Following from Temperance's valid point in another thread concerning an (admittedly poor) attempt by John Milton to write a History of Britain in the 17th century as a good example of bias - both on the author's part and on that of his censors - it does indeed raise a vexed question. Is there such a thing as unbiased history at all?

We are educated to believe that there exists a sort of "neutral" history - normally associated with text books and the like prescribed for school curricula - which concentrates on the presentation of hard facts rather than analysis. But even this style of reporting history is fraught with potential bias (what facts should be included and, crucially, omitted?) and in fact can probably be deemed even more potentially a dangerous influence on the reader than more overtly analytical presentations, leading one to believe that one has assimilated all the important data while unaware that other pertinent facts have been withheld.

What it boils down to is what one considers "trustworthy" history. At a pinch I can't actually think of a good example which itself cannot be immediately shot down. Can you?

I'm quoting at length from Wiki here but this came to my attention a while ago whilst searching for something else:

From wiki:

During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial [brought by David Irving in which he asserted that Deborah Lipstadt and Peguin had libelled him in 1996 by calling him a Holocaust denier in her book 'Denying the Holocaust'], it became evident that the court needed to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". This was necessary so that there would be a legal bench mark with which to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the methods employed by David Irving, as before the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian.

Justice Charles Gray leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practice by holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies.

In summarising Gray's judgement, in an article published in the Yale Law Journal, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:

The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
The historian must not dismiss counterevidence without scholarly consideration;
The historian must be even-handed in treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
The historian must clearly indicate any speculation;
The historian must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
The historian must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict a favored view; and
The historian must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.

Schneider uses the concept of the "objective historian" to suggest that this could be used as an aid in assessing what makes a historian suitable to be an expert witnesses under the Daubert standard in the United States. Schneider proposed this, because, in her opinion, Irving could have passed the standard Daubert tests unless a court was given "a great deal of assistance from historians".

Schneider proposes that by testing a historian against the criteria of the "objective historian" then, even if a historian holds specific political views (and she gives an example of a well-qualified historian's testimony that was disregarded by a United States court because he was a member of a feminist group), providing the historian uses the "objective historian" standards, he or she is a "conscientious historian". It was Irving's failure as an "objective historian" not his right wing views that caused him to lose his libel case, as a "conscientious historian" would not have "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to support his political views.

.... although I'm not sure that gets us any nearer answering whether there is such a thing as a "neutral" historian.

MM, who was quoting from Justice Charles Gray, who was leaning heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, wrote:

The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations...

Oh, yes indeedy, but what exactly is meant by "appropriate reservations"? This is the opening of a postmodern can of assorted worms, mainly linguistic ones. And how those postmodern worms can wriggle.

I have mentioned Richard J. Evans (Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University) elsewhere. I read his superb book In Defence of History about three years ago - and then went on to read E.H. Carr's What is History?, a book which is, I believe, still required reading for History undergraduates. Evans, who can't be doing with the postmodernists, wrote the introduction to my edition of Carr.  Carr said (in 1950, long before Derrida and the other French intellectuals got going): "Objective history does not exist." Yet Carr also argued that to try to attain it was far from being a futile enterprise. "To assert that fallible human beings are too much entangled in circumstances of time and place to attain absolute truth," he wrote, "is not the same thing as to deny the existence of truth; such a denial destroys any possible criterion of judgement, and makes any approach to history as true or false as any other."

Well, yes. There's the dilemma. As I understand it, postmodernist thought - deconstruction and all that - has as its guiding insight the idea that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, political, religious or historical - that attempts to organise our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out. Derrida - and I admit I struggle to understand what the man meant - insisted (I think) that what is repressed or excluded does not disappear, "but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems." Nothing is secure. What are the implications of that for the historian?  


I remember touching on this a couple of years ago on the Princes in the Tower thread. ID criticised Minette for her - er - robust(?) convictions about Richard III.

This exchange was from 26th August 2014 - perhaps ID's comment and my reply are relevant here:

ID wrote:

Yes indeed she has and quite rightly, but then she goes on to place her own theories in place of the Tudor version and present them as irrefutable truth or fact thereby doing no different than the Tudor propaganda machine. And that is where her argument falls flat as she has no more original sources or information to hand than anyone else has or has ever had on which to base her particular version of events. So that's all they'll ever be, a theory.

But aren't we all - you included, ID -  guilty of this? We are all "theorists".

After my little epiphany yesterday morning I've decided to go back to thinking a bit more about historiography: I'm dutifully ploughing my way (second time round) through E.H. Carr and Richard J. Evans, but I still find myself in some despair. I said years ago I'd never make an historian; or at least not the sort of "proper" historian that you and nordmann and ferval would approve.

"Laying out the matter as it is," says Lucian of Samosata (one of Thomas More's favourites) of the task before the historian.  A worthy but perhaps impossible aim? And wasn't Lucian an early "novelist" and satirist, not a historian at all? "As it is" - who on earth is to decide that? The forensic scientists? But even their results are disputed and queried. We go round in circles and I, in my innocence, no longer know who or what to trust. A sign of the times generally, I suppose, or of growing old. Things fall apart and all that - and we have to accept and live with the falling apart.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

As noted by one of those mad Celts.

Perhaps seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland's verdict "On History" (quoted by E.H. Carr) is worth thinking about: "I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention."

PS "Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing Sir George Clark on his head, I were to call history "a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts", my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original dictum." E. H. Carr


Gosh, what a muddle this post is. Never mind - I'll send it.

PS

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n20/peter-ghosh/laid-down-by-ranke

http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/evans7.html


This is Richard Evans's response to Peter Ghosh's review of In Defence of History (first link):



In his review of my book In Defence of History (LRB, 15 October) Peter Ghosh claims that I am engaged in a ‘polemic against history since 1960’, that my book defends an ‘exaggerated empiricism’ based on the ‘fetishising of documents’, that I believe that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves’. In Defence of History argues on the contrary that history has undergone a welcome renaissance since the Sixties. It defends at length the broadening of the discipline against conservative historians who would like to see it return to its old concentration on the politics of the nation-state.

The book argues that facts and documents do not speak for themselves but speak only when they are spoken to by the historian. Historians need to use, indeed cannot avoid using, theories and concepts developed in their own time. Ghosh himself denies this, takes the historicist view that ‘theory comes from within history’ and excoriates the historian’s use of theories derived from other disciplines. This is sheer obscurantism. Most advances in modern historical scholarship have taken place as a result of theories borrowed from elsewhere, whether philology, economics, sociology, anthropology or linguistics.

Ghosh claims that my portrait of the history of ideas as the continual reinterpretation of a limited number of classic texts ‘bears no relation to the modern discipline of the history of ideas’. He goes on to note, however, that the ‘old version’ which I describe ‘actually resembles Post-Modernism in the style of Hayden White or Ankersmit’. But this is precisely the point made in my book. White and all his numerous disciples and followers argue that all texts are capable of infinite reinterpretation, and it is this idea (among others) which my book is trying to argue against.

