The Pursuit of History

Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History

John Tosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000416541
• Edition: 7
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This classic introduction to the study of history invites the reader to stand back and consider some of its most fundamental questions – what is the point of studying history? How do we know about the past? Does an objective historical truth exist and can we ever access it?

In answering these central questions, John Tosh argues that, despite the impression of fragmentation created by Postmodernism in recent years, history is a coherent discipline which still bears the imprint of its nineteenth-century origins. Consistently clear-sighted, he provides a lively and compelling guide to a complex and sometimes controversial subject, while making his readers vividly aware of just how far our historical knowledge is conditioned by the character of the sources and the methods of the historians who work on them.

History does not stand still, and this updated seventh edition deals with complex and wide-ranging material in a clear and accessible way that is up-to-date with current historiographical trends. A fuller treatment is given to the importance of digitization both in the section on source criticism and in relation to public history, reflecting its growing importance within historical study. Both the text and references have been expanded to include a fuller range of both American and global scholarship, and the book concludes with a forthright reminder that historical perspective illuminates major problems in the present.

Lucid and engaging, this edition retains the user-friendly features that make it a favourite with both students and lecturers, including marginal glosses, illustrations and suggestions for further reading. Along with its companion website, this is an essential guide to the theory and practice of history.

1
Historical awareness

This chapter looks at the difference between memory, whether individual or collective, and the more disciplined approach towards the past that characterizes an awareness of history. All groups have a sense of the past, but they tend to use it to reinforce their own beliefs and sense of identity. Like human memory, collective or social memory can be faulty, distorted by factors such as a sense of tradition or nostalgia, or else a belief in progress through time. Modern professional historians take their cue from nineteenth-century historicism, which taught that the past should be studied on its own terms, ‘as it actually was’. However, this more detached approach to the past can put historians in conflict with people who feel their cherished versions of the past are under threat.

‘Historical awareness’ is a slippery term. It can be regarded as a universal psychological attribute, arising from the fact that we are, all of us, in a sense historians. Because our species depends more on experience than on instinct, life cannot be lived without the consciousness of a personal past; and someone who has lost this through illness or ageing is generally regarded as disqualified from normal life. As individuals we draw on our experience in all sorts of different ways – as a means of affirming our identity, as a clue to our potential, as the basis for our impression of others, and as some indication of the possibilities that lie ahead. Our memories serve as both a data bank and a means of making sense of an unfolding life story. We know that we cannot understand a situation without some perception of where it fits into a continuing process or whether it has happened before. The same holds true of our lives as social beings. All societies have a collective memory, a storehouse of experience that is drawn on for a sense of identity and a sense of direction. Professional historians commonly deplore the superficiality of popular historical knowledge, but some knowledge of the past is almost universal; without it one is effectively excluded from social and political debate, just as loss of memory disqualifies one from much everyday human interaction. Our political judgements are permeated by a sense of the past, whether we are deciding between the competing claims of political parties or assessing the feasibility of particular policies. To understand our social arrangements, we need to have some notion of where they have come from. In that sense all societies possess ‘memory’.

But ‘historical awareness’ is not the same thing as social memory. How the past is known and how it is applied to present need are open to widely varying approaches. We know from personal experience that memory is neither fixed nor infallible: we forget, we overlay early memories with later experience, we shift the emphasis, we entertain false memories and so on. In important matters we are likely to seek confirmation of our memories from an outside source. Collective memory is marked by the same distortions, as our current priorities lead us to highlight some aspects of the past and to exclude others. In our political life especially, memory is highly selective, and sometimes downright erroneous. It is at this point that the term ‘historical awareness’ invites a more rigorous interpretation. Under the Third Reich those Germans who believed that all the disasters in German history were the fault of the Jews certainly acknowledged the power of the past, but we would surely question the extent of their historical awareness. In other words, it is not enough to invoke the past; there must also be a belief that getting the story right matters. History as a disciplined enquiry aims to sustain the widest possible definition of memory, and to make the process of recall as accurate as possible, so that our knowledge of the past is not confined to what is immediately relevant. The goal is a resource with open-ended application, instead of a set of mirror-images of the present. That at least has been the aspiration of historians for the past two centuries. Much of this book will be devoted to evaluating how adequately historians achieve these ends. My purpose in this opening chapter is to explore the different dimensions of social memory, and in so doing to arrive at an understanding of what historians do and how it differs from other sorts of thinking about the past.

Third Reich

The technical term for the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany, 1933–45. Reich (roughly ‘Empire’) was used to denote the original medieval German Empire and the unified German Empire (the Second Reich), which lasted from 1871 to 1919.

I

Social memory: creating the self-identity of a group

For any social grouping to have a collective identity there has to be a shared interpretation of the events and experiences that have formed the group over time. Sometimes this will include an accepted belief about the origins of the group, as in the case of many nation states; or the emphasis may be on vivid turning points and symbolic moments that confirm the self-image and aspirations of the group. Current examples include the vital significance of the Edwardian suffrage movement for the women’s movement and the appeal of the ‘molly house’ sub-culture of eighteenth-century London for the gay community in Britain today.¹ Without an awareness of a common past made up of such human detail, men and women could not easily acknowledge the claims on their loyalty of large abstractions.

