Between January and March 1961, a former diplomat and historian, particularly the historian of Russia, Edward Hallett Carr, delivered six lectures as part of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge. E.H. Carr's lectures soon became published as a famous book, What is History?, which discussed and debated history and historical theories of his time.
In these lectures, E.H. Carr asked his listeners what constitutes history. To understand what constitutes history, it is essential to examine how “facts” emerge—and become established—in history, and how they shape historians and their history.
Nineteenth-century historians, such as Ranke in the 1830s, suggest that a historian must “simply show how it really was”—that is, to treat facts as they are, as objects separate from the subject. This view of history was known as the commonsense view of history. Here, the “historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to [them]”. But such objectivist history-writing is fundamentally problematic.
The Historian and His Facts
E.H. Carr suggests that “facts speak only when the historian calls on them: he decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context” (pp. 10-11). And in fact, all historians are selective, and all suggestions of historical facts existing objectively, independently of interpretations, are a “preposterous fallacy” (p. 12). There are two ways in which this selection of facts is fundamentally biased.
Say, someone who writes in 18th-century Europe, only writes of things about the French Revolution that he can see, understand, interpret, and deem fit for himself and his audience. Here, there is already a particular selection bias. Now, say a historian picks up this text and wants to write their history of the French Revolution, they again do their own filters with facts—they select and choose, and sometimes even introduce new facts.
Therefore, E.H. Carr writes: “Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. They do not constitute history by themselves; they provide no ready-made answer to this tiresome question: What is history?” (p. 19).