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What Is History, Now?
This groundbreaking new collection addresses the burning issue of how we interpret history today. What stories are told, and by whom, who should be celebrated, and what rewritten, are questions that have been asked recently not just within the history world, but by all of us. Featuring a diverse mix of writers, both bestselling names and emerging voices, this is the history book we need NOW.
WHAT IS HISTORY, NOW? covers topics such as the history of racism and anti-racism, queer history, the history of faith, the history of disability, environmental history, escaping imperial nostalgia, hearing women's voices and 'rewriting' the past. The list of contributors includes: Justin Bengry, Leila K Blackbird, Emily Brand, Gus Casely-Hayford, Sarah Churchwell, Caroline Dodds Pennock, Peter Frankopan, Bettany Hughes, Dan Hicks, Onyeka Nubia, Islam Issa, Maya Jasanoff, Rana Mitter, Charlotte Riley, Miri Rubin, Simon Schama, Alex von Tunzelmann and Jaipreet Virdi.
WHAT IS HISTORY, NOW? covers topics such as the history of racism and anti-racism, queer history, the history of faith, the history of disability, environmental history, escaping imperial nostalgia, hearing women's voices and 'rewriting' the past. The list of contributors includes: Justin Bengry, Leila K Blackbird, Emily Brand, Gus Casely-Hayford, Sarah Churchwell, Caroline Dodds Pennock, Peter Frankopan, Bettany Hughes, Dan Hicks, Onyeka Nubia, Islam Issa, Maya Jasanoff, Rana Mitter, Charlotte Riley, Miri Rubin, Simon Schama, Alex von Tunzelmann and Jaipreet Virdi.
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 2021
132 people are currently reading
1160 people want to read
About the author
Suzannah Lipscomb
16 books743 followersProf Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor Emerita in History at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, A Visitor's Companion to Tudor England, The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII, Witchcraft, and The Voices of Nimes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc. She edited, with Helen Carr, What is History, Now? (out 2021). She also writes and presents television programmes, including series on Henry VIII and his Six Wives, Witches: A Century of Murder, and Elizabeth I; hosts the podcast Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, and writes a regular column for History Today.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
December 17, 2022
Reading What is History? as part of my university study was one of the formative moments of my education. Not only was it a challenge to the way I thought about my chosen subject, it opened my eyes to the construction of the world around me, showed me that history was created by those who wrote it. A seemingly simple enough point, but one that stuns when you consider that everything you know might depend on blind luck, happy accident, or the choices made by a set of people with the power to decide on what 'deserved' to be saved. So many stories are missing and it's hardly a surprise to realise that groups other than straight, rich white men tend to be the ones left behind - their lives and contributions forgotten, sidelined, or outright destroyed.
That those peoples want to find their places in history, and thus in modern society, is no revelation. They have been fighting for that right for a long time. They are still fighting. Finally, slowly, it feels like things might be changing, in universities and schools there are challenges being made to the way things have always been. And some people hate it. Every time you see a news story about 'wokeness' or the need to 'defend our history', you know that some marginal group has tried to find their place in history or someone has asked critical questions about our country's past. It would be funny if it weren't so destructive. That we're still trying to balance railways with massacres or erase slavery with profit and statues. Adding to our understanding of what came before does not 'erase' anything, it adds depth and colour. It makes history more real, not less.
This is what Helen Carr, Suzannah Lipscomb and others argue in this book, with a great deal more eloquence and intelligence that I have here. Particular favourites were 'Why history should always be rewritten' by Charlotte Lydia Riley, who puts into words everything I think about what history is and should be, and 'How literature shapes history' by Islam Issa, whose argument about the essential link between literature and history, past, present, and future is one I take into my lessons every day. As well as these, there are many more fascinating and pertinent essays within, a true honouring of E. H. Carr's legacy and a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the world we live in now.
ARC via Netgalley
That those peoples want to find their places in history, and thus in modern society, is no revelation. They have been fighting for that right for a long time. They are still fighting. Finally, slowly, it feels like things might be changing, in universities and schools there are challenges being made to the way things have always been. And some people hate it. Every time you see a news story about 'wokeness' or the need to 'defend our history', you know that some marginal group has tried to find their place in history or someone has asked critical questions about our country's past. It would be funny if it weren't so destructive. That we're still trying to balance railways with massacres or erase slavery with profit and statues. Adding to our understanding of what came before does not 'erase' anything, it adds depth and colour. It makes history more real, not less.
This is what Helen Carr, Suzannah Lipscomb and others argue in this book, with a great deal more eloquence and intelligence that I have here. Particular favourites were 'Why history should always be rewritten' by Charlotte Lydia Riley, who puts into words everything I think about what history is and should be, and 'How literature shapes history' by Islam Issa, whose argument about the essential link between literature and history, past, present, and future is one I take into my lessons every day. As well as these, there are many more fascinating and pertinent essays within, a true honouring of E. H. Carr's legacy and a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the world we live in now.
ARC via Netgalley
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October 22, 2024Facts are not just facts, they always need an interpretative framework to do justice to them. That is the baseline with which British diplomat E.H. Carr made world fame more than 60 years ago in his book What Is History?. Without being aware of it, Carr became one of the forerunners of postmodernism, in particular the Narrative Turn, which took off in the 1980s. This Narrative Turn particularly focused on historical studies, pointing out that all historiography is a narrative construction. In its most radical version, this narrativism collapsed into complete relativism, claiming that no reliable historical narrative was possible at all because the historian's subjectivity was all-determining.
I have no doubt that E.H. Carr would strongly disagree with this, and that is also the position taken here by his great-granddaughter Helen Carr and the other contributors to this collection. They do adhere to the constructivist character of historiography, but argue that we should look for other, new perspectives as much as possible, preferably from groups that have been marginalized until now. I have to say, I don't really adhere to the minority approach, especially because, in turn, it often falls into a one-sided, reductionist view of history.
On the other hand, Charlotte Lydia Riley's contribution to this book (chapter 17) appealed to me. She emphasizes that history must always be rewritten, not from an ideological or interest-oriented perspective, but in a permanent dialogue with previous views on a particular past. The past as it really was simply cannot be perfectly reconstructed, but an honestly constructed view based on a scrutiny of the sources should be possible, in dialogue with earlier views. “After the history is written, we historians argue among ourselves about which version of the story is most compelling, and we look at the work done by historians of generations before us and we pick holes in it, pull it apart, and write it all again from a different perspective, including different people or using different archives or theories or schools. And then we present our history to the world – or at least, to each other – as a rewritten history. History would be a very different discipline if each topic were ticked off as finished whenever a new book appeared. If we could not rewrite history, then bad histories would stand as facts, and contentious interpretations – or worse, intentional untruths – would go unchallenged and unappealed.” (p. 271).
Her conclusion is not surprising: “We think about our own pasts differently as our lives change. Distance from the past does not always change the way that we feel about it – some memories and emotions stay with people forever. But for most people, even if they don't do this consciously, the past is always being reimagined, just as the future is continuously invented and reinvented, everything being rewritten over and over again. As historians, in our work, part of what we should try to do is capture this sense of fluidity, and contingency, and precarity – the past and the future, as creative endeavors. Imagining the past is a creative endeavor, and it is something that everyone does, all of the time. Historians do it for a living, maybe, but we are not the only ones. History can be comforting, or it can be challenging, but it is always only one of many possible stories. History must be rewritten, over and over again, to reflect this. ” (p. 280). Now that's a fruitful way to look at subjectivity in historiography!
I have no doubt that E.H. Carr would strongly disagree with this, and that is also the position taken here by his great-granddaughter Helen Carr and the other contributors to this collection. They do adhere to the constructivist character of historiography, but argue that we should look for other, new perspectives as much as possible, preferably from groups that have been marginalized until now. I have to say, I don't really adhere to the minority approach, especially because, in turn, it often falls into a one-sided, reductionist view of history.
