Don’t ask a historian what history is

E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to read it as a teen-ager, and it has prompted multiple reconsiderations over the years — as acknowledged by the editors in their introduction to this book. Reappraisals and conferences on ‘What is History?’ are launched with regularity. (One of the editors of this volume is Carr’s great-granddaughter.)

Aside from the reappraisal of Carr’s original work, the fact that books like this continue to be produced in academic history says something about the slipperiness of defining it in the first place — and the discipline’s own anxieties. Over the past century universities have been unsure whether history is part of the humanities or the social sciences.

Even within a university history department you’ll find competing views of what ‘historian’ means. There are some who believe their role to be dutiful recounters of archival fact, spending hours over spooling microfilm as the Bedes de nos jours; those who see themselves as storytellers and sustainers of a cultural patrimony; and those who feel a need to bring to light historical injustices, that we may take a more nuanced view of hazy nostalgia. (And that’s aside from the role that many academicians have: of educating the next generation.)

Outside academia, there’s the issue to contend with of ‘What is a historian?’— a challenge not really faced by other fields. Nobody says ‘I’m a physicist’ because they read the Richard Feynman lectures; you’d be surprised by the number of ‘historians’ whose qualification seems to be liking books about Napoleon — and who get quite shirty if you suggest someone with a PhD in the field might have more claim to the title. If history belongs to everyone, who is to control its meaning? As Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb suggest, the conversation must be bigger than the academy.