Ghosh seems to believe that any kind of aesthetic impulse which goes into the structuring of a work of history is evidence of that work’s conceptual vacuity. He refers to my book Death in Hamburg as an example. If he had actually read the book, he would have discovered that it is structured by a set of Marxist concepts. The conceptual and aesthetic aspects of writing a history book are not mutually exclusive; if they were, all history books would be unreadable.

Ghosh’s grotesque misreading of In Defence of History culminates in the claim that it construes Post-Modernism exclusively as the denial of the possibility of truth and objectivity. If he had read my book with any care, he would have discovered that it distinguishes between extreme Post-Modernist versions of hyper-relativism, which it argues against, and moderate versions of Post-Modernism, which it defends. He asserts that there was ‘no conscious tradition of Modernism’ in history against which to react, so there can by implication be no such thing as Post-Modernism. If we stuck to such a view, we would never be able to use concepts about people in the past which they did not use themselves. This would make the historian’s job impossible.

Something important has happened to history in the last twenty years: the great overarching narratives have collapsed, the story of history as progress has been abandoned, innovation has come above all from historians writing about the marginal, the bizarre, the individual, the small-scale. It seems quite reasonable to call these now-defunct narratives Modernist, as indeed many Post-Modernist writers on history do; and equally reasonable to call the new development Post-Modernist.

Richard Evans
Gonville and Caius College Cambridge



Nordmann, have you read In Defence of History?

Temperance,

thank you very much for your interesting "exposé".
I discussed it already to dead on the old BBC, on the French "Passion Histoire' and also on the American "Historum". There I remember some replies from Ferval...and also overhere and here I had some interesting replies from Nordmann...


"I have mentioned Richard J. Evans (Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University) elsewhere. I read his superb book In Defence of History about three years ago - and then went on to read E.H. Carr's What is History?, a book which is, I believe, still required reading for History undergraduates. Evans, who can't be doing with the postmodernists, wrote the introduction to my edition of Carr.  Carr said (in 1950, long before Derrida and the other French intellectuals got going): "Objective history does not exist." Yet Carr also argued that to try to attain it was far from being a futile enterprise. "To assert that fallible human beings are too much entangled in circumstances of time and place to attain absolute truth," he wrote, "is not the same thing as to deny the existence of truth; such a denial destroys any possible criterion of judgement, and makes any approach to history as true or false as any other.""

I like the approach from Meles meles...after all one can only "try" to be as scientific and as unbiased and neutral as possible...

After my 14 years on history fora now I have the impression that "common sense" is primordial to any good history research...common sense to feel when the "influence" of interfering "deforming" factors starts...and yes it is also my experience from these 14 years that one who wants to deform the history knows very well what he is doing...many times with a certain goal...Yes and I don't say there aren't some less clever people, who deform it without knowing themselves...we have a proverb...people that believe their own lies...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

I wish it were as simple as that, Paul - perhaps it is; I really don't know.

And I suppose the topic has been done to death, one way or another.

I just wondered if anyone had read the Evans book, that's all.

But thank you for your reply.

Temp wrote:

Nordmann, have you read In Defence of History?

I had to google it to check, but yes, I did read Evans' book. The title is actually slightly misleading - Evans' principal and often repeated point is that the vast majority of serious histories (as opposed to flippant, condensed or loony works pretending to be history) conform to rather diligent standards of approach and subject treatment. He also made the very valid point that histories produced in the expectation of peer review (as in any academic discipline) are less likely to descend into ultra post-modernistic guff. He seems to have forgotten he said this in the passage you quoted him saying above regarding what "has happened history in the last twenty years", but if I remember correctly this trend he detected towards historical treatments of the marginal, bizarre, small scale etc, wasn't entirely unwelcome either according to him, just something to be very aware of when consulting historical books to learn about a particular subject. You need to read many treatments of the same theme to have any chance of distilling a rounded view from the exercise. But then, that was always true, even when the history section of the library was dominated by weighty tomes and dry academic journals.

Well said Nordmann, well said...

With esteem, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Well said Nordmann, well said...

With esteem, Paul.

Mmm.

I rather think there's more to it - and to Evans's book - than nordmann's dismissive post would suggest. I've been as wary of (or should that be baffled/frightened by?) "ultra postmodern guff" as anyone, but "guff" is too contemptuous a term to describe the movement that - whether we realise/like it or not - has had such a profound influence on all our lives during the past thirty years. Professor Evans certainly does not so dismiss it, and neither do the many historians whom he quotes in the introductory chapter of In Defence. Perhaps the most hysterical fears were expressed by no less a traditionalist than the great Sir Geoffrey Elton. Elton certainly was a frightened man: the "guff" - the influence of postmodernist thinking - was denounced by him in emotive language indeed: the pernicious ideas that were taking hold were "menacing", "destructive", "absurd" and "meaningless", a "virus" of "frivolous nihilism" that was infecting young historians everywhere. He (Elton) continued: "In battling against people who would subject historical studies to the dictates of literary critics, we historians are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights - the intellectual equivalent of crack."

Crikey.

Evans, in his "Afterword", written a few years after In Defence was published in 1997, confessed that he had been taken aback by the sheer variety "and utterly contradictory nature of the responses which the book has elicited". He went on: "I would not have thought it possible for a single book to be read, or misread, in so many different ways". That made me smile. It's a bit like history, isn't it?

Paul mentions "common sense" as being necessary when we study history or do historical research. But what exactly do we mean by the application of "common sense" in this discipline? Common sense usually gets mentioned by exasperated people who have "had enough" of "guff" (not just historians). In the original post, the word "trustworthy" was used: does common sense produce trustworthy history then? Can common sense save you all from this nonsensical postmodern chaos ?  After all, like it or not, as the American historians, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob have warned, in Telling the Truth About History, "History has been shaken right down to its scientific and cultural foundations."

Wonder what the young people think about all this, if they think about it at all?

Temp wrote:

I rather think there's more to it - and to Evans's book - than nordmann's dismissive post would suggest.

On the contrary - I recollect that Evans himself was quite particular in not dismissing "post-modernist" history out of hand and reserved his criticism for its more extreme examples, typified by an underlying theory that one theory is always as good as another so one historian's claim, however badly compiled or presented, is as valid as another's too - and this before even their research or method have been explained, if at all. Evans objected to this, hence also my reference to it as "guff". I was not dismissing Evans' view in the slightest. Quite the opposite.

I will refrain from offering further views in response to your questions above, you will be pleased to hear. Being accused of bullshitting and dismissiveness each time I post is hardly conducive to dialogue, and I just couldn't be arsed risking further opprobrium.

Oh, for goodness' sake, nordmann, why do you always have to be so touchy? I apologised for my bullshitting remark - and I did add, not in the apology, but in the original oh-so-insulting comment, that "it takes one to recognise one", plus a smiley. I nearly sent you a PM to apologise, but felt I should do it publically - which I did. Yes?

Have you completely lost your sense of humour?

I wish you would be "arsed" to offer further views - what you say is always interesting and informative, as you bloody well know. I'm sorry that I don't add oodles of "esteem" every time I respond to your ideas. Perhaps that would make you happier?

