The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice.

Kent, Christopher

The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, by Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press, 1998. viii, 306 pp. $35.00.

"What is history?" asked E.H. Carr. His answer, terse, lucid and dogmatic, made his book of that title the best selling introduction to historiography that it still remains nearly forty years later. Several generations of historians have cut their teeth on it. Chief among its few competitors has been Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History (1967), almost as terse, lucid and dogmatic, and aimed directly at Carr whose unabashed Whiggism, with its presentist and determinist tendencies, is confronted with the Toryism of historicism, history for its own sake, and suspicion of social scientism. Pairing these two books for teaching purposes staged a satisfying contest between history's two most basic theoretical positions. An additional attraction was the contrast of intended audiences between Carr's more generalized "intelligent reader" -- Carr was a professional diplomat and editorial writer for The Times as well as an historian -- and Elton's more exclusive attention to the practitioner of academic history. Carr emerged on top, by the verdict of the market place, not least because his emphasis on the social and his left of centre progressivism were in tune with the upsurge of social history in the 1960s and 1970s. Elton is out of print: Carr remains profitably in print at forty times the price of the first Penguin edition of 1964, having sold over a quarter million copies.

But nobody has yet published a book titled "What is Historiography?"-- rather surprisingly, given that historiography is currently all the rage among publishers. Whether historians are all that interested is another matter. A fairly recent survey of the profession in the U.S. found that only one percent of historians considered it their primary or even secondary field.(1) One reason for this attitude is perhaps that historiography is considered vaguely parasitical. As literary criticism is to literature, so is historiography to history: "doing it" is surely superior to writing about how it is done. Real historians do it in the archive: with primary sources: like Ranke. A related reason for historiography's slightly dubious reputation is that it promotes self-consciousness, a characteristic historians tend to view with suspicion, as encouraging at best an unhealthy subjectivity and at worst a debilitating preoccupation with matters ontological ("What is Reality?) and epistemological ("What is Truth?") that are the philosophers' business, not ours. From this standpoint, the pat answer to "What Is Historiography?" is "Trying to answer the question `What is History?'"

There was a time when historiography did not seem to matter much. At any rate, I never encountered an historiography class throughout my entire student career, from 1959 to 1968. The terra, if it meant anything, usually meant surveying the prior historical literature on a given topic or field -- a "state of play" report. Or it might be used as a near synonym for research methodology. One might read Carr's irresistibly titled (and short) book, or even R.G. Collingwood's more tantalizingly titled and much more demanding The Idea of History, in the interests of becoming "well-rounded." One might even participate in a debate over whether history was an art or a science -- whatever that meant. But matters seemed fairly clear cut. Everyone seemed to know what history was: it was what historians did. Other disciplines confirmed this belief, making it very clear that they did not do history. Literature was still committed to the "new criticism," strongly antihistoricist in its emphasis on the eternal aesthetic achievement of the masterpiece, firmly fixed in the canon and untrammelled by temporality. Social sciences were militantly anti-historical as if their very identities depended on it, as historically they indeed had. Philosophers were generally scornful of history, which offered few questions of serious interest to the dominant analytical school in the Anglo-American world. Epistemologically, historical knowledge was deemed inferior due to its lack of rigour. Well meant efforts by a school of philosophers to elevate it to the higher standard of properly scientific knowledge by forcing it into the Covering Law Model of explanation proved unconvincing -- the type of generalization that resulted was as inelegantly encumbered with qualifications as was Ptolemaic astronomy with epicycles. At bottom, it had to be admitted, history told stories, and what could be less scientific than that?

Things are different today. Historicism is currently fashionable in a number of disciplines. Story telling has become intellectually respectable in other disciplines, even hard science. The drive toward grand theory has been arrested. Structuralism, social scientism's last phase, has exhausted itself. Deconstruction has self deconstructed, we are told, and interdisciplinary trend-surfers now turn to history for inspiration in the form of postmodernism, to the pleasure of some historians, to the bemusement and dismay of others. More interested in all this, perhaps, than senior members of the profession, are the students whose duty it always is to be up to date. Many of them want to know what this all means. The task of making sense of it falls particularly upon those who teach historiography, arguably the self-consciousness of the discipline. What follows is a discussion of some recent books on offer under the general heading of historiography. What they tell us about the state of the profession is one of the most important things historiography has to offer, particularly to graduate students who aspire to become professional historians.

To begin, someone teaching historiography at the undergraduate level might consider an up to date text book dealing directly with postmodernism, which students hear so much about elsewhere, if rarely from historians. Survey evidence suggests that history is suffering from low esteem among students both in high schools (in the U.S. "students rated history their least liked subject") and universities (in Canada 1994-97 history suffered a 22% enrolment decline, ranking forty-third out of forty-seven subjects).(2) Perhaps this owes something to the perception that history is somehow out of date. Of course it is, and that's the whole point of it according to the historicist ideal. But from the presentist standpoint it is all too up to date: unavoidably, ineradicably -- some would argue disablingly -- up to date. History is in crisis some say, a disciplinary crisis brought about by its own ambitions, and the pressure of interest taken in it by other disciplines. But crisis is at least more interesting than torpor surely, if that is part of history's image problem, and may indeed present an opportunity. Three contenders in the up to date text market are Keith Jenkins, On "What is History?" From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (1995), Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (1996) and Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (1997). All are fairly short; all are published by Routledge, the theory-friendly publishers; all address the undergraduate reader. The authors come from Britain's latest generation of post-secondary institutions, where the impact of cultural studies and budget-conscious interdisciplinarity is perhaps strongest. In the country Mrs. Thatcher remade, the education sector is very market driven. These books advertise, among other things, their authors and their institutions as, if not cutting edge, at least cutting edge-conscious.

