Iggers, Georg, G. (1997) Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Hanover, NH, Wesleyan University Press. Why History Matters is thought provoking and challenging, in its insistent and urgent call for a closer engagement between history and public political discourse. It makes a strong case that an informed and nuanced sense of history is an essential part of civic empowerment, developing the remit of 'public history' far from its default grounds of heritage and identity. My admiration notwithstanding, in this response to his book I would like to question some of the author's ideas and assumptions, consider some less welcome potential effects of political/historical engagement, and ask what the role of pre-modern history might also play. The historian and the public parents of our modern generation do not seem to take the matter of bringing up a family as an important priority ... it's the parents that need educating and bringing into line - not just their kids. Our past provides us with that example. John A. Tosh FRHistS is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of History at Roehampton University. [1] He gained his BA at the University of Oxford and his MA at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD by the University of London in 1973; his thesis topic being "Political Authority among the Langi of Northern Uganda, circa 1800–1939". He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 1987–88 he held a visiting appointment at the University of California, Davis. [2] At Roehampton University he teaches History, specifically "Reading and Writing History". He served as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society from 1999 to 2002. [3] He has also published several works on the history of masculinity in nineteenth-century Britain. [4] He is currently preparing a critical analysis of the social applications of historical perspective in contemporary Britain.

Konstantin Dierks, ‘Men’s history, gender history, or cultural history?’, Gender and History 14 (2002), 150. A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992). Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Hard and heavy: toward a new sociology of masculinity,’ in Michael Kaufman (ed.), Beyond Patriarchy (Toronto, 1987), p. 176. Callinicos, Alex (1995) Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge, Polity Press. R.W. Connell, ‘The big picture: masculinities in recent world history’, Theory and Society 22 (1993), 606.

The dangers of relevance

John Gillis, A World of their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996). John Tosh’s Reader begins with a substantial introductory survey charting the course of historiographical developments since the second half of thenineteenth century. He explores both the academic mainstream and more radical voices within the discipline. The text is composed of readings by historians such as Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Scott and Jordanova. This third edition has been brought up to date by taking the 1960s as its starting point. It now includes more recent topics like public history, microhistory and global history, in addition to established fields like Marxist history, gender history and postcolonialism. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London, 1983), p. 120. For a corrective, see Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120–22. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark (eds), Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (Basingstoke, 2007); Heather Ellis and Jessica Meyer (eds), Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2009). Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is History?? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, I believe it provides a much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr's (apparently radical at the time) acceptance that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts, or that sources only become evidence when used by the historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning (Jenkins 1995: 1-6, 43-63). This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of all reconstructionist empiricists who follow his lead. This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by them. For illustration, rather misunderstanding the nature of "semiotics - the postmodern?" as he querulously describes it, it is the claim of the historian of Latin America Alan Knight that Carr remains significant today precisely because of his warning a generation ago to historians to "interrogate documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer's motives" (Knight 1997: 747). To maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the postmodern challenge to historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr's contribution in What is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-modernist history.

Joanne Bailey, lecture delivered at conference on ‘Masculinities and the Other’, Balliol College, Oxford, 29 August 2007. See further Joanne Bailey’s chapter in this volume. In Why History Matters the schools do not carry the entire burden of my critique. The media have a crucial part to play in placing current affairs in historical perspective. But to perform that role effectively they depend on a historical profession which is alert to the topicality of its scholarship and prepared to reach out beyond a largely captive audience of fellow-academics and students. What is striking about this passage is that Stubbs did not echo the standard justification for history-teaching in schools, that it would instil patriotism and deference. Instead he emphasised the power of judgement acquired through the study of history. The value of history lay not in the detailed knowledge of particular periods or problems, but in a distinctive cast of mind - a standard of judgement which might be exercised on any subject. What Stubbs prescribed for the school pupil was in this respect identical with what he recommended to his Oxford students. Other leading historians agreed with him. When the Historical Association was founded in 1906, A.F. Pollard declared that its journal, History, would 'bring the light of history to bear in the study of politics.... to test modern experiment by historical experience.' In 1913 G.M. Trevelyan - then a progressive Liberal - declared that the educational role of history was 'to train the mind of the citizen into a state in which he is capable of taking a just view of political problems.'In answering these central questions, John Tosh argues that, despite the impression of fragmentation created by Postmodernism in recent years, history is a coherent discipline which still bears the imprint of its nineteenth-century origins. Consistently clear-sighted, he provides a lively and compelling guide to a complex and sometimes controversial subject, while making his readers vividly aware of just how far our historical knowledge is conditioned by the character of the sources and the methods of the historians who work on them.