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Pelican / Penguin Books Ltd (1970), Edition: New Impression, Paperback, 160 pages
Description
Who is to say how things really were? In formulating a modern answer to the question 'What is History?' Professor Carr shows that the 'facts' of history are simply those which historians have selected for scrutiny. Millions have crossed the Rubicon, but the historians tell us that only Caesar's crossing was significant. All historical facts come to us as a result of interpretative choices by historians influenced by the standards of their age. Yet if absolute objectivity is impossible, the role of the historian need in no way suffer; nor does history lose its fascination. This edition includes new material which presents the major conclusions of Professor Carr's notes for the second edition and a new preface by the author, in which he calls for ‘a saner and more balanced outlook on the future'.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member dreamlikecheese
What is History? by E H Carr is a collection of a series of lectures he gave in the 60s about history and historiography. I took a class called History and Theory a few years ago and we looked at some of Carr's work regarding the English working class. He struck me as an interesting and thoughtful
The book was fascinating. Carr looks at the theory and philosophy of history with a very post-modern view and has a number of interesting critiques around historical 'objectivity' and the influence of contemporary society on how we read and write history. Carr's Marxist influences are clearly on display through much of the book, with his focus on social and economic history and his critique of earlier historical focus on political and constitutional history.
Regardless of what you think of Carr's personal politics and philosophy, it can't be denied that he is a great writer, with a good understanding of structure and how to engage a reader/listener. I found his lectures to be diverse, interesting, well thought out and logical...even when I didn't agree with him.
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historian who could be both academic and readable at the same time (a rare achievement!) so when I saw this slim volume on the history table at the bookfair I just had to pick it up. Also, for me, one of the greatest advertisements for his book was that Keith Windschuttle hates it (if you haven't been following the Australian History Wars then you probably won't know who that is...needless to say, I'm not a fan!)The book was fascinating. Carr looks at the theory and philosophy of history with a very post-modern view and has a number of interesting critiques around historical 'objectivity' and the influence of contemporary society on how we read and write history. Carr's Marxist influences are clearly on display through much of the book, with his focus on social and economic history and his critique of earlier historical focus on political and constitutional history.
Regardless of what you think of Carr's personal politics and philosophy, it can't be denied that he is a great writer, with a good understanding of structure and how to engage a reader/listener. I found his lectures to be diverse, interesting, well thought out and logical...even when I didn't agree with him.
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LibraryThing member LynnB
This is a philosophical look at history and historians. The book is based on a series of lectures, so it has an easy to read style.
Mr. Carr raises some interesting points about objectivity in historical writings, the nature of facts vs. truth and the links between the past and the future.
Mr. Carr raises some interesting points about objectivity in historical writings, the nature of facts vs. truth and the links between the past and the future.
LibraryThing member TLCrawford
Edward Hallett Carr’s What is History? is still a remarkable work of historiography fifty years after it was written. Originally written as a series of lectures at Cambridge University in 1961 the book has aged very well. Carr begins by explaining what makes a fact historical rather than just a
After revealing that facts are not the vestal virgins that they are sometimes painted as being Carr moves on to a brilliant explanation of causality and objectivity that has been quoted by other historians for good reason. It is the clearest and most well reasoned explanation of those concepts I have read.
The last chapter of the book, the final lecture in the series, is titled “The Widening Horizon” and today can be read several ways. Was Carr, a British student of Russian history, lamenting the United Kingdom’s diminishing roll as a leading influence on history? Was he predicting, something he warned against, the rise of his primary object of study to the forefront of history? Did he actually see the Far East assuming the role we see it in today?
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fact and goes on to explain a few other truths about historical facts. No fact is pure, even the original recording of the fact is tainted by the prejudice of the recorder. Facts need to be understood through the eyes of the tine they were created, historians need to imagine an understanding of the times. The present will always color our view of past facts. After revealing that facts are not the vestal virgins that they are sometimes painted as being Carr moves on to a brilliant explanation of causality and objectivity that has been quoted by other historians for good reason. It is the clearest and most well reasoned explanation of those concepts I have read.
The last chapter of the book, the final lecture in the series, is titled “The Widening Horizon” and today can be read several ways. Was Carr, a British student of Russian history, lamenting the United Kingdom’s diminishing roll as a leading influence on history? Was he predicting, something he warned against, the rise of his primary object of study to the forefront of history? Did he actually see the Far East assuming the role we see it in today?
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LibraryThing member JNagarya
A classic, and must-read for anyone who is a student of history. And anyone who confuses political ideology for history, so speaks in intelligible-seeming gibberish having only accidental foundation, if any.