Keith Jenkins is the most militant postmodernist of this group. His book is unabashedly polemical and propagandist. You may be irritated by his cocky, hectoring vanguardism. He glories in the fact that, as "by now we all should have learned," there are "no such things as neutral/objective `interpretations,' as `innocent' surveys, as `unpositioned positions'" (p. 13). His main theme is that the old Carr versus Elton presentation of historiography should be abandoned because both these worthies are clapped out old geezers. Elton is a particular object of scorn on account of both his historicist toryism and his elitism -- his belief that the academic profession contains the only serious practitioners of history -- which make him the embodiment of "impotent modernism." Towards Carr, Jenkins is a little more respectful, as befits an old leftist who addressed a wider audience. Carr's main offence, of course, is his profound commitment to the master narrative of Western-style progress. He did not live to witness his obsolescence since he died in 1982 leaving "notes towards a second edition of What Is History?" that have been duly incorporated into the second edition of 1987 (already, pace Jenkins, in its sixth printing). Carr's notes indicate that he would have maintained his unrepentant vindication of progress. Elton, by contrast, lived to witness the fatal advent of the postmodernist "theory-mongers." Shortly before his death he warned that "we 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, in fact."(3) (The drug dealers he had in mind were Michel Foucault, Hayden White and their ilk.) Elton always emphasized the notion that history was a particularly adult activity, one that at once required and conferred maturity, a perception that has surely made history attractive to generations of students. And historians themselves, as I personally can confirm, find increasingly attractive the corollary -- that the older one is, the better one gets in this particularly knowledge-cumulative and experience-intensive discipline. By contrast, Jenkins addresses his implied readership as students who command a postmodernist future with a different view of the past. "Traditional historians," he notes, will of course offer "understandable resistances" (p. 16). Jenkins creates the impression of a stranded, re-tooling Marxist who gets a materialist frisson from talking about "running" and "working" his arguments, which he certainly does -- hard.

Jenkins approaches history, and especially historians, from the cultural studies perspective which views all disciplinary interests with a suspicious eye. He presents himself as a demystifier of the historians' guild. We historians, "salaried workers in higher education," are part of the "public historical sphere." We are "gatekeepers" who intervene in the unavoidably ideological process of naturalizing and rendering objective an interested intellectual product: "History is always history for someone" (p. 22), someone in the present. Jenkins is most persuasive when he is discussing those he Finds most sympathetic, notably his two heroes, Hayden White and Richard Rorty. His chapter on White is lucid, though it deals almost exclusively with Metahistory, now over a quarter century old and however much a landmark in the "linguistic turn" and a classic of modern historiographical studies, a book which White himself would no longer wish to be confined or defined by. However, Jenkins effectively uses White to spell out the price history as a discipline pays for its commitment to the myth that ordinary, everyday language somehow enables us to escape from theoretical issues. And how such language, far from being innocent, is peculiarly interventionist, performing much concealed theoretical work. I found Jenkins's best chapter the one on Richard Rorty, who is not an historian at all but a distinguished philosopher highly controversial within his own discipline for his strong historicizing. Jenkins conveys some sense of the high intellectual stakes currently involved in the multi-disciplinary concern with history: why it is no longer just "our game"; why Heidegger matters so much to so many serious thinkers about history; and what implications all this has for the heavily contested idea in which historians have so much invested -- that the world and truth are "out there."

Jenkins' book, in short, has the strengths of its commitments. Despite its ranting style it is both challenging and accessible at the senior undergraduate level where it might be pitted against some equally forthright book from the other side. Unfortunately there is none. E.P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory (1978) is too personal, for all its eccentric brilliance; Brian Palmer's Descent into Discourse (1990) is too turbid and truculent: moreover both vent their spleen against postmodernism and theory in the name of Marxisant materialism which most historians would not consider traditional or conventional, though to a considerable degree it is. Of the other two historiography texts considered here Southgate's History: What? and Why? and Munslow's Deconstructing History straddle the fence, attempting to offer sympathetic explanation of postmodernism without overcommitting to it. Southgate's is perhaps the more successful. Its approach integrates the "crisis of postmodernism" into a longer term perspective on historiography stretching back to ancient Greece. According to Southgate, the Rankean model of history, so important in giving scientific credentials to the discipline at a critical period of its legitimation, was specific to a particular period of our cultural and intellectual history that has now passed. However the issues of skepticism and relativism that anguished traditionalists (and postmodern triumphalists) tend to regard as uniquely part of postmodernism's corrosive attack on history, are the perennially recurring consequences of the philosophical conditions of our existence. Just as, according to Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living, so, Southgate urges, unexamined history is not worth doing. He urges students to seize history's postmodern moment as empowering. Far from undermining the value of history, it enhances it by showing how in making our past we make our future.

Decidedly less inspirational is Alun Munslow's book, which attempts with dogged impartiality to map out the current intellectual terrain of history in terms of different basic assumptions about the relationships between the history "out there" and the historian's presentation of it. The three main positions, according to Munslow, are "reconstructionist," "constructionist," and "deconstructionist," along an axis of diminishing realism. The reconstructionist is the common sense empiricist who more or less unproblematically, though of course with enormous diligence, seeks the past in its surviving traces, and reconstructs the story they tell. The constructionist, exemplified by the Marxisant historian, articulates the past according to a scientifically constructed model which explains the relationship between past events. The deconstructionist believes in the primacy of language in determining what historians do in the name of history since there is no accessible "out there" to get at. Munslow even-handedly discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these various positions, which he nuances with qualifiers such as "moderate", "practical", "naive" and "hard line." His project is certainly worthy, and ambitious, particularly at the level of comprehensibility Munslow aims at. The result, however is distinctly hazy, even with the help of a well meant glossary and specific chapters on Michel Foucault and Hayden White. In one respect at least the author displays postmodernist inclinations: he tends to blur the more traditional categories and boundaries of the discipline. Thus he labels the intellectual historian Alan Megill (p. 113) and the cultural historian Peter Burke (p. 113) philosophers, while categorizing the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (p. 19) and the philosopher Frederic Olafson (p. 142) as historians. While this might be viewed as evidence of a relaxed and generous-spirited interdisciplinarity, it could be regarded more suspiciously as an indications of the influence of cultural studies -- for many more traditional scholars, not just historians, the enemy of both disciplinary and disciplined scholarship.

Jenkins, Southgate and Munslow explicitly address an undergraduate audience with the apparent intention of demonstrating that history is alive and well and that postmodernism represents an opportunity rather than a threat. The next three books aren't so sure of this. They are addressed, somewhat in the spirit of E.H. Carr, to a wider audience, including perhaps the parents of our undergraduates, who may have heard rumors that history no longer teaches what actually happened, and if that is so, may be asking what's the use of it? Their titles are telling; The Killing of History, In Defence of History, The Truth About History, and History on Trial all purposefully borrow some of the presumed glamour, excitement and dignity of the courtroom and the judicial process (and perhaps subliminally promote the notion, long encouraged by history professors, that if nothing else, history is a good preparation for law school).

