Edward Hallett Carr's contribution to the study of Soviet history is widely regarded as highly distinguished. In all probability very few would argue against this assessment of his multi-volume history of Soviet Russia. For the majority of historians he pretty much got the story straight. However, for several years there was disagreement about his contribution to the analytical philosophy of history. His ideas were outlined in What is History? first published in 1961. For many today What is History? is the most influential book on history thinking published in Britain this century. For many years, however, the methodologically foundationalist wing of the history profession regarded the book as espousing a dangerous relativism. This has now all changed. Arguably the central ideas in the book constitute today's mainstream thinking on British historical practice. Most British commentators, if not that many in America, acknowledge the significance and influence of the book. In this review I want to establish why it is What is History? now occupies a central place in British thinking about the relationship between the historian and the past. I conclude that the important message of What is History? - fundamentally misconceived though I believe it to be - lies in its rejection of an opportunity to re-think historical practice. This failure has been most significant in rationalising the epistemologically conservative historical thinking that pervades among British historians today.
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, nevertheless 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).
So, according to Tosh and Jenkins, we remain, in Britain at least, in a lively dialogue with What is History?. Why should this be? The reason is, as most British historians know, to be found in the position Carr took on the nature of historical knowledge. A position that brought him into a long conflict with, among others, the Tudor historian and senior Ambassador at the Court of 'Proper' Objectivist History Geoffrey Elton. Again I turn to John Tosh for his comment that "The controversy between Carr and Elton is the best starting-point for the debate about the standing of historical knowledge" (Tosh 1991: 236). Until Jenkins' recent re-appraisal of Carr's philosophy of history, Carr had been misconstrued almost univer among British historians as standing for a very distinctive relativist, if not indeed a sceptical conception of the functioning of the historian.
Explaining Carr's 'radicalism' the philosopher of history Michael Stanford has claimed Carr "insisted that the historian cannot divorce himself from the outlook and interests of his age (sic.)" (Stanford 1994: 86). Stanford quotes Carr's own claim that the historian "is part of history" with a particular "angle of vision over the past" (Stanford 1994: 86). As Stanford points out, Carr's "first answer...to the question 'What is History?"' is that it is a continuous "process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past". While this was not a fresh insight with Carr, it still carved him out for a number of years as someone with a novel stance. However, over time, the effect of his argument (which generated such initial notoriety) was to increasingly balance the excesses of the hard core empiricists. In What is History? Carr propelled British historiography toward a new equilibrium - one that pivoted on a new epistemological certitude.
The claim to epistemological radicalism on behalf of Carr does not seem to me especially convincing. Why? My doubts about the message in What is History? is the product of my present intellectual situatedness as a historian (a writer about the past). Today, with our greater awareness of the frailties and failures of representationalism, referentialism, and inductive inference, more and more history writing is based on the assumption that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past. It would be tempting, but wholly incorrect, to say that history's pendulum has swung far more to the notion of history as a construction or fabrication of the historian. Rather, what has happened, is that our contemporary conditions of existence have created a much deeper uncertainty about the nature of knowledge-creation and its (mis-)uses in the humanities. It is not about swings in intellectual fashion.
It follows, a growing number of historians believe that we don't 'discover' (the truthful?' 'actual?' 'real?' 'certain?') patterns in apparently contingent events because, instead, we unavoidably impose our own hierarchies of significance on them (this is what we believe/want to see/read in the past). I do not think many historians today are naive realists. Few accept there must be given meaning in the evidence. While we may all agree at the event-level that something happened at a particular time and place in the past, its significance (its meaning as we narrate it) is provided by the historian. Meaning is not immanent in the event itself. Moreover, the challenge to the distinction of fact and fiction as we configure our historical narratives, and further acknowledgments of the cognitive power of rhetoric, style and trope (metaphors are arguments and explanations) provide not only a formal challenge to traditional empiricism, but forces us to acknowledge that as historians we are making moral choices as we describe past reality.
Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is History?? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, I believe it provides a much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr's (apparently radical at the time) acceptance that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts, or that sources only become evidence when used by the historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning (Jenkins 1995: 1-6, 43-63). This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of all reconstructionist empiricists who follow his lead. This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by them. For illustration, rather misunderstanding the nature of "semiotics - the postmodern?" as he querulously describes it, it is the claim of the historian of Latin America Alan Knight that Carr remains significant today precisely because of his warning a generation ago to historians to "interrogate documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer's motives" (Knight 1997: 747). To maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the postmodern challenge to historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr's contribution in What is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-modernist history.
Carr is also not forgotten by political philosopher and critic of post-modernist history Alex Callinicos, who deploys him somewhat differently. In his defence of theory in interpretation (Marxist constructionism in this case), Callinicos begins with the contribution of a variety of so called relativist historians of which Carr is one (others include Croce, Collingwood, Becker and Beard). Acknowledging the "discursive character of historical facts" (Callinicos 1995: 76) Callinicos quotes Carr's opinion (following Collingwood) that the facts of history never come to us pure, but are always refracted through the mind of the historian. For Callinicos this insight signals the problem of the subjectivity of the historian, but doesn't diminish the role of empirically derived evidence in the process of historical study.
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'.
Carr wished to reinforce the notion that he was a radical. As he said in the preface to the 1987 Second Edition of What is History? "...in recent years I have increasingly come to see myself, and to be seen, as an intellectual dissident' (Carr 1987: 6). But his contribution really lies in the manner in which he failed to be an epistemological radical. In the precise manner of his return to the Cartesian and foundationalist fold lies the importance of What is History? The book's distinction resides in its exploration and rapid rejection of epistemological scepticism - what I call post-empiricism. From the first chapter Carr accepts relativism would an unacceptable price to pay for imposing the historian on the past beyond his narrow definition of dialogue. Dialogue even cast as interrogation is all very well and good, but an intervention that cannot ultimately become objective is quite another matter. After all, Carr argues, it is quite possible to draw a convincing line between the two.
While confirming the ever present interaction between the historian and the events she is describing, Carr was ultimately unwilling to admit that the written history produced by this interaction could possibly be a fictive enterprise - historians if they do it properly, (their inference isn't faulty and/or they don't choose to lie about the evidence) will probably get the story straight. This argument still appeals to many historians today for whom the final defence against the relativism of deconstructionism lies in the technical and forensic study of the sources through the process of their authentication and verification, comparison and colligation.
In Britain, most realist-inspired and empiricist historians thus happily accept the logical rationalisation of Carr's position - that of the provisional nature of historical interpretation. This translates (inevitably and naturally it is argued) as historical revisionism (re-visionism?). The provisionality of historical interpretation is a perfectly normal and natural historian's state-of-affairs that depends on discovering new evidence (and revisiting old evidence for that matter), treating it to fresh modes analysis and conceptualisation, and constantly re- contextualising it. For illustration, in my working career (since the early 1970s) the omission of women in history has been 'rectified', and now has moved through several historiographical layers to reach its present highly sophisticated level of debate about the possibility for a feminist epistemology(ies). So, new evidence and new theories can always offer new interpretations, but revisionist vistas still correspond to the real story of the past because they correspond to the found facts.
