In Defence of History

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The success of this movement led to the assertion that it was the only true history and that all history was social history. Evans contends that the practice of historic study proves this is wrong: the truth, the facts of the past indeed ARE attainable, by applying the correct methodology and when always understood as a preliminary result. Evans is reminding us that treating reality as simply “useful fiction” has serious real-world consequences. And as for (2) my guess would be that is exactly what Collini said it was: a series of coarsely distorted rebuttals of coarsely distorted ideas, and that it does not engage in a serious argument with postmodernism.

For my own part, I remain optimistic that objective historical knowledge is both desirable and attainable.H Carr lewat bukunya ‘What Is History’ (1961) serta kritikan Sir Geoffrey Elton kepada karya tersebut lewat ‘The Practice of History’ (1967) yang mana ia sendiri akhirnya menjadi suatu karya klasik di dalam bidang historiografi. Evans especially attacks the most radical protagonists Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit on their assertion that reality is only linguistic, only text and discourse, and we never can reach the 'real' reality, in short, that there is no truth and thus all statements are accurate, which comes down to a complete relativism. The most horrifying example he gives is a feminist history of witchcraft that treats all sources, including explicitly fictional sources, as being equally valid.

Where Kansteiner sees inconsistency between Evans’ assertion that sources may allow a spectrum of interpretations and his rejection of the idea that contrary interpretations may be equally valid, one may instead see a discursive give and take between a professional and a school of thought that was, and still is, used to discredit his profession. walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their passions, but now all gone, one generation washing into the another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockrow. These books appeared in the early sixties, and have remained the principal university texts on the subject ever since, despite continuing changes in the academic discipline of history, with feminist history, black history and gay history becoming seriously considered as ways to look at the past.Upacara yang terkemudian itu dilakukannya dengan sungguh ‘rakus’ dan ‘kejam’ sekali, sungguh berbeza dengan nada yang digunapakai sebelumnya; pembaca tertanya-tanya samada ada bahagian itu masih ditulis oleh penulis yang sama. The most serious new movement in these four decades is the advent of post-modernism, which has gone so far as to deny the possibility of writing history at all (on the grounds that the past is a construct of the present). If historians abandon the time-honoured techniques of placing their reliance on primary sources and the belief that history is about something real, that the past can be (at least partially) recovered, then they will be left with nothing.

They are limited by the facts and by the words a document contains, words which are not, contrary to what postmodernists claim, capable of an infinity of meaning. The book gives an overview of some of the major movements in the study of history over the past 200 years, but its primary objective is to defend history from postmodernists. Elton is Evans’ standard-bearer for a hardline empiricism; and right from the start he asserts that “few historians would now defend the hard-line concept of historical objectivity espoused by Elton” and certainly Evans does not agree with Elton that what a historian does is “not a question of interpreting fact but of establishing it” . Het is geen eenzijdige aanval op het postmodernisme, maar veeleer een brede overweging van de geschieddiscipline in haar geheel. So when Patrick Joyce tells us that social history is dead, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth declares that time is a fictional construct, and Roland Barthes announces that all the world's a text, and Frank Ankersmit swears that we can never know anything at all about the past so we might as well confine ourselves to studying other historians, and Keith Jenkins proclaims that all history is just naked ideology designed to get historians power and money in big university institutions run by the bourgeoisie, I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it did, and reach some tenable conclusions about what it all meant.The most extreme postmodernists argue that the past can be described in so many different ways and from so many different points of view that it's impossible to determine what really happened. However there is a sense that Evans is supportive of Elton’s idea that a historian must “subdue his imagination to the controls which scholarship provides” , which particularly comes across in his handling of the Abraham case. Some may argue that this approach is rather heavy-handed but it is in keeping with the debates of the time. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.