On the other hand, Charlotte Lydia Riley's contribution to this book (chapter 17) appealed to me. She emphasizes that history must always be rewritten, not from an ideological or interest-oriented perspective, but in a permanent dialogue with previous views on a particular past. The past as it really was simply cannot be perfectly reconstructed, but an honestly constructed view based on a scrutiny of the sources should be possible, in dialogue with earlier views. “After the history is written, we historians argue among ourselves about which version of the story is most compelling, and we look at the work done by historians of generations before us and we pick holes in it, pull it apart, and write it all again from a different perspective, including different people or using different archives or theories or schools. And then we present our history to the world – or at least, to each other – as a rewritten history. History would be a very different discipline if each topic were ticked off as finished whenever a new book appeared. If we could not rewrite history, then bad histories would stand as facts, and contentious interpretations – or worse, intentional untruths – would go unchallenged and unappealed.” (p. 271).
Her conclusion is not surprising: “We think about our own pasts differently as our lives change. Distance from the past does not always change the way that we feel about it – some memories and emotions stay with people forever. But for most people, even if they don't do this consciously, the past is always being reimagined, just as the future is continuously invented and reinvented, everything being rewritten over and over again. As historians, in our work, part of what we should try to do is capture this sense of fluidity, and contingency, and precarity – the past and the future, as creative endeavors. Imagining the past is a creative endeavor, and it is something that everyone does, all of the time. Historians do it for a living, maybe, but we are not the only ones. History can be comforting, or it can be challenging, but it is always only one of many possible stories. History must be rewritten, over and over again, to reflect this. ” (p. 280). Now that's a fruitful way to look at subjectivity in historiography!
December 6, 2023
This book presents itself as an update of the famous book by E.H. Carr, What Is History? from 1961. The compiler Helen is a great-granddaughter of the British diplomat-historian. She makes no secret of the fact that this is also a tribute to her ancestor.
The book offers about 20 short chapters that discuss an aspect of history, often from a current affairs perspective, very diverse in terms of themes, and also reasonably committed. The latter refers to the call to give more attention to minority groups (women, indigenous peoples, queer, etc.). “Sixty years on from What is History? E.H. Carr's questions about how we investigate and interrogate the past remain. Sixty years on, it is crucial as well as timely to reinvestigate, reinterrogate and reinterpret our understanding of the past. Not the past of the select few, but the past of the many, in order to demonstrate, share – shout from the rooftops – that history belongs to us all.” Commendable, certainly, but isn’t this unidirectional approach slightly outdated by now? I know, these other perspectives can enrich our view on the past (making it less based on the bias of our own perspective), but they contain the risk of exchange this for other biases. Anyway, this is a very worthwhile book. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
The book offers about 20 short chapters that discuss an aspect of history, often from a current affairs perspective, very diverse in terms of themes, and also reasonably committed. The latter refers to the call to give more attention to minority groups (women, indigenous peoples, queer, etc.). “Sixty years on from What is History? E.H. Carr's questions about how we investigate and interrogate the past remain. Sixty years on, it is crucial as well as timely to reinvestigate, reinterrogate and reinterpret our understanding of the past. Not the past of the select few, but the past of the many, in order to demonstrate, share – shout from the rooftops – that history belongs to us all.” Commendable, certainly, but isn’t this unidirectional approach slightly outdated by now? I know, these other perspectives can enrich our view on the past (making it less based on the bias of our own perspective), but they contain the risk of exchange this for other biases. Anyway, this is a very worthwhile book. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
January 9, 2025
I’m of an age where as an undergraduate, although far from new, E H Carr’s
What is History?
, with his ideas about how the historian themselves was a major figure in how we understand the past, was one of the foundational texts of my chosen field, off-setting the hideously conservative G R Elton and the curmudgeon Arthur Marwick. I guess now we’d call it positionality, but his argument is more than that, emphasising contingency and the shifting ways history and historians engage with, make sense of, and understand the past in and of the present. Published in 1963, Carr’s work has had a profound effect, especially but not only on how we do history in the British world, and over the years has spawned an array of revisits and attempts at updates – yet, like many areas of intellectual work and academic practice, history has fractured, and there has been little that is single authored that has had anywhere near the same impact, partly because the field is less monolithic than it seemed 60 years ago.
In the latest addition to the collection of What is History?, Helen Carr (E.H.’s great granddaughter) and Susanna Lipscomb have gathered together an array of authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, at different stages in their careers and with different career types (academics, public historians, freelancers, and the like) to consider the question in the Now. The result is a valuable if uneven collection – although it is likely that that that unevenness also reflects my disciplinary bent.
The overall effect is that the field is diverse and informed by rich interdisciplinary practice with an evidence base that is becoming increasingly eclectic. Some papers review their sub-disciplinary fields – Maya Jasanoff on empire, Rana Mitter on East Asia for instance. Others raise intriguing methodological questions – Sarah Churchwell on the vernacular, or Carr on the emotions. There are as those that explore shifting historiographies – Leila K Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock on Indigenous histories and Justin Bengry on queering the past, or revisit the silenced – Lipscomb on women’s histories and Onyeka Nubia on black Tudors. Sharp and insightful they are written for a more-than-academic audience, so there is an introduction to history feeling about the collection, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, given the history debates and sanctification of a version of the past in our various culture wars.
My particular areas of work mean that some essays stood out as valuable and to be revisited – Blackbird and Dodds Pennock, Jasanoff, and Churchwell in particular, but more generally two essays struck me powerfully, one for its paradoxical link to much of the rest of the book, and the other for its overall significance. My overall concern in terms of the reach of and claims made by the collection is that it has an overwhelming North Atlantic, Anglophone orientation, with a heavy emphasis on Britain, even as there are several pieces that are not constrained to that focus. Here’s where the paradox comes into play: the opening substantive paper is Peter Frankopan’s outline of global history as having two principal forms; one seeks to fill the gaps left by Eurocentric histories, while the other more transformative seeks to shift the focus away gap filling to a global frame of reference. Yet this set-up does not play itself in the collection that follows, were many of the papers do not build on that global approach, remaining narrowly nationalist, almost excessively British, in form.
At the other end of the collection, the antepenultimate paper, Charlotte Lydia Riley’s ‘Why history should always be rewritten’ is a masterclass in historians’ practice, and a direct and uncompromising rebuttal of the ‘they’re-destroying-the-past’ outbursts of the culture war right. She builds her case around five points – history is not the past, but an interpretation of it; rewriting history is our job historians; we need to tell new stories and recognise/add new voices and stories; rewriting is not erasure; and writing history is as much about the now as the then. It’s a powerful rebuttal of those who’d protect a status quo, and a vital reminder of why history matters – it is what history is, now.
It’s a useful collection, and an important contribution to contemporary debates – but it also requires a sceptical eye, which is, of course, another vital element in the historian’s toolkit.
In the latest addition to the collection of What is History?, Helen Carr (E.H.’s great granddaughter) and Susanna Lipscomb have gathered together an array of authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, at different stages in their careers and with different career types (academics, public historians, freelancers, and the like) to consider the question in the Now. The result is a valuable if uneven collection – although it is likely that that that unevenness also reflects my disciplinary bent.
The overall effect is that the field is diverse and informed by rich interdisciplinary practice with an evidence base that is becoming increasingly eclectic. Some papers review their sub-disciplinary fields – Maya Jasanoff on empire, Rana Mitter on East Asia for instance. Others raise intriguing methodological questions – Sarah Churchwell on the vernacular, or Carr on the emotions. There are as those that explore shifting historiographies – Leila K Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock on Indigenous histories and Justin Bengry on queering the past, or revisit the silenced – Lipscomb on women’s histories and Onyeka Nubia on black Tudors. Sharp and insightful they are written for a more-than-academic audience, so there is an introduction to history feeling about the collection, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, given the history debates and sanctification of a version of the past in our various culture wars.
My particular areas of work mean that some essays stood out as valuable and to be revisited – Blackbird and Dodds Pennock, Jasanoff, and Churchwell in particular, but more generally two essays struck me powerfully, one for its paradoxical link to much of the rest of the book, and the other for its overall significance. My overall concern in terms of the reach of and claims made by the collection is that it has an overwhelming North Atlantic, Anglophone orientation, with a heavy emphasis on Britain, even as there are several pieces that are not constrained to that focus. Here’s where the paradox comes into play: the opening substantive paper is Peter Frankopan’s outline of global history as having two principal forms; one seeks to fill the gaps left by Eurocentric histories, while the other more transformative seeks to shift the focus away gap filling to a global frame of reference. Yet this set-up does not play itself in the collection that follows, were many of the papers do not build on that global approach, remaining narrowly nationalist, almost excessively British, in form.