In fact, with each revision (narrative version?) it is presumed by some that we know better or see more clearly the nature of the past. So, we are for ever inching our way closer to its truth? Arthur Marwick makes the claim that by standing on "...the powerful shoulders of our illustrious predecessors" we are able both to advance "the quality" and "the 'truthfulness' of history" (Marwick 1970: 21). Standing on the shoulders of other historians is, perhaps, a precarious position not only literally but also in terms of the philosophy of history. No matter how extensive the revisionary interpretation, the empiricist argument maintains that the historical facts remain, and thus we cannot destroy the knowability of past reality even as we re-emphasise or re- configure our descriptions. Marxists and Liberals alike sustain this particular non sequitur which means they can agree on the facts, legitimately reach divergent interpretations and, it follows, be objective. The truth of the past actually exists for them only in their own versions. For both, however, the walls of empiricism remain unbreached. The (empiricist-inspired) Carr- endorsed epistemological theory of knowledge argues that the past is knowable via the evidence, and remains so even as it is constituted into the historical narrative. This is because the 'good' historian is midwife to the facts, and they remain sovereign. They dictate the historian's narrative structure, her form of argumentation, and ultimately determine her ideological position.
For Carr, as much as for those who will not tarry even for the briefest of moments with the notion of epistemological scepticism, Hayden White's argument that the historical narrative is (a story) as much invented as found, is inadmissible because without the existence of a determinate meaning in the evidence, facts cannot emerge as aspects of the truth. Most historians today, and l think it is reasonable to argue Carr also endorses this view in What is History?, accept Louis Mink's judgment that "if alternative emplotments are based only on preference for one poetic trope rather than another, then no way remains for comparing one narrative structure with another in respect of their truth claims as narratives" (Vann 1993: 1). But Carr's unwillingness to accept the ultimate logic of, in this instance, the narrative impositionalism of the historian, and his failure to recognise the representational collapse of history writing, even as he acknowledges that "the use of language forbids him to be neutral" (Carr 1961: 25), has helped blind many among the present generation of British historians to the problematic epistemological nature of the historical enterprise.
Take the vexed issue of facts. Carr's answer to the question "What is a historical fact?" is to argue, pace Collingwood (Collingwood 1994: 245) that facts arise through "...an a priori decision of the historian" (Carr 1961: 11). It is how the historian then arranges the facts as derived from the evidence, and influenced by her knowledge of the context, that constitutes historical meaning. For Carr a fact is like sack, it will not stand up until you put 'something' in it. The 'something' is a question addressed to the evidence. As Carr insists, "The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context" (Carr 1961: 11).
It is easy to see why Elton and others like Arthur Marwick misconstrue the (Collingwood-) Carr position when Carr says such things because, if pushed a little further allows historians to run the risk of subjectivity through their intervention in the reconstruction of the past. Carr, of course, denies that risk through his objectivist bottom line. There is clear daylight between this position and that occupied by Hayden White. It is that while historical events may be taken as given, what Carr calls historical facts are derived within the process of narrative construction. They are not accurate representations of the story immanent in the evidence and which have been brought forth (set free?) as a result of the toil, travail, and exertion of the forensic and juridical historian.
Since the 1960's Carr's arguments have moved to a central place in British thinking and now constitute the dominant paradigm for moderate reconstructionist historians. This is because, as Keith Jenkins has demonstrated, Carr pulls back from the relativism which his own logic, as well as that of Collingwood, pushes him. In the end Carr realises how close to the postempiricist wind he is running, so he rejects Collingwood's insistence on the empathic and constitutive historian, replacing her with another who, while accepting the model of a dialogue between past events and future trends, still believes a sort of objectivity can be achieved. This then is not the crude Eltonian position. It is a claim to objectivity because it is position leavened by a certain minimum self-reflexivity. This is a conception of the role of the historian affirmed by the most influential recent American commentators Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob who claim there can be no postmodern history by repeating (almost exactly) Carr's fastidious empiricist position. Carr received only one oblique reference in their book Telling the Truth About History which may help explain why they re-packed Carr's position as practical realism (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob 1994: 237, 241-309 passim). Is it that his position is so central to the intellectual culture of mainstream history that it wasn't even necessary to reference him? In the early 1990's the historian Andrew Norman endorsed the Carr mainstream position more directly by arguing writing history necessitates historians engaging directly with the evidence "A good historian will interact dialogically with the historical record" (Norman 1991: 132). Facts in history are thus constituted out of the evidence when the historian selects sources contextually in order to interpret and explain that to which they refer, rather than in the narrative about which they describe.
It is because Carr remains at the end of the day a convinced objectivist despite (or because of?) his dalliance with relativism - that his legacy in What is History? is still so potent among British historians. His objectivist appeal in What is History? is potent because it is not of the naive variety. We know the Carr historian cannot stand outside history, cannot be non-ideological, cannot be disinterested, or be unconnected to her material because she is dispassionate. But she is telling us what actually happened because she can overcome those obstacles. She knows that the significance of the evidence is not found solely in the evidence. The historian, as he said, "does not deal in absolutes of this kind" (Carr 1961: 120). There can be no transcendental objective measures of truth. However, while accepting the "facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian" (Carr 1961: 120), Carr was forced by his naked objectivist desire to underplay the problems of historical form and the situatedness of the historian. he did this by arguing that the standard for objectivity in history was the historian's "sense of the direction in history" by which he meant the historian selected facts based not on personal bias, but on the historian's ability to choose "the right facts, or, in other words, that he applies the right standard of significance" (Carr 1961: 123).
Carr's philosophical sleight-of-hand produced the objective historian who "has a capacity to rise above the limited vision of his own situation in society and history" and also possesses the capacity to "project his vision into the future in such a way as to give him a m-ore profound and more lasting insight into the past than can be attained by those historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own immediate situation" (Carr 1961: 123). The objective historian is also the historian who "penetrates most deeply" into the reciprocal process of fact and value, who understands that facts and values are not necessarily opposites with differences in values emerging from differences of historical fact, and vice versa. This objective historian also recognises the limitations of historical theory. As Carr says a compass "is a valuable and indeed indispensable guide. But it is not a chart of the route" (Carr 1961: 116).
Social theory historians (constructionists) understand past events through a variety of methods statistical and/or econometric, and/or by devising deductive covering laws, and/or by making anthropological and sociological deductive-inductive generalisations. For hard-core reconstructionist-empiricists on the other hand, the evidence proffers the truth only through the forensic study of its detail without question-begging theory. These two views are compromised by Carr's insistence that the objective historian reads and interprets the evidence at the same time and cannot avoid some form of prior conceptualisation - what he chooses simply (or deliberately loosely?) to call "writing" (Carr 1961: 28). By this I think he means the rapid movement between context and source which will be influenced by the structures and patterns (theories/models/concepts of class, race, gender, and so forth) found, or discovered, in the evidence.