I shall go and spray the caterpillars in my garden now. A bit of judicious horticultural murder is necessary this morning.

Oh, shit, shit, shit - and it is was such an interesting topic.

I suppose he'll sulk in his tent for ages now - nearly posted a picture of Achilles, but probably not a good idea.

I'd better offer my resignation, I suppose. That's the thing to do when you've messed up - isn't it?

Now, now children, play nicely. This is a history forum not the inner cabal of a political party so there's no need to be so defensive or to go looking for perceived insults when there's none there. And nordmann, I will not allow you to do a Boris (or a Dave, a Michael, an Andrea) and quit the field in a monumental huff. Edit - Oh God, Temp's at it too now. I give up.

To the topic then; I'm in the post-modernist lite camp as I've said before but can I raise another point - is there such a thing as a neutral reader and so how would, or could,  one define a 'neutral' historian? Can 'neutral' also mean 'neutered'?

ferval wrote:

Now, now children, play nicely. This is a history forum not the inner cabal of a political party so there's no need to be so defensive or to go looking for perceived insults when there's none there. And nordmann, I will not allow you to do a Boris (or a Dave, a Michael, an Andrea) and quit the field in a monumental huff. Edit - Oh God, Temp's at it too now. I give up.

I was playing nicely. It's him. If you disagree with him - or misunderstand him - he pulls your hair and storms off.  

ferval wrote:

To the topic then; I'm in the post-modernist lite camp as I've said before but can I raise another point - is there such a thing as a neutral reader and so how would, or could,  one define a 'neutral' historian? Can 'neutral' also mean 'neutered'?

The point about "neutral reader" is so important, ferval: none of us are "neutral readers", no matter how hard we try to fool ourselves that we are. And there is no such thing as a "neutral text" - even a scientific one? (Please note the question mark.) Isn't that what the postmodernist argument is all about - sort of? The postmodernist view that language is such a slippery, unstable thing - that it cannot relate to anything else except itself - must, as one alarmed historian observed, "entail the dissolution of history" and "necessarily jeopardises historical study as normally understood."

But that way madness lies - that's why I wanted to discuss the role of common sense in all this. But what's the point? There's just too much bad feeling around at the moment. A real shame, but there it is.

Temperance wrote:

ferval wrote:

Now, now children, play nicely. This is a history forum not the inner cabal of a political party so there's no need to be so defensive or to go looking for perceived insults when there's none there. And nordmann, I will not allow you to do a Boris (or a Dave, a Michael, an Andrea) and quit the field in a monumental huff. Edit - Oh God, Temp's at it too now. I give up.

I was playing nicely. It's him. If you disagree with him - or misunderstand him - he pulls your hair and storms off.  

Huh, you're as bad as each other. Otherwise there wouldn't be the constant bun fights and huffs....no? 

Now as ferval said, play nicely or we'll bang yer heads together...

Islanddawn wrote:

Huh, you're as bad as each other. Otherwise there wouldn't be the constant bun fights and huffs....no? 

You are probably right - but I doubt he'll ever admit it. I really did think nordmann was being dismissive by saying "guff" about something I thought deserved serious consideration, but perhaps I misread or misunderstood the man's post. But then perhaps I was looking for trouble - not a neutral reader, you see.

Oh, well. C'est la vie - you live and never learn. It's all very depressing, but there you go. In a hundred years' time who's going to care (Woody Allen)? In fact, by tomorrow teatime, who's going to care?

Temperance wrote:

ferval wrote:

Now, now children, play nicely. This is a history forum not the inner cabal of a political party so there's no need to be so defensive or to go looking for perceived insults when there's none there. And nordmann, I will not allow you to do a Boris (or a Dave, a Michael, an Andrea) and quit the field in a monumental huff. Edit - Oh God, Temp's at it too now. I give up.

I was playing nicely. It's him. If you disagree with him - or misunderstand him - he pulls your hair and storms off.  

ferval wrote:

To the topic then; I'm in the post-modernist lite camp as I've said before but can I raise another point - is there such a thing as a neutral reader and so how would, or could,  one define a 'neutral' historian? Can 'neutral' also mean 'neutered'?

The point about "neutral reader" is so important, ferval: none of us are "neutral readers", no matter how hard we try to fool ourselves that we are. And there is no such thing as a "neutral text" - even a scientific one? (Please note the question mark.) Isn't that what the postmodernist argument is all about - sort of? The postmodernist view that language is such a slippery, unstable thing - that it cannot relate to anything else except itself - must, as one alarmed historian observed, "entail the dissolution of history" and "necessarily jeopardises historical study as normally understood."

Temperance,

"The postmodernist view that language is such a slippery, unstable thing - that it cannot relate to anything else except itself "

I read something in a German text about language...with all my knowledge of the past 14 years on history boards I am still an apprentice, especially in matters of how history has to be applied...
On Historum and overhere I tried to read the for me nearly unreadable book of Frank Ankersmit: "Sublime Historical Experience" and the book of Chris Lorenz, which was a bit more understandable: "Construction of the Past" and even as both were in Dutch, I didn't catch most of it...and both are eminent historians about the theory of history...
It's all in Nordmann's thread from 2012:
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t121-history-is-it-science-or-art

And now again about language: The German text said that each language has its own singularity, its own individual character and that therefore historiography was in each language different. I don't agree with that, as one can in my opinion transplant any idea or any mental concept into another language provided that one, and that's true for whatever language, provides a wide spectrum of all matters related to the concept that at the end depicts a line of thought, which is understandable for the reader.
And I think it is that what you mean...if the concept of words in a sentence isn't clearly defined it can be that language is a "slippery, unstable thing"

I agree such literature is not for the average reader, while it is so boring, with all these explanations, that it is only for a select pair of historians within their own craft...for other readers one needs a divulgation of these scientific texts into readable history...

About the concept of a word for instance, to speak about the difficulties, I saw threads with several dozens of pages about one concept of one word...

But again in my opinion if one has some common sense and tries along the scientific method to do research in history one can again in my humble opinion come to a fair picture, with all the data available, with attention to all the lacking ones, where there is a danger of extrapolation, which is in my opinion dagerous.

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

Paul wrote:

And now again about language: The German text said that each language has its own singularity, its own individual character and that therefore historiography was in each language different. I don't agree with that, as one can in my opinion transplant any idea or any mental concept into another language provided that one, and that's true for whatever language, provides a wide spectrum of all matters related to the concept that at the end depicts a line of thought, which is understandable for the reader.
And I think it is that what you mean...if the concept of words in a sentence isn't clearly defined it can be that language is a "slippery, unstable thing"...

