Doing History

Mark Donnelly, Claire Norton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000220520
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Doing History bridges the gap between the way history is studied in school or as represented in the media and the way it is studied at university level.

History as an academic discipline has dramatically changed in recent decades and has been enhanced by ideas from other disciplines, the influence of postmodernism and historians' incorporation of their own reflections into their work. Doing History presents the ideas and debates that shape how we 'do' history today, covering arguments about the nature of historical knowledge and the function of historical writing, whether we can ever really know what happened in the past, what sources historians depend on, and the relative value of popular and academic histories. This revised edition includes new chapters on public history and activist histories. It looks at global representations of the past across the centuries, and provides up-to-date suggestions for further reading, presenting the reader with a thorough and current introduction to studying history at an academic level as well as a pathway to progress this study further.

Clearly structured and accessibly written, it is an essential volume for all students embarking on the study of history.

Part I

What is history?

1

Introduction

Is history the same as the past?

The terms ‘history’ and ‘the past’ are often used interchangeably. History is commonly understood to mean past events. When we say that something or someone ‘is history’, we mean that their significance belongs only to the past. When something is said to be the best or the biggest in history, it is another way of saying that nothing of its type in the past can match its superiority. Media features on ‘this week in history’ consist of events that happened to occur between corresponding day/month ranges in the past. The apparent convertibility of the terms history/past is what lies behind the misleading idea that history is a naturally occurring substance. Both the past and history are assumed to be produced by the passage of time breaking away from the present. In this sense, describing something as historical is primarily a comment on its distance in time from now. This is important because, if we think of history in terms of its temporal distance from the present, it suggests that things become historical by themselves as the years pass.

Throughout this book, we will avoid giving the impression that there is anything natural about history. In our usage of the term, history refers to particular ways of thinking about the past, researching phenomena from the past and creating accounts. For us, history is produced by acts of writing, speech and other forms of communication. History is a matter of designation (by historians) and recognition (by audiences for histories). It is not something that generates its own forms naturally as the past is left behind by the accumulation of time. This might sound like a counter-intuitive and therefore uncomfortable line of thought for people to follow. After all, the idea that history is simply ‘back there’ waiting for us to come looking for it has become ingrained within our ways of thinking and talking. Phrases such ‘going back in time’ to look at a previous era, or ‘bringing the past to life’ contain this sense of history as a pre-formed, observable object. Moreover, as well as seeming to be counter-intuitive, thinking critically about the meaning of the term history is liable to be dismissed by some as an unnecessary and self-indulgent distraction from the ‘real’ work of researching past events. Why worry about ‘what history is’? Why not just read histories or original sources? Our answer to such questions is contained within this book’s title.

‘Doing history’ conveys how we prefer to use history as a term that names an activity or set of practices. History for us is something that people can choose to do, to create, to write, to produce, to perform and to imagine. If we use history as a noun to refer to a thing in this book, we usually mean history as the name of an academic discipline, with its various institutional infrastructures (school and college departments, journals, publishers, research institutes, archives and so on). Given that we regard history primarily as something that some people ‘do’, a series of questions follow. How do we currently do history, and has it always been done the same way? Where do the rules for doing history come from, and how are they kept in place? Why do we choose to produce histories at all? Whose interests are served or damaged by our current ways of doing history, and how might this change if we did history differently? These are the kinds of questions that we address in this book. In emphasising our preference for thinking about history as a set of practices, we should deal with one possible source of confusion straight away. Of course we accept that all kinds of actions, reactions, sequences of occurrences and transitions took place in the past. The French monarchy really was abolished in September 1792. Rosa Parks did refuse to move her seat on a bus in Alabama in December 1955. But these events, and countless others like them, are not ‘historical’ in and of themselves. For that to happen, they have to be brought within the modes of writing, speech and representation that are commonly recognised as ‘history’.

The processes by which things from the past are designated as belonging to history are often overlooked. Historians disagree with each other about the accuracy and explanatory value of various accounts of the past – usually centring on issues of interpretation, categorisation and how sources have been used. But such disagreements are usually played out on the shared ground that the thing in dispute is unquestionably a historical object of enquiry. Indeed, when history was professionalised as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century it modelled itself on the natural sciences, incorporating their codes of objectivity and supposedly disinterested empirical investigation. This culminated in Carl Hempel’s ‘The Function of General Laws in History’ (1942), which sought to relate individual explanations for historical events to the type of universal laws found in the sciences.¹ In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the shared assumption that historical objects are ‘real’, that they exist independently from any modes of perception or thought, was brought into question. The key issue here was the role of language, not just in communicating the findings of research, but in constituting the objects of enquiry within a field of research in the first place. This focus on the shaping role of language was part of a broader ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, the humanities and social sciences from the 1960s onwards. Instead of assuming that language was capable of representing reality as accurately as possible, the linguistic turn set out from a more sceptical position. It held that language could produce effects of reality, but it could never articulate reality in itself. The production of reality effects in any given field (including history) resulted from the deployment of rhetorical techniques, agreed vocabularies, narrative strategies, reading practices and figures of speech. All of these combine to create a discourse – which means a particular way of talking or writing about something. Following the linguistic turn, thinkers such as Hayden White, Keith Jenkins, Elizabeth Ermarth, Alun Munslow and Beverley Southgate argued that history was just one type of discourse that was available for producing knowledge about the past. But what history could never be – and what it never had been – was a way of getting to the actuality of the past.

