The Pursuit of History

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Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is History?? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, I believe it provides a much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr's (apparently radical at the time) acceptance that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts, or that sources only become evidence when used by the historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning (Jenkins 1995: 1-6, 43-63). This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of all reconstructionist empiricists who follow his lead. This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by them. For illustration, rather misunderstanding the nature of "semiotics - the postmodern?" as he querulously describes it, it is the claim of the historian of Latin America Alan Knight that Carr remains significant today precisely because of his warning a generation ago to historians to "interrogate documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer's motives" (Knight 1997: 747). To maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the postmodern challenge to historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr's contribution in What is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-modernist history. History in Higher Education has long provided a path through which more demanding history reaches a wider audience of potential opinion-formers Tensions regarding boys’ education and childrearing “since their gender identity seemed threatened by the attentions of the mother; this was one reason why a rising proportion of middle-class youth was educated away from home” (7). Joanne Bailey, lecture delivered at conference on ‘Masculinities and the Other’, Balliol College, Oxford, 29 August 2007. See further Joanne Bailey’s chapter in this volume. Iggers, Georg, G. (1997) Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Hanover, NH, Wesleyan University Press.

Winn, James A. (1993) "An Old Historian Looks at the New Historicism," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 859-870. A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (Yale University Press, 1999) David Roberts, ‘The paterfamilias and the Victorian governing classes’, in Anthony S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family (London, 1978). Why History Matters is thought provoking and challenging, in its insistent and urgent call for a closer engagement between history and public political discourse. It makes a strong case that an informed and nuanced sense of history is an essential part of civic empowerment, developing the remit of 'public history' far from its default grounds of heritage and identity. My admiration notwithstanding, in this response to his book I would like to question some of the author's ideas and assumptions, consider some less welcome potential effects of political/historical engagement, and ask what the role of pre-modern history might also play. The historian and the public

Important though a sense of controversy is to public discourse, a great deal of historical knowledge rests on firm foundations (notwithstanding the scepticism of some Postmodernists). An important service is performed in restoring to public memory events and trends from the past which are beyond contention. In such cases the anxiety expressed by John Arnold about the partisanship of politically focused history is misplaced. Thus to return to the case of Iraq, there is still debate over the motives of the British occupation in 1914 and the depth of the indigenous resistance, but there is no disputing that the occupation and the resistance took place. In 2003 even to know this much was grounds enough for taking seriously the possibility of political failure in a post-Saddam Iraq. History & Policy Pre-modern history presents some alternative reasons for why history matters, most often as a means to critique present certainties about what is 'natural', or 'necessary', or 'new' The sixth edition of John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History is a clearly written, informative and absorbing introduction to the practice of ‘doing’ history. While retaining the most useful features of earlier editions of the book, this latest edition introduces new, valuable material on public history, digitised sources, historical controversies, transnational history and the nature of the archive. It includes an expanded range of examples and case‐studies, including additional material on American history, along with an updated reference list, making it an invaluable text for both tutors and students of history alike."