That's not really what I meant, Paul: it's really to do with - among other, horribly complicated things - how you read a text. Deconstruction - a favourite and much misunderstood term in post-structuralism/postmodernism - is often referred to as "reading against the grain", or "reading the text against itself" with the purpose of "knowing the text as it cannot know itself". (These are Terry Eagleton's   definitions.) The great historian, Sir Geoffrey Elton, whom I mentioned above, found it presumptuous that such techniques - those of literary criticism - should be applied to historical texts. Elton found this sort of stuff utterly infuriating:

"A text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying...it may be read as carrying a plurality of significance or as saying many things which are fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single "stable" meaning. Thus a text may "betray" itself." (J.A. Cuddon)

The man who, with others, started all this - Derrida - said that a deconstructive reading "must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language he uses... (It) attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight." (Of Grammatology, pp158 and 163)

Many consider this to be the stuff of madness! So what is actually "trustworthy"? Is anything written "trustworthy"? Seems not. But what do we mean by "trustworthy" anyway?

And this is possibly - probably - not what nordmann was getting at at all by his question (below) in the original post. And it's very late and I am rambling dreadfully and probably making no sense at all. Wish I'd never mentioned postmodernism, Evans' book or anything else here. Back to the Moggy Thread for me, I'm afraid.

nordmann wrote:

What it boils down to is what one considers "trustworthy" history. At a pinch I can't actually think of a good example which itself cannot be immediately shot down. Can you?

But then, it seems anything can be shot down - not just history. Nothing is stable; there is no such thing as absolute truth (except Derrida's, of course). You always have to ask the question, "Whose truth?"

Before I am accused of further sulking, skulking or other scoundreling in the scrubbage, I'll add that I completely agree with Paul and his "common sense" comment. For me common sense, which can indeed be a rather nebulous concept, is actually much simpler to define in terms of producing a history (or for that matter any representation of purported factual content) than even in many other fields of study. And this ties in also with what a "trustworthy" history might be too.

If, as often happens in historical treatment of subjects, the writer or presenter (we live in such times) uses as a natural device the inclusion of a personal theory which summarises and explains their preamble and can be presented as a conclusion, then common sense - which dictates that they wish to be believed - also includes a requirement to present as many justifications for that wish to be granted by the reader (or viewer) as possible. A good historian therefore will always present or make available their sources (and as comprehensively as possible). Likewise their ancillary theories if they are relevant, which in history often means their political or religious bias and beliefs. And a really good historian employing common sense will do this in a manner which facilitates criticism rather than deflects or avoids it, the one presently devised that works best being to compile one's work either within, or using the standards imposed by, reputable academic institutions - the crucial one being peer review by individuals also constrained by these demands.

The result for the reader, neutral or biased, is a work in which the mechanism behind its construction can be trusted by them to have been employed as honestly as its creator could manage, and any lapse in honesty or ability will already have been flagged up by the process anyway in the form of reputable reviews.

The "ultra" post-modernist view might hold that none of these checks and balances absolve any presentation from suspicion, and this might be true in an absolutist sense, but since then suspicion falls also by default on their own averral anyone wishing to learn anything simply has to place such reservations on the back burner and employ common sense too, hopefully as diligently as the writers, when reading their work. In no way does this present an existential crisis to anyone in relation to received knowledge, its acquisition or assessment. Common sense alone dictates that existentialist crises such as those anyway must never take precedence over the acquisition and assimilation of knowledge. It is a simple value judgement we elect to take every day in the course of living, and learning history - like learning anything - is subject to the same values we apply to decide when we should believe anything and when we should doubt anything. Accommodating both in relation to one factual claim, for example, is rarely sustainable if one wants to proceed to learning another fact, and so on.

It is better to proceed moderately confused in life than to stay until one dies in a hole of deep uncertainty, fortified against uncomfortable doubt often from within by a self-made structure of unjustified certainties to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from simply a prison of doubt itself.

nordmann wrote:

It is better to proceed moderately confused in life than to stay until one dies in a hole of deep uncertainty, fortified against uncomfortable doubt often from within by a self-made structure of unjustified certainties to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from simply a prison of doubt itself.

Yes, I agree entirely with what you say.

Anyway, I'll leave you to your lurking down in the "scrubbage" (clever word, by the way, classic nordmann) - best I take a break from all this now. You win.

EDIT: I am completely out of my depth trying to discuss this - or anything - with you. I do not have your intellect, your command of the subtleties of English, or your ability to devastate an opponent. If carelessly foolish words from me have caused pain or offence here, I am genuinely sorry: I never mean to hurt anyone during a discussion or debate. Deliberate insult is never my intent: I consider it an absolutely despicable way to argue.

Temperance,

only to show how difficult it is to write history I give an example from my own experience. It's about Belgian history and perhaps not that comprehensible if you are not an insider, but I hope with my guide I will be able to show you the difficulties of writing "honest" history...
Its about the 18 days campaign, in fact the 18 days of battle in Belgium starting on 10 May 1940.
And the polemic started on a French forum where the webmaster mentioned an article about:
the difference in combativity between the Flemish and the Walloon regiments...
Before the war the regiments were distributed in Flemish and Walloon regiments...
First my links, because the wife is calling to go to sleep...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Fontaine
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toudi
http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1012
http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=526
http://www.39-45.org/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=31432&start=30


Kind regards, your friend Paul.

OOPS, Dear Temperance,

nearly spent my time with research sparked by a link about the Spanish Armada by Gil, in the Isabel Barreto thread...

To start with my history writing history...
At the beginning there was a thread on a French forum
http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=526
Where the webmaster Bruno Roy Henry pointed to an article from a certain Fontaine in a mensuel Toudi
http://www.larevuetoudi.org/fr/story/r%C3%A9giments-flamands-et-wallons-en-mai-1940
The tendence of the article I have to say is rather at first sight neutral but nevertheless he points to the lack of combativity of nearly all Flemish regiments in comparaison with the Wallloon ones and the surrrender of many without much fight...

I did some research as I always do about the author and his work:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Fontaine

And it is not anyone having a PHD in philosophy from the university of Louvain Belgium...but further in his curriculum stays:
"Il se réclame du renardisme. Il est connu pour avoir fait un discours pour l'instauration d'une république et d'une Wallonie autonome, à Namur, lors des fêtes de Wallonie le 19 septembre 1999"
"Il est connu pour avoir fait un discours pour l'instauration d'une république et d'une Wallonie autonome, à Namur, lors des fêtes de Wallonie le 19 septembre 1999"
(He is known to have made an address for the instauration of an autonomous Wallonia, speech at Namur during the "Fêtes de Wallonië", the 19th of september 1999)
And it was already from 2008 that the discussion started:
http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=526

And again I was sollicitated by Bruno Roy Henry on the forum: Le monde en guerre (the world at war, WWII) on the same question:
http://www.39-45.org/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=31432&start=30
"Bruno,
j'ai déja promis sur votre forum de repondre à votre question, qui est trés difficile à prouver au fond. J'avais besoin des numéros de "Jours de guerre" et de "België in de tweede wereldoorlog". J'ai déja fait des recherches il y a quelque mois et les numéros sont encore disponible dans les archives de la bibliothèque de Bruges. Mais faute de temps...si absorbé par le forum histoire américain Historum et le forum Passion Histoire et je lis aussi votre forum, peut -être pas tous les "utterings" de François Delpla...et enfin je suis encore un forum histoire de "ex-BBC-iens" stationné à Norvège: Res Historica...
J'ai déja fait des recherches dans votre forum et j'ai vu que Mick et moi ont déja abordé la question lors d'un wikipédia? qui mentionne ce question en français et pas en néerlandais. Peut-être que c'est l'auteur de votre article qui avait rédigé le wikipédia français? Un peu plus tard le wikipédia français ne mentionnnait plus cette question d'après mes recherches...je ne sait pas comment c'est maintenant...
Je promis, et vous me connaissez, de chercher avec une attitude impartiale. Mais seulement de mon point de vue d'amateur historien et avec les ressources que je peux trouver et de préférence des sources sans parti pris..."