For Carr the evidence suggests certain appropriate explanatory models of human behaviour to the objective historian which will then allow for ever more truthful historical explanation. This sleight-of-hand still has a certain appeal for a good number of historians today. The American historian James D. Winn accepts this Carr model of the objective historian when he says that deconstructionist historians "...tend to flog extremely dead horses" as they accuse other historians of believing history is knowable, that words reflect reality, and their un-reflexive colleagues still insist on seeing the facts of history objectively. Few historians today, thanks to Carr, work from these principles in pursuit of, as Winn says "...the illusory Holy Grail of objective truth" but strive only to ground "...an inevitably subjective interpretation on the best collection of material facts we can gather" (Winn 1993: 867-68). At the end of the day, this position is not very much different to the hard line reconstructionist-empiricist.
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.
For such historians Carr also deals most satisfactorily with the tricky problem of why they choose to be historians and write history. The motivation behind the work of the historian is found in the questions they ask of the evidence, and it is not, automatically to be associated with any naked ideological self- indulgence. Any worries of deconstructionists about either ideology, or inductive inference, or failures of narrative form has little validity so long as historians do not preconceive patterns of interpretation and order facts to fit those preconceptions. Carr would, I think, eagerly challenge the argument that historians are incapable of writing down (reasonably) truthful narrative representations of the past. The position that there is no uninterpreted source would not be a particularly significant argument for Carr because historians always compare their interpretations with the evidence they have about the subject of their inquiry. This process it is believed will then generate the (most likely and therefore the most accurate) interpretation.
So, when we write history (according to the Carr model) our motivation is disinterestedly to re-tell the events of the past with forms of explanation already in our minds created for us through our prior research in the archive. 'Naturally' we are not slaves to one theory of social action or philosophy of history - unless we fall from objectivist grace to write history as an act of faith (presumably very few of us do this? Do you do this?). Instead we maintain our models are generally no more than 'concepts' which aid our understanding of the evidence indeed, which grow out of the evidence. We insist our interpretations are independent of any self-serving theory or master narrative imposed or forced on the evidence. It is the 'common sense' wish of the historian to establish the veracity and accuracy of the evidence, and then put it all into an interpretative fine focus by employing some organising concepts as we write it. We do it like this to discover the truth of the past.
To conclude, Carr's legacy, therefore, shades the distinction between reconstructionism and constructionism by arguing we historians do not go about our task in two separate ways with research in the sources for the facts, and then offering an interpretation using concepts or models of explanation. Rather the historian sets off, as Carr says "...on a few of what I take to be the capital sources" and then "inevitably gets the itch to write". This I take to mean to compose an interpretation and "...thereafter, reading and writing go on simultaneously" (Carr 1961; 28). For Carr this suggests the "...untenable theory of history as an objective compilation of facts...and an equally untenable theory of history as the subjective product of the mind of the historian..." is much less of a problem than any hard-nosed reconstructionists might fear. It is in fact the way in which human beings operate in everyday life, a "...reflection of the nature of man" as Carr suggests. (Carr 1961: 29). Historians, like Everywoman and Everyman work on the evidence and infer its most likely meaning - unlike non-historians we are blessed with the intellectual capacity to overcome the gravitational pull of our earthly tethers.
The idée fixe of mainstream British historians today is to accept history as this inferential and interpretative process that can achieve truth through objectivism. Getting the story straight (from the evidence). The unresolved paradox in this is the dubious legacy of What is History?. I assume a good number of historians recommend Carr to their students as the starting point of methodological and philosophical sophistication, and a security vouchsafed by the symmetry between factualism, objectivism and the dialogic historian. While I am unconvinced by its message, I think this is why What is History? remains, for the majority of British historians, a comforting bulwark against post- constructive and post-empirical history.
In Why History Matters, Gerda Lerner sums up her thinking and research of the last sixteen years, combining personal reminiscences with innovative theory that illuminate the importance of history and the vital role women have played in it. The chapters are divided into three sections, each in different ways revelatory of Lerner as a woman and a feminist.
We read first of Lerner’s coming to consciousness as a Jewish woman, of her experiences in Nazi Germany, as well as her decision to become a historian. The second section focuses on more professional concerns. Included here is a fascinating essay on nonviolent resistance, tracing the idea from the Quakers, such as Mary Dyer, to abolitionists, to Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience, then across the sea to Tolstoy and Gandhi, before finally returning to America during the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The highlight of the final section of the book is Lerner’s bold and innovative look at the issues of class and race as they relate to gender.
We read first of Lerner’s coming to consciousness as a Jewish woman, of her experiences in Nazi Germany, as well as her decision to become a historian. The second section focuses on more professional concerns. Included here is a fascinating essay on nonviolent resistance, tracing the idea from the Quakers, such as Mary Dyer, to abolitionists, to Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience, then across the sea to Tolstoy and Gandhi, before finally returning to America during the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The highlight of the final section of the book is Lerner’s bold and innovative look at the issues of class and race as they relate to gender.
A major figure in women’s studies and long-term activist for women’s issues, a founding member of NOW and a past president of the Organization of American Historians, Gerda Lerner is a pioneer in the field of Women’s History and one of its leading practitioners. Why History Matters contains some of the most significant thinking on history of this distinguished historian.
Why History MattersLife and Thought
By GERDA LERNEROxford University Press
In these days of the agony of the state of Israel, its native-born citizens and that large group of survivors from every part of the globe who have found refuge there--all of us as Jews in the diaspora--are forced to examine our relationship with the fact of being Jewish. What does it mean to us? What burdens and responsibilities does it pose for us? What values do we derive from this accident of birth or this chosen allegiance?
These are very personal questions that do not lend themselves easily to meaningful generalization. They are ancient questions which, it seems, are posed anew to each generation of Jews. Simple existence, the acceptance of one's being as normal and secure and unchallengeable, has not been possible for Jews. We have had to live consciously, with awareness, and by making choices. This is so because everywhere, since the days of the destruction of the Temple, since the days of the onset of the diaspora, Jews have not only been defined by themselves as "different," but they have been everywhere defined by non-Jews as "the Other," the outsider, the deviant. Among equals there is no category of "Otherness." The very act of categorizing another implies oppression. The one who does the categorizing sets himself up as the norm, the defining subject, while the one being categorized becomes the deviant from the norm, the defined object. Being so defined forces one to take a position, to assert or deny, who one is.
Let me illustrate what I mean by being "the Other" from my own experience. I grew up in Vienna, Austria, after World War I, in a comfortable middle-class family. We were "assimilated" Jews, that is, we did not keep a kosher home, although my grandmother did; we were raised in the best traditions of German culture and regarded ourselves as liberal Austrians. Still, I was sent to Sabbath services in the orthodox synagogue and we kept the religious holidays in the traditional way, going to synagogue and celebrating at home. Strangely, it was not at Sabbath school that I learned that I was a Jew and what that meant--it was in a number of subtle lessons my family taught me.