Edwardian suffrage movement

The movement in the period before the First World War to obtain the parliamentary vote (‘suffrage’) for women. It is best known for campaigns by the militant suffragettes, although it was the more moderate suffragists who finally obtained votes for women in 1918.

The term ‘social memory’ accurately reflects the rationale of popular knowledge about the past. Social groupings need a record of prior experience, but they also require a picture of the past that serves to explain or justify the present, often at the cost of historical accuracy. The operation of social memory is clearest in those societies where no appeal can be made to the documentary record as a corrective or higher authority. Precolonial Africa presents some classic instances.² In literate societies, the same was true for those largely unlettered communities that lay outside the elite, such as the peasantries of pre-modern Europe. What counted for historical knowledge here was handed down as a narrative from one generation to the next, often identified with particular places and particular ceremonies or rituals. It provided a guide for conduct and a set of symbols around which resistance to unwelcome intrusion could be mobilized. Until quite recently popular memory in a largely illiterate Sicily embraced both the Palermo rising of 1282 against the Angevins (the ‘Sicilian Vespers’) and the nineteenth-century Mafia as episodes in a national tradition of avenging brotherhood.³

‘molly house’

An eighteenth-century covert meeting house for homosexual men. Molly houses remained little known until Mark Ravenhill’s play Mother Clapp’s Molly House (2001) was staged to widespread acclaim at the Royal National Theatre in London.

But it would be a mistake to suppose that social memory is the preserve of small-scale, pre-literate societies. In fact the term itself highlights a universal need: if the individual cannot exist without memory, neither can society, and that goes for large-scale, technologically advanced societies too. All societies look to their collective memories for consolation or inspiration, and literate societies are in principle no different. Near-universal literacy and a high degree of residential mobility mean that the oral transmission of social memory is now much less important. But written accounts (such as school history books or popular evocations of the World Wars), film and television perform the same function. Social memory continues to be an essential means of sustaining a politically active identity. Its success is judged by how effectively it contributes to collective cohesion today, and how widely it is shared by members of the group. Sometimes social memory is based on consensus and inclusion, and this is often the function of explicitly national narratives. It can take the form of a foundation myth, as in the case of the far-seeing Founding Fathers of the American Republic, whose memory is still invoked today in order to shore up belief in the American nation. Alternatively, consensual memory can focus on a moment of heroism, like the story of Dunkirk in 1940,

foundation myth

A story, usually much-treasured, about the foundation of a group or people. One of the most famous is the biblical story of the Creation. Nations often have semi-‘official’ versions of their origins, usually involving national hero figures, but foundation myths can be found in schools, army regiments and even companies. ‘Myth’ need not imply that the story is entirely false, merely that it has developed into a simplistic, usually rosy, version of events.

which the British recall as the ingenious escape that laid the foundations of victory (see Chapter 11 for fuller discussion).

Figure 1.1 Foundation myth: the Declaration of Independence by America’s ‘Founding Fathers’ in 1776 remains an iconic moment in American history of immense symbolic importance. American school history books still present it in resolutely heroic terms. © Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA/Bridgeman Images.

Social memory of past oppression

But social memory can also serve to sustain a sense of oppression, exclusion or adversity, and these elements account for some of the most powerful expressions of social memory. Social movements entering the political arena for the first time are particularly conscious of the absolute requirement of a past. Black history in the United States has its origin in the kind of strategic concern voiced by Malcolm X in the 1960s. One reason why blacks were oppressed, he wrote, was that white America had cut them off from their past:

If we don’t go into the past and find out how we got this way, we will think that we were always this way. And if you think that you were in the condition that you’re in right now, it’s impossible for you to have too much confidence in yourself, you become worthless, almost nothing.⁴

The purpose of much British labour history has been to sharpen the social awareness of the workers, to confirm their commitment to political action and to reassure them that history is ‘on their side’ if only they will keep faith with the heroism of their forebears. David Montgomery’s work on the American labour movement combined studies of shop-floor relations with the wider class environment in which workers developed their political consciousness. ‘When you come right down to it’, Montgomery remarked, ‘history is the only teacher the workers have.’⁵ In Britain the inaugural editorial of History Workshop Journal declared that the historical reconstruction of working people’s experience was ‘a source of inspiration and understanding’.⁶ Working-class memories of work, locality, family and politics – with all the pride and anger so often expressed through them – were rescued before they were pushed out of popular consciousness by an approved national version.

History Workshop Journal

A collaborative research venture set up by a group of left-wing historians led by Raphael Samuel (1934–96) at Ruskin College, Oxford, to encourage research and debate about working-class and women’s history.

The women’s movement of the past thirty years has been if anything...