Tomorrow the traduction, Temperance...and it will not be as in those old silent cowboy films of the Twenties: next week the ungoing events...
No it is only that the lady is saying that it is bedtime...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

I doubt if you will ever find a truly "neutral" historian, and the best we can do is to BE that historian, creating our own syntheses of the accounts of numerous different authorities (hint - if Author B is continually citing author A, they almost certainly share a viewpoint, and you need to move on to Author C, the one whose views our respected Prof. B dismisses)

It's finding Author C that often fouls up that method (which is basically sound advice nevertheless). Some kind of informed and intelligent approach has to be used to identify which of the thousands of non-A or B authors who have published an opinion deserve to be treated as C in your eyes. An appreciation of some of the basic principles taught as historiography helps to a degree. However, ironically, a love of history itself can often work to one's detriment here - with that love comes exposure to the alternatives, but not necessarily the critical faculties to prioritise them, especially when tackling a theme new to one.

nordmann wrote:

It's finding Author C that often fouls up that method (which is basically sound advice nevertheless). Some kind of informed and intelligent approach has to be used to identify which of the thousands of non-A or B authors who have published an opinion deserve to be treated as C in your eyes. An appreciation of some of the basic principles taught as historiography helps to a degree. However, ironically, a love of history itself can often work to one's detriment here - with that love comes exposure to the alternatives, but not necessarily the critical faculties to prioritise them, especially when tackling a theme new to one.

Nordmann,

yes it is difficult to find a neutral historical author. And to trust for instance the omnipresent Wikipedia, to take one example, is also dangerous, because such subject as this one is such "special" history, that nearly nobody can challenge it because of the technicity of the subject. You can of course say that I can challenge the wiki because I am perhaps one of the few who did the research to know the background. But although it is obvious that the wiki has its information from "Toudi" I preferred to challenge the question on the forum: "Le Monde en Guerre" and as such the readers have an alternative to the wiki article...
And at least my motives are honest, while those of the PHD in filosophy, who says that he is against the Belgian monarchy and for an independent republican Wallonia away from Belgium, Brussels and Flanders, can be in that light a bit biased? But perhaps you can say that I too am not "neutral", while I still see the Belgian entity with its several "regions"...

Yes I agree with Gil and Temperance and in a former discussion with Ferval that it is very difficult to be "neutral"...but I still stick to my statement that in history writing doing it along the scientific method one can "try" to be as accurate and as less biased as possible...and yes it is many times interesting to  discern as many sources as possible even opposite ones and to make a balanced choice among them to get a more complete picture of the question. I did it for instance for the Belgian ultraright figure of Léon Degrelle...

Kind regards, Paul.

Temperance, addendum to the previous  message.

"Bruno,
j'ai déja promis sur votre forum de repondre à votre question, qui est trés difficile à prouver au fond. J'avais besoin des numéros de "Jours de guerre" et de "België in de tweede wereldoorlog". J'ai déja fait des recherches il y a quelque mois et les numéros sont encore disponible dans les archives de la bibliothèque de Bruges. Mais faute de temps...si absorbé par le forum histoire américain Historum et le forum Passion Histoire et je lis aussi votre forum, peut -être pas tous les "utterings" de François Delpla...et enfin je suis encore un forum histoire de "ex-BBC-iens" stationné à Norvège: Res Historica...
J'ai déja fait des recherches dans votre forum et j'ai vu que Mick et moi ont déja abordé la question lors d'un wikipédia? qui mentionne ce question en français et pas en néerlandais. Peut-être que c'est l'auteur de votre article qui avait rédigé le wikipédia français? Un peu plus tard le wikipédia français ne mentionnnait plus cette question d'après mes recherches...je ne sait pas comment c'est maintenant...
Je promis, et vous me connaissez, de chercher avec une attitude impartiale. Mais seulement de mon point de vue d'amateur historien et avec les ressources que je peux trouver et de préférence des sources sans parti pris..."


(Bruno, (a sollicitor from I suppose from Paris, if I remember it well)
I have already promised on your forum to reply at your question, which is very difficult to prove in depth. I need the data of "Jours de guerre" and of "België in de tweede wereldoorlog. I have already done research some moths ago in the booklets wich re still available in the archyves of the library of Bruges.
I have already done research on your forum and I have seen that Mick and I have already brought up the question on the occasion of a Wikipedia? that mentionned thsi question in French but not in Dutch. perhaps it is the author of your article, who has formulated this question in the French wiki? Some time later the French wiki didn't mention anymore this question up to my research...I don't know how it is now...I promise, and you know me, to search with an impartial attitude. But only from my point of view of amateur historian and with the sources that I can find and in preference sources which are not biased...)

Temperance, I give here my final take about the question in the thread after all the intermittent research in the former messages.
It's again in French and if you want I will translate it tomorrow...and as translating from one foreign language into another is so tiresome I prefer to wait for your advice ...