In elementary school, a public school, I met a girl I wanted to be my special friend, but my father forbade it because she was not Jewish. I then tried making friends with a Jewish girl. All was well as long as she visited me in my home. When I was invited to hers I encountered a traditional Jewish home in which Yiddish was spoken and kosher food was served. At age eight or nine, this was a novelty for me on which I reported enthusiastically at home. After a few questions my father elicited the fact from me that the girl's father was the local kosher butcher, whereupon he categorically forbade me ever to visit that home again. It was all right for the girl to come to my home, but not the other way around. I am still not sure whether this edict was due to class or cultural prejudice, but the result was that the friendship ended abruptly, when the girl refused to accept these conditions and informed me I was a stuck-up goose. My family, it seemed, mixed neither with non-Jews nor with Yiddish-speaking Jews. True, mine was a peculiar family, but the friends and neighbors of my childhood were all homogeneous in class, education and religion. We lived in self-chosen affinity groups, in which for a long time, one could exist without having to confront most of the actual negative conditions of one's existence.
Yet when, one day in high school, I brought home the first B grade I had ever earned, my father reacted as though the world were coming to an end. I was berated, scolded, punished. When finally I objected meekly that, after all, I had so far earned nothing but A's and the other children in my class got C's and D's, I was told in no uncertain terms, "Jews don't get B's."
I never did get one thereafter. So we were the chosen people, intellectually superior, more disciplined, more conscious of the need to achieve. Excellence was the mark of the tribe and each of us had better live up to that standard. Even though it was a good preparation for achievement. it was a burden too heavy for a child to bear. And worse, it only further separated one from the other group. Scholastic excellence, prized by parents as a guarantee of future success, meant for Jewish children, especially female children, that they were only further marked off as being different in a world where being different was definitely not good.
In public school there was a crucifix on the wall in every classroom. On Wednesday afternoons students were required to take religious instruction and the class divided into two groups--them, thirty or more Christians; and us, three or four embarrassed Jewish children who were gathered in a separate room with the Jewish children from the other grades so that we might be instructed by a Rabbi imported for that purpose. The Rabbi was an ardent Zionist and preached politics to us. I disliked him and his message. I was an Austrian, a normal person, I was not going to allow him to make me into some sort of foreign misfit, dedicated to setting up a so-called Jewish homeland in some distant desert area in the Mideast. I read Goethe and Schiller, I formed my views of the world from German fairy tales and heroic sagas of the Norse people. I was, as it happened, blue-eyed with light brown hair and was constantly mistaken for one of them, which was not unpleasant to me. On the other hand, there were my black-haired, yellow-complexioned mother and sister--I always explained that they looked Hungarian, which my mother was by birth. Strangely, it was my blue-eyed father and his family who kept up the Jewish tradition, while my more Jewish-looking mother was a modern European and world citizen who wanted nothing to do with "Otherness." When we went on summer vacations in the beautiful mountain resorts of Austria, my father impressed us with the need not to "act Jewish," that is, we were not to speak with our hands, not to raise our voices, not to be noisy or too lively or too inquisitive. The message again backfired--it told me we were outsiders and ought to try to hide our deviant, disgraceful status as best as we could.
I have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish influenced your work in Women's History?"
The simplest way I can answer this question is, I am a historian because of my Jewish experience. With the Covenant story in the Book of Genesis, Jews invented teleological history, the concept that the God-given purpose of existence is the fulfillment of a distant goal defined in the Covenant. It is not individual fate that matters, but the historical promise of people, land and prosperity in some distant future which is implicit in the Covenant between God and Abram. With it history as the unfolding of God's promise begins. After the destruction of the Temple, and with the beginning of the diaspora, this unfolding of historical events included the promised return of the people of Israel to their homeland. Thus every Jew is born into a historical world, and a consciousness of being linked to other members of the Jewish community. How to define that collectivity becomes a crucial and disturbing question. In the Bible the Jews are referred to as the "chosen people," a nation set off from others because of its special relationship with God. I never could accept this, even when I still believed in God. Since the diaspora that chosen flock had not been a nation. Was it "a people"? But it came in different colors, nationalities, spoke different languages, lived in vastly different cultures. Was it then merely a group of religious believers, united by that belief and by nothing else? Where I grew up, such thoughts about the nature of Jews and the origins of their history were forced upon us by daily experience.
What I learned from that comfortable, sheltered life I led in a country in which Catholicism was the state religion and antisemitism was an honored political tradition, was that being Jewish set one apart. Jews were not "normal," we were not right, we were different. And that difference had something to do with our inescapable, compelling history.
Was our history different because we were the "chosen people"? Were we different because of our history of persecution and suffering? Had we shaped our history by our refusal to be like other nations, by clinging to customs and habits that inevitably set us off from those among whom we lived? Assimilated Jews in Central Europe, like my birth family, accepted that explanation. If it was true, then the more we became like those among whom we lived, the less would our difference be offensive. We spoke High German, not Yiddish; in appearance, clothing and education we were not to be distinguished from the gentiles, except for those inescapable physical characteristics that identified some of us immediately as Jews--the dark hair, a certain kind of nose, the intense, vivid gestures. Self-hatred was a necessary component of assimilation, a self-hatred so subtle we never admitted it, even to ourselves, but still it operated as a corrosive poison, setting family members against each other. We reinforced it by keeping our distance from those not interested in assimilation--the orthodox, the Yiddish-speaking Jews. We were different, different from the gentiles, different from "those" Jews.
Assimilated Jews did not wish to dwell on the actuality of European Jewish history. There were biblical times and there was the present. What was forgotten and silenced out of existence was the long, bitter, repetitive history of persecution. There was no good news in it. As a child I once heard a story of how in the Middle Ages the Jews of certain German cities had been forced onto leaky boats to float down the Rhine river and drown to the last man, woman and child. Such stories made me feel the shame of belonging to a group so thoroughly victimized. Victims internalize the guilt for their victimization; they become contemptible for being available to victimization. Did they never fight back? Did they go like sheep' Today, I know innumerable instances of Jewish heroism, resistance, fighting back in the series of medieval antisemitic disasters which led to the 15th-century holocaust which destroyed two-thirds of the Jewish communities of western Europe and ended with the expulsion of all Jews from Portugal and Spain. I never heard of this history, not at school, not at home, not in the synagogue, any more than I heard of the existence of a women's history. Had I been a boy and studied Talmud, I would have learned Jewish history in a positive way. I would have learned about the existence of wise rabbis and great leaders; I would have studied that mysterious mental construct which held the community together for all these persecuted millennia. I was a girl, and the life-line of Jewish learning--Talmud, Mishna, Midrash--was out of my reach. All I got was indoctrination in gender restrictions and a thorough exposure to the great silences--the denial of the past, the suppressed voices, the absence of heroines.