To start with the most provocatively titled, the author of The Killing of History is Australian, as is its context. Perhaps because of Australia' s geographical isolation from the West, its intellectuals have always appeared anxious to keep abreast of the latest trends. They were quick to take an interest in Foucault and quick to embrace the internet. It is an Australian university that maintains the "Postmodern Discourse Generator" website, beloved of irreverent graduate students. Hyper-receptivity to novelty is a particular problem for the discipline of history in Australia, according to Keith Windschuttle, whose book's subtitle is quite explicit about this: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past. One ominous fact he mentions is that none of the newly elevated former colleges of advanced education that have doubled the number of Australia's universities in the last decade has a separate history department. Professional history, this would suggest, is in danger of losing its distinctive identity in the all-engulfing interdisciplinary stew of cultural studies. But this is no mere diatribe against the usual suspects a la Brian Palmer. For one thing, Windschuttle is not an academic historian but a social analyst and media critic whose work must regularly expose him to a high dosage of cultural studies. His university training in traditional history, he makes clear, remains his touchstone of intellectual integrity. The interest of this book, especially to non-Australianists, is particularly its detailed and critical discussion of some outstandingly original and significant Antipodean historical scholarship bearing on postcolonial issues. In this area Australia and New Zealand seem to be in advance of Canada, with whom they share the existence of an increasingly self-conscious aboriginal population. According to Windschuttle, much of this historical scholarship is seriously vitiated by the fatal impact of other disciplines.

In fact, only three of the authors Windschuttle discusses at length are professional historians. One of them is Inga Clendinnen, whose Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991) he sees as a resounding vindication of sound historical reasoning and practice over the "Paris Labels and Designer Concepts" which he surveys in his opening chapter. Clendinnen addresses the long standing problem of explaining the fall of the Aztec empire to a handful of Spaniards. According to Windschuttle, she challenges Tzvetan Todorov, the structuralist theoretician whose The Conquest of America (1982) largely attributed the Aztec defeat to their lack of a written language, an absence that locked them into their own past with an inflexibly ritualized mindset that rendered them incapable of responding effectively to the novelty of the Spanish threat. By contrast, Clendinnen returns the Aztecs to history on the basis of contemporary reports which indicate that their politics, technology and culture of warfare were more adaptive than Todorov allows, and she notably rejects the argument that the Aztecs believed the Spanish and their horses to be divine. Windschuttle praises her for refusing Todorov's convoluted Eurocentric guilt trip which on the one hand extenuates the mass executions of the Aztecs -- described in gut-wrenching detail by Clendinnen -- as aspects of a "sacrifice society" which was "more civilized" than the "massacre society" of the Europeans who inflicted a "scourge worse than the Holocaust," while on the other hand it demeans the Aztecs by withholding agency and enrolling them in the victimology of powerlessness. Windschuttle is clear in his own mind that, heavily freighted with cultural politics though the conquest of America may have become, moral outrage and "othering" are inappropriate avenues for historical understanding.

Windschuttle's second fully credentialed Australian historian is Greg Dening, a very senior historian -- which shows that age does not necessarily arm us against temptation -- who succumbed to theory's charms. (Both Clendinnen and Dening were seemingly tempted in academic Eden, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, by that serpent Clifford Geertz, the influential cultural anthropologist.) Dening's Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (1992) reinterprets the notorious mutiny as a semiotic problem, arguing that the crew's rebellion stemmed ultimately not from undue flogging but from Bligh's failure to communicate with them, not just in the spoken language of authority but in its rituals and theatrics. Windschuttle reads this much praised work as a treatise on historical theory and method presented as a parable about the mutiny and a discussion of the European impact on the Pacific islands in the eighteenth century. He dwells on the formal aspects of the work, which is self-consciously literary, even theatrical in its division into prologue, acts, scenes and entr'actes, and hyper-aware of its uncertainties and necessary fictitiousness. Dening is not only trying to cover the story of the Bounty, but the story of the story, especially as represented in three Hollywood versions, to explore how history enters the realm of cultural literacy -- "that knowledge of the past that sustains the values of the present." Windschuttle is commendably fair in describing an approach to history that he considers a serious threat to the discipline's basic commitment to the primacy and permanence of factual evidence. He triumphantly claims that Dening himself contradicts the fashionable indeterminism of his denial that we can ever know the past "as it really was" by his own conventional archival research which establishes from statistical evidence the significant fact that Bligh "really was" less inclined to flog than were most Royal Navy commanders of his era.

The other historian who crosses Windschuttle's sights is Simon Schama, whose Dead Certainties (1991) succeeded in raising the blood pressure of a number of guardians of historical morality by crossing an ethical line and inventing certain material, such as an alleged soldier's eyewitness account of the Battle of Quebec, as fact (though he admitted to doing so in his Afterword). Windschuttle, a talented writer himself, sympathizes with Schama's aesthetic rationale for claiming greater freedom in mobilizing the imaginations of both author and reader. But he enters a sensible caveat about the dangers to the perceived legitimacy of history that attend taking advantage of -- cashing in on -- the implicit and legitimate expectations readers, especially the non-professional readers Schama is angling for, bring to the text. Such trust is indeed precious to our profession and should not be abused.

