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.