind of clarion call for a revolution in historical studies” – a revolution that never arrived but did not lose its meaning. The purpose of this brief article is to present Hayden White’s critique of historiography in this text and to make some considerations about its meaning and scope.