Thus, historical consciousness grew together with consciousness of gender, but all the process yielded were baffling questions, no answers. Why did women and girls have to sit upstairs in the balcony in the synagogue, while men and boys sat below? Why could men speak and act during the services, reading the daily portion of the Torah, swaying dramatically over their prayer books, chanting their Hebrew lines in ragged unison, while we upstairs sat in stiff silence, at best following the words with our fingers in the Hebrew text. And when the Torah was lifted from the ark and carried on the shoulders of two of the elders in a sort of procession through the synagogue, so that each man might touch his finger, wrapped in the tallis, reverently to the scroll and then kiss it, why were the women allowed only to stretch out their fingers into the air reaching for the Torah without seeing or touching it? These were questions I asked repeatedly and the answers were never satisfactory. I was told that it was the tradition; and when I asked where was it written in the Bible, there was no answer other than that the rabbis had so interpreted it for thousands of years. Thus I became a Jew and a Jewish woman and double difference became imprinted on me--not pride, but embarrassment; not collectivity, but exclusion. I did not have the words for it at the time, but I know that my discomfort at being part of the religious Jewish community was based not so much on theological differences as on my unwillingness to accept the role this community assigned to women.
I soon stopped stretching out my hand in search of the Torah during services, a cheap and inconspicuous refusal. More difficult and public was my refusal, four weeks before the appointed date, to go through with my Bat-Mitzvah on the ground that since I no longer believed in God nor in what I was taught in religious instruction, it would be hypocritical for me to go through the ceremony. This provoked a family crisis, much noise, anger and pressure of various sorts, but in the end I prevailed. But more--I refused to set foot in a synagogue again and kept to that refusal for over fifty years. As I look back on these events, these small steps taken for reasons not entirely understood at the time, I can now name them differently my first feminist actions came out of my experiences as a Jewish woman.
What is left to a Jew who refuses the religious community? Antisemitism and history. In short order I experienced plenty of both.
On March 11, 1938, German troops, meeting no resistance, occupied Austria and were greeted enthusiastically by millions of wildly cheering Austrians. The Anschluss was quickly followed by outbursts of violence against Jews that exceeded anything that had been inflicted in Germany since 1933. Gangs of armed Nazis terrorized Jewish pedestrians. Jewish men and women were forced to scrub the streets, walls and toilets in police barracks with their bare hands or with toothbrushes to the amusement of crowds of bystanders. Raids on homes and businesses, followed by theft of property by Nazi gangs, were commonplace despite their illegality. In the streets and Jewish communities of Vienna there was open season on Jews for anyone with a Nazi insignia on his lapel. Jewish businesses were forced to close their doors; Jews were dismissed from their jobs and official positions; the University was closed to Jewish students and faculty within six weeks of the Anschluss. The legal and administrative regulations to legalize these excesses were soon enacted.
Violent antisemitism came naturally to Austrians, who had a long history of antisemitic political parties and movements. The Germans had to be led into violent antisemitism; in Austrians it erupted spontaneously. Within weeks of the Anschluss the situation of Jews in Austria was worse than that of Jews in Germany six years after the Nazi takeover.
Right from the start, a reign of terror was instituted. Prominent Jewish leaders and businessmen, the heads of various Jewish organizations, doctors and university professors, journalists and politicians were arrested without any charges against them and held for weeks and months in jail or in the Dachau concentration camp. Jewish playwrights, actors and directors were barred from the stage, and many prominent writers and actors were arrested. A Jewish orphanage was closed, the orphans thrown out and the building turned into a Nazi barracks. SA troops forced their way into the biggest Jewish synagogue during evening services, arrested all present and desecrated the premises by singing the Horst-Wessel song. All government employees were forced to take a loyalty oath to Hitler; those unwilling to do so were summarily dismissed. By the end of April a decree of the Education Department assured that all school and university sessions would open and close with students and faculty giving the Hitler salute. Everywhere, former Nazi sympathizers and "illegal" Nazis now emerged proudly with new power and status. In the private school I attended, which had many Jewish teachers and a Jewish director, a number of the teachers turned out to have been underground members of the Nazi party. The Jewish director was replaced by one of these illegal Nazis before the end of the school term.
My father fled the country after being warned by a "friendly" Nazi that his name was on a list of people to be arrested. He thought of course his absence would be temporary, but it proved permanent. A few weeks after my father's flight, twelve fully armed stormtroopers raided our apartment, put a gun at my twelve-year-old sister's chest, demanding to know where my father was, tore up the furniture with bayonets and generally terrorized us for hours while they pretended to search the apartment for hidden gold. In the end they took me and my mother to jail. We were taken to regular prison, separated from each other, and for six weeks we were forgotten, not accused, not indicted, not tried. We were, in fact, held as hostages for my father and were released only after he finally signed away all his property and his business. We were then forced to sign our own deportation orders.
I lived for another six months in Nazi Austria after that, because we could not get the various permits necessary to leave. Each week we had to report to the police, who threatened to throw us in a concentration camp if by the next week we were still here. During these months, the persecution and daily harassment of Jews increased. Destitute families doubled up in apartments, and many people never left their homes for fear of arrest during the random street raids that were a daily occurrence. The number of Jewish suicides increased from five in January to more than a hundred during each month of that summer. In our circle, each family had its own horror stories; everyone had heard of some acquaintance who had committed suicide rather than be taken to jail. This was long before the "final solution," long before any of these persecutions were cloaked in the mantle of legality. The Austrian treatment of Jews was improvised on the spot; its versatility, ingenuity and brutality were then unprecedented.
Legally and theoretically, it was then still possible for Jews to leave the country. In actuality, all borders in Europe and most other countries of the world were closed against refugees from Nazi persecution and only a lucky few had the connections or money to escape. Since by newly enacted legislation, Jews leaving Austria were permitted to take only the equivalent of $10--in cash and their household goods and clothing--money or connections were essential for survival abroad. In April approximately 25,000 Viennese Jews applied to the U.S. consulate for immigration visas; at the time the quota for immigrants from Austria was fixed at 1413 per year.
With the aid of "Aryan" lawyers and by signing over all our property and assets, finally, one week before Kristallnacht, my mother, my sister and I secured all the necessary papers and were able to join my father in Liechtenstein, a tiny country on the Austrian border. We had residence permits for Liechtenstein because my father had established a business there in 1934. This fact saved his and our lives. He was also able to rescue his mother and adopted sister, while most of our relatives remained in the death trap.
An emigrant now, awaiting my U.S. immigration visa, I had become virtually a stateless person. With a German passport which marked me as a Jew, return to Germany meant certain death. Being stateless, a Jew and destitute change one's view of what it means to be part of an establishment: my outsider status from then on was firmly fixed. Even after coming to America, I never felt secure in front of anyone connected with an establishment--bureaucrat, policeman, soldier or lawyer.
During World War II the U.S. government forced me and other Jewish immigrants like me to register once a month at the post office as "enemy aliens." Still, I did eventually become an American citizen. Insofar as I now had citizen's rights I could trust, this fact changed my outsider status. But I was different, marked by my experience; I was carrying my "Otherness" within me.
A few years after the end of the war, when the full extent of the horror in which some of my family members had perished had become known, the sense of the difference of my own experience became sharper. My mother had died at age fifty, a death hastened by the hardships of emigration. Still, I was among the very fortunate; most of my close relatives had survived. But the personal loss was dwarfed by the enormity of the loss of a people, of communities, of one's own past.
