Researching and writing history with Jim Hagan
RIS ID
32897
Abstract
This essay has two related purposes: the first is to understand how Jim Hagan practised the historian's craft; the second, to provide a glimpse into the personality and passions that motivated this productive and gifted historian. These two purposes are closely related: the method that historians adopt is typically shaped by the questions they pose - and these questions are deemed significant by the author's personality, interests and ideology (something more than their conscious beliefs). Jim would have welcomed an article about his historical method, but resisted the idea of exploring his motivation; he was a rather private person, suspicious of the cult of intellectual personality and unsympathetic to the idea of psyco-historical explanation of either history or the historian.
Publication Details
Wells, A. D. (2010). Researching and writing history with Jim Hagan. Labour History: a journal of labour and social history, N/A (98), 224-230.