At the other end of the collection, the antepenultimate paper, Charlotte Lydia Riley’s ‘Why history should always be rewritten’ is a masterclass in historians’ practice, and a direct and uncompromising rebuttal of the ‘they’re-destroying-the-past’ outbursts of the culture war right. She builds her case around five points – history is not the past, but an interpretation of it; rewriting history is our job historians; we need to tell new stories and recognise/add new voices and stories; rewriting is not erasure; and writing history is as much about the now as the then. It’s a powerful rebuttal of those who’d protect a status quo, and a vital reminder of why history matters – it is what history is, now.
It’s a useful collection, and an important contribution to contemporary debates – but it also requires a sceptical eye, which is, of course, another vital element in the historian’s toolkit.
December 24, 2021
As an armchair lover of history, I wasn't too sure what to expect of this book when I ordered it.
Having just completed it, I found the essays informative and interesting. One or two came across as a bit flimsy and just there to make up a demographic. Those aside it was a great insight to how history in today's world can and should be perceived.
I'd like to echo two points made by other reviewers. Firstly, a summing up by Suzannah and Helen of all the essays would've been nice and secondly another volume to explore the themes further would be a boon.
Having just completed it, I found the essays informative and interesting. One or two came across as a bit flimsy and just there to make up a demographic. Those aside it was a great insight to how history in today's world can and should be perceived.
I'd like to echo two points made by other reviewers. Firstly, a summing up by Suzannah and Helen of all the essays would've been nice and secondly another volume to explore the themes further would be a boon.
August 26, 2021
Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the publication of E.H. Carr’s influential What Is History?, this new collection of essays is an essential read for anyone with an interest in history. As national institutions and local councils are ridiculed in certain newspapers for re-examining legacies of their collections or statues and universities are forced to cut arts and humanities courses, What is History, Now? is not only timely, it’s an urgent book.
The book looks at how historical research and enquiry has developed over the past few decades, opening up to interdisciplinary study and narratives other than Great White Male Victorious, with essays on more diverse and inclusive avenues such as indigenous history and history of disability as well as neglected geographical areas such as East Asia. Gus Casely-Hayford writes about the aims of the new V&A East London museum while Alex von Tunzelmann examines our relationship with historical TV dramas and films, highlighting the current government’s outrage at the portrayal of the royal family in The Crown – a fictional drama series. Maya Jassaniff’s essay on imperialism, Onyeka Nubia’s on diversity in Tudor England and Charlotte Lydia Riley’s on why history should always be rewritten are also particularly pertinent. There is a lot to take out from this book, not least further reading sections that follow the individual essays.
Highly recommended, should be on the curriculum.
My thanks to Orion, W&N and Netgalley for the opportunity to read What Is History, Now?
The book looks at how historical research and enquiry has developed over the past few decades, opening up to interdisciplinary study and narratives other than Great White Male Victorious, with essays on more diverse and inclusive avenues such as indigenous history and history of disability as well as neglected geographical areas such as East Asia. Gus Casely-Hayford writes about the aims of the new V&A East London museum while Alex von Tunzelmann examines our relationship with historical TV dramas and films, highlighting the current government’s outrage at the portrayal of the royal family in The Crown – a fictional drama series. Maya Jassaniff’s essay on imperialism, Onyeka Nubia’s on diversity in Tudor England and Charlotte Lydia Riley’s on why history should always be rewritten are also particularly pertinent. There is a lot to take out from this book, not least further reading sections that follow the individual essays.
Highly recommended, should be on the curriculum.
My thanks to Orion, W&N and Netgalley for the opportunity to read What Is History, Now?
June 4, 2022
What is History Now? – An interesting discussion of where history is today.
What is History Now? Is the 21st century answer to the original text What is History? From EH Carr. I have seen some reviews which complain about this excellent book because it does not give examples of what Carr meant all of them years ago. I think they must have missed a word in the title, now rather than back in the 1960s. Carr’s book was very much a book of the mid-20th century, and the world has changed since then. We have women that are now professors in their own right rather than being administrative support as they were then.
There are nineteen excellent chapters that discuss the state if history in the 21st century and reflects the many differences that have helped moved the subject forward. Carr himself stated that history needs a consistent interrogation and reinterpretation and that there should be ‘a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his [her] facts.’ It also raises the question that if the government is so concerned with history and heritage then it should fund research, rather than allow it to fester and rot, while allowing the populist to mis-quote history.
I do not have much argument with many of the chapter in this book as an academic historian it is always interesting to see areas where research is growing. The only disappointment for me was Simon Schama writing about History and Nature. This is probably a generational point for me. As while Professor Schama’s writing is beautiful he takes the classists view of natural and environmental history. While engaging, it is very much a twentieth century view of the subject. Talking about nature and man’s interaction with the world. Today the elephant in the room is the urban part of nature, you cannot remove urban from natural history. Anyone studying this area knows that some of the best work on natural and environmental history is happening in America. Whereas here in Britain we are playing catch up, because the classists mistakes with standing on the rock and not looking underneath it.
To me Leila K. Blackbird sums up the current state of history, not only in the USA but here in the UK where we have mythologised accounts of colonisation and challenging the narrative is seen as woke. She quite rightly states that history has been come a crucible in modern politics. Rather like the German’s we British seem to think we have our own Sonderweg (special path) especially how we use the Second World War to colour our discussion. Pity most of those that actually lived through it are either dead or their final destination is getting close. But the modern day we cannot get away from the ‘blitz’ spirit’, Dunkirk resistance, or when we ‘stood alone’, when we did not.
This really is an excellent collection of essays, raising some very wide topics, whether it be on queer history, how film and movie history are all important parts of our culture. Carr said that history should reflect one’s age – and this collection certainly does that.
What is History Now? Is the 21st century answer to the original text What is History? From EH Carr. I have seen some reviews which complain about this excellent book because it does not give examples of what Carr meant all of them years ago. I think they must have missed a word in the title, now rather than back in the 1960s. Carr’s book was very much a book of the mid-20th century, and the world has changed since then. We have women that are now professors in their own right rather than being administrative support as they were then.
There are nineteen excellent chapters that discuss the state if history in the 21st century and reflects the many differences that have helped moved the subject forward. Carr himself stated that history needs a consistent interrogation and reinterpretation and that there should be ‘a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his [her] facts.’ It also raises the question that if the government is so concerned with history and heritage then it should fund research, rather than allow it to fester and rot, while allowing the populist to mis-quote history.
I do not have much argument with many of the chapter in this book as an academic historian it is always interesting to see areas where research is growing. The only disappointment for me was Simon Schama writing about History and Nature. This is probably a generational point for me. As while Professor Schama’s writing is beautiful he takes the classists view of natural and environmental history. While engaging, it is very much a twentieth century view of the subject. Talking about nature and man’s interaction with the world. Today the elephant in the room is the urban part of nature, you cannot remove urban from natural history. Anyone studying this area knows that some of the best work on natural and environmental history is happening in America. Whereas here in Britain we are playing catch up, because the classists mistakes with standing on the rock and not looking underneath it.
To me Leila K. Blackbird sums up the current state of history, not only in the USA but here in the UK where we have mythologised accounts of colonisation and challenging the narrative is seen as woke. She quite rightly states that history has been come a crucible in modern politics. Rather like the German’s we British seem to think we have our own Sonderweg (special path) especially how we use the Second World War to colour our discussion. Pity most of those that actually lived through it are either dead or their final destination is getting close. But the modern day we cannot get away from the ‘blitz’ spirit’, Dunkirk resistance, or when we ‘stood alone’, when we did not.
This really is an excellent collection of essays, raising some very wide topics, whether it be on queer history, how film and movie history are all important parts of our culture. Carr said that history should reflect one’s age – and this collection certainly does that.
