What Is History?
First edition
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| Author | E. H. Carr |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historiography |
| Published | 1961 (University of Cambridge Press) |
What Is History? is a study of historiography that was written by the English historian E. H. Carr. It was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1961. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history.
The book was originally part of a series of G. M. Trevelyan lectures given by Carr in 1961 at the University of Cambridge. The lectures were intended as a broad introduction into the subject of the theory of history.
Some of Carr's ideas are contentious, particularly his alleged relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis. His work provoked a number of responses, notably Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History.
Carr was in the process of revising What is History? for a second edition at the time of his death in 1982. He had finished a new preface, in which he discussed the pessimism of westerners in the 1980s, which he contrasted with the optimism of the 1960s, and pondered his own status as a "dissident intellectual".
"Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation."
Chapter one, "The Historian and his Facts", explores how the historian makes use of historical facts. Carr notes that in the 19th century, western historians held to an empirical, positivist worldview that revolved around a "cult of facts", viewing historical facts as information that simply had to be assembled to produce an objective picture of the past that was entirely accurate and independent of any human opinion. Carr argues that this view is inherently flawed, because historians selectively choose which "facts of the past" get to become "historical facts", or information that the historians have decided is important. As an example, he notes that millions of humans have crossed the Rubicon river in Northeastern Italy, but that historians have only chosen to treat the crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar in 49 BCE as an important "historical fact". Carr contends that historians arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas.
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