E h carr biography of william hill

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    HISTORY ZONE

    E. H. Carr’s What is History? was first published in and remains in print today regarded, whether you agree with him or not, as a ‘classic’  of its genre.  It has, after all, sold over a quarter of a million copies since its first publication, and with good reason. I read it first when studying O Levels and later an undergraduate and on several occasions since.   Its droll and incisive prose elegantly attacked the kind of history being taught at school and university that was dominated by high politics and diplomacy, bereft of theory and entirely  unaware that it might be serving some kind of ideological or political purpose.   This was not lost on the vibrant ‘school’ of English Marxist historians, who began to publish widely in the s, after most of them had left the Communist Party in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and devoted themselves to building up the intellectual foundations of the ‘New Left’.  Historian

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    The Two Faces of E.H. Carr

    by Professor Richard J. Evans, with extracts from his new introduction to What is History?, published by Palgrave

    E. H. Carr's What is History? played a central role in the historiographical revolution in Britain in the s. As an undergraduate I devoured its witty and cogent attacks on the kind of history I had been taught at school - dominated by high politics and diplomacy, bereft of theory, and entirely innocent of any consciousness that it might be serving some kind of ideological or political purpose. It rudely knocked the sacred texts of the historical profession, such as the New Cambridge Modern History, off their pedestals, to the general applause of all of us who were forced to plough our way through them. Not the least of its pleasures was the fact that it made fun of so many icons of the Cold War - purveyors of 'Western' values such as Sir Karl Popper and Sir Isaiah Berlin, at a time when these

  • e h carr biography of william hill

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    EH Carr’s sense of history

    History has not been kind to EH Carr. When he died in , aged 90, he was still viewed as a formidable, authoritative public intellectual from an era in which the divide between public and academic had yet to become an iron curtain. He was the brilliant historian who, thanks to his volume history of Russia after , was feted, in the words of his friend Isaac Deutscher, as &#;the first genuine historian of the Soviet regime&#;; he was the man who had birthed the discipline of international relations, with his real-politik championing of appeasement in The Twenty Years&#; Crisis: ‑, published, with grim irony, as Hitler&#;s Germany rolled into Poland; and he was the author, most famously perhaps, of What fryst vatten history? (), a limpid, persuasive polemic that proved so popular among the general public that professional historians have rarely stopped dismissing it ever since.

    Yet today Carr is an almost wilfully obscured figure. When he fryst vatten mentioned, it is wi