February 26, 2023
I'd seen some glowing reviews of this, and asked for (and received!) it for Christmas. I don't think I realised however that this was a series of chapters by different historians, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse in terms of how much I got from the book.
Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb here aim to update and add to E. H. Carr's acclaimed and influential book of sixty years ago, and they invite a wide range of contributors to assist in answering the question posed in the title. I very much enjoyed the first half, but felt my interest waned a little later in the book. Whether this was because of the chapters being ordered in a specific way, I'm unsure, but I felt that the very interesting insights and thought-provoking points made - especially about how modern historians deal with changing perceptions and sensitivites - became repetitive. Many contributors each justified their research in the same way, made the same (valid, but not needing restating in every piece) points about the value of non-white, non-male, non-priviledged contributors, plus some of the chapters didn't seem particularly important to me.
It's my scientific mind/training but all the 'we don't have much evidence to rely on regarding the history of [very tiny minority which in the grand scheme of things didn't have a lot of historical or social significance]' statements just made me think 'well, don't bother then, you can't draw many reliable conclusions on such a paucity of reliable information'.
Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb here aim to update and add to E. H. Carr's acclaimed and influential book of sixty years ago, and they invite a wide range of contributors to assist in answering the question posed in the title. I very much enjoyed the first half, but felt my interest waned a little later in the book. Whether this was because of the chapters being ordered in a specific way, I'm unsure, but I felt that the very interesting insights and thought-provoking points made - especially about how modern historians deal with changing perceptions and sensitivites - became repetitive. Many contributors each justified their research in the same way, made the same (valid, but not needing restating in every piece) points about the value of non-white, non-male, non-priviledged contributors, plus some of the chapters didn't seem particularly important to me.
It's my scientific mind/training but all the 'we don't have much evidence to rely on regarding the history of [very tiny minority which in the grand scheme of things didn't have a lot of historical or social significance]' statements just made me think 'well, don't bother then, you can't draw many reliable conclusions on such a paucity of reliable information'.
February 2, 2024
'What is History, Now' is a great collection of essay's that focus on different approaches to applying historical theory and framework within the study of history, today.
Much of the essay's focus on how we can pull marginalized historical groups out of the dark, and into public readership and understanding. Chapter's such as 'Can and should we queer the past?', 'How can we write the history of disability?', 'How can we recover the lost lives of women?' and, 'How making space for Indigenous peoples changes history'. For many students and researchers, these themes are finally starting to receive the attention that is desperately needed in the field, and the authors do a great job in laying out how we should go about researching these histories.
Other stand-out essays for me included, 'Glorious memory' and 'Why history should always be re-written'. These essays spoke to me due to their emphasis on how we memorialize history and the belief that re-writing history always contains a negative connotation. It is well understood that re-writing history is a key aspect of a historians job, and what adds crucial historiographic context to a topic. In 'Glorious memory' I really enjoyed the take on the current discussion around the removal of statues in cities across the world. The essay argues that statues and memorials are erected to serve a purpose and represent core elements of the society in which they belonged to. We are not erasing history by removing statues or re-naming streets, that history will always remain. What society is doing by this is exactly the same that those did when naming streets and erecting statues during their time. We are reflecting what we believe is representative of the culture, society, and history around us, now.
I think that many students and writers of history would find these essays of great help in guiding them to take new approaches to historical subjects. While that is said, these essay's can also help non-historically trained individuals to see the world in a more inclusive, multi-narrative, and better understood way.
Much of the essay's focus on how we can pull marginalized historical groups out of the dark, and into public readership and understanding. Chapter's such as 'Can and should we queer the past?', 'How can we write the history of disability?', 'How can we recover the lost lives of women?' and, 'How making space for Indigenous peoples changes history'. For many students and researchers, these themes are finally starting to receive the attention that is desperately needed in the field, and the authors do a great job in laying out how we should go about researching these histories.
Other stand-out essays for me included, 'Glorious memory' and 'Why history should always be re-written'. These essays spoke to me due to their emphasis on how we memorialize history and the belief that re-writing history always contains a negative connotation. It is well understood that re-writing history is a key aspect of a historians job, and what adds crucial historiographic context to a topic. In 'Glorious memory' I really enjoyed the take on the current discussion around the removal of statues in cities across the world. The essay argues that statues and memorials are erected to serve a purpose and represent core elements of the society in which they belonged to. We are not erasing history by removing statues or re-naming streets, that history will always remain. What society is doing by this is exactly the same that those did when naming streets and erecting statues during their time. We are reflecting what we believe is representative of the culture, society, and history around us, now.
I think that many students and writers of history would find these essays of great help in guiding them to take new approaches to historical subjects. While that is said, these essay's can also help non-historically trained individuals to see the world in a more inclusive, multi-narrative, and better understood way.
July 5, 2023
This is very much speaking to the converted!
February 17, 2022
This book has some really interesting chapter. Definitely recommend! My favourite quote from the book is this
"Rewriting history is not airbrushing the past, because 'history' and 'the past' are fundamentally different things. The past is everything that has already happened, everywhere, to anyone. The past cannot be revisited or rewound - if you missed something that happened, tough luck! - and it cannot be rewritten. What we can do is research and write histories, which are at their heart stories about the past. These histories are partial and subjective, a single version of many different stories about the past that the historian could have chosen to tell" - Charlotte Lydia Riley
"Rewriting history is not airbrushing the past, because 'history' and 'the past' are fundamentally different things. The past is everything that has already happened, everywhere, to anyone. The past cannot be revisited or rewound - if you missed something that happened, tough luck! - and it cannot be rewritten. What we can do is research and write histories, which are at their heart stories about the past. These histories are partial and subjective, a single version of many different stories about the past that the historian could have chosen to tell" - Charlotte Lydia Riley
December 27, 2023
Some very good essays (particularly enjoyed the one on museums by Gus Casely-Hayford and on making spaces for Indigenous peoples by Leila K. Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock) with some lacking in sufficient detail (the one on literature felt like it was too broad a topic to be covered by one short essay). An interesting modern update/reaction to E.H. Carr’s seminal “What is History?”
Read
December 5, 2021"Great history is written precisely when the historian's vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present."
E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37
"It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context."
― Edward Hallett Carr
Facts … are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.
E.H. Carr, What is History?
"every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis."
Leon Trotsky
You can never judge a history book by its cover. But you can judge a book by the blurb on the back cover, especially when the historians praising the book are broadly conservative ones.
While this new collection of articles contain E.H. Carr's original title of his world-famous book, I somehow doubt that he would favour the type of gender, racial or culturally-based historiography presented in this book.
The central theme of Carr's book was how to connect the writing of history with contemporary social, political and economic problems. As the historian, R.G. Collingwood, said: "the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae."[1]
While the introduction to this new collection of essays is adequate, it leaves out the context and point of Carr's book, which was to answer an attack on him by the writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[2] As Ann Talbot writes out, "The book was in large measure a reply to Berlin's essay Historical Inevitability, in which he had criticised those who believed in the "vast impersonal forces" of history rather than giving priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. (Berlin 1997) Berlin maintained that those who regarded history as a determined causal chain, in the manner of Hegel or Marx, denied the role of free will and the individual responsibility of history's tyrants for the crimes they committed. Both Carr and Berlin wrote with sparkling wit.
What was at issue was Britain's attitude to the Soviet Union and its place in a putative nuclear war. The counterfactuals that Carr had in mind were those that suggested that some other outcome had been possible in Russia, that the 1917 Revolution was not inevitable, that the Bolsheviks might not have come to power and that instead, the Provisional Government might have succeeded in maintaining its grip on events and managed to establish a parliamentary system. An ideological dispute of this kind is so very un-British that there is not even a satisfactory English word for it, so I will use the German word. What we have here is a very British Historikerstreit.
It was a dispute conducted in the most gentlemanly, oblique and mediated of terms, and both sides were more likely to appeal to the commonsense of the average Times reader than high theory, but a Historikerstreit it was nonetheless. The national peculiarities of the time and class should not lead us to suppose that theoretical questions were not involved any more than we should suppose that political questions were not involved simply because they remained, for the most part, unstated".[3]This kind of dispute, however gentlemanly, is a very rare occurrence in today's heavily sanitised academic world.
