Hayden White, Who Explored How History Is Made, Dies at 89

Hayden V. White, an influential scholar whose ideas on history and how it is shaped have fueled discussions in academic circles for half a century, died Monday at his home in Santa Cruz, California. He was 89.

His wife, Margaret Brose, confirmed his death. She did not give a cause.

White began garnering attention in 1966 with his essay “The Burden of History,” which suggested that history was being relegated to a sort of second-class citizenship by advances in other disciplines.

“Both science and art have transcended the older, stable conceptions of the world which required that they render a literal copy of a presumably static reality,” he wrote. He urged historical scholarship to do the same.

“The historian serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it,” he wrote. “On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption and chaos is our lot.”

He expanded on his ideas in 1973 with his best-known work, “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” which proposed a classification system for assessing the ideologies, storytelling techniques and other attributes that went into the creation of history.

“He argued that the great historians built their works using the same materials as any other literary form, especially in the area of plot,” Hans Kellner, an English professor at North Carolina State University who studied under White and has written extensively about his work and influence, explained by email.

“In his later years,” Kellner added, “White championed the ‘practical past,’ the way in which memory, structures, novels and the enormous residue of the past shape the identities of peoples and individuals. History, he once said, is all we have, but it was not only the history of historians.”

White was born on July 12, 1928, in Martin, in northwest Tennessee, to Virgil and Alda White. As a boy he lived in Tennessee and in Detroit, where his father had gone to work in automobile factories, alternating frequently between the two places.

He enlisted in the Navy near the end of World War II and then attended Wayne State University in Detroit under the GI Bill, receiving a bachelor’s degree in history in 1951. He earned a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1952 and, after spending two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship researching church reform in the Middle Ages, was awarded a doctorate at Michigan in 1956.

White taught at a number of universities, including Wayne State, the University of Rochester, Wesleyan, Stanford and several campuses of the University of California system.

In 1972, while he was a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, his career acquired an unusual footnote: He sued Edward M. Davis, the Los Angeles police chief, over the department’s practice of enrolling undercover officers as UCLA students so they could monitor the goings-on in classrooms and student organizations. He argued that the practice violated the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and privacy.

The California Supreme Court, in 1975, ruled for White, reversing a lower court decision.

“Given the delicate nature of academic freedom, we visualize a substantial probability that this alleged covert police surveillance will chill the exercise of First Amendment rights,” the court said.

White’s other scholarly works included, most recently, “The Practical Past” (2014). A collection, “The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory 1957-2007,” was published in 2010.

“Perhaps White’s most controversial idea, and one for which he was so often shunned by his fellow historians, is that ‘all stories are fictions,'” Robert Doran, a professor at the University of Rochester who edited that volume, said by email. “White held that while historical facts are scientifically verifiable, stories are not. Stories are made, not found in the historical data; historical meaning is imposed on historical facts by means of the choice of plot-type, and this choice is inevitably ethical and political at bottom.

“This is what White called ‘emplotment,’ a term he coined,” Doran continued. “Even the most basic beginning-middle-end structure of a story represents an imposition: The historian chooses where to begin, where to end, and what points are important in the middle. There is no scientific test for ‘historical significance.'”

The literary critic Gary Day, reviewing the collection in the British publication The Times Higher Education supplement, found White’s views invigorating and sobering.

“His closely argued, wide-ranging essays are an antidote to the philistine and sinister demands that we forget the past,” he wrote. “In history, we don’t just remember the dead, we do their remembering for them. And that’s an awesome responsibility, but a necessary one.”

White’s assorted theories and writings all examined, in various ways, how history is a living, breathing entity shaped by those who write it, not merely a dry examination of dusty artifacts.

“The accessibility of the historical object lies in the fact that it’s supposed to be over and done with,” he said in a video interview at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. “It’s no longer developing. When in reality our own relationship to the past is that it’s constantly intruding upon it.” Kellner said White’s insights were valid across disciplines.

“White was trained as a medievalist and chaired a major history department before he was 40, but his work was enthusiastically embraced by scholars in many fields, notably literature, art history, and philosophy,” Kellner said. “To all of these he offered a way of appealing to the past that was open to their different styles of thought. The enormous variety of topics he addressed was remarkable.”

In addition to his wife, whom he married in the early 1970s, White is survived by a daughter, Juliana Sarah Brose White; two sons, Adam and David; and a grandson. In 2014, White returned to Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, where he had directed the Center for the Humanities in the 1970s, to receive an honorary degree.

“When he made brief remarks to the Class of 2014 at commencement, he didn’t tell them to go discover their pasts, to go find out who they really were and then express that,” Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president, wrote on Tuesday in a commemorative blog post. “No, Hayden told us all that we weren’t rooted in some authentic past and that we could make out of ourselves something new, something not beholden to someone else’s idea of who we really were and where we had really come from. We could remake the meanings of our pasts, paradoxically, by seizing opportunities to create our futures.”