Abstract
‘What is History?’, asked E.H. Carr in 1961. In the course of his Trevelyan lectures, delivered in Cambridge, broadcast on BBC radio, and printed in a book that has since sold over a quarter of a million copies worldwide, Carr sought to answer this question in a number of ways. He began by making a distinction between history and chronicle. History was an attempt to understand and interpret the past, to explain the causes and origins of things in intelligible terms. Chronicle, on the other hand, was the mere cataloguing of events without any attempt to make connections between them. The chronicler was content to show that one thing followed another; the historian had to demonstrate that one thing caused another. Of course, Carr conceded, establishing that something happened was an important part of the historian’s work. It was the foundation on which everything else rested. But the really important part of the historian’s work lay in the edifice of explanation and interpretation which was erected on this foundation.1
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Notes and references
E.H. Carr, What is History? (40th anniversary edition, with a new Introduction by Richard J. Evans) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 5–6, 22–4
also E.H. Carr, ‘History and Morals’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 December 1954, distinguishing between history and chronicle.
E.H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, Vol. I: The Bolshevik Revolution, I (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 5–6.
Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 1999)
E.H. Carr, ‘An Autobiography’ (1989), in Michael Cox (ed.), E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. xiii–xxii.
Haslam, The Vices of Integrity, p. 146; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Mr Carr’s Big Battalions’, New Statesman, 5 January 1962, pp. 15–16
H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘E.H. Carr’s Success Story’, Encounter, May 1962, pp. 69–77.
Particularly influential here were E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958)
and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).
See the account of the ‘discussion’ in Cambridge University Reporter 96 (1965–66), pp. 627, 1013–29, 1292, 1591, 1830, 1852–3, and more generally in Patrick Collinson, ‘Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, 1921–1994’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 94 (1996), pp. 429–55, here pp. 448–9.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Tools and the Job’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, Special Issue: ‘New Ways in History’;
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1979), p. 6
R.W. Fogel and G.R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1983).
Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacob and Lynn Hunt, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), pp. 202, 216
Peter N. Stearns, ‘Coming of Age’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 10 (1976), pp. 246–65.
For a useful overview, see Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
Harvey J. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
and the introductory survey in Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
For a discussion of these trends, see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (2nd edn, with a new Afterword) (London: Granta, 2001).
Among many examples, see in particular Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1996) and
Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991)
more briefly, Frank Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Post-modernism’, History and Theory, Vol. 28 (1989), pp. 137–53.
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 16
Paul Boghossian, ‘What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 December 1996, pp. 14–15
Alan B. Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
For references, see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 284–301.
See, for an extreme example, Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
For a critical account of this change, in the context of British labour history, see David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, ‘Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language’, Social History, Vol. 17 (1992), pp. 165–88.
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (London: Scolar Press, 1978)
Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978); La péché et la peur: la culpabilisation en Occident (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1983).
Among many attempts to recount and explain this phenomenon, two of the most illuminating are Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 1999)
and Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, in Istvan Déak, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 293–324.
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Penguin, 1954) and many succeeding novels
Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994) and many more
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London: Picador, 1992)
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000); Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (London: Penguin, 2000)
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Vintage, 1993).
John Willis, ‘Past is Perfect’, Guardian, 29 October 2001, Media Supplement, pp. 2–3 (the author is a television executive).
Mark C. Carnes (ed.), Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996)
Richard J. Evans, ‘Is This the Past as we Know it?’, Independent, 12 March 2001, Monday review, p. 5.
Tristram Hunt, ‘Back to the Future’, Observer, 6 January 2002.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000).
Richard J. Evans, ‘How History has become Popular Again’, New Statesman, 12 February 2001, pp. 25–7.
Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989).
Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), p. 158 (interview with Carr).
For an extended discussion of such manipulation and distortion, see Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
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Evans, R.J. (2002). Prologue: What is History? — Now. In: Cannadine, D. (eds) What is History Now?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204522_1
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