Edward Hallett Carr (1961). What is History? New York: Vintage.
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 a "Whig interpretation of history" as steady progress toward liberty and prosperity. In the twentieth century, a less confident West has been much readier to see history as a series of accidents, and to question the very idea of historical objectivity. Even "the facts" are not objective, since which facts are presented is a matter of selection.
Carr rejects both the simple determinism of historical writing in the nineteenth century and what may be calle...