Elton: no empathy for the past – only objectivityī) Key Elements of Historical Study 1) TimeĢ) Structure and Agency 3) Meanings 4) Evidence.Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (1967).Historical Standards A) The Elton-Carr Debate
History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.” ( The Observer, 9 July 2006) History is memory, we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even – if we dare, and we should dare – a Nazi. History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm, it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. nowing is not enough – if you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ or indeed cried ‘Death to Wilkes!’ if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise and over-adulate them. In the end, I suppose my point is that history is all about imagination rather than facts. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes we now take for granted. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows? We haven’t arrived at our moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles, we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering – as all human things, and human beings are. Kind good ancestors of al all of us in this room never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolts us. Stephen Fry: “Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffees knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Lecture One, Part Two: Before the "Science" of History Introduction: Is History Science or Art? Relationship between the present and the past. Investigation of objectivity of historical knowledge.ĥ. Study of what historians have argued about the past.ģ. Lecture 01: Welcome & Early Historiography Lecture 01, Part One: Introduction: What is Historiography? I. Lecture 13 (June 25): Archives and the Present - Conclusion Lecture 12 (June 23): Historians in Trouble
Lecture 09 (June 11): Historical Research and Writing Lecture 07 (June 4): Social Science and Anthropological Approaches Lecture 06 (June 2): Social History & Micro-History Lecture 05 (May 28): Annales & Social History Lecture 04 (May 26): Big Theory and Historical Time Part Two: The Path to "Scientific" History Lecture 02 (May 19): Victoria Day, no class Part Two: Before the "Science" of History Part One: Introduction: What is Historiography? Lecture 01 (May 14) Welcome & Early Historiography Check each lecture before class if you want to make sure you have the updated version. I may change some of these lectures before I deliver them, in which case the outlines here will be updated. These outlines are the text from my planned PowerPoint slides.