Content area
Abstract
This study is about history and its knowledge. The transition from History to histories challenges the total objectivity assumed in historical study. It is obsolete to assume that there is a transcendently universal historical explanation of past events. Past reality is not a singular, but to affirm the multiplicity of past realities is not the same as affirming that history has diverse knowledge.
This study acknowledges the diversity of historical explanations as the present reality. Then, it is the purpose of this study to seek knowledge in history that encompasses the diverse historical explanations. This study stresses that the purpose of historical study is not only constructing historical explanations but also constructing knowledge. Knowledge in history is the mechanism to build a comprehensible understanding of diverse historical explanations. This knowledge has been particularly important ever since the plurality of historical explanations became irrefutable reality.
Many years have passed since History became histories. The plurality of historical explanations has become irrefutable reality, but it is now posing different problems that cannot be resolved by the existing notion of history and its knowledge. Different historical explanations coexist on the basis of ignoring, avoiding, and localizing themselves from other conflicting historical explanations. Even worse, different historical explanations seek coexistence through domination, active suppression, and ignoring other explanations of history.
This study argues that knowledge of history is fluid: history's knowledge is ceaselessly made and remade in light of what becomes known after the event's occurrence. Fluidity, like melody, needs to be studied differently from how we study the past substances. Past substances are like musical note that can be substantiated but they themselves are not melody. The plurality of historical explanations, this study argues, provides the source for our historical inquiry into how we have understood the past differently in different moments of the past. This study thus explores how Hiroshima's atomic bombing has been shaped and reshaped as ahistorically significant past event in Japan to present the fluid reality of history's knowledge.