Edward Hallett Carr (1961)

The word history is often used in two distinct if related senses. It is sometimes used to mean whatever happened in the past, and sometimes to mean the process of writing about the past. In the first sense, we may say that the assassination of Julius Caesar was an episode in Roman history; in the second sense, we may say that such-and-such a scholar wrote a Roman history. In What is History?, Edward Hallett Carr seeks to bridge these two senses, which in his view are intimately linked. "My first answer therefore 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" (p. 35). He begins by speaking of the writing of history, and ends by inquiring into the nature of historical events.

Carr begins with the observation that historians' interpretations of history have themselves changed over the years. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire says as much about eighteenth-century Britain as it does about ancient Rome. What French historians have had to say about Napoleon has varied rather consistantly with the trends of French public life (p. 53); to one generation he is a tyrant who aborted the Revolution; to another, he is a hero who extends the glory of France.

In the nineteenth century, the West was highly self-confident; thus, in Britain, Victorian historians tended to accept

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of a picture. "A Sicilian [Army] recruit ... added a crucifix where it had always appeared in his native land to a house without a chimney. He was marked wrong" (p. 200). A low point in the history of IQ testing was established by Sir Cyril Burt, whose studies of identical twins, supposedly demonstrating the dominant role of heredity in intelligence, were eventually found to be wholly fraudulent (pp. 235-36). In Gould's view, however, Burt committed a conceptual error that would have rendered his results largely irrelevent even if they had been valid: the conclusion that there is some single measurable quantity of "intelligence." Gould devotes considerable attention to the mechanics by which scores on a range of mental tests were correlated to derive a single value, and to criticism of the application of this methodology. Gould argues that, whatever we mean by human intelligence in an everyday sense, it is too complex and elusive to be reduced to a single measure. It is no one "thing." His ultimate point, however, is how the belief in this "thing" has been put in the service of prejudice and self-satisfaction of the comfortable. Peter L. Berger (1963). Invitation to Sociology. New York: Doubleday. Sociology has onl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2089
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)