What Is History
/WHAT IS HISTORY
WHAT IS HISTORY?
E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School,
London, end Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Foreign Office in 1916, and, after numerous jobs in and connected with the F.O. at home and abroad, he resigned in 1936, and became Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales,
Aberystwyth. He was Assistant Editor of The Times from 1941 a, 1946, Tutor In Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1955, and became a Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1955. Among his many publications are: The Romantic Exiles, The Twenty
Year’s Crisis 1919-1939, Conditions of Peace, The Soviet Impact on the Western World,
The New Society (1951). The first six volumes of his large-scale History of Soviet Russia has been published in Pelicans, including the Bolshevik Revolution, The Interregnum, and two volumes of Socialism in One Country. Professor Carr's most recent book, a collection of essays, is 1917: Before and After (1968).
I. The Historian and His Facts
I OFTEN THINK IT ODD THAT IT SHOULD BE SO DULL, FOR A GREAT DEAL
OF IT MUST BE INVENTION. q -Catherine Morland on History
WHAT is history ? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the
Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press on the work which he had undertaken to edit:
It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath.... By the judicious division of labour we should be able to do it, and to bring home to every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of international research.
Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of
WHAT IS HISTORY?
E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School,
London, end Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Foreign Office in 1916, and, after numerous jobs in and connected with the F.O. at home and abroad, he resigned in 1936, and became Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales,
Aberystwyth. He was Assistant Editor of The Times from 1941 a, 1946, Tutor In Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1955, and became a Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1955. Among his many publications are: The Romantic Exiles, The Twenty
Year’s Crisis 1919-1939, Conditions of Peace, The Soviet Impact on the Western World,
The New Society (1951). The first six volumes of his large-scale History of Soviet Russia has been published in Pelicans, including the Bolshevik Revolution, The Interregnum, and two volumes of Socialism in One Country. Professor Carr's most recent book, a collection of essays, is 1917: Before and After (1968).
I. The Historian and His Facts
I OFTEN THINK IT ODD THAT IT SHOULD BE SO DULL, FOR A GREAT DEAL
OF IT MUST BE INVENTION. q -Catherine Morland on History
WHAT is history ? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the
Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press on the work which he had undertaken to edit:
It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath.... By the judicious division of labour we should be able to do it, and to bring home to every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of international research.
Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of