Despite being called a diverse set of essayists, what these historians write about has a common thread: they reflect a modern-day preoccupation with gender, race, and sexuality. Titles such as "Can and should we queer the past?", "How can we write the history of empire?" and "Can we recover the lost lives of women?" and a debate over the removal of statues set the tone for the rest of the book.
If the debate over removing a few reactionary statues were all there was, then that would be fine. The middle-class layer behind the removal of revolutionary figures has a far more right-wing and sinister agenda. In some cases, the demand and removal of progressive and revolutionary figures such as Abraham Lincoln are deeply reactionary and troubling.
There is nothing progressive in the destruction of statues and monuments that memorialise the American Revolution and the Civil War leaders such as Lincoln. As Leon Trotsky wrote, "for argument's sake, let us grant that all previous revolutionary history and, if you please, all history, in general, is nothing but a chain of mistakes. But what to do about present-day reality? What about the colossal army of permanently unemployed, the pauperised farmers, the general decline of economic levels, the approaching war? The sceptical wiseacres promise us that sometime in the future, they will catalogue all the banana peels on which the great revolutionary movements of the past have slipped. But will these gentlemen tell us what to do today, right now"?[4]
As Trotsky said, the study of history is important to make sense of the world. Although Carr was not a Marxist historian, he knew enough about Marx to know that people do not make history as they please. According to Marx, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language".[5]
The first chapter by Peter Frankopan titled Why global history matters while not breaking any new ground is hard not to disagree with. Alex Von Tunzelmann's chapter is a little more contentious, examining history at the movies. I am afraid I have to disagree with Katrina Gulliver[6] when she says, "Tunzelmann takes the optimistic view that even inaccurate history might pique people's interest and lead them to engage with more meaningful sources".Bad history is what it is and should be opposed in both movies and academia.
It should be said upfront that I love historical movies. It would be hard to find a person that does not. It must also be said that most historical movies are simply misleading, lazy and, in many cases, an outright and deliberate falsification of history. Many historical dramas today are made by a self-obsessed middle-class layer who, instead of wanting to change the social conditions for the bulk of the population, want to change the historical facts to suit their ideological prejudices. The result, in many cases, is dreadful movies that make them a pile of money.
One film mentioned by Tunzelmann is James Cameron's Titanic. By any stretch of the imagination, this is an extremely bad film. Titanic made close to one billion dollars and was lauded as a great film. As David Walsh wrote, "The response to Titanic is so great and so out of proportion to the quality of the film itself that one is forced to view its success as a social phenomenon worthy of analysis. This is not simply a film—it is virtually a cause. Its admirers defend it with fervour and admit no challenges and no criticisms—it is not simply a 'good' film or a 'wonderful' film. It must be acknowledged as 'the greatest film of all time.'[7]
It is hard to know where to start with Justin Bengry's essay, Can and should we queer the past?. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is either bad history or good history but no queer history. If only Bengry were talking about the study of homosexuality through the ages, this would be a legitimate field of study, but unfortunately, there is an agenda here. The promotion of so-called gender, race and sexuality is being pushed out not by the working class but by a self-obsessed section of the middle class. This is not about social equality or democratic rights. It is about money and power.
This modern-day campaign for want of a better word has nothing to do with left-wing politics and certainly has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the product of decades of ideological and political reaction. It has more to do with the politics of envy than it does with socialism.
Helen Carr's piece on the history of emotions promotes the "Cultural Turn" genre. Carr's use of this genre has more in common with writer and historian Stuart Hall than with her great grandfather. As Paul Bond perceptively writes in his obituary of Hall," Stuart Hall, who died in London February 10 at the age of 82, was the academic figure most closely identified with the growth of Cultural Studies in British universities. His obituaries have been fulsome. Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[8]
Another genre covered in the book is 'history from below' –popularised by E. P Thompson and other leading historians in the Communist Party Historians Group. Lucien Febvre originally used the phrase in 1932, 'Histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut' roughly translated by Google as 'history seen from below and not from above. Perhaps the most famous book produced by this genre was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Despite containing some valuable insights, Thompson saw the development of the English working class from a purely nationalist perspective.
He also played down the deeply right-wing nature of the History from Below genre. As Ann Talbot writes, "The Communist Party sponsored a form of "People's History", which is typified by A.L. Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr".[9]
When there are many essays in a book, there is usually a conclusion where the editors usually sum up what has been written by all the essayists. For some reason, this has not been done by these editors. Maybe there is confusion over what the hell to do with a rather large number of very conservative pieces of history.
So what is the general reader to make of this book. It is clear that it is a very conservative piece of work and that the essayists were carefully chosen to put forward complacent and largely reactionary historiography. If this is Edward Hallett Carr's legacy, I am not sure he would be too happy about it. Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great historian "the facts of history never come to us "pure", since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it."
[1] What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 23 [back]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_...
[3] Chance and Necessity in History: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared
Author(s): Ann Talbot: Historical Social Research , 2009, Vol. 34, No. 2
[4] Once Again on the “Crisis of Marxism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...
[5] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
[6] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/d...
[7] Titanic as a social phenomenon.www.wsws.org/en/articles/2...
[8] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014...
[9] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003...
E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37
"It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context."
― Edward Hallett Carr
Facts … are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.
E.H. Carr, What is History?
"every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis."
Leon Trotsky
You can never judge a history book by its cover. But you can judge a book by the blurb on the back cover, especially when the historians praising the book are broadly conservative ones.
While this new collection of articles contain E.H. Carr's original title of his world-famous book, I somehow doubt that he would favour the type of gender, racial or culturally-based historiography presented in this book.
The central theme of Carr's book was how to connect the writing of history with contemporary social, political and economic problems. As the historian, R.G. Collingwood, said: "the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae."[1]
While the introduction to this new collection of essays is adequate, it leaves out the context and point of Carr's book, which was to answer an attack on him by the writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[2] As Ann Talbot writes out, "The book was in large measure a reply to Berlin's essay Historical Inevitability, in which he had criticised those who believed in the "vast impersonal forces" of history rather than giving priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. (Berlin 1997) Berlin maintained that those who regarded history as a determined causal chain, in the manner of Hegel or Marx, denied the role of free will and the individual responsibility of history's tyrants for the crimes they committed. Both Carr and Berlin wrote with sparkling wit.
What was at issue was Britain's attitude to the Soviet Union and its place in a putative nuclear war. The counterfactuals that Carr had in mind were those that suggested that some other outcome had been possible in Russia, that the 1917 Revolution was not inevitable, that the Bolsheviks might not have come to power and that instead, the Provisional Government might have succeeded in maintaining its grip on events and managed to establish a parliamentary system. An ideological dispute of this kind is so very un-British that there is not even a satisfactory English word for it, so I will use the German word. What we have here is a very British Historikerstreit.
It was a dispute conducted in the most gentlemanly, oblique and mediated of terms, and both sides were more likely to appeal to the commonsense of the average Times reader than high theory, but a Historikerstreit it was nonetheless. The national peculiarities of the time and class should not lead us to suppose that theoretical questions were not involved any more than we should suppose that political questions were not involved simply because they remained, for the most part, unstated".[3]This kind of dispute, however gentlemanly, is a very rare occurrence in today's heavily sanitised academic world.
Despite being called a diverse set of essayists, what these historians write about has a common thread: they reflect a modern-day preoccupation with gender, race, and sexuality. Titles such as "Can and should we queer the past?", "How can we write the history of empire?" and "Can we recover the lost lives of women?" and a debate over the removal of statues set the tone for the rest of the book.
If the debate over removing a few reactionary statues were all there was, then that would be fine. The middle-class layer behind the removal of revolutionary figures has a far more right-wing and sinister agenda. In some cases, the demand and removal of progressive and revolutionary figures such as Abraham Lincoln are deeply reactionary and troubling.