Essentially a guide explaiing "How to Read history" so one doesn't confuse popular cutlural
Essentially a guide explaiing "How to Read history" so one doesn't confuse popular cutlural
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myths and or one's own projections for objective fact and actual history, simply because one has heard them countless times thus unquestioningly assumed them true. Show Less
LibraryThing member Elliots89
This book probably would have been much more useful to me had I read it before I started my history degree not a good few years after it. Nevertheless this book contains some essays about what is history from a historian's point of view however I found it quite hard going at times.
LibraryThing member _Zoe_
I had wanted to read more about historiography and the theory of history since I'll be writing history myself, but it had been difficult to find books that were interesting and accessible without being aimed at undergraduates. I'm not looking for advice on how to write a course paper, but I also
This was recommended by one of my supervisors, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Carr has written a very readable account of what he thinks history is and how ideas about history have developed over time, without talking down to the reader. This is a book about theory that's actually entertaining to read, thanks in large part to Carr's vivid and memorable metaphors. For example, he describes the naive writing of history without theory as a sort of Garden of Eden:
"This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb."
This follows a discussion of nineteenth-century historiography, with its focus on facts that could really be known. The key phrase is Ranke's, that "the task of the historian was 'simply to show how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewesen)'." Positivists and empiricists thought that history could be carried out like science, and was just a matter of gathering the facts.
I have to include another of Carr's comparisons here, because I just find them so entertaining:
"The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. Acton, whose culinary tastes were austere, wanted them served plain...."
And then he resumes 20 pages later:
"The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They 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."
The basic idea is that history isn't simply a matter of presenting the facts in some pure form; instead, it's about the interaction of the historian and the facts. The "facts" are what the historian makes of them. At the beginning of the first chapter, Carr answers the title question as follows: History is "a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past."
The next chapter follows in the same vein: he brings in society, arguing that people don't exist in isolation. This leads to the conclusion that history "is a dialogue not between abstract and isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday."
Much of what Carr says is reasonable and helpful (I particularly appreciated one point about just writing, when you reach the point where you have to set down your ideas on paper, even if it's in the middle of an idea—I've been struggling lately with the fact that my writing style does not match the extremely systematic approach promoted by one of my supervisors, so it was nice to see that in reality people don't all write like that). I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. But of course, there are some ideas that I'm less persuaded by. I'm not sure quite where I stand on the idea that there's not much difference between history and science because both ask the question "why". I know that the newest theories say that we can't really know anything as certainly as we think, and yet even as I accept that history is a discourse dependent for meaning on the historian and the reader and all sorts of external factors, rather than reflecting some absolute certainty in itself, I still believe in the objectivity of science in a different way. Carr acknowledges that there is a difference between physical science and history, but goes on to try to close the gap between them: "My principal objection to the refusal to call history a science is that it justifies and perpetuates the rift between the so-called 'two cultures'." Carr relates this to class prejudice ("the humanities were supposed to represent the broad culture of the ruling class, and science the skills of the technicians who served it"), and ultimately is "not convinced that the chasm which separates the historian from the geologist is any deeper or more unbridgeable than the chasm which separates the geologist from the physicist". These are interesting ideas, but not ones that I ultimately find very persuasive.
The other key point where I differ from Carr is on the idea of history as progress, and I think this is one place where I actually fall more on the side of the postmodernists, whom I usually find frustratingly negative and destructive (although I actually found it very fruitful to read a book on postmodern theory of history, which I'll review next). Basically, Carr acknowledges that "the hypothesis of progress has been refuted. The decline of the West has become so familiar a phrase that quotation marks are no longer required." But he goes on to assert that he still really believes in progress after all, because societies are always working toward improvement. In his view, "Every civilized society imposes sacrifices on the living generation for the sake of generations yet unborn." This was published in the early 60s, and it sounded almost ridiculously quaint and outdated to me when I read it in the present: my impression of the world is that people as a whole look primarily to their own immediate benefit, and leave the problems of debt/environmental degradation/various unsustainable practices for future generations to worry about. Apparently I've become sort of cynical. But I still think there's a *possibility* for progress, I just don't see it as a given for any "civilized society".
But despite these disagreements, or maybe even because of them, I found this a very rewarding read. There's lots to think about, and it's presented in a clear and accessible style that doesn't hide behind jargon. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the broader concept of history.
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didn't want something overly dense that name-drops modern theorists without explanation of their ideas.This was recommended by one of my supervisors, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Carr has written a very readable account of what he thinks history is and how ideas about history have developed over time, without talking down to the reader. This is a book about theory that's actually entertaining to read, thanks in large part to Carr's vivid and memorable metaphors. For example, he describes the naive writing of history without theory as a sort of Garden of Eden:
"This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb."
This follows a discussion of nineteenth-century historiography, with its focus on facts that could really be known. The key phrase is Ranke's, that "the task of the historian was 'simply to show how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewesen)'." Positivists and empiricists thought that history could be carried out like science, and was just a matter of gathering the facts.
I have to include another of Carr's comparisons here, because I just find them so entertaining:
"The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. Acton, whose culinary tastes were austere, wanted them served plain...."
