Editorial for the special issue dedicated to “The History of Hayden White“.

Excerpt:
This special issue of the journal Práticas da História – Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past was organised upon hearing news of Hayden White’s death – born in 1928, in the U.S.A., White would live there for most of his life and there he died, on March 2018. Over a period of more than half a century, his interventions were pivotal to ongoing debates on the limits and benefits of History as a discipline, to the extent that it is difficult to tell whether White placed himself in the eye of the storm or his interventions were the storm itself. The way he formulated the question of the literary dimension of history writing, in his monumental 1973 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, was exemplarily provocative. It come a few years after his essay “The burden of history” had tried to persuade historians of the ineluctable moral implications of their practice, regard-less of how much of a semblance of neutrality the embrace of scientific methods seemed to afford them.

Keywords:
Hayden White, Historiography, Metahistory