History lesson | 19 November 2011

When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study it because for most people causes and ideas are irrelevant. They have to find ways of surviving whatever history, circumstance, events inflict upon them. I was of course born after the two world wars; Carr was born in 1892, as Victoria’s empire began to wane.

On Radio 3 this week a group of historians and biographers have been looking again at Carr’s book, 50 years after its publication in 1961. What Is History, Today? they asked (produced by Katherine Godfrey). Only Professor Richard Evans gave us a convincing explanation of what Carr was trying to do. He was warning his readers, explained Evans, that historians are always writing with the beliefs and prejudices of their time, and that you must study the historian and his world before you study his interpretations of events. This, though, for Carr did not diminish history’s importance as an academic subject but rather enhanced it by opening it up as ‘an exciting and challenging discipline, alive to current theories and new ideas’.

Carr himself was all too aware of how looking back on events could show you just how wrong you once were. As a former diplomat he had championed appeasement, believing Hitler not to be a serious threat to the rest of Europe. Later, as the assistant editor of the Times, he wrote articles in support of the wartime alliance with Stalin’s Russia. Does this discredit him? Not at all, argued Dr Elizabeth Buettner in her contribution to the week’s essays.