The other scholars targeted by Windschuttle are not within the discipline, but students of history will find him a stimulating guide to their work since he is more knowledgeable about them than are some of the professional historians who have warned us against accepting rides from them -- Foucault for instance, who did not choose to be disciplined by history or any other discipline. Despite repeating a few canards', including the suggestion that Foucault lifted the central idea of Discipline and Punish unacknowledged from Erving Goffman (at least he does not tell us that the episteme was a plagiarism of Kuhn's paradigm) Windschuttle is a grudgingly respectful guide. Thomas Kuhn figures prominently in a chapter on history and the sciences, natural and social where along with Karl Popper, Paul Feyrabend and Imre Lakatos he is viewed mainly as a threat to history's epistemological foundations. Here the author seems unduly swayed the eccentric views of an Australian philosopher, David Stove, whose apparent mission is to discredit this school of thought, which leads in his view from relativism to absurdity via anarchism. The fact is, however, that the revolution in the history and philosophy of science associated with these names has done much more damage to traditional thinking in the discipline of philosophy than in history, since it has infected philosophy with historicity in a way that makes many philosophers, like Stove, deeply uncomfortable, the natural sciences and particularly physics (from which Kuhn originally came to history) having long been taken as the gold standard for true knowledge. If it is hard for historians to cope With the notion that truth has a history -- that it changes over time -- they can at least fob the problem off on philosophers. It is much harder for philosophers, whose primary business it is to worry about such matters. Though historians may be concerned about the invasion of history by other disciplines, it is worth considering the other side of it. Not only philosophy but every discipline from the hardest sciences downwards has undergone significant historicization in the last few decades. From their perspective, they might be considered the victims of an invasion by history and those who come to terms with it, or even embrace it, might be considered collaborators by the resistants. A whole area of sociology (some would say the intellectually liveliest), the sociology of knowledge, is deeply historicized: one of its chief scholars Anthony Giddens, whose work Windschuttle criticizes, has argued that history and sociology now amount to the same thing. Most members of both disciplines would probably disagree, and so would I.

Though some historians, a minority I suspect, might consider history a science, hardly anyone outside the discipline would consider it one, except perhaps a few unreconstructed Marxists retaining a neo-Hegelian definition of history. Until recently Marxism provided scientific stiffening for a number of soft sciences, and a soft Marxism was part of the common sense of social history.(4) The intellectual retreat of Marxism and the empirical discrediting of its historical master narrative by the collapse of the Soviet empire were viewed as striking confirmations of postmodernism's advent. Windschuttle's chapter on the "Fall of Communism and the End of History" discusses the implications of Francis Fukuyama's revival of the Hegelian idea of universal history. Here we see a political scientist who is "doing history" in a way no late twentieth century professional historian would, turning Marxism on its head (and Hegel the right way up again) to produce a teleological celebration of the global triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism as the ideology that best satisfies the fundamental human desire for self esteem and recognition. Here Windschuttle offers a stimulating sketch of an intellectual episode which briefly dazzled onlookers before the morning after of post-communism. It drives home, yet again, the point that however much historians may consider history their intellectual property, this notoriously slippery word, whose ambiguities even historians take advantage of more than they admit, is simply too potent, too seductive for us to control.

Though Windschuttle's book is seemingly dedicated to the notion that historians should be defending their turf, their disciplinary "body" even, according to the implicit metaphor of its title, its contents testify to the expansionist rather than the defensive stance of the profession. If the claims to certainty which initially supported history's pretensions to scientific status are being abandoned, it is because historians are increasingly going outside the realms of European big power, archive-centred, elite-oriented, high politics of the Rankean paradigm. Rankean certainties, such as they are such as they are, will not be found in the realms of social and cultural history, particularly when they turn to the pre-literate and/or non-Western world. An excellent example of this is provided in this book's discussion of the controversies surrounding European contact narratives. In addition to the Aztec-Spanish contact, Windschuttle discusses the death of Captain Cook, over which a major debate has erupted between two anthropologists, the American Marshall Sahlins and the Sri Lankan Ganesh Obeyesekere. Sahlins sees Cook as paradoxically the victim of non-history: he collided with the timeless structure of Hawaiian religious belief, according to which he was a god, and suffered the consequences. For Obeyesekere, who challenges this structuralist account, Cook died "historically" not as a god but as a man, in an encounter that is intelligible in terms of a practical rationality common to both Hawaiians and ourselves. He protests the condescension of Western scholars who treat the non-Western, pre-literate world as hyper-"other," a strategy which licences all sorts of imaginary scenarios.(5) Windschuttle welcomes the views of this non-Western non-historian who shares his suspicion of excessive othering: a happy contrast to Greg Dening, white Australian historian and fervent admirer of Sahlins. That Dening's account in Mr. Bligh's Bad Language of the European arrival in Tahiti is heavily influenced by Sahlins' theories is another major weakness of that book in Windschuttle's view.

However the apotheosis of faddish, theory-driven history, we learn, is Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987), a widely acclaimed study of early European settlement and aboriginal contact in Australia: it receives a whole chapter in The Killing of History. Carter is apparently a literary historian who claims to have replaced traditional "linear, narrative history: with a new and superior" spatial history" that shatters the ideological bonds of white imperial history which have hitherto oppressed our minds. This book serves as Windschuttle's most flagrant example of cultural studies-corrupted history, with its distinctive blend of intellectual arrogance, politically correct guilt and theoretical pretension. Though I haven't read it, I'm tempted to do so to test my suspicion that he may be a bit too hard on it -- but just a bit.

Its lucid, vigorous style and extensive use of interesting and unfamiliar examples make The Killing of History a contender for textbook status: it is perhaps the closest thing to a match against Jenkins. Richard J. Evans' In Defence of History also merits consideration. It too is conspicuously well written and unlike the previous books considered here, its author is a widely published historian of the first rank, conscious of the authority this confers. While addressing a general audience a la E.H. Carr he refers frequently to Jenkins whom he makes his particular sparring partner -- with an eye to the text market perhaps -- invariably to disagree with him. Yet Evans is not an out and out anti-postmodernist. He shrewdly avoids the hyper-polarized polemic of Jenkins, on the one hand, or pugnacious traditionalists like Arthur Marwick on the other, and plays the judicious arbiter, reprimanding both sides for their excesses.(6) Like Jenkins he devotes considerable attention to Carr and Elton, whom he too considers a bit dated. However he shows less sympathy to Carr, whose historiography he consider as well as his famous book, concluding firmly that he was "essentially a Stalinist" (p. 228). Elton, by contrast, lived long enough to note that among the very few lessons we could draw from the past was "the magnificent unpredictability of what human beings may think and do" (p. 192), a tacit allusion to the utterly unpredicted collapse of Carr's great "success story," Soviet Russia.

