Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > History: An Introduction to Theory, Method, and Practice > Status Update

'Elton recognises that history is not the study of the past (we have no time machine to allow us to travel back), but the study of what remains of the past in the present. Clearly we must take evidence seriously: approach it with honesty and a degree of integrity; even if we find it does not accord with an argument we are trying to make.'

'stories and others like it - the attacks by white settlers on American 'red' Indians in countless Westerns ('Got him' we shouted as they were shot from their horses), ruthless Nazis in comics, forever exclaiming Achtung - takes us to questions about the nature of history and our understanding of the past... many of us don't come to these subjects without prejudice, what is it that we can really know about the past?'

'Yet historians, like anyone else, are social and cultural animals, prompting the suggestion that history is less a science and more an art: it is made through the imagination of a particular moment rather than discovered or applied by objective methodology. The past can reveal truths which are part of our personal and collective lives.'

'The former Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, the late Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921-94), put it succinctly: history is at once interesting and exciting, amusing and instructive. Yet Elton was against historians having empathy for the past, for such emotional engagement displaces what should be the object of the historian, namely, rational enquiry into past events.'