There is nothing progressive in the destruction of statues and monuments that memorialise the American Revolution and the Civil War leaders such as Lincoln. As Leon Trotsky wrote, "for argument's sake, let us grant that all previous revolutionary history and, if you please, all history, in general, is nothing but a chain of mistakes. But what to do about present-day reality? What about the colossal army of permanently unemployed, the pauperised farmers, the general decline of economic levels, the approaching war? The sceptical wiseacres promise us that sometime in the future, they will catalogue all the banana peels on which the great revolutionary movements of the past have slipped. But will these gentlemen tell us what to do today, right now"?[4]
As Trotsky said, the study of history is important to make sense of the world. Although Carr was not a Marxist historian, he knew enough about Marx to know that people do not make history as they please. According to Marx, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language".[5]
The first chapter by Peter Frankopan titled Why global history matters while not breaking any new ground is hard not to disagree with. Alex Von Tunzelmann's chapter is a little more contentious, examining history at the movies. I am afraid I have to disagree with Katrina Gulliver[6] when she says, "Tunzelmann takes the optimistic view that even inaccurate history might pique people's interest and lead them to engage with more meaningful sources".Bad history is what it is and should be opposed in both movies and academia.
It should be said upfront that I love historical movies. It would be hard to find a person that does not. It must also be said that most historical movies are simply misleading, lazy and, in many cases, an outright and deliberate falsification of history. Many historical dramas today are made by a self-obsessed middle-class layer who, instead of wanting to change the social conditions for the bulk of the population, want to change the historical facts to suit their ideological prejudices. The result, in many cases, is dreadful movies that make them a pile of money.
One film mentioned by Tunzelmann is James Cameron's Titanic. By any stretch of the imagination, this is an extremely bad film. Titanic made close to one billion dollars and was lauded as a great film. As David Walsh wrote, "The response to Titanic is so great and so out of proportion to the quality of the film itself that one is forced to view its success as a social phenomenon worthy of analysis. This is not simply a film—it is virtually a cause. Its admirers defend it with fervour and admit no challenges and no criticisms—it is not simply a 'good' film or a 'wonderful' film. It must be acknowledged as 'the greatest film of all time.'[7]
It is hard to know where to start with Justin Bengry's essay, Can and should we queer the past?. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is either bad history or good history but no queer history. If only Bengry were talking about the study of homosexuality through the ages, this would be a legitimate field of study, but unfortunately, there is an agenda here. The promotion of so-called gender, race and sexuality is being pushed out not by the working class but by a self-obsessed section of the middle class. This is not about social equality or democratic rights. It is about money and power.
This modern-day campaign for want of a better word has nothing to do with left-wing politics and certainly has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the product of decades of ideological and political reaction. It has more to do with the politics of envy than it does with socialism.
Helen Carr's piece on the history of emotions promotes the "Cultural Turn" genre. Carr's use of this genre has more in common with writer and historian Stuart Hall than with her great grandfather. As Paul Bond perceptively writes in his obituary of Hall," Stuart Hall, who died in London February 10 at the age of 82, was the academic figure most closely identified with the growth of Cultural Studies in British universities. His obituaries have been fulsome. Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[8]
Another genre covered in the book is 'history from below' –popularised by E. P Thompson and other leading historians in the Communist Party Historians Group. Lucien Febvre originally used the phrase in 1932, 'Histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut' roughly translated by Google as 'history seen from below and not from above. Perhaps the most famous book produced by this genre was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Despite containing some valuable insights, Thompson saw the development of the English working class from a purely nationalist perspective.
He also played down the deeply right-wing nature of the History from Below genre. As Ann Talbot writes, "The Communist Party sponsored a form of "People's History", which is typified by A.L. Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr".[9]
When there are many essays in a book, there is usually a conclusion where the editors usually sum up what has been written by all the essayists. For some reason, this has not been done by these editors. Maybe there is confusion over what the hell to do with a rather large number of very conservative pieces of history.
So what is the general reader to make of this book. It is clear that it is a very conservative piece of work and that the essayists were carefully chosen to put forward complacent and largely reactionary historiography. If this is Edward Hallett Carr's legacy, I am not sure he would be too happy about it. Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great historian "the facts of history never come to us "pure", since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it."
[1] What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 23 [back]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_...
[3] Chance and Necessity in History: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared
Author(s): Ann Talbot: Historical Social Research , 2009, Vol. 34, No. 2
[4] Once Again on the “Crisis of Marxism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...
[5] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
[6] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/d...
[7] Titanic as a social phenomenon.www.wsws.org/en/articles/2...
[8] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014...
[9] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003...
June 14, 2023
What is History, Now takes up the mantle from What is History author EH Carr, with one of the editors being his great granddaughter Helen Carr. Through 19 essays the book is a welcome intervention into a climate that has been muddied by bad faith politicians and commentators seeking to whip up culture wars over the role of history. As many of the essays suggest, the idea of one fixed history is so absurd it's hard to imagine someone that is genuinely engaged and interested in history could fall prey to the nonsense spewed forth over recent issues, such as with the National Trust or statues like Edward Colston, or people moaning when some people point out Churchill was a flawed human being and not the cartoon invincible hero some myth-makers like to paint him as.
Historians are products of their place and time, and using the metaphor deployed in the introduction, they are fishing in an ocean full of facts. Knowing where to fish, they'll generally find the facts they want. This is not to denigrate historian's research but simply to draw attention to the inevitable limitations and partial nature that any one narrative that draws these facts together can have.
Institutional authorities also deploy a great amount of power in what is chosen and what is not chosen, whether it is in how an artefact is presented, where the emphasis on it's value is placed, reading lists: who are considered to be worth reading and who is not. Such decisions have often been made with a fairly homogenous demographic in mind as the audience, usually the same type as the figures making those decisions. It is not necessarily consciously malignant by any means, and such histories revealed are always valuable in their own right, but a history for everyone, in societies that are increasingly diverse need histories that speak to everyone. Hidden voices and marginalised lives not considered of interest by Victorian historians ( for example ) are vital to help everyone feel connected to the profession and to society. It should not just be the preserve of middle class white folk, who don't want to ask questions like "so, where did this come from? How was it acquired? What kind of impact did this have on those who lived here etc etc"
History and myth-making, history and literature are woven together and can create quite the emotional force for some. For some who are deeply invested in a particular "origin story" counter-narratives are perceived as threats, when often it's no more than pointing out that the origin story is just one partial perspective, and that there are other people then and now for whom that construction might seem disingenuous or limited at best.
Each of these essays addresses a different argument or debating point regarding history. What it means for history to be re-written ( it constantly is already and always has been), how literature shapes history and identities and vice versa, black history, gay history, lost voices of women and so forth, all highlighting how rich history can be, and how important it is to think on these questions if we want to say we genuinely are a society for everyone.
The people who know this already will find it very informative and engaging, but I fear as ever, the people who need to read these arguments are always likely to stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la and call it woke or something nonsensical like that. But if it can breakthrough to even just a few people then it's well worth it.
Historians are products of their place and time, and using the metaphor deployed in the introduction, they are fishing in an ocean full of facts. Knowing where to fish, they'll generally find the facts they want. This is not to denigrate historian's research but simply to draw attention to the inevitable limitations and partial nature that any one narrative that draws these facts together can have.
Institutional authorities also deploy a great amount of power in what is chosen and what is not chosen, whether it is in how an artefact is presented, where the emphasis on it's value is placed, reading lists: who are considered to be worth reading and who is not. Such decisions have often been made with a fairly homogenous demographic in mind as the audience, usually the same type as the figures making those decisions. It is not necessarily consciously malignant by any means, and such histories revealed are always valuable in their own right, but a history for everyone, in societies that are increasingly diverse need histories that speak to everyone. Hidden voices and marginalised lives not considered of interest by Victorian historians ( for example ) are vital to help everyone feel connected to the profession and to society. It should not just be the preserve of middle class white folk, who don't want to ask questions like "so, where did this come from? How was it acquired? What kind of impact did this have on those who lived here etc etc"
History and myth-making, history and literature are woven together and can create quite the emotional force for some. For some who are deeply invested in a particular "origin story" counter-narratives are perceived as threats, when often it's no more than pointing out that the origin story is just one partial perspective, and that there are other people then and now for whom that construction might seem disingenuous or limited at best.