Evans starts with a quick survey of history writing since Ranke, offering the interesting claim that little history of distinction was written between the early twentieth century and the 1960s due to ideological fallout from the two world wars which in the West produced the anti-ideological pretensions to objectivity of L.B. Namier and the cold warriors. It is however a somewhat narrow perspective, indicative of the author's British background and German specialty: so much for the Annales school, for instance. A more genuine objectivity returns to the discipline in the 1960s when social and economic history move to the forefront and the profession swells with the influx of entrants like Evans himself. Even if its social scientific pretensions were sometime overblown, this new history has achieved much. If quantitative history sustained a blow in the controversy over Time on the Cross, who could deny the triumphant results won during the past quarter century by the painstaking and intelligent number-crunching of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure under Laslett, Wrigley and Schofield? It is salutary to be reminded by Evans of Peter Stearns in 1976, in the full tide of social history's vogue, calling for social history to free itself from the "boring" nature of "conventional" history and claim the status of a distinct discipline with its own separate department. The seeds of challenge to hubristic scientism were sown by Kuhn and others, and now we have postmodernism, and the triumphalism of another part of the discipline, intellectual history. Here Evans' insider status distinguishes him from Windschuttle. Evans has a better sense of the internal dynamics of the profession. History is not being threatened by external enemies, it seems. Confidence, not paranoia is Evans's forte. But is it being threatened from within? Here he is a bit coy, not wanting to dismiss threat entirely, since that would threaten the title and even the raison d'etre of his book. So he allows that certain dangers exist, for instance from the linguistic turn of postmodernism. That the boundary between fact and fiction may disappear under analyses that emphasise the literary and fictive status of all texts, is "not merely an alarmist diagnosis" (p. 96). "A hostile intent toward traditional norms of judgment" (p. 102) is at large, and of course Hayden White bears some responsibility, though even he receives some sympathy. Talk about the poetics of history may be a bit precious, but given the fact that "most history books are hopelessly unreadable," because "few historians write competently," perhaps it is no bad thing that historians' works are being critically analyzed from a literary standpoint. And Evans cannot resist quoting some silliness from Arthur Marwick, self-professed exemplar of the sophistication of conventional professional history. Marwick just happens to be the author of The Nature of History (3d. ed., 1990), an enduring success in the historiography text market.

Like Marwick, Evans is also a social historian, and that most of postmodernism's exponents are intellectual historians has not escaped his notice. He hints at something of a power straggle, or skirmish at least, within the profession. Social history enjoyed its time in the sun, having rather rudely displaced political history, and now its overly complacent hegemony is being challenged in turn by intellectual history, exhibiting a certain similar impatience and intolerance. Something of a generational phenomenon is suggested: it is an interpretation with some merit. Evans, like many historians, is inclined to look for the old and familiar in the new and there is no question that in the name of postmodernism a lot of very old issues are being ventilated anew, a point Southgate's book makes well. Certainly intellectual historians tend to work not in archives with original sources, but in libraries with published and well known texts; reinterpreting the known source rather than interpreting the newly discovered source, they are better prepared for the textualism of postmodernism. An important part of the postmodern critique of conventional history is a challenge to the archive snobbery which claims privileged, direct contact with the past by a mystified primary source experience. But Evans effectively uses his own experience as a social historian examining large quantities of original source material concerning the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, and then wrestling with the problem of creating a coherent narrative based on them, to show that professional historians don't enter, or leave, archives in quite the state of naivety some postmodernists like to imagine. He trenchantly maintains the value of the traditional primary/secondary source distinction.

Evans provides useful sketches of certain recent historiographical controversies that bear significantly on the "postmodernist-traditionalist" debate. One such controversy is the Abraham affair, where certain barons of the profession righteously (or unfairly) terminated (or trashed) the career of an untrustworthy (or promising) young historian on professional (or ideological) grounds of having falsified (or misinterpreted) sources. Evans's presentation (like Peter Novick's) leans towards the side of Abrahams whom it is certainly plausible to regard as a sacrificial victim on the altar of a hyperbolic objectivity. In the Paul de Man affair critics of postmodernism made much -- some, too much -- of the discovery that this most revered of its theorists had suppressed the fact that he had written some anti-semitic articles as a journalist in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Here, they claimed, was damning evidence of postmodernism's disrespect for the historical truth. Most serious has been the suggestion that the skepticism and relativism engendered by postmodernism have nourished the "revisionist historiography" of Holocaust denial. Cashing in on these attitudes the deniers present their counter history as almost parodically conventional and positivist, with the full panoply of traditional scholarly apparatus and an obsessive fixation on small discrepancies of documentation and testimony in the accepted Holocaust narrative. As Evans puts it, Hayden White has felt compelled to backpedal lest the "hyperrelativism" of his historiographical theories appear to countenance the deniers.

Although Evans is a practitioner of dynamic fence-sitting, delivering deft putdowns to both sides, on the whole the postmodernist side fares worst. Practising a bit sub-Foucaultian academic sociology of knowledge, he suggests the grandiose pretensions of postmodernists to replace the author of the text and reinvent the past, along with their emphasis on subjectivity and reflexivity, are narcissistic compensations for the declining power of the academic intellectual both in higher education, and the world at large. It is particularly the ideology of the academic underdog, he sneeringly suggests: Jenkins' "jaundiced" view of university historians may "have something to do with the fact that he is only a lecturer in an institute of higher education" (p. 205). Evans. happens to be Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Even in Tony Blair's England, one is expected to know one's place.

If Evans's book offers useful lessons in academic gamesmanship, as well as breezy assurance that whatever good ideas postmodernism has, can be accommodated by the discipline without much disruption, Telling the Truth About History is, by contrast, an uptight book with a serious mission. Its authors are fully as eminent as Evans, being three of the leading intellectual historians in the United States. Their mission is to win the high ground for history in the American culture wars. As a piece d'occasion, its immediate context is particularly important to appreciating its merits and weaknesses. In the late 1980s Lynne V. Cheney as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded the creation of national standards in various disciplines for public schools. History enrolment was declining and Cheney seemed to be blaming the dominance of social history for undermining the unity and truth claims of history itself. Creating the history standards, though undertaken by professional historians led by Gary Nash, was a fraught, highly politicized process of reconciling disciplinary standards with the demands of numerous powerful interest groups. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997) by Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn describes the process in fascinating detail. Joyce Appleby, a past president of the Organization of American Historians and soon to be president of the American Historical Association, played a "key role" in developing the National History Standard for primary and secondary schools. When it was published in October, 1994 it met a storm of protest from culture warriors on the American right who claimed the standards sacrificed the hallowed truths of the American past to political correctness by pandering to minorities in the name of multiculturalism -- a dirty word to the American right. Nash and Appleby appeared in televised debates with Cheney, who had turned against the standards. Newspaper editorials took up the issue, which even went to the floor of the Senate in a discreditable episode.(7)