Re: Campagne des 18 jours

Post Numéro: 52   de Paul Ryckier   07 Jan 2013, 23:30
Addendum au message précédent.
Je ne sais pas ce que c'est passé? J'ai déja plusieurs fois essayé d'atteindre le URL:
http://www.larevuetoudi.org/fr/story/r% ... n-mai-1940
mais on ne peut pas le capter comme avant. L'ordinateur dit toujours après quelques trois minutes que la page de la toile ne peut pas être reproduit...
Pour la différence entre les régiments flamands et wallons, mes suppositions! sont:
Que les soldats d'infanterie de réserve ne sont même après tant de mois de mobilisation que des citoyens en uniforme.
Chez les citoyens flamands on avait plus de gens de "droite" que chez les Wallons, plus Socialiste et donc plus anti-fasciste? Pour les mouvements fascistes de l'entre deux guerres je pense, et j'ai déja fait des recherches dans le temps pour la Tribune Histoire de Bruno, que le VNV en Flandre était plus répandu, que le Rex de Léon Degrelle en Wallonie et à Bruxelles, mais je n'ai jamais trouvé des chiffres cohérentes et ça dépénd aussi de quelle année on fait le calcul. Et même une division comme la quatrième pouvait être entamée? Avec des causes de subordination et de laxisme pendant la mobilisation...
Les cadres wallons chez l'armée et chez les politiques avaient aussi plus des membres qui regrettaient la fin de la pacte avec la France (1922? je dois vérifier dans mes notes) sous la regne de Albert I (mort après une chute, mais pas un accident (supposé dans un livre récent autour de ce drame)) et ils regrettaient aussi la neutralité introduite par Léopold III et le parlement belge (voir mes notes sur Tribune Histoire concernant l'introduction de la neutralité belge. Discussion avec Bruno sur Tribune Histoire). Donc plusieurs cadres et citoyens wallons avaient tendance à se battre contre les fascistes allemands en aidant les troupes françaises entrées en Belgique?
Concernant les histoires que j'ai entendu des miliciens par exemple au Canal Albert. J'ai vu sur des photos de Peter Taghon que les planeurs allemands sont attérris aprés les lignes belges sans marques allemands sur leure carlingue et attaquaient les régiments le long du Canal Albert de derrière. Ils faisaient aussi semblant de parachutistes avec des poupées qui sont jetées des avions. Ce soldat témoin disait à moi que les Allemands sont vu comme des "magiciens" qui pouvaient exercer la magie en laissant apparaître leurs soldats un peu partout...et ça donne de la panique qui se répandit de bouche à bouche...Et je sais on avait le même à Witry, Léglise et Nives...mais là bas on avait des soldats professionels, les Chasseurs Ardennois...?
Et je suis d'accord, j'ai entendu des soldats d'infanterie flamande des indices qu'ils ne risqueraient leur peau qu'en cas d'urgence immédiate ou pour proteger leurs camerades. Chez l'artillerie qui n'avaient pas le contact direct avec l'ennemi ils étaient plus vaillants il me semble...
Alors reste les mèmores personnelles de ma mère le 25 Mai et les jours suivants...que je veux raconter dans le message suivant..."


Kind regards, Paul.

Paul - Did the Eben Emael operation have a major impact on Belgian troops morale?

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Paul - Did the Eben Emael operation have a major impact on Belgian troops morale?

Gilgamesh,

if I am right not so much on the Belgian troops' morale, but it was of important strategic value, while it made possible to conquer the bridges on the Meuse and so to come  directly on the Albert Canal the first defensive line, which was rapidly surpassed obliging the Belgian troops to retreat to the KW line ( from Koningshooikt to Waver, from east of Antwerp to south of Brussels) hold by the BEF and the French. But that was then rapidly without value because of the breaktrough in the Ardennes (operation Sichelschnitt), cutting off the allies in the North from those in the South.
I made a lot of "studies" for the several fora among others the poor coordination with the Dutch after the march to Breda from the first French army, the best one. Also very poor coordination in the Belgian Ardennes between the entering French army and the Belgian army, among others the tank obstacles (cointet) against the German tanks, but which of course also hindered the French tanks.
On the whole very poor coordination between the Allies, which were on 10 May, date of entering of the British and French troops in Belgium, to say the best at least improvisatory...
The only two serious occasions to counter the German breaktrough to Calais were the tank battle at Hannut and the counter offensive of the British and French at Arras
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arras_(1940)
And here you see also the poor coordination...as the Ypres conference between the British, the French and the Belgians...I made in the time a whole thread on it about the misunderstandings...

While we are on it, Gil, and it is perhaps out of topic here, I made once a what if,  and many on a French forum aggreed with me that it was a big mistake to have the French best army pushed to Breda...what if the British and the French had stayed at the Belgian border, perhaps these troops would have been available for a counter attack against the breaktrough in the Ardennes...But perhaps that the Germans would then have changed their plans too with these new data that would also filtered through to the German espionage?
But I suggested also that even with that what if, while the Germans were that superior in battle strategy, that they also would have won the Battle for France
See for instance "The strange defeat" from Marc Bloch and many other comments...
Perhaps the only difference would have been the retreat through France of the British and the French and not a Dunkirk, but a retreat to AFN (French North Africa) and not a Mers-el-Kebir...
But that "what if" is a complete other story...

Kind regards, Paul.

Digressing back to the topic for a moment - does one really want to read the work of a neutral historian anyway, even if one could be identified? After all, what would identify one? A determination not to draw subjective conclusions in analysis of historical events, it seems to me, leaves the historian with rather nowhere to go in terms of intelligent analysis. Unlike with more purely scientific pursuits, history is an attempt to understand what boils down to human behaviour performed by individuals and societies operating within frameworks of attitudes and circumstances that themselves demand at this point in time to be properly understood before one can draw any value judgement concerning those who lived through them. This also, should the historian wish to be rigorously neutral, would obviously present a considerable challenge to reliable and full comprehension anyway. Such a historian, besides simply presenting the extant factual record of events (and even this is fraught with opportunity for bias), could never draw any useful conclusion whatsoever.

It strikes me that Gil's point earlier is probably the most relevant one to this discussion - that the onus is on the reader to apprise themselves of the factual record as thoroughly as possible (read, read, read, and then read) and in that way - when approaching another work related to whatever historical theme it tackles - be naturally aware of that which has been omitted, the most common indication of bias, without being either surprised or dismissive when each omission is noticed.

In fact the real surprise and suspicion should be when confronted with a work that apparently omits nothing. In my experience this often indicates invention of the record, and whether the culprit then draws analytical conclusion or not the damage done to historical analysis per se is incalculably greater than that done by any biased historian who has stuck to the rules.

Nordmann,

"A determination not to draw subjective conclusions in analysis of historical events, it seems to me, leaves the historian with rather nowhere to go in terms of intelligent analysis."

I agree with you that an historian has after his scientific research of the historical events always to make "subjective conclusions" but then in a logical way which let not intrude anomalies into his subjective conclusions.

"Unlike with more purely scientific pursuits, history is an attempt to understand what boils down to human behaviour performed by individuals and societies operating within frameworks of attitudes and circumstances that themselves demand at this point in time to be properly understood before one can draw any value judgement concerning those who lived through them."

That's right too, one has to transpose himself into the thinking world of that particular place and time, before to start to make any "subjective conclusion", but in my humble opinion that don't free any historian from the rules mentioned in paragraph one. And taht's also the opinion of Professor Ankersmit that I mentioned before and he has written a complet book about it...

"This also, should the historian wish to be rigorously neutral, would obviously present a considerable challenge to reliable and full comprehension anyway. Such a historian, besides simply presenting the extant factual record of events (and even this is fraught with opportunity for bias), could never draw any useful conclusion whatsoever."

"rigorously neutral, would obviously present a considerable challenge to reliable and full comprehension anyway."
Why not? After this rigorously neutral approach an historian can always pronounce his conclusions (I agree always subjective) based on his own judgment from experienced historian.


And yes I agree with Gil too, that it is the "alert" and "experienced" reader, who has finally to make a judgment, and in my opinion he can only do that after comparing several on the first side "honest" works. I even agree that it is for the "alert" reader, as for the "alert" historian interesting to read also the "biased" works to have a broader picture of the question and to make his own "subjective conclusions"...

