The Pursuit of History

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A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992). A gallery containing images from the book, as well as additional images to further illustrate the material. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999), ch. 4.

John Tosh’s Pursuit of History was so far ahead of the game on its first publication that much of the profession are only just now catching up with his wonderfully diverse and pluralistic approach to the study of the past. This new edition promises to equip and inspire the next generations of historians once again very much for the better." One must then be clear about the purpose of public engagement. Does the historian aim (as Thucydides, and many thereafter him, considered themselves to have aimed) at simply providing a useful storehouse of examples for posterity? Or does one have to admit that any attempt to make history 'matter' to a wider audience must at some level commit to a particular politics, and this in turn must align with a particular interpretation of history? Whilst John Tosh is clearly liberal and left-leaning in his politics, Why History Matters makes an admirable attempt to incorporate the views of people with whom the author disagrees. But I am not sure that historians should be offering a synthesis view with which most members of the profession could agree. If our interpretations are not to some extent partisan, are they actually politically engaged at all?

The relevance of the pre-modern

Active citizenship in a deliberative democracy stands in much greater need of critical historical knowledge than is generally recognised. The Pursuit of History has many strengths. It is extremely well‐written and lucid. It strikes a very nice balance between tracing historiography, delineating historical methodology, and discussing the major historiographical developments over the last few decades. Comprehensive, insightful and conversant with the latest historiographical currents, it is essential reading in any undergraduate or graduate theory and method course." One must be clear about the purpose of public engagement; if it is to be part of political discussion, this may have to embrace a particular political stance, rather than claiming to be a general public 'good'

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). What Carr is doing then in What is History? is setting up the parameters of the historical method - conceived on the ground of empiricism as a process of questions suggested to the historian by the evidence, with answers from the evidence midwifed by the application to the evidence of testable theory as judged appropriate. The appropriate social theory is a presumption or series of connected presumptions, of how people in the past acted intentionally and related to their social contexts. For most objective historians of the Carr variety, his thinking provides a more sympathetic definition of history than the positivist one it has replaced, simply because it is more conducive to the empirical historical method, and one which appears to be a reasoned and legitimate riposte to the deconstructive turn.

A hundred years of history for citizens

Bringing together in one volume the key writings of many of the major historians from the last few decades, Historians on History provides an overview of the evolving nature of historical enquiry, illuminating the political, social and personal assumptions that have governed and sustained historical theory and practice. Of course Carr tried to fix the status of evidence with his own objections to what he understood to be the logic of Collingwood's sceptical position. Collingwood's logic could, claims Carr, lead to the dangerous idea that there is no certainty or intrinsicality in historical meaning - there are only (what I would call) the discourses of historians - a situation which Carr refers to as "total scepticism" - a situation where history ends up as "something spun out of the human brain" suggesting there can be no "objective historical truth" (Carr 1961: 26). Carr's objectivist anchor is dropped here. He explicitly rejected Nietzsche's notion that (historical?) truth is effectively defined by fitness for purpose, and the basis for Carr's opinion was his belief in the power of empiricism to deliver the truth, whether it fits or not (Carr 1961: 27). Historians ultimately serve the evidence, not vice versa. This guiding precept thus excludes the possibility that "one interpretation is as good as another" even when we cannot (as we cannot in writing history) guarantee 'objective or truthful interpretation'. John Tosh, in the most recent edition of his own widely read methodological primer The Pursuit of History describes Carr's book as "still unsurpassed as a stimulating and provocative statement by a radically inclined scholar" (Tosh 1991: 234). Keith Jenkins, much less inclined to view Carr as a radical scholar, never-the-less confirms the consequential nature of What is History? suggesting that, along with Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History both texts are still popularly seen as "'essential introductions' to the 'history question"' (Jenkins 1995: 1-2). Jenkins concludes both Carr and Elton "have long set the agenda for much if not all of the crucially important preliminary thinking about the question of what is history" (Jenkins 1995: 3). R.W. Connell, Arena 6 (1996), quoted in D.Z. Demetriou, ‘Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: a critique’, Theory and Society 30 (2001), 340. Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Hard and heavy: toward a new sociology of masculinity,’ in Michael Kaufman (ed.), Beyond Patriarchy (Toronto, 1987), p. 176.

What is striking about this passage is that Stubbs did not echo the standard justification for history-teaching in schools, that it would instil patriotism and deference. Instead he emphasised the power of judgement acquired through the study of history. The value of history lay not in the detailed knowledge of particular periods or problems, but in a distinctive cast of mind - a standard of judgement which might be exercised on any subject. What Stubbs prescribed for the school pupil was in this respect identical with what he recommended to his Oxford students. Other leading historians agreed with him. When the Historical Association was founded in 1906, A.F. Pollard declared that its journal, History, would 'bring the light of history to bear in the study of politics.... to test modern experiment by historical experience.' In 1913 G.M. Trevelyan - then a progressive Liberal - declared that the educational role of history was 'to train the mind of the citizen into a state in which he is capable of taking a just view of political problems.' Chapter-by-chapter resources for students, including questions for discussion, features that take a more in-depth look at topics from the book, links to primary sources and suggestions for further reading.

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John Tosh (March 2007). A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12362-3 . Retrieved 22 July 2013. It may seem premature to raise the possibility of a redundant specialism when, as recently as the mid-1980s, the history of masculinity did not yet exist in Britain. Indeed, the very idea was absent from academic and popular discourse. Its modest beginnings were associated less with the discipline of history than with sociology; politically and conceptually it was indebted to socialist feminism. Those influences were critical at what turned out to be foundational moment for the history of masculinity. In September 1988 the theory section of the British Sociological Association convened in Bradford. The event was dominated by academics in social theory and social policy. Interest in history on the part of the delegates was minimal. 1 But the conference was attended by a small number of historians, and the outcome for them was an informal study group — the first forum of any kind in Britain in which the history of masculinity was discussed. In due course the group produced the first theorised collection of essays on the history of masculinity in Britain. 2 Even so, progress thereafter was slow. A panel on masculinity at a History Workshop in 1992 was thinly attended. The following year the theme of the Institute of Historical Research’s annual Anglo-American Conference was gender, but only a few papers on masculinity were featured. R.W. Connell was not far wrong in stating in 1993 that serious historical work on themes of masculinity was ‘extremely rare’. 3 Keywords A. James Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp. 247–81. John Gillis, A World of their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996).

The final section, focusing on the period 1870-1900, discusses the reasons why domestic ideology began to lose its hold on the Victorian imagination.Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995). But is that what education for citizenship should be about? The problem with the nation-building agenda is that making political demands on the history curriculum is open to endless proliferation. It must now accommodate those multicultural identities which are rightly viewed as part of being British; it must also strike a balance between the national and the global; and schools would be failing in their social duty if the history curriculum did not also devote time to the Holocaust and the slave trade. There are sound arguments for each of these. But the end result is a history curriculum without coherence. Historians routinely condemn the 'sushi bar' of history (though the metaphor is inappropriate if it implies consumer choice). Instead of emerging from school with a sense of history as an extended progression, students learn to 'think in bubbles' (as David Reynolds has put it).