Many historians rejected the implications of the linguistic turn. Geoffrey Elton continued to regard history as an objective search to discover truth about the past.² Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob argued for retaining the concept of a real and knowable past in Telling the Truth about History (1994), albeit a past that should be written about from a variety of cultural perspectives. A similar assumption appears in Richard J. Evans’s In Defence of History (1997), in which the past is likened at various points to a sculptor’s block of stone, a mountain observed by painters and a jigsaw puzzle. Each of these analogies conveys the sense that the past that historians study is singular and whole – after all, there is only one way of putting together a jigsaw puzzle that makes any sense. This notion of a singular past is crucial to historians’ beliefs that they can produce authoritative and reliable accounts of it. (As we will explain later, we prefer to think in terms of plural pasts. But for convenience we will normally refer to ‘the past’ in this book).

For sceptics such as Jenkins and Ermarth, however, there is no way of comparing the past itself with an account of that past to check for reliability. The past is always absent, so it is never available as a referent. Of course, we can accept that all kinds of things took place ‘before now’, but we cannot go back to the time of the Norman Conquest, the Ottoman Empire or anything else as observers. Our knowledge of the past is derived from different kinds of texts (or sources). Historians work in the present, and from there they can only look at traces left behind from the past (like documents, objects, buildings, films and so on), talk to people about their memories of past events, or look at other people’s versions of what they imagine the past might have been like (usually in the form of books, films or documentaries). In short, instead of thinking that history simply studies the past (which is always out of reach), it is more useful to think of history as being about the study of these other things (the traces, the memories, other people’s versions of the past). History looks at surrogates of the past, not the past itself. In this line of thinking, statements about the ‘accuracy’ or ‘truthfulness’ of a historical account are held to relate to the ways in which the historian has used their research materials – the documents, the objects, other histories, the surrogates of the past. They do not relate to the past itself. This is why Keith Jenkins has argued that when it comes to dealing with historical knowledge, ‘“the past” is a useless notion’.³ History as an activity, in other words, involves the writing of the past – albeit with a methodological reliance on the use of sources in a particular way – but it is not an exercise in reconstructing the past ‘as it was’.

Why study history?

Historians (we include ourselves) often choose to answer this question instrumentally. We take it as an invitation to market our subject to whichever audience is in front of us. We compile audits of skills that can be acquired by studying history. We list the kinds of employment that history graduates typically move into. We tell prospective students how exciting and rewarding they will find our history courses. These are the safe and easy answers to the ‘why study history?’ question that we provide for students and academic managers. They have a certain value. History is a subject that helps students to think – the same can be said, of course, of many other subjects. Reading for a history degree requires students to expand their vocabularies, their categories of thought and their facility for linking texts and ideas together. History students learn to analyse complex sets of data, synthesise competing historical interpretations, read different kinds of primary and secondary texts critically, develop their reasoning skills and improve their capacity to undertake research. These are transferable and therefore marketable skills. This is why history graduates often move into careers in areas such as management, law, education, media, journalism and public administration.

But the ‘why study history?’ question also needs to be answered on a different level, one that relates to a philosophical view of history, or a theoretical understanding of what historical enquiry might be able to achieve. The question implies an existential challenge – what is the point of our doing what we do? Tony Judt wrote a powerful advocacy of studying history – specifically twentieth-century history – as a means of providing a context against which contemporary political challenges might appear more intelligible. He wrote:

of all our contemporary illusions, the most dangerous is the one that underpins and accounts for all the others. And that is the idea that we live in a time without precedent: that what is happening to us is new and irreversible and that the past has nothing to teach us… except when it comes to ransacking it for serviceable precedents.⁴

According to Judt, history helps us to understand the ‘perennial complexity’ of our current dilemmas: social, political, moral, ethical and ideological. Only in cultures that seek to forget the recent past, he says – with the exception of those parts of the past that are selected for memorialisation – can ahistorical abstracts like the ‘war on terror’ or the threat of ‘Islamo-Fascism’ be taken seriously as justifications for policy decisions.⁵ In a similar vein, Eric Hobsbawm argued in his memoirs that ‘most historians, including all good ones, know that in investigating the past, even the remote past, they are also thinking and expressing opinions in terms of and about the present and its concerns. Understanding history is as important for citizens as for experts’.⁶ We might add here that Hobsbawm’s injunction can be turned on its head – thus, it is our understanding of the present that makes the study of the past intelligible.

In some respects it might seem surprising that eminent historians such as Judt and Hobsbawm feel the need to make the case for studying history. After all, the subject is a ubiquitous feature of the wider contemporary cultures of media, entertainment and national politics. We are constantly directed to think in historical terms. Placing things into what we call a historical context has never been more popular, or assumed to be so necessary and ...