Sometimes, when you walk up a mountain, the views of the valley below are clear and sharp. Then the weather changes, a cloud of fog settles into the valley and the view vanishes. There is nothing beneath one's feet except gray mist. It is eerie, like the terror of nightmares, one is cut off and cast off and the very place from which one came, what once was home, has vanished. When this happens, on the mountain, one can console oneself in the knowledge that the place in the valley is still there; it is as it always was and one will see it when the fog lifts. But for the refugee such consolation does not exist. The city in which I had grown up, the circle in which I moved during the years of my childhood no longer existed. Of the 176,000 Jews of Vienna, over 9 percent of its total population in 1934, only 4746 survived in 1944, a few months before the liberation of the city. More than 65,000 Austrian Jews died in the ghettoes and concentration camps of Nazi Europe. The others, who had been deported or forced to emigrate survived scattered all over the world. I have visited Vienna six times in the past fifty years. The buildings are restored, some of them are more beautiful than they ever were. But what I notice most, as I walk through the streets of the city is the absence of Jews, an absence I think only a survivor could notice. For me, there is no one left to go back to; there is no place to go back to except a place of hatred and bad memories. There is only one life-line left--memory, personal and historical. After the Holocaust, history for me was no longer something outside myself, which I needed to comprehend and use to illuminate my own life and times. Those of us who survived carried a charge to keep memory alive in order to resist the total destruction of our people. History had become an obligation.
Like all immigrants, I did not think this through or find such fancy words for it. I had to struggle for existence and survival and if I gave any thought to the matter at the time, it was how to become a good American. I tried to erase whatever I could of my foreign characteristics. I worked hard at acquiring as pure an English as I possibly could. I shed my indestructible European clothes, as soon as I could afford to replace them with throw-away American fashions. I tried to make friends with Americans and be accepted by them. It is no accident that decades later when I began to prepare for an academic career I chose the field of American history, not European. I still wanted, as I had in Austria, to be a "normal" person. Yet, from the start I chose a deviant field, in fact, a then non-existing field, that of Women's History. My "Otherness" was obvious from the moment I entered graduate school--too old (over forty), a foreign-born woman, a Jew, insisting on specializing in a field of history my professors considered "exotic" and weird. I will skip over the years of struggling for the legitimation of this new field of inquiry. It was only when I came to Madison, by then a well-established historian of fairly advanced age, that for the first time I began to feel accepted, an insider. The University gave me recognition, honors, support for my work and clear signs of their appreciation. The advances made in my embattled field--Women's History--had brought some measure of respectability and, while some colleagues still considered me a deviant sort and not quite up to their measure, my general experience was of having finally made it. I was now an insider and began to worry about being corrupted by that unaccustomed state. Then, a few years ago in April, there was a swastika smeared on a poster on my office door. In August there were forty-one antisemitic incidents in Madison and one, not reported and thus not included in that number, a threatening antisemitic phone message left on my answering machine. Back to square one. The Jew remains "the Other."
My story illustrates quite well the effect on Jews of being designated a deviant out-group. There are essentially three major response patterns: cultural separatism, denial through assimilation, and acculturation.
Cultural separatism means affirming one's "Otherness" as a positive good. We are the chosen people, smarter, better, morally superior and somehow purified by our history of suffering. We prefer to live in self-selected ghettoes, confine our social contact to people like ourselves and cultivate our separate institutions.
Denial through assimilation is an effort to fuse with the majority and ultimately to give up all distinctiveness. For many Jews of the generation between the wars in both Central Europe and in America this took the form of adopting a philosophy of modernism, of anti-nationalism and internationalism, of a desire to find a new form of community which would embrace different cultures, religions and nationalities. This was my mother's philosophy and for a long time it was mine. We abhorred all nationalism and all theories of hierarchy and dominance. Tolerance and a "new humanism" would take the place of the old separations, hatreds and differences.
I married a second-generation American. My husband's family represented another response, in its shtetl culture in the Jewish ghetto of Philadelphia. His parents were immigrants from Russia who had come to the U.S. to escape the infamous Kishinev pogroms. They were working-class people who spoke Yiddish and were proudly affiliated with their synagogue, their Landsmannschaft and their Yiddish culture. They were as unassimilated as Americans as one can be and they were wonderful, loving people who took me in as their own, even though at first glance I seemed to them to be a shikse. Living in solid, tightly knit networks of families, they were mutually supportive, but resisted the tendency of the younger generation--the first-generation Americans--to partake of the general culture, to accommodate to the values of tolerance, multi-culturalism and internationalism. To this younger generation, the old folks seemed hopelessly limited and limiting. The horizontal mobility of first-generation Americans--out of the ethnic working-class ghettoes--into ethnic suburban ghettoes--illustrates this process of "Americanization."
The third response, "acculturation," is both more adaptive and more realistic than the other two. It embraces the demand for integration in regard to rights and opportunities--one wants to be an Austrian or an American with full equality--yet one does not want to lose one's group identity. Integration and difference is the goal. Jews with that stance will privatize their Jewishness and separate its communal function within their group from their public roles. Jews would adopt the external behavior and standards of the dominant culture but retain their emotional, psychological affinities to their own group. They might, as in America in the third generation, move into integrated upper-class neighborhoods, attend elite colleges and vote not on the basis of ethnicity but of class, yet their social life would be within a like-minded circle of Jews. My father represented that stance in its European version.
The irony of these choices is that antisemitism would not recognize any difference between the separatist, the assimilated, the acculturated Jew. Hitler's Nuremberg laws defined Jews by "genetic" inheritance into the third generation, and lifestyle choices meant nothing. Similarly, the person who put a swastika on my door in Madison, Wisconsin, fifty years later cared not one bit as to what kind of a Jew I was or I am. I was a Jew, that was sufficient.
Each of us has over a lifetime struggled with choices representing these different positions. And as we choose, we take on ourselves the guilt over our existence. If we choose right, we and the people will be spared. If we get all A's, we will be among the saved. If we choose wrong, the holocaust is our fault. It is a cruel bind, which blames the victim and obscures the actuality of the situation in which he or she exists. What it obscures is that it is not difference, but the designation of difference as inferiority which has created the evil.
The psychological effect on Jews, as on other out-groups designated as deviant, is that they internalize guilt for their being "different" and spend their lives choosing between various forms of adaptations to the constraints placed upon them. But what is really oppressing us is not our choice of adaptation or our nature as a group designated as "different," it is having our definition of self made not by ourselves but by others.
To be a Jew means to live in history. The history of the Jews is a history of one holocaust after another with short intervals of peaceful assimilation or acculturation. Most of us never study this long and bitter history and yet we live with it and it shapes our lives. We live from pogrom to pogrom, one of my friends recently said. What it means to be a Jew--having to look over your shoulder and have your bags packed.
It is only in the light of this history that we can understand the significance of the existence of the state of Israel and even the idiosyncratic behavior of the leaders of the state. It is not always a sign of paranoia to think that one is surrounded by enemies. For many religious Jews, Eretz Yisroel, the land of Israel, means the fulfillment of biblical promise and the re-establishment of their rightful place in a land from which they were driven. But for millions of nonreligious and secular Jews the state of Israel, means that for the first time in two thousand years Jews no longer will allow themselves to be defined by others and scapegoated by them. I think that this particular meaning should be important as well to every non-Jew who believes in the right of people to self-determination and freedom.
