[The piece linked to in the previous post inspired me to go back and rework the draft chapter 1 of Why History Doesn't Matter. Here is the new opening.]
“We do not need ‘experts’ to tell us what to think any more”
We don’t need no education
- Roger Waters[2]
In June 2009 the Observer ran a piece entitled ‘They’re
too cool for school: meet the new history boys and girls.’[3] Faintly ridiculously, it continued ‘[t]heory
is a thing of the past for these hip [sic]
young historians’. So, it turned out in
several cases, was any actual training in the discipline. Two had left university after their first
degree (which was not specified as having been in history); another was a geographer. Four of the six were, at the time, under
thirty but that had not stopped at least one from having turned out three books
by then.[4]
As training for the role of historian,
one had been features editor at Men’s
Health magazine; another had been an actress. One at least had been a ‘researcher’ on a
television programme presented by right-wing controversialist and
former-historian David Starkey. None of
this lack of training or qualification, however, got in the way of the
presentation of this group as ‘historians’, who were ‘leading the fight-back’
against history’s decline in popularity.
A year or so later, the then
twenty-seven-year-old William Hastings Burke published a book about Albert
Goering. Like some of the glittering
young things in the Observer article,
Burke had no historical education at all.
This nevertheless did not prevent his publisher (presumably with his
approval) writing his profile thus: ‘Fed
up with the stuffy academic approach to history, he is part of a new generation
bringing history up to speed.’[5] Who needs any training in the historical
discipline? Evidently, to ‘bring it up
to speed’ history needs people who, in almost any other academic subject, would
be regarded as ‘not knowing what they were talking about’.
In November 2013, the Daily Mail printed a piece entitled ‘The
history girls: meet the women building a bright future from the past’.[6] This piece shows an interestingly gendered
variation on the theme. For here, five
of the seven women featured actually did have a higher degree in history and indeed
three had proper University posts. Self-confidently
riding to the rescue of an apparently failing discipline, unencumbered by any
actual training or qualification, turns out unsurprisingly to be a mainly male (and
– even less surprisingly – a male Oxbridge) thing. Also unlike the earlier Observer article, this piece was written by one of the ‘historians’
featured – if they want coverage, do women have to do it themselves? The piece also had a number of less positive
features. There was objectification, a
concentration on glamour, posed photos in nice outfits and – unlike any of the
male historians – mention of their marital status and the number of their
children. Dwelling on an essentialist
‘women’s history’ the piece entirely avoided the feared word ‘gender’. This was the Daily Mail after all. Once
again, two of the rising stars, who had ‘rescued studying the past from the
clutches of fusty academia and changed our view of yesteryear for ever’, had no immediately evident historical qualification.
Let us look a little closer at
the types of history being written by these rising stars. Overwhelmingly it is descriptive narrative or,
above all, biography, especially of high-status women: Emma Hamilton, young
Queen Victoria, Mary Tudor, queens and consorts, the Wyndham sisters, or Henry
VIII, Lord Castlereagh, the Plantagenets.
Otherwise it is the salacious (Victorian prostitutes, royal concubines, lonely
hearts adverts) or the gimmicky (the private lives of saints [see also the
salacious]; a visitor’s guide to Tudor England). If this represents the way history is going it is time for us all to catch a bus in the opposite direction as soon as possible. With the exception of a couple of the more
academically-qualified female scholars, their comments on historical method are,
as one might expect, at best naive. “I
think writing your books with specific political aims in mind is an
old-fashioned approach”, opines Claudia Renton (with no qualification higher
than a BA). “It's not particularly helpful. I think if you produce a good
narrative history, which convincingly creates the world you're writing about,
then people will read it and draw their own conclusions.” Kate Williams appears to have been stuck in a
time-warp since about 1970 (ironically given the article’s repeated allusion to
time machines and time capsules): “Women’s stories have been neglected for so
long – unless they were queens. Exploring the history of women is a way of
redressing that imbalance.” Sometimes
the comments are simply bizarre: “Being male or female is important to us now
but we shouldn’t assume it was important to people in the past.” On
occasion, however, they are more representative, if no more sophisticated. Susannah Lipscomb (with, unlike most of the
others – especially the men – a PhD and a prize-winning journal article to her
name), declares that “History tells us the story of who we are and where we’ve
come from; it reassures us that we aren’t the first to walk these paths.” It is this distressingly widely-held point of
view that the present book seeks to demolish.
This is precisely why history doesn’t
matter.
[1] Quoted in http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-economy-is-desperately-in-need-of-more-productive-young-immigrants-8931222.html (accessed 10 Nov.2103).
[2] ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’ (1979).
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/28/history-starkey-historians-writers, accessed 7 November 2013.
[4]
Five of the six were educated at Cambridge, the other at Oxford, illustrating
neatly how class and cultural capital continue to function ahead of actual
merit and experience in ensuring access to patronage, opportunity and
resources.