A. James Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp. 247–81. Social theory historians (constructionists) understand past events through a variety of methods statistical and/or econometric, and/or by devising deductive covering laws, and/or by making anthropological and sociological deductive-inductive generalisations. For hard-core reconstructionist-empiricists on the other hand, the evidence proffers the truth only through the forensic study of its detail without question-begging theory. These two views are compromised by Carr's insistence that the objective historian reads and interprets the evidence at the same time and cannot avoid some form of prior conceptualisation - what he chooses simply (or deliberately loosely?) to call "writing" (Carr 1961: 28). By this I think he means the rapid movement between context and source which will be influenced by the structures and patterns (theories/models/concepts of class, race, gender, and so forth) found, or discovered, in the evidence. Knight, Alan (1997) "Latin America" in Bentley, Michael (ed.) Companion to Historiography, London, Routledge.To conclude, Carr's legacy, therefore, shades the distinction between reconstructionism and constructionism by arguing we historians do not go about our task in two separate ways with research in the sources for the facts, and then offering an interpretation using concepts or models of explanation. Rather the historian sets off, as Carr says "...on a few of what I take to be the capital sources" and then "inevitably gets the itch to write". This I take to mean to compose an interpretation and "...thereafter, reading and writing go on simultaneously" (Carr 1961; 28). For Carr this suggests the "...untenable theory of history as an objective compilation of facts...and an equally untenable theory of history as the subjective product of the mind of the historian..." is much less of a problem than any hard-nosed reconstructionists might fear. It is in fact the way in which human beings operate in everyday life, a "...reflection of the nature of man" as Carr suggests. (Carr 1961: 29). Historians, like Everywoman and Everyman work on the evidence and infer its most likely meaning - unlike non-historians we are blessed with the intellectual capacity to overcome the gravitational pull of our earthly tethers. In discounting the merits of public history, historians set aside the insights of their predecessors since the mid-19th century. If the study of history can really be made an educational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation who not only know how to vote, but will bring a judgement, prepared, trained and in its own sphere exercised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of life.

John Tosh (January 2006). The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, And New Directions in the Study of Modern History. Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-2351-7 . Retrieved 22 July 2013. Tosh's claim to originality and notability rests largely on his work as a historian and historiographer. Since the turn of the millennium, he has taken a leading role as a public historian in developing the history of masculinity and ensuring it has become an important dimension of social and cultural history. [5] He has shown how domesticity, previously regarded as an aspect of women's history, also conditioned and influenced the lives of men and society. [6] As a historiographer he has updated the way we look at the study of history and how we construct our knowledge of the past, as well as providing insight into the works of other historians and their impact on the study of the subject. [7] Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd edn (Baltimore, 1986); Peter Stearns, Be A Man! Males in Modern Society (New York, 1979).Public history for citizens consists of both agreed historical knowledge (as foregrounded in History & Policy) and an awareness that historical interpretation is a matter of debate and contention. The nature and scope of that 'public' has however changed over history; only recently has it been considered a mass audience, with a universal franchise

The final section, focusing on the period 1870-1900, discusses the reasons why domestic ideology began to lose its hold on the Victorian imagination.

The dangers of relevance

Konstantin Dierks, ‘Men’s history, gender history, or cultural history?’, Gender and History 14 (2002), 150. Finally, when making history 'matter' to the public, is there a place for the pre-modern, or is it only contemporary history which has any clear political point? There are several ways in which the pre-modern matters perhaps even more than the last couple of centuries. Take any deep-rooted argument about nature, identity, nationalism and the like. Contemporary political ideology often grounds its authority through either a claim to radical novelty, or an assumption of what is 'natural' or 'traditional'. Only through a long view can these claims be successfully critiqued: for example, notions of what constitute a 'family' or the varying claims of nationhood or the disparate forms of collective social action through which many communities have prospered. Many influential political theories have based their claims about 'humanity' through a highly partial reading of history, frequently jumping from antiquity to the Enlightenment. The pre-modern again has a critical role to play here, for example in current debates about religion and politics, the 'West' and the 'East', grounded in part upon assumed caricatures of the medieval church and what changed with the Reformation. The middle ages has in fact been implicit to all arguments about modernity - it is that which is silently invoked by everything which proclaims itself 'modern' and 'western'. But too often the idea of what is 'medieval' owes more to Walter Scott and Hollywood than anything found in pre-modern archives. Medievalists have an important revisionary role here, when and where they are able to find a public voice. The fragmentation of history permits many political bases to be covered, but at very heavy cost. Constant switching from one topic to another means that students do not learn how to think historically. They fail to grasp how the lapse of time always places a gulf between ourselves and previous ages; to recognise instances of a process or trajectory still unfolding in the present; and to understand that any feature of the past must first be interpreted in its historical context. The absence of meaningful historical perspectives on the crisis in Iraq was thus hardly surprising (the credibility of the comparison of Saddam with Hitler was also enhanced by the heavy weight placed by post-14 History teaching on the Third Reich).