Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study

by G.R. Elton

This volume contains the text of the three Cook Lectures, delivered by Sir Geoffrey Elton at the University of Michigan in April 1990, which reviewed various current doubts and queries concerning the writing of reasonably unbiased history. The lectures offer critical advice on how such unbiased history might be achieved, together with a general critical survey of 'fashionable' theories on the writing of history. The Cook Lectures appear in print for the first time. Also included in the volume are reprinted versions of Sir Geoffrey's two Cambridge inaugural lectures, as Professor of Constitutional History, and as Regius Professor of Modern History. These tried to dispel, respectively, what Sir Geoffrey sees as the anti-historical fantasies current in the 1960s (but by no means yet gone), and the artificial attempt to denigrate the history of one's native country.

Genres: History

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton FBA (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.

An strong advocate of the primacy of political and administrative history, Elton was the pre-eminent Tudor historian of his day. He also made very significant contributions to the then current debate on the philosophy of historical practice, as well as having a powerful effect on the profession through, among other things, his presidency of the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A shot not merely across the bow of the post-modernist crowd in history departments, but rather a shot into the bow - under the water line!