It was no coincidence that Telling the Truth About History appeared as this uproar entered a crescendo. It is intended as a manifesto on behalf of history as understood and practised by professionals, or at least most of them, today. It can be, and has been, criticized for errors, misinterpretations, exaggerations and evasions, but is worth noting that it is ambitiously intended for a very broad audience: "We want to provide general readers, history students and professional historians with some sense of the debates currently raging about history's relationship to scientific truth, objectivity, postmodernism and the politics of identity" (p. 10). The "we" underlines the collective responsibility of the three authors; they are intellectual historians, more specifically perhaps, social historians of ideas, specializing in the eighteenth century in the United States, France and Britain, -- the Enlightenment, postmodernism's hottest topic. They fulfill their mission by offering three metanarratives from intellectual history. All three stories are about the enthronement and dethronement of "intellectual absolutisms," heroic models of science, of American history, and of progress. These models, some would say myths, served well in their time, but the slow and painful discovery of their "feet of clay" is still being worked out, or through. That discovery occurred at a time when the number of people exposed to higher education rose dramatically. That number included members of hitherto excluded groups like the authors, "outsiders" (p. 2) for whom the break-up of an unspoken elite consensus about what mattered, about how truth and objectivity are defined, offered important political and cultural points of entry. One of the most important sites for this process, they claim, was social history, which saw a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s in which they themselves were fortunate to participate. This wide ranging enterprise took history away from the elites and give it to the neglected, including women. If it strained the unity of the discipline and encouraged scepticism and relativism, such was the necessary cost of empowerment and democracy.

Telling the Truth About History is something of a rhetorical contest. The authors' other publications, particularly Hunt's and Jacob's, demonstrate a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of what postmodernism is about. But the word itself is evidently tainted, and rather than fight for it they are ready to throw it to the wolves of neoconservatism. Other words are negotiable: relativism, crippled by its associations with cynicism and nihilism, is expendable. Skepticism is contested with some reluctance: irony too. But because of their rhetorical potency, truth and objectivity must be held onto at all costs, as the book's very title signals. Without them history cannot claim to be a foundational discipline. So the authors "carve out" a position from which they can be deployed in history's cause. The distinctive cadence of the sound bite rings out regularly: "This book confronts head-on the present uncertainty about values and truth-seeking ..."(p. 3). "Let us be clear about what we the authors believe" (p. 6). After such trenchant preliminaries, to hear that "it is possible to know some things more rather than less truly" (p. 194) may sound anticlimactic, however sensible. The authors acknowledge that "we run the serious danger of giving our story a very teleological cast ... because we are trying to tell a long story in a short space" (p. 63). Specialists will find a good deal to criticize in their stories of the emergence of scientific history and the idea of modernity, or the rise and fall of heroic science, but for all their faults one must admire their nerve. Neither Evans nor Windschuttle offers anything equivalent. Historiography students and many self-styled postmodernists are insufficiently aware of the crucial importance of the new historiography of science to the postmodern paradigm.

There is considerable shadow boxing in their treatment of postmodernism, however. The chosen figures are, if not quite straw men, certainly provocateurs: thank God for Sande Cohen, the villain from historians' central casting! Contrary to this book's claim, postmodernism does not always "operate in the attack mode" (p. 202), nor are all its exponents "deeply disillusioned intellectuals who denounce en masse Marxism and liberal humanism, communism and capitalism, and all expectations of liberation" (p. 206). The authors charge postmodernists with being scornful of those who write for art "ordinary educated public" (p. 233), but one wonders whether they themselves don't sometimes sacrifice the professional reader and even underestimate that very public. Reading their crude and even misleading treatment of Foucault (who is symptomatically lumped with Derrida), I was reminded of once hearing one of file authors at a colloquium respond to criticism of her misstatements on Foucault with the words, "Not in front of the children." No wonder "the children" sardonically responded to this sort of hyperprotective attitude by designating Foucault "the F-word." The doctrine of the double troth is always disturbing. Perhaps, however, they are offering a political justification for their general strategy when they note epigrammatically that "For much of their history, Americans have shown a preference for hypocrisy over cynicism" (p. 297).

That the authors of Telling the Truth About History show none of Windschuttle's fear of other disciplines corrupting history is significant. Cultural studies certainly flourishes in the United States and multiculturalism poses a particularly acute challenge for the creation of a consensual grand narrative of American history that is relevant to all its ethnic interests. Yet historians in the United States have perhaps shown greater receptivity to other disciplines than any in the world, with women historians leading the way. Nor do these authors voice the intra-disciplinary suspicions that Evans does. Lynn Hunt, the presumed lead author of that part of their book dealing with modernity, postmodernity and historiographical theory, may well call herself a cultural historian more than an intellectual historian. If intellectual historians have a particular interest in engaging with postmodern critique, cultural historians are the most likely to be writing history which actually embodies postmodernist notions in its practice.

That brings us to the third cluster of books I will consider. They are directed neither to the "ordinary educated public" nor the undergraduate, but to the profession. They address the theoretical issues that most historians tend to ignore, but which these authors can't ignore because they are intellectual historians, and historiography is above all their responsibility. The irruption of structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, Foucault, Derrida and the rest, has in fact been a boon for intellectual historians. Their subdiscipline had suffered a heavy loss of prestige in the 1960s when social history eclipsed it in popularity and disparaged it for its "elitist" preoccupation with the canonical "great minds" of that "Western Tradition" to whose propagation it was deeply committed (Appleby, Hunt and Jacobs as social historians of ideas avoided this indictment). Now, intellectual historians could make themselves useful to the profession by acting as interpreters and censors of the exotic, frequently French egos and isms that were suddenly all the rage. With few exceptions, their initial message to the discipline was: Avoid contact! -- They are either useless or positively harmful! Foucault in particular seemed to pose a serious threat to history, pointedly avoiding even that very word for alternatives like archaeology and genealogy.(8)

The idea that the profession of history was in danger was most memorably expressed by Peter Novick in That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question "and the American Historical Profession (1988), with its often quoted conclusion that "As a broad community of discourse, as a community of scholars united by common aims, common standards and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist." Novick's luminous intellectual history of the discipline in the U.S. over the past century made historiography suddenly a hot topic -- a "crisis" topic -- and other intellectual historians leapt at the opportunity to enter the limelight and speak to and for the whole discipline, offering to provide the unity Novick denied. One of his most influential reviewers was Thomas Haskell, who argued that Novick's lament about lost unity and the collapse of a common ideal of objectivity was triumphantly if unintentionally contradicted by his own book, which all members of the profession acclaimed as a model of objectivity. Objectivity was neither impossible nor unattainable but was a matter of employing those professional skills all historians pride themselves on: thorough research, balanced presentation, skilful organization and elegant, jargon-free exposition. The discipline had extensive areas of methodological common ground and a shared ethos which united it despite its increasingly varied and divergent areas of interest. Pragmatic is a word Haskell regularly invokes as a philosophically and theoretically respectable cover term for his justification of "what works."

