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HEAD TO HEAD

What is History?
RECENTLY PUBLISHED

How did
9/11
change
Four historians consider the most the way
fundamental question of all, one the world
sees the
famously posed by E.H. Carr almost 60 United
years ago. States?

The First
History Today | Published in History Today Volume 70 Issue 8 August 2020 Soviet in
Ireland

Sophisticating
the Past

MOST READ

1. How did 9/11 change

the way the world
sees the United
States?

2. What is History?

3. The First Soviet in

The Owl of Athena: Terracotta lekythos (oil flask) c. 490–480 BC. Ireland
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
4. Things, Many and
‘History is the study of people, actions, decisions, Varied
interactions and behaviours’
5. The Rise of the
Francesca Morphakis, PhD Candidate in History at the
Working Wife
University of Leeds

History is narratives. From chaos comes order. We seek

to understand the past by determining and ordering
‘facts’; and from these narratives we hope to explain the
decisions and processes which shape our existence.
Perhaps we might even distill patterns and lessons to
guide – but never to determine – our responses to the
challenges faced today. History is the study of people,
actions, decisions, interactions and behaviours. It is so
compelling a subject because it encapsulates themes
which expose the human condition in all of its guises
and that resonate throughout time: power, weakness,
corruption, tragedy, triumph … Nowhere are these
themes clearer than in political history, still the
necessary core of the field and the most meaningful of
the myriad approaches to the study of history. Yet
political history has fallen out of fashion and
subsequently into disrepute, wrongly demonised as
stale and irrelevant. The result has been to significantly
erode the utility of ordering, explaining and distilling
lessons from the past.

History’s primary purpose is to stand at the centre of

diverse, tolerant, intellectually rigorous debate about
our existence: our political systems, leadership, society,
economy and culture. However, open and free debate –
as in so many areas of life – is too often lacking and it is
not difficult to locate the cause of this intolerance.

Writing history can be a powerful tool; it has shaped

identities, particularly at the national level. Moreover, it
grants those who control the narrative the ability to
legitimise or discredit actions, events and individuals in
the present. Yet to marshal history and send it into
battle merely to serve the needs of the present is misuse
and abuse. History should never be a weapon at the
heart of culture wars. Sadly, once again, it is: clumsily
wielded by those who deliberately seek to impose a clear
ideological agenda. History is becoming the
handmaiden of identity politics and self-flagellation.
This only promotes poor, one-dimensional
understandings of the past and continually diminishes
the utility of the field. History stands at a crossroads; it
must refuse to follow the trend of the times.

‘I have a preference for historians who probe into

the “why” and the “how”’
Chandak Sengoopta, Professor of History at Birkbeck,
University of London

Any thoroughly researched and well-argued study of

any aspect of the past counts, for me, as history. I do
have a preference for historians who probe into the
‘why’ and the ‘how’ but, overall, I think that our scope
should be as broad and as catholic as possible. I am old
enough to remember a time when women’s history was
a separate field – left, in many universities, to Women’s
Studies programmes – and the existence of non-white
people was recognised by historians only in the context
of imperial history. Back then – I am talking only about
the late 1980s – English, Anthropology and even History
of Science departments were often more adventurous in
addressing the history of ‘others’ but their work, we
were often told by ‘real’ historians, wasn’t proper
history: ‘they use novels as evidence, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Have any of them been near an archive?’

If things are better today in History departments, it is

because the disciplinary frontiers have been redrawn.
But we still have our borders, not all of which are
imposed by our institutions or funding authorities. How
many History departments would exclude an otherwise
excellent candidate only because her sources are mostly
literary? A great many, I dare say, including my own.
Many of the field’s old fixations may have disappeared,
but quite a few antiquated fences still await a well-
aimed boot.

Political, economic and social history are, without

question, essential; so is the history of Europe and
America. But they are not the alpha and the omega of
History as a discipline. We still do not pay enough
attention to histories of ideas, of the arts, of medicine,
of philosophy, of entertainment, of technology, whether
in Europe or America or elsewhere. Nor do we feel
particularly comfortable about biographical approaches
to history. None of these potentially enriching themes
can be addressed unless we jettison our atavistic
equation of the archive with a collection of yellowing
reams of paper. It won’t be easy to dislodge this idol, but
I would like to hope that coming generations of
historians will chip away at it with greater conviction
than mine has been able to muster.