To give an example I mentioned to Islanddawn this evening: the book about Angela Merkel. I found it a rather "objective" book which pointed only to the events and some relationships that pointed in certain directions, but it was up to the reader to make any conclusions.
Quite something else than the book mentioned in "Der Spiegel", which pointed to Merkel as an old "Communist" from East-Germany.
I have nothing yet read from the book, but from the content I guess that it will make unsupported claims, not based on known facts?
But I don't say that one has not to read that book as it has from his data perhaps some facts that give a more complete picture about Angela Merkel. I guess also that you will find no Turkish historian anymore, which can give a fair picture about for instance an Erdogan...
I had also that experience about Pétain on a French forum...And "Maréchal Pétain" is already dead sometime...



Kind regards, Paul.

I was dismayed when rereading the posts on this very interesting topic to discover that I had ended up scrapping with nordmann again. And he had been so nice and polite in his opening post! Oh dear, perhaps it is I who qualify as being a tad unreasonable at times - motes and beams and all that.

But enough of such melancholy thoughts. I have resurrected the topic, not to apologise, but because of something I have just read in Julian Barnes' superb novel "The Sense of an Ending". It is a novel about histories - our own and those of other people, a book about time and remembering -  a study of memory and memories. I watched the film (starring Jim Broadbent) last week, but would advise others to read the book first.

I know quoting at length often indicates a lack of original thought, but I found the following exchanges from the text so interesting - and I hope relevant to this thread - that I wanted to share them.

During an A-level history class sometime during the early 1960s, a newcomer to the sixth form, a boy called Adrian Finn, has this to say in response to his history master's asking whether or not he has studied the period being discussed: was he "up to this period"?

"Not really, sir, I'm afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event - even the outbreak of the First World War, for example - is that 'something happened'. "

Later in the week, during the next history lesson, the story's narrator tells how the teacher, "as if picking up Adrian's earlier challenge", asked the class to debate the origins of the First World War: specifically the responsibility of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassin for starting the whole thing off.

Back then, we were most of us absolutists. We liked Yes v. No, Praise v. Blame, Guilt v. Innocence... We liked a game that ended in a win and loss, not a draw. And so for some, the Serbian gunman, whose name is long gone from my memory (insert a smiley here), had one hundred per cent individual responsibility...

..."Finn, you've been quiet. You started this ball rolling. You are, as it were, our Serbian gunman...Would you care to give us the benefit of your thoughts?"

"I don't know, Sir."

"What don't you know?"

"Well, in one sense I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident." He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us. "Indeed, isn't the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is - was - a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us."

There was silence. And no, he wasn't taking the piss, not in the slightest.

In the last session of the term, attempting to look back over what has been learnt and to draw conclusions, the seemingly simple question is put to the boys.

"What, then, is History? Any thoughts? Finn?"

" 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.' "

"Is it indeed? Where did you find that?"

"Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He's French."

"So one might have guessed. Would you care to give us an example? "

Which Finn (who, not surprisingly, wins a scholarship to Cambridge) proceeds to do. I'd like to give his example here, but have quoted enough.

Good that a mere novel includes such interesting stuff about History, I feel. Hope I'm not wrong about that.

I'm afraid that is one piece of advice I extremely unlikely to take. I have a settled opinion that one should never NEVER NEVER read the book before watching the film.

Ah yes, Gil, that's somewhat like never reading a post here before noting who wrote it.

Novels are an interesting way of exploring ideas - or  in this case for relating 6th form discussion. I recall many such times when the nature of Beauty, Altruism - and yes, the purity of historian opinion and similar were our daily fare. And now, many years on am no clearer about any of them tho I think we were all agreed that historian bias was inevitable - like taking sides for the Boat Race , sometimes for the oddest of reasons. (We had heated family rows  once a year with  someone's winning crowing fading by the next dawn for 12 months.) I never had thc courage to write an A level answer that it (whatever) happened. Does it really matter why? The Unification of Italy comes to mind.

Thing is, Finn was taking the p*ss!

Nordmann will know why. Probably Gil does too! (I had to be told - alas - by a historian, of course.)

Actually, I think it was Barnes taking the p!$$ out of Bennett's "The History Boys" as much as anything else.

And of course what 6th forms also used to be for; two years of immense fun. Is it thus now? Not only having a go at history but Economics and Politics were ripe for it then too. I recall our head trying to be a neutral politician in discussion - bring on the mincer, guys. Fifty years on I met his daughters at a High Table dinner held at that school who said they knew of me and my lot very well as he had related his daily suffering during our time there. Three of those went on to get OxBridge Doctorates in History with elevated careers. The rest of us only got pithier...... does that need any$$$'s?

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Actually, I think it was Barnes taking the p!$$ out of Bennett's "The History Boys" as much as anything else.

There are perhaps parallels, but not what I had in mind. But perhaps I'm wrong. It was around 1964/65 remember - lot of stuff coming out of France at the time which a very, very bright student hoping to get into Oxbridge would be interested in and reading - not so sure about the relevance of Lagrange's work, though.

But then again...

I found this article interesting:

The Sense of Uncertainty




In their reviews, many critics mention Patrick Lagrange or quote his definition; in a sense, it seems to plainly assert the thesis, so to speak, of the novel. For The Sense of an Ending is concerned with the imperfections of memory —of its narrator’s memory in particular— and inadequate documentation and the illusory certainty we each have about our own history. Beneath this scarcely-interrogated certainty, Barnes posits, is an impenetrable morass of synthesized recollection and invention: experiences deliberately forgotten, lessons we cannot bear to learn, delusions we grasp tightly, fears we will not acknowledge, stories we repeat until we don’t remember the events they misrepresent. The Sense of an Ending explores how we compose the texts of our lives, and how as storytellers we lie to ourselves and others; how as historians we redact our perceptions and later our memories; how as academics we rationalize our behavior theoretically; and how as individuals we read our lives as inattentively and badly as we read novels.

It is fitting, then, that the French historian Patrick Lagrange is himself an invention, his remark a creation of uncertain provenance, his authority on the subjects of history and memory as questionable as our own. Among those reviewers who didn’t uncritically parrot his professorial assertion were some who seemed irritated by the false-flag fiction:


Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation — and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book.

This is an astonishingly dim analysis in many respects; notably, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Adrian concocted Lagrange; all we know is that the narrator Anthony Webster claims that he remembers Adrian defining history thusly and attributing the definition to a French historian named Patrick Lagrange. Did Adrian manufacture him? Did Webster remember him incorrectly? Did both occur? Did neither? Did Barnes mean for Patrick Lagrange to have been part of the fictional world of his characters? But in all other historical respects it is identical to our own!

With pristine irony, Barnes lightly enacts for us, for our experiential intellection, a moment of vertiginous epistemic uncertainty. We have not only a muddled and unreliable narrator, telling a story at some decades’ remove from the events which, at this point, can only be said to have “inspired” it; we have this narrator recalling words spoken by a friend to whose dark fate he may have contributed with an act he’s determined not to remember; and the words in question are, according to the friend, a quotation, that is, the friend’s recollection of the words of another; and he recalls that his friend recollects too the name of the author of the words: Lagrange.