Not surprisingly, Haskell has specialized in the intellectual history of specialization and professionalization, which makes him something of an expert on expertise and lends authority to his analysis of his own profession. Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (1998) reprints a number of his essays including the Novick review, its titlepiece. Particularly interesting is his very first publication. In it he fired the opening shot in the barrage of criticism that was to cripple Time on the Cross (1974) by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. This monumental two volume quantitative analysis of the historical economics of slavery in the United States was initially greeted as a triumphant demonstration of quantitative history that according to its exponents would soon sweep over the entire profession. Haskell, a newly minted PhD and no economic historian, felled two of the nation's top economic historians because, though not an expert, he could sense there was something seriously wrong with their argument. The quantitative history wave never recovered its momentum. It is a David versus Goliath story to warm the hearts of graduate students, technophobes and innumerates. And of course it contributes neatly to Haskell's pragmatic argument on behalf of disciplinary unity.

As the title of his book suggests, the word objectivity is of strategic rhetorical importance to Haskell, just as truth is to Appleby, Hunt and Jacob. History's public reputation and power -- crudely, its enrolments, and funding -- are at stake in these foundational words. In an important sense both words are about the same thing, the temporal and cultural status of certainty, and its moral implications. Haskell is determined to keep objectivity afloat even at the cost of using certain flotation words, modifiers that flirt with oxymoron such as "provisional", "minimal" and "conventional." He is resourceful and sophisticated in argument, and his engagements with theory usually pertain to the practicalities of addressing major historical problems. One such problem is the persistent belief in natural rights that people hold and act upon with great practical consequences despite its dubious metaphysical status. The intellectual and moral origins of capitalism is another. Haskell is a militant compromiser. He is a moderate historicist, a Humean rather that a Nietzschean sceptic. The story of the O-ring, the cause of the Challenger disaster, is a parable for Haskell's belief in the serious intellectual power of common sense -- where much of history's intellectual power also lies.

All of this is anathema to another American intellectual historian, David Harlan, who was one of the first to break ranks and proclaim allegiance to postmodernism and its French exponents in a 1989 American Historical Review article which drew considerable criticism. It is reprinted with changes in The Degradation of American History a book not quite as overheated as its title. Haskell and Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob are singled out for their dereliction of duty. Other kinds of historians perhaps have an excuse for trying to avoid the big theoretical questions, but intellectual historians don't, he argues: engaging them is what they are paid to do. So the guilty four, and others, are scourged for their flabby and highly politicized evasions -- such as Haskell's attempts to salvage objectivity by relying on methodology, and The Truth About History's patched-up realism. Harlan has no use for the middle of the road: with him it's all or nothing. Yet his definition of postmodernism is hardly scary. It is essentially a version of "the old idea that we have no way of seeing or thinking or desiring that we have not acquired from the surrounding culture" (xx); all our contact with the world is second hand, coming to us through an interpretive medium. It follows that we must pay more attention to that medium, which is largely linguistic. The glass of language which stands between us and the world is not perfectly transparent; therefore we should look at the glass, not just through it. Postmodernism tells us there is no such thing as pure objectivity, and if you can't have it, you should abandon the word: Harlan is for rigour. He is also a presentist, since the alternative, historicism, is essentially a version of objectivism. Our contact with the past is mediated by textual sources, so he is a radical textualist. We cannot get beyond our sources to a contextual past reality: contextualism is the dream of historicism. All we can do with the text is interpret it, and we should rejoice in the multiplicity of possible interpretations, not be transfixed by fears about their instability.

It needs to be said that for all its wider claims, Harlan's book is really about intellectual history as practiced in the United States. His own specialty deals largely with literary texts such as those of Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville, canonical authors in the tradition of American Studies. Thus while it is perhaps true, as Harlan claims, that historians tend to exaggerate the difference between history and literature, he works in an area where their relationship is particularly close. Of his canonical literary texts it does make more sense to argue that we should not be caught up in trying to recover the context of their creation, or the precise intent of their authors. What matters most about masterpieces is what they say to us today. We can enter into "conversation" with them and interpret them according to our needs. But most historians do not use texts of that kind, or if so, only in passing. Most texts that historians use are such that the only thing of interest in them is what they say of their own times. For this reason the radical textualism of Derrida to which Harlan is drawn has little to offer most of us, unlike Harlan wrestling with multiple readings of Moby Dick. The work of Foucault, still too often undifferentiated from Derrida's in the demonology of traditionalist historians, pointedly avoided canonical texts for neglected and marginalized texts, and has much more to say to most historians -- if they care to listen. However it should be said of Harlan's book that it is not just polemic and denunciation. Most of it is in fact devoted to useful analysis of scholars with whom Harlan is sympathetic. Some of these are historians, like Joan Scott and especially Hayden White, who receives an excellent analysis covering the entire trajectory of his career to date. Among others are historicist literary critics like Elaine Showalter and Louis Henry Gates and historicist philosophers like Richard Rorty ("historicist" in the current non-historian's use of the word, meaning whiggishly interested in history), which fairly suggests that Harlan finds more to sympathize with outside his profession than inside it with the Harlans, Hollingers, Applebys, Jacobs and Hunts.