And then he resumes 20 pages later:
"The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They 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."
The basic idea is that history isn't simply a matter of presenting the facts in some pure form; instead, it's about the interaction of the historian and the facts. The "facts" are what the historian makes of them. At the beginning of the first chapter, Carr answers the title question as follows: History is "a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past."
The next chapter follows in the same vein: he brings in society, arguing that people don't exist in isolation. This leads to the conclusion that history "is a dialogue not between abstract and isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday."
Much of what Carr says is reasonable and helpful (I particularly appreciated one point about just writing, when you reach the point where you have to set down your ideas on paper, even if it's in the middle of an idea—I've been struggling lately with the fact that my writing style does not match the extremely systematic approach promoted by one of my supervisors, so it was nice to see that in reality people don't all write like that). I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. But of course, there are some ideas that I'm less persuaded by. I'm not sure quite where I stand on the idea that there's not much difference between history and science because both ask the question "why". I know that the newest theories say that we can't really know anything as certainly as we think, and yet even as I accept that history is a discourse dependent for meaning on the historian and the reader and all sorts of external factors, rather than reflecting some absolute certainty in itself, I still believe in the objectivity of science in a different way. Carr acknowledges that there is a difference between physical science and history, but goes on to try to close the gap between them: "My principal objection to the refusal to call history a science is that it justifies and perpetuates the rift between the so-called 'two cultures'." Carr relates this to class prejudice ("the humanities were supposed to represent the broad culture of the ruling class, and science the skills of the technicians who served it"), and ultimately is "not convinced that the chasm which separates the historian from the geologist is any deeper or more unbridgeable than the chasm which separates the geologist from the physicist". These are interesting ideas, but not ones that I ultimately find very persuasive.
The other key point where I differ from Carr is on the idea of history as progress, and I think this is one place where I actually fall more on the side of the postmodernists, whom I usually find frustratingly negative and destructive (although I actually found it very fruitful to read a book on postmodern theory of history, which I'll review next). Basically, Carr acknowledges that "the hypothesis of progress has been refuted. The decline of the West has become so familiar a phrase that quotation marks are no longer required." But he goes on to assert that he still really believes in progress after all, because societies are always working toward improvement. In his view, "Every civilized society imposes sacrifices on the living generation for the sake of generations yet unborn." This was published in the early 60s, and it sounded almost ridiculously quaint and outdated to me when I read it in the present: my impression of the world is that people as a whole look primarily to their own immediate benefit, and leave the problems of debt/environmental degradation/various unsustainable practices for future generations to worry about. Apparently I've become sort of cynical. But I still think there's a *possibility* for progress, I just don't see it as a given for any "civilized society".
But despite these disagreements, or maybe even because of them, I found this a very rewarding read. There's lots to think about, and it's presented in a clear and accessible style that doesn't hide behind jargon. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the broader concept of history.
Show Less
LibraryThing member JonArnold
Going back to re-read old university textbooks for fun must be a sign of incipient nostalgia for the lost days of youth. That or masochism. I didn’t get a nostalgic buzz (possibly as I was young and foolish enough to think I could get away by essentially skimming it) but reading it with age and
Carr’s initial question is the springboard for six essays, transcribed from a series of lectures. It’s a musing on what history is and the role it has in our society – how it actually fits neatly in with sciences, how objective a historian can be and how history tells us as much about the time it’s written in as it does about the time itself. It’s actually aged very well, being prescient on a number of issues and forcefully making a point of how history should be a positive force. Still, one thing is concerning– if Carr’s thesis that a nation in decline harks back to golden ages and nostalgia and turns inward on itself then the UK is in a ‘sick’ state indeed. A fascinating starting point for anyone looking at history and historiography.
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experience was far more rewarding than giving it to an intellectually arrogant 19 year old.Carr’s initial question is the springboard for six essays, transcribed from a series of lectures. It’s a musing on what history is and the role it has in our society – how it actually fits neatly in with sciences, how objective a historian can be and how history tells us as much about the time it’s written in as it does about the time itself. It’s actually aged very well, being prescient on a number of issues and forcefully making a point of how history should be a positive force. Still, one thing is concerning– if Carr’s thesis that a nation in decline harks back to golden ages and nostalgia and turns inward on itself then the UK is in a ‘sick’ state indeed. A fascinating starting point for anyone looking at history and historiography.
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LibraryThing member antiquary
It puzzles me that Carr was taken so seriously as a "distinguished historian" in British academic circles, considering that he spent the first part of his career championing appeasement of Germany and much of the rest admiring Stalin.
LibraryThing member kslade
Interesting book on History that I read back when I changed my college major from English to History, '82? Don't remember much but it did not keep me from that major, so it must have been OK.
Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1961
Physical description
160 p.; 6.93 inches
ISBN
0140206523 / 9780140206524