‘History is fundamentally a problem-solving

discipline’
Marcus Colla, Departmental Lecturer in European History
at Christ Church, Oxford

Though almost 60 years have passed since E.H. Carr first

posed the question, undergraduates still continue to
find much to unpack in his answers. Indeed, Carr’s 1961
book What is History? has enjoyed a longer shelf-life
than most works of actual history.

But it is a curious fact that What is History? remains a

go-to reference for teachers and students everywhere.
After all, much of Carr’s argument and the debates to
which he was contributing might strike us now, as we
attempt to answer the question, as being quaintly
archaic. The interim 60 years encompass
postmodernism, the rise of gender history and the
‘memory boom’, to name but a tiny sample. Today’s
students inhabit a completely different intellectual
universe.

Carr’s ideas clearly resonate more with our

contemporary sensibilities than do those of his
detractors, who remained wedded to the idea of an
objective historian unfettered from all current
assumptions. By contrast, Carr saw history as
fundamentally a problem-solving discipline. Not only
should historians divest themselves of the illusion that
they could somehow stand outside the world in which
they live, he argued. They should in fact embrace the
fact that the study of the past could be oriented to the
needs of the present.

One can immediately see the appeal of such an

argument today. In an academic world where the
humanities are under greater pressure to justify their
significance than ever before, studying ‘the past for the
past’s sake’ no longer cuts it. But I don’t think this is the
whole story. Rather, I sense that the enduring
fascination with Carr reflects something much more
fundamental in how we view the relationship between
past and present. For instance, we are surely less
inclined than previous generations to demand rigid
dichotomies between ‘history’ on the one hand and
‘memory’ or ‘heritage’ on the other. Furthermore, we’re
more democratic in who we believe history belongs to:
who from the past it includes, and who in the present
can benefit from it.

Each historian will view the relationship between past

and present differently. But it was Carr’s great
achievement to identify the tensions of this relationship
as the very engine of the discipline itself.

‘Histories are useful for telling us how we got

“here”’
Faridah Zaman, Associate Professor of History, University
of Oxford

One way to attempt to answer this question is to ask

ourselves what and who are histories for? A common
starting point might be that histories are useful for
telling us how we got ‘here’. Such histories might take
the form of origin stories, of relatively linear and
perhaps teleological accounts – how did we come to
organise our societies and political systems in the ways
that we have now, for instance – or, as the apocryphal
saying goes, a series of lessons to learn from in order to
avoid the ignominy of repetition.

Such an understanding of history conceals within itself

a more exciting and fraught – though not necessarily
antithetical – possibility. Just as we might look to the
past to better understand the myriad, complicated ways
in which our present world came to exist, historians
might also set themselves the task of illuminating
worlds unrealised and of other presents that might have
existed. Such histories, counter-intuitively, help us
understand our own times better either by underscoring
the contingency of the world around us or, depending
on your perspective, the enduring power of the
structures responsible for foreclosing those other
paths.

These kinds of histories require attending to – and often

recovering and reconstructing – narratives and
perspectives that have been lost in dominant historical
accounts. My own work has focused on unsuccessful
revolutions and failed political visions in the early 20th
century. More broadly, we might consider it a
fundamental task of history to reveal the complexity
and plurality that people lived with in the past. Such
histories can demonstrate how differently people have
thought about and related to the world around them,
including other ways of recording their ideas and
experiences. Much of this terrain used to be marginal to
‘History’ proper; M.K. Gandhi noted as much in 1909
when he dismissed conventional history as simply a
record of war. In recovering what has been subsumed
and forgotten – for instance, radical dissenting
traditions that were drowned out, or anticolonial
resistance movements that were defeated – history
might instead serve much more emancipatory ends and
open up spaces of critical and imaginative possibility for
our own times.

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