There are too many potential points of failure along this chain of recollections and representations to count. Taken in its full context, it is a tidy, carefully-crafted satirization of the idea of epistemic authority, and it’s neither fussy nor demanding: read literally, it supports the novel’s themes; if one ponders the fact that the quotation is remembered, it supports the novel’s themes; if one digs and digs into it, and cross-references it with the world beyond the novel, one suddenly realizes that —as one of the book’s refrains has it— one didn’t understand, didn’t get it; and this supports the novel’s themes.


But time for the Moggy Thread now.

Temperance wrote:

when rereading the posts on this very interesting topic

Temperance,

I reread the thread too...are that "we", who can write such thought provoking stuff...now I understand, why we have continuously an average of some 20 readers...perhaps there are some academics among them ...if you look to "our" content"...

Kind regards to the three of you from Paul.

I am very confused by your post above, Paul, but no matter.

And I am very confused about how TV presents history. For instance, the prog on Lady Jane Grey was quite well done and posters on another site engaged with it. However, there were needlessly thin patches. Explaining (for the 4th time on UK TV  in as many months) the exact details of hanging drawing and quartering for treason ( perhaps to explain to the Scots that it was not for them alone) we were told that Jane's husband Guilford Dudley - son of the Duke of Northumberland - would suffer this fate. But did he? No source I have looked into mentioned it.

Of course the Duke recanted the faith he had set up Jane to protect - possibly to avoid it- a good bargaining point for a recant, if ever. The several Historians of high post had lots of opinions on several issues but none touched the commonsense that my tutor dished out long ago.

That Mary only had Jane beheaded when her father got involved in another plot and that she had resisted all suggestions to get on with it was not from kindness of heart - not her strongest suit - but that a 7 month gap from arrest to execution was viable once  obvious   Jane was not pregnant . Had she produced a son - ah then the succession may have been different. There was much more meat on the bone to chew over but needless repetition, attention to nasty detail and the wiseacres not sounding very wise missed much out. They also forgot to mention that Edward's will re the succession had been signed by over 160 worthies and was due to be presented  for making into law just a few days after he died. Perhaps the presenter was attempting neutrality but leaving out these and a few other related facts made for a shallow production.

Guildford Dudley was beheaded.

According to Eric Ives it only took one blow of the axe. The body was put on a cart and trundled back to the Tower "where Jane saw it being unloaded and taken into the Tower Chapel."

Not much of a response either - not that they had been very close for too long. His mum was ever so cross because Jane said she could not make him King but he would have to do with becoming Duke of Clarence so he sulked in another part of the Tower Palace just as mummy wanted. This from WiKi and not BBC prog who left him out it for the most part - apart from suggesting his gory death - and he only 17 too! A sort of latter-day snowflake response. 

Didn't Nell Gwynne's son by Charles become Duke of Clarence? Must be a title dedicated to being a full stop to ambition. I have not looked this up but you will know, Temp. Now I shall retire from posting for a tad and to the relief of many. Regards, P.  Tads come in assorted  time spans, of course.

I currently hold in my hand proof positive that a "neutral" historian does exist. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Utterly-Impartial-History-Britain-Idiots/dp/0552773964

Ah the smug mocking style....... can a book about idiot upper class rule be neutral? Not all idiots rulers are upper class and not all upper ruling class are idiots. As for the funny style - smug mockery - it is easy to write - I have and do use it myself -it may be evenly dished out but rarely is, so this tome fails the neutrality test. Many of us were taught history in the mocking style- I lapped it up - and it gave me profound insight into Caesar and his Gallic Drawers  Wars but woeful understanding of Latin which I should have been learning. I did so enjoy my school years - apart from new staff who did not understand the school style and suffered when we applied it.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

I currently hold in my hand proof positive that a "neutral" historian does exist. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Utterly-Impartial-History-Britain-Idiots/dp/0552773964

Ten years out-of-date is John O'Farrell's book - must be time for a revisionist version of his version of our island history. It is very funny, though, and you have to warm to a historian whose "About the Author" blurb tells us: John O'Farrell studied history at Desborough Comprehensive where he got a B in his O-Level*. He later continued his research by watching lots of programmes about the Nazis on the UK History Channel.

Nevertheless, O'Farrell's comment in his introduction summarises in one nice sentence what it takes Julian Barnes an entire novel to get across:

The point is that the way we recount the past is deeply affected by how we feel now: whether our perspective is clouded by fierce religious fervour, a urge of patriotism, or three pints of Brakspear's bitter...

He also makes a very valid point about Lady Jane Grey's brief reign. Noting that this unfortunate young religious fanatic (my opinion, not O'Farrell's) was known as the "Nine-Day Queen", O'Farrell adds that no one called her that on Day One because it wouldn't have been very encouraging to have had the proclamation read: "By the Grace of God she shall rule over this realm until a week on Thursday."

And we know that's true because we still have the Proclamation (they showed it on the BBC programme which Priscilla mentions above).

I actually quite enjoyed the programme, but then I would, wouldn't I? I liked the bit about the PS added to all letters signed by Jane the Quene: Jane not the Queen.
I've always believed something I read about the Jana Non Regina addendum in Alison Plowden's biography of Jane: that it was the canny young William Cecil who, good civil servant - and survivor, whatever the regime - that he was, was responsible.

Lots of different accounts of what happened to Jane and Guildford: The Chronicle of Queen Jane; Holinshed; Florio, plus the usual sarky comments from the foreign ambassadors (Renard, by the way, the Spanish ambassador, was repeatedly utterly exasperated by Mary Tudor's ridiculous desire to be "kind") - also the Marquis of Northampton who watched Guildford's execution from the nearby Devil's Tower. Whose version should we believe - and why?


PS * One assumes this refers to his History O-Level.

PPS After eight pints of this strong Oxford brew, History becomes even more clouded - or so I have been told. I never ever drink beer - can't stand it. But good red wine probably has a similar effect. We see things as we are, not as they are (or were).


Brakspear's Bitter - the Historian's Friend.

Just popped in to say hello and apologise for my absence. 
I think I may be getting the hang of historians (if not history) after reading a book by one John Harvey, called The Plantagenets.  I got halfway through after wondering whether he was extracting the michael.  I then gurgled the chap and found he was a fascist architectural historian which I don't think is the real deal.
glen

It occurred to me when I woke up that my last post might be misinterpreted.

What I meant was that I can recognise when a historian has an axe to grind and cherry picks anecdotal evidence to suit their agenda.  I know the primary sources are prone to this but had not always recognised it in later books.

[Edit]   After a little browsing it's obvious that this and the previous post should have gone to 'History of History- Is there such a thing as a "neutral" historian'.  I don't know if His Omnipotence is able to transfer it.
glen

Dutifully and omnipotently moved, and welcome back brenogler!

brenogler,

is there a "neutral" historian?
Two examples:
The French controversy about Sylvain Goughenheim:
my last message of today:
http://historum.com/european-history/96237-enlightenment-stolen-islamic-knowledge-15.html

The German Historikerstreit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit


Kind regards from Paul.