Each of these essays addresses a different argument or debating point regarding history. What it means for history to be re-written ( it constantly is already and always has been), how literature shapes history and identities and vice versa, black history, gay history, lost voices of women and so forth, all highlighting how rich history can be, and how important it is to think on these questions if we want to say we genuinely are a society for everyone.
The people who know this already will find it very informative and engaging, but I fear as ever, the people who need to read these arguments are always likely to stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la and call it woke or something nonsensical like that. But if it can breakthrough to even just a few people then it's well worth it.
January 20, 2022
What Is History by E.H. Carr is a text so essential and foundational to modern anglophone History that we were practically told at university not to take someone seriously as a historian if they hadn't read it. Of course, that book was published in the 1960s and it's telling that this follow on is c0-edited by E.H Carr's own great-granddaughter. General change in more than one way.
What Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb have pulled together is a wonderful, stimulating, essential and informative set of essays about some of the many facets of History which historians, and the wider world, must wrestle with today.
At a time when illiterates in government and the media are complaining that History is being rewritten, this book boldly stands up and says "Yes. That's the point. We are rewriting it because we think about women/black/indigenous/queer/poor people as people nowadays". It's saying we should look at the history of emotions or the environment or even notions as seemingly uncontroversial yet often overlooked as places which aren't Europe. One chapter (a favourite) is simply about why rewriting History is the whole point, full stop, because the alternative is literally a single book on every topic ever, and no more. What madness that would be.
To make things even better, each chapter ends with a reading list from which I will no doubt expand my unread book mountain and future shelved-and-read books. Superb.
What Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb have pulled together is a wonderful, stimulating, essential and informative set of essays about some of the many facets of History which historians, and the wider world, must wrestle with today.
At a time when illiterates in government and the media are complaining that History is being rewritten, this book boldly stands up and says "Yes. That's the point. We are rewriting it because we think about women/black/indigenous/queer/poor people as people nowadays". It's saying we should look at the history of emotions or the environment or even notions as seemingly uncontroversial yet often overlooked as places which aren't Europe. One chapter (a favourite) is simply about why rewriting History is the whole point, full stop, because the alternative is literally a single book on every topic ever, and no more. What madness that would be.
To make things even better, each chapter ends with a reading list from which I will no doubt expand my unread book mountain and future shelved-and-read books. Superb.
June 17, 2023
The format of this book is perfect for its purpose: Lots of short essays that can be read in 10-20 mins, allowing you to sit down for a short period whilst also taking in a thoughtful discussion. The book covers a vast array different approaches to how history research should be conducted, each one focussing on a particular topic. Some of the essays feel a bit forced, but perhaps that owes to my biased topical interests. I was particularly interested in the essay on approaching the fact that word definitions change over time, so reading an old document now requires understanding how a word has been shaped and re-defined through history.
December 12, 2024
This was an interesting book. I particularly liked the chapters about vernacular history, empires, East Asia and literature. That being said, you need to have prior knowledge on most areas of history (incl. geographical and topical) since some chapters had lengthy discussions around areas which I had no prior knowledge which made them relatively boring (e.g. I know nothing about Arabic History or natural history). Also, since this is a collection of essays from different writers, there is bound to be particular styles of writing which you enjoy more than others, however, the quality of writing overall is solid. A well-collated book.
January 27, 2025
Ganske fin introduksjon til flere ulike tilnærminger til historie, inkludert emosjonshistorie, funksjonshemmelseshistorie, og inkorporering av innfødte og deres historie, og effekten det har. Kapitlene er lettleste, samtidig som de oppfordrer leseren til å tenke og reflektere over dems egne forståelser og antakelser. Ikke alle kapitlene var like spennende for meg personlig å lese, men hvis man vil ha en god og lettlest introduksjon til en rekke ulike måter å forstå historie på, er dette en god bok.
November 10, 2025
Qué bueno, qué interesante. Me ha gustado mucho esta lectura. La selección de temas y autores me parece impecable y algunos de los capítulos me han resultado verdaderamente inspiradores.
Recomendaciones concretas:
- Why global history matters (Frankopan)
- Can and should we queer the past? (Bengry)
- Glorious memory (Hicks)
- Why diversity in Tudor England matters (Nubia)
- How can we recover the lost lives of Women (Lipscomb)
Recomendaciones concretas:
- Why global history matters (Frankopan)
- Can and should we queer the past? (Bengry)
- Glorious memory (Hicks)
- Why diversity in Tudor England matters (Nubia)
- How can we recover the lost lives of Women (Lipscomb)
November 27, 2024
Every lover of history should read this.
December 19, 2024
This book is amazing for those starting a history degree. The book covers some of the major aspects /types of history that provided me with a grounded understanding of the discipline.
May 13, 2024
This anthology really gets the brain going and makes me love this format even more. The book gives new (old) perspectives on history and how it is written. A must read for any in the field or just anyone wanting to get their head out of their a...
March 31, 2024
Erg interessant boek voor wie met geschiedenis bezig is. Zet je aan het denken over geschiedschrijving en hoe dit anders zou kunnen/moeten op verachillende gebieden en subdisciplines
November 12, 2025
I love when a bunch of smart people come together to make my tbr even more egregious than it already is
October 27, 2024
As always with these kind of books composed of different articles from different authors, the final result is a mixed bag: some of them are pretty good, others not so good and there are a couple that are absolutely terrible.
Not bad if you're interested to learn what the new historic trends are, some of them I find, as newly graduated historian, ludicrous.
Not bad if you're interested to learn what the new historic trends are, some of them I find, as newly graduated historian, ludicrous.
February 14, 2022
"What is History, Now?" is a collection of essays that looks at history in 2022. It is built on the foundations laid by E H Carr's What is History? (1961). It's structure though is very different. It isn't the thoughts of a single person but of 19 different historians. Each of them tackles a genre - if that's the right word - of history and explains either what it is or why it matters.
Now is, of course, the ideal time for a book like this. Edited by Helen Carr (who is the great-granddaughter of E H Carr) and Suzannah Lipscomb this book is a challenge to the arguments of the conservatives about history and why it matters. The 'culture wars' have made the study of history even more of a political hot potato that it usually is. Raising questions that challenge our fondly held national myths seems to upset people. Mostly people who have no idea what history as a academic discipline is. They seems to think history ends. But it doesn't. It is a dynamic discipline. It changes faced with new evidence or new perspectives.
That fact is laid out most explicitly in Charlotte Lydia Riley's excellent essay, "Why history should always be rewritten'. This should be essential reading for all politicians and other professional pontificators. But all the other essays reflect this dynamic view of history to some degree or another.
The two essays I found most interesting, because they raised questions about how one deals with history which is more gaps and shadows than documents. They were Suzannah Lipscomb's "How can we recover the lost lives of women?" and "How making space for Indigenous peoples changes history" by Leila K Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock. Both these essays I found fascinating because they ask us to look beyond traditional historical methodologies to fill gaps in our knowledge that otherwise we couldn't fill. Some of these solutions, I'm thinking of "critical fabulation" in particular. Is "critical fabulation" crossing the line between history and fiction? The truth is that line isn't quite as firm as it looks.
There's real food for thought in every essay though. Two cover areas I'm particularly interested in, Alex von Tunzelmann's 'Why history deserves to be at the movies" and "How literature shapes history?" by Islam Issa. The reasons for this was I intended to write my thesis of "The use of fiction as a historical source, with particular reference to the Preston Cotton Strike of 1853-54".
In the end though I recommend this book as a whole. There's so much interesting stuff in here covering a lot of different areas. It's a great riposte to the conservative theory that history is fixed.
Recommended.
Now is, of course, the ideal time for a book like this. Edited by Helen Carr (who is the great-granddaughter of E H Carr) and Suzannah Lipscomb this book is a challenge to the arguments of the conservatives about history and why it matters. The 'culture wars' have made the study of history even more of a political hot potato that it usually is. Raising questions that challenge our fondly held national myths seems to upset people. Mostly people who have no idea what history as a academic discipline is. They seems to think history ends. But it doesn't. It is a dynamic discipline. It changes faced with new evidence or new perspectives.