It was this understanding of the problem of "Otherness" and of the denial of self-definition which led me to the study of the history of women. For women have, for longer than any other human group, been defined by others and have been defined as "the Other." Women have, for longer than any other group, been deprived of a knowledge of their own history. I have, for the past thirty-five years, tried to comprehend analytically what I experienced and learned as a prototypical outsider--a woman, a Jew, an exile.
There is a third strand to this weave of connections Why did I spend years helping to develop the then nonexistent field of Black Women's History and never, until recently, study the history of Jewish women?
As one who chose to be an American, I had to accept the problematic in my newly adopted home together with the good. Race was the crucial issue in America. The relative freedom of the American Jewish community compared with Jews in other countries, and its long existence under conditions of tolerance and open access to the resources of the society, is no doubt due to the existence of the American Constitution and its protections, but it is also due to the existence of racially defined minorities which are the primary target for discrimination, hatred and scapegoating. This is not to minimize the existence of a history of antisemitic discrimination. We must recognize that, whether we like it or not, as Jews and as whites we have had privileges and benefits from the racially segmented labor market and from housing and job discrimination against people of color, just as have non-Jewish whites. Moreover, the way the system of competing outgroups works, there is an incentive for members of one minority group to display their assimilation, their Americanism as it were, by participating in institutionalized racism. Thus some European Jewish immigrants, who in all their lives had never seen a person of color, learned racism in short order once they assimilated to American society. I wanted to be an American but I did not want to assimilate to the evil of racism, here any more than there. It was logical for me as a scholar to focus on the issue of race in American history and because of my interest in women, on the history of black women.
There was another reason why I could not then focus on Jewish women. Coming out of my own experience of fascism, I had become convinced that nationalism of any kind could only lead to conflict and war. It was this conviction that made me unable for a long time to accept the ideological premise of Zionism. I wanted to get away from nationalistic allegiances; I wanted to transcend differences of race, ethnicity, religion and nationality. I saw my choice as "either-or." Now I am more aware of the complex weave of connections, of multiple causes, of interdependencies.
None of us can be defined simply as being members of one group or another. We are Jewish, Christian or Muslim, women or men, immigrants or fifth generation, we may be differently abled or differently acculturated by being rich or poor, we may be lesbians or married heterosexual women, battered or independent, educated or deprived of education. And all of us, ultimately, will join one of the most despised, neglected and abused groups in our society--the old and the sick. As Jews we know the frailty and unreliability of acquired status and privilege. It may be here today but gone tomorrow. We know the perils of being defined by others and of being stigmatized. We know the pain and the invisibility, the fickleness of friends and the conformity of enemies. Our history of suffering has taught us patience and survival skills.
But now, what must survive is no longer the small group, the kin, the shtetl, the Landsmannshaft, even the nation. All of us must survive in a world in which difference is the norm and no longer serves as an excuse for dominance or we will not survive at all. And in order to survive in this interconnected global village we must learn and learn very quickly to respect others who are different from us and, ultimately, to grant to others the autonomy we demand for ourselves. In short, celebrate difference and banish hatred.
John Tosh
Executive Summary
- Active citizenship in a deliberative democracy stands in much greater need of critical historical knowledge than is generally recognised.
- The history taught in schools under the National Curriculum is seriously deficient in this regard.
- The historical profession pays too little attention to the role it could play in disseminating critical historical knowledge through the media; a crucial dimension of public history is thus downplayed.
- In discounting the merits of public history, historians set aside the insights of their predecessors since the mid-19th century.
- Public history for citizens consists of both agreed historical knowledge (as foregrounded in History & Policy) and an awareness that historical interpretation is a matter of debate and contention.
Introduction
This is a book about the practical rationale of historical knowledge in contemporary Britain. To a considerable extent it was inspired - and indeed made possible - by the material which History & Policy has placed in the public domain over the past five years. In the book I make explicit the assumptions about public history in Britain which inform many of the contributions to the website. It is my hope that the book will spread awareness of the potential of applied history beyond the constituencies which currently make use of History & Policy.
I make two connected arguments. First, thinking historically has a crucial part to play in the intellectual equipment of the active, concerned citizen (an earlier draft of the book had as its sub-title the somewhat unwieldy 'resources for a critically empowered citizenry'). Second, at present this civic role is ill served by the media, by the schools, and by historians themselves. Time and again, complex policy issues are placed before the public without adequate explanation of how they have come to assume their present shape, and without any hint of the possibilities which are disclosed by the record of the past. This is not the only democratic deficit in British society at present, but it is one which attracts little serious public discussion. Reducing that deficit may, as Ludmilla Jordanova points out, involve confronting deeply held popular myths, with very uncertain prospects of success. But on many of the topics to which historical perspective can profitably be applied the problem is not the tenacity of myth but the lack of any relevant knowledge at all. Here gains in popular understanding can be made with greater confidence.
The lessons of the Iraq war
My own practice as a historian has always been informed by an awareness of the social and political purchase of historical knowledge - first as an Africanist naively aspiring to equip a new nation with part of its history, and later as a British gender historian concerned to historicize the essentialist notions of masculinity which were current in the 1980s. But the writing of this book was prompted by more recent experience.
For me the Iraq War was a wake-up call. Here was a crisis which manifestly had its roots in the past. Yet during the long lead-up to the invasion in 2003, there was almost no attempt to uncover that past in the media. Instead the British public were repeatedly told that Saddam Hussein was another Hitler - in spite of the fact that analogies which leap over both time and space are the least illuminating. Little was said about the earlier British occupation of Iraq in 1914 and the ensuing attempt to rule the country through a puppet ruler (as pointed out by Beverley Milton-Edwards). There was constant unrest in the country - met by the deployment of RAF bombers as a routine arm of the administration - until the British relinquished overall control in 1934. At the very least such a perspective would have brought sharply into focus the risk of continued insurgency and instability in post-invasion Iraq.
In public government ministers dismissed the merits of historical perspective: Tony Blair told the US Congress in July 2003, 'There has never been a time.... when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day'. What we have been told of Cabinet deliberations suggests an engagement with history which was only a little less superficial. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this episode is that there was so little appetite for historical enlightenment among the public. It was as if the bearing of historical perspective on issues of urgent concern was lost on the British people, indicating a political culture in which there was less readiness than ever to draw intelligently on the past.
History and citizenship
This sombre instance of what Christopher Andrew has called the Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder sheds some light on the second strand of recent experience which has contributed to this book: the ongoing debate about citizenship education, and the place of history in it. History's role is widely assumed to be to make political identities more than an abstraction - to give human content to 'Britishness' and the values which are held to define it. In fact this has been the dominant interpretation of citizenship since state education was launched in the 1870s. Nation, empire and social deference were the guiding principles of history teaching in Victorian and Edwardian schools (see History and national identity: why they should remain divorced by Stefan Berger). Social cohesion is now defined much more broadly to encompass multicultural identities as well as respect for one's country, and the class politics which once infused the curriculum is much less in evidence today. But recent statements by the Department for Education and Skills and its advisors point to a remarkable continuity of purpose (see the Ajegbo report of 2006, Diversity and Citizenship). History is still expected to produce better citizens by acquainting them with the 'right' past.