That fact is laid out most explicitly in Charlotte Lydia Riley's excellent essay, "Why history should always be rewritten'. This should be essential reading for all politicians and other professional pontificators. But all the other essays reflect this dynamic view of history to some degree or another.
The two essays I found most interesting, because they raised questions about how one deals with history which is more gaps and shadows than documents. They were Suzannah Lipscomb's "How can we recover the lost lives of women?" and "How making space for Indigenous peoples changes history" by Leila K Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock. Both these essays I found fascinating because they ask us to look beyond traditional historical methodologies to fill gaps in our knowledge that otherwise we couldn't fill. Some of these solutions, I'm thinking of "critical fabulation" in particular. Is "critical fabulation" crossing the line between history and fiction? The truth is that line isn't quite as firm as it looks.
There's real food for thought in every essay though. Two cover areas I'm particularly interested in, Alex von Tunzelmann's 'Why history deserves to be at the movies" and "How literature shapes history?" by Islam Issa. The reasons for this was I intended to write my thesis of "The use of fiction as a historical source, with particular reference to the Preston Cotton Strike of 1853-54".
In the end though I recommend this book as a whole. There's so much interesting stuff in here covering a lot of different areas. It's a great riposte to the conservative theory that history is fixed.
Recommended.
July 19, 2023
4⭐️
An important book detailing how we see history through a modern lens.
An important book detailing how we see history through a modern lens.
August 2, 2022
This is a great follow up to E.H. Carr’s What is History, it manages to add to the story, rather than take away from Carr’s original theories.
The essays cover a wide range of topics, however I still think there was some scope it could have included, such as the social scientific side of History and other minority groups not included. However the book would have to be hundreds of pages more to possibly include every aspect of what is History now.
With the introduction to the book and the references to the 2020 BLM movement, it would have been interesting to include more content directly related to the recent movements in the attitudes towards History. However, this book was a brilliant starting point in beginning my research of the History of the individual and with all the further reading lists at the end of the essays allowed me to continue my research in specific areas that I was interested in.
I particularly enjoyed Emily Brand’s essay on ‘Why Family History Matters’. A stand out quotation was as follows:
Family history matters because engagement with it can transform our view of ourselves, how we relate to the world around us, and even provide existential solace for an increasingly secular and ageing population. It complicates visions of collective identities, raises questions about established historical narratives, and can restore the humanity to those who have been stripped of it in life or death. Learning about the particular struggles or achievements of our ancestors fosters a deeply personal act of remembrance, and writing rigorous, unflinching family histories - in whatever form that may take - in turn allows for the preservation of a rich cultural legacy.
This is a brilliant starting point for anyone wanting to diversify their understanding of modern History beyond what is taught in the textbooks.
The essays cover a wide range of topics, however I still think there was some scope it could have included, such as the social scientific side of History and other minority groups not included. However the book would have to be hundreds of pages more to possibly include every aspect of what is History now.
With the introduction to the book and the references to the 2020 BLM movement, it would have been interesting to include more content directly related to the recent movements in the attitudes towards History. However, this book was a brilliant starting point in beginning my research of the History of the individual and with all the further reading lists at the end of the essays allowed me to continue my research in specific areas that I was interested in.
I particularly enjoyed Emily Brand’s essay on ‘Why Family History Matters’. A stand out quotation was as follows:
Family history matters because engagement with it can transform our view of ourselves, how we relate to the world around us, and even provide existential solace for an increasingly secular and ageing population. It complicates visions of collective identities, raises questions about established historical narratives, and can restore the humanity to those who have been stripped of it in life or death. Learning about the particular struggles or achievements of our ancestors fosters a deeply personal act of remembrance, and writing rigorous, unflinching family histories - in whatever form that may take - in turn allows for the preservation of a rich cultural legacy.
This is a brilliant starting point for anyone wanting to diversify their understanding of modern History beyond what is taught in the textbooks.
June 6, 2022
I found this to be uneven. It is presented as a series of essays by practicing historians on what the study of history means to them.
Taking history as the "study of past societies", the loose theme of the book is how historians have expanded what is studied, so it is more than just "old white men in power." However several of the essays failed to hit the mark for me. The essay on African people in Tudor England whilst interesting failed to answer a basic question - how many were there? If it was only a trickle, then perhaps generalist histories of the period ignore them for good reason?
The essay on LGBT history was ahistorical nonsense as it seemed to support a back projection where historians should look out for modern aspects of the LGBT movement in past society. I suspect uncovering much about gay history is going to be challenging given that as "the love that dare not speak its name" it hasn't left much in the way of sources. But still you can't just make shit up.
The book has 2 huge omissions, which didn't surprise me. It takes a literary rather than social science approach to history. There was no essay on how the social sciences can help our understanding of the past, and yet demography and economics are the backdrop to any past society.
It also failed to cover working class history, which is a huge area of "minority" history.
I call this uneven as it has its merits. Lipscomb's essay on reading against the grain to uncover women's history in late 16th century France was a highlight.
Taking history as the "study of past societies", the loose theme of the book is how historians have expanded what is studied, so it is more than just "old white men in power." However several of the essays failed to hit the mark for me. The essay on African people in Tudor England whilst interesting failed to answer a basic question - how many were there? If it was only a trickle, then perhaps generalist histories of the period ignore them for good reason?
The essay on LGBT history was ahistorical nonsense as it seemed to support a back projection where historians should look out for modern aspects of the LGBT movement in past society. I suspect uncovering much about gay history is going to be challenging given that as "the love that dare not speak its name" it hasn't left much in the way of sources. But still you can't just make shit up.
The book has 2 huge omissions, which didn't surprise me. It takes a literary rather than social science approach to history. There was no essay on how the social sciences can help our understanding of the past, and yet demography and economics are the backdrop to any past society.
It also failed to cover working class history, which is a huge area of "minority" history.
I call this uneven as it has its merits. Lipscomb's essay on reading against the grain to uncover women's history in late 16th century France was a highlight.
March 18, 2023
--- "Pulling down a statue is not erasing history; it’s an act of historiography, the process by which historians critically evaluate ideas about the past." (Riley: 277)
--- "but if we only tell the stories of those about whom we have copious sources, we will keep on telling the same stories of the people in power." (Lipscomb: 188)
--- "When historians type their final sentence, when they publish their book, that is the start of a conversation, not the end." (Riley: 267)
This book is about the current situation of history as far as its methods or fields of study are concerned. It shows how things have changed since the publication of Carr's book "What Is History?" and what still needs to be done.
Having short chapters means that sometimes these chapters can feel incomplete, like chapter 4, where I wish there had been more room for further examples. Some ideas are being repeated throughout the book, including the idea that history is subjective or how unreliable archives are. Examples are also being repeated, like those about National Trust or Richard III. But on this occasion the authors were sure to add new information every time they went back to the same example, which was nice.
The book discusses women or Asia in the last chapters of the book. By talking about them at the end of the book is to a certain extent a symbolic way of claiming they are still secondary. But I found the examples of East Asia excellent to show how history can be manipulated for political reasons.
--- "but if we only tell the stories of those about whom we have copious sources, we will keep on telling the same stories of the people in power." (Lipscomb: 188)
--- "When historians type their final sentence, when they publish their book, that is the start of a conversation, not the end." (Riley: 267)
This book is about the current situation of history as far as its methods or fields of study are concerned. It shows how things have changed since the publication of Carr's book "What Is History?" and what still needs to be done.
Having short chapters means that sometimes these chapters can feel incomplete, like chapter 4, where I wish there had been more room for further examples. Some ideas are being repeated throughout the book, including the idea that history is subjective or how unreliable archives are. Examples are also being repeated, like those about National Trust or Richard III. But on this occasion the authors were sure to add new information every time they went back to the same example, which was nice.
The book discusses women or Asia in the last chapters of the book. By talking about them at the end of the book is to a certain extent a symbolic way of claiming they are still secondary. But I found the examples of East Asia excellent to show how history can be manipulated for political reasons.
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