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).
The fragmentation of history permits many political bases to be covered, but at very heavy cost. Constant switching from one topic to another means that students do not learn how to think historically. They fail to grasp how the lapse of time always places a gulf between ourselves and previous ages; to recognise instances of a process or trajectory still unfolding in the present; and to understand that any feature of the past must first be interpreted in its historical context. The absence of meaningful historical perspectives on the crisis in Iraq was thus hardly surprising (the credibility of the comparison of Saddam with Hitler was also enhanced by the heavy weight placed by post-14 History teaching on the Third Reich).
This failure is sometimes condoned on the grounds that the history taught in schools cannot be expected to equip students with all the background they will need for every political eventuality. It would indeed be absurd to criticize schools in the 1980s and 1990s for not having taught the history of Iraq. That would be to misunderstand the social role of history. The fault of the education system lies, not in having omitted to teach the history of Iraq, but in having failed to convey the essentials of historical thinking which are applicable to Iraq - and to any number of subjects whose topicality will only become apparent as the future unfolds. This is an argument which has particular relevance to public understanding of international affairs, since the next flash-point of global concern is proverbially hard to predict.
A hundred years of history for citizens
Citizenship enjoys an exceptionally high profile in political discourse at present. The reflective, active citizen, weighing up merits of competing policies and alternative understandings is the central player in deliberative democracy. My argument is that, in the long-term, enhancing the capacity for informed debate counts for more than addressing the political preoccupations of the moment. If that is so, the dominant modes of teaching history in schools are on the wrong track. The National Curriculum in history should be reviewed. Its contribution to citizenship remains central, but it needs to be defined in a way which respects the genuine contribution that historical understanding can make to informed public debate.
In the present climate such a programme would be innovatory, but it is not without precedent. Ever since the beginning of state education historians have canvassed alternative visions of a civic history. In 1867 - a few months before the franchise was extended to include a proportion of working class men - William Stubbs delivered his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford University. He outlined his approach to the teaching of history in these terms:
The stock of information accumulated is only secondary in importance to the habits of judgement formed by the study of it. For we want to train not merely students, but citizens...... to be fitted not for criticism or for authority in matters of memory, but for action.
Ten years later, following the establishment of state elementary education, Stubbs spelt out the democratic implications:
If the study of history can really be made an educational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation who not only know how to vote, but will bring a judgement, prepared, trained and in its own sphere exercised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of life.
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.'
At a time when the citizenship agenda is still in flux, it is worth being reminded of these debates. Pollard's remark about testing modern experiment by historical experience would not be out of place in the introduction to a remodelled National Curriculum.
The role of historians
In Why History Matters the schools do not carry the entire burden of my critique. The media have a crucial part to play in placing current affairs in historical perspective. But to perform that role effectively they depend on a historical profession which is alert to the topicality of its scholarship and prepared to reach out beyond a largely captive audience of fellow-academics and students.
Few historians would deny that their subject holds the answers as to how we came to be where we are, but far fewer give serious thought to how this knowledge can be disseminated. Despite the popularising efforts of a small proportion of scholars, there remains a yawning gap between the academic output of historians and the reading matter of the educated public. There is still the feeling that 'going public' is not for scholars. Part of the explanation is that the priorities of scholars are over-determined by the current research regime: books written for a general audience mean less time for meeting the pressing requirements of the Research Assessment Exercise. But the objection runs deeper than that.
Some scholars worry that their less scrupulous colleagues will play to the gallery and bend their interpretation to the prevailing prejudices. This is a residue of the shock experienced by the older generation at the prostitution of historical scholarship in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which gave rise to the belief that any admission of relevance is the thin end of the totalitarian wedge.
At root, however, it is anxieties about professional standing which account for most of this hostility to public history. Historical scholarship is both more technical and more theoretical than it was even twenty years ago. Abstruse analysis accompanied by lengthy foot-notes marks out the serious professional and is entirely inappropriate for a lay audience. Above all, the practicalities of popularisation would seem to eliminate the debates and controversies which are meat and drink to historians. How can they confidently communicate 'relevant' history to the public when so much of the content rests on a quicksand of contested interpretation (a point made by Ludmilla Jordanova)?
Where historians position themselves in this debate depends on how highly they value public history. Writing for one's peers and writing for a non-specialist readership are two different registers. Addressing the public - whether through the printed word or broadcasting - undeniably involves a dilution of standards. The scaffolding of scholarship is pared down to a minimum. Documentation and analysis are less rigorous. On the other hand plurality of interpretation is less of an obstacle than it might seem. Few things would make for a more mature understanding of current affairs than an awareness that the relevant historical perspectives are themselves the subject of debate - particularly if those controversies bear on the present. It then becomes possible to think outside the box - to challenge the spurious authority of single-track thinking - for example Margaret Thatcher's slogan TINA ('there is no alternative'). Indeed it is precisely this plurality of interpretation which provides the best defence against the danger of history being enlisted in the cause of propaganda (of a totalitarian or any other kind). As Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacob and Lynn Hunt have shown, the clash of historical perspectives is one route to a 'revitalised public.'
Important though a sense of controversy is to public discourse, a great deal of historical knowledge rests on firm foundations (notwithstanding the scepticism of some Postmodernists). An important service is performed in restoring to public memory events and trends from the past which are beyond contention. In such cases the anxiety expressed by John Arnold about the partisanship of politically focused history is misplaced. Thus to return to the case of Iraq, there is still debate over the motives of the British occupation in 1914 and the depth of the indigenous resistance, but there is no disputing that the occupation and the resistance took place. In 2003 even to know this much was grounds enough for taking seriously the possibility of political failure in a post-Saddam Iraq.
History & Policy
This is the context in which History & Policy has proved its value over the past five years. From the perspective of public history the real potential of the website lies not so much in influencing government and think tanks, as in providing material for the media and thus raising the level of public historical awareness. In 2003 that was true only to a limited extent. Even though they engaged very directly with the post-invasion prospects of Iraq, the articles by Beverley Milton Edwards and John W. Dower received little notice. But the much higher profile of the website now suggests that comparable contributions today would make a significant impact. Particularly encouraging is the rising proportion of unsolicited contributions written by young scholars who recognise the obligation to disseminate findings of topical importance.
Historians have long been expected to instil good citizenship in others. But what is the appropriate role of the citizen-scholar? For historians themselves, good citizenship consists in contributing their expertise to the national conversation: exposing politically slanted myth, placing our concerns in more extended narratives, testing the limits of analogy, and above all showing how familiarity with the past can open the door to a broader sense of the possibilities in the present. That should be our contribution to a 'revitalised public'.
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