Another avowed postmodernist among American historians is Mark Poster, who for the past few decades has sent reports from the cutting edge of high theory. His latest volume Cultural History & Postmodernity (1997), collects six essays, the oldest (on Foucault) dating back to 1982. He is an apostle of the new age of digital communications, which he sees almost as a new Foucaultian episteme, though at time his language verges on hype, as when he announces "the future is now" (p. 68). Poster explicates the work of two historians who set his standards for theoretical sophistication, Foucault, and above all Michel de Certeau, whom he sees as "most germane to cultural studies," which is defined as the interdisciplinary "investigation of aspects of every day life with a particular emphasis on the problem of resistance" (p. 108). The history of consumerism is usefully aired here, with a full supporting cast of French theorists such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, et al. Perhaps Poster's greatest merit, and no small merit it is in such company, is that he writes very clearly. This book is worth considering as an accessible introduction to high French theory and its historical applications and implications. Elsewhere Poster shows how certain historians, even those with pretensions to considerable theoretical awareness, fall short of his very, perhaps impossibly, high standards. Lawrence Stone, Francois Furet and, inevitably, Appleby, Jacob and Hunt receive very critical attention. The level of theoretical introspection and self-disclosure Poster requires would leave little room for "getting on with it." Considering the nature of his prior publications one might uncharitably ask whether Poster could actually write a history according to his own standards, as opposed to writing about writing it.

Whether historiography specialists should also be expected to do "real" history is nonetheless a serious question. The subject of historiography and its literature are sufficiently complex and extensive to command full time attention: indeed, anything less might not do it justice. On the other hand there is a strong assumption that those who teach and write about historiography should "know what they're talking about" -- that is, have done the real thing. But the real thing is becoming increasingly disparate, hence Novick's crisis of fragmentation, and historiography is a much needed antidote to over-specialization because it continues to address the discipline as some kind of a whole. And of course the word "real" is highly problematic: Poster might well argue that what he is writing about is no less real than Furet's French Revolution or Stone's early modern family. From the standpoint of theory, history and historiography are the same. Yet there is a certain authority to our next book, Robert Berkhofer's Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse, that comes from knowing that the, author has written, among other things, two histories concerning Indian-White relations in North America. He has worked in one of history's most fraught zones, where traditional assumptions of the discipline are most hotly challenged.

The "great story" of Berkhofer's title refers to the "normal" (with a nod to Thomas Kuhn), traditional mode of history. It is a metastory, a master context in which are embedded all the partial histories which are the special concern of most historians. This master context is deemed unique, in accordance with the official doctrine of historicism, so that each great story is unlike any other. The characteristic great story is national, history being by far the most ethnocentric of all academic disciplines to this day. There are of course areas of contest, conflicting interpretations within the great story, but these are largely differences of interpretation, and are resolved within the great story. Berkhofer practices history at the sharp edge of multiculturalism where the great story, in this case the great white story, meets resistance. He mentions one of his Native American students refusing to read William Cronon's study of Indian/White relations in colonial New England because "if the author could not understand so fundamental a fact as that Indians had not migrated across the Bering Strait but had always existed in North America, on what else could he be trusted?" Berkhofer's book is notable for its scope and fairness. He tries to ventilate as many as possible of the topics currently under scrutiny from the postmodernist perspective, and does so with reasonable lucidity. He is sympathetic to postmodernism but no zealot, unlike Jenkins or even Poster. He indulges in no name-calling or straw-manning. But neither does he claim to have a middle way in the manner of Evans or Appleby and Co. If anything he tends to overdichotomize matters, and risks leaving the reader faced with seemingly irreconcilable positions and asking frustratedly, "why bother?" On the other hand, he frequently breaks open a problem into a series of direct questions, questionnaires from which historians can identify those which most directly address their own concerns and practices. Not all historians have, or believe themselves to have the same stake in these matters: cultural, intellectual, social, economic, political diplomatic is a likely rank ordering of descending engagement (this is my own list, not Berkhofer's).

To single out the area where Berkhofer's contribution is most original, he has much to say about the poetics of history, a subject of equal relevance to all historians. Hayden White transformed this particular landscape: one needs only to compare his Metahistory (1973) with Peter Gay's Style in History which appeared the following year but was made out of date even before it was published by White. Berkhofer does not dwell heavily on the history/fiction distinction, which is overdone and too often sensationalized for polemical reasons. Instead he brings to bear on history the work literary scholarship has done in examining the various roles of author and reader in the "literary contract." Historians should give more thought to the varieties of the authorial persona, such as the actual author and the implied author, and to questions of authorial voice and viewpoint. Similarly the reader is a problematic entity: besides the actual, out-of-text reader, there are in-text readers created by the author, such as the ideal and implied reader with whom actual readers may or may not choose to identify. Worth mentioning here is a book that has been useful to Berkhofer on such matters, Philippe Carrard's Poetics of the New Historical French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chattier (1992). Despite its rather severe title it deserves to be better known. Although it focusses on recent French history writing, its approach and insights apply to all historiography, since it deals with the narrative contract, reader-author relations, impersonal versus personal or familiar styles, poetic licence and authority, risk-taking and dullness, and other matters of serious interest to any historian who writes to be read. For instance, Carrard remarks that in France the Nouvelle Histoire from the 1960s onwards exploited the fact that the avant gardeism of the Nouveau Roman forgot about the reader in its obscure experimentalism. Alienated readers turned to history, to the considerable profit of astute historians like Leroy Ladurie and Georges Duby. Berkhofer's own type of history needs all the help it can get since it faces the pressures of "new intellectual ghettoes" (p. 179) and the claims of "affirmative action history" (p. 189) from groups, usually minorities, seeking their own historical voice, a voice which some would claim is the exclusive right of those who share the experience of the group in question. Berkhofer clearly demonstrates the value of Joan Scott's use of postmodernist theory to challenge the claims of experience and exclusive or privileged claims to "voice." But careful attention to the poetics and rhetoric of history may well offer the best hopes of negotiating a professionally and publicly acceptable route through these difficulties.

Speaking of voice, a book that enables us to "hear" the voices of some of the big names of current historical theory in an agreeably informal manner is Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism, eleven interviews by Ewa Domanska a young "Assistant Professor of Methodology of History and History of Historiography" at Adam Mickiewicz University (they take the subject seriously in Poland, at least). Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Hans Kellner, Stephen Bann, Jerzy Topolski, Peter Burke and Georg Iggers are the historians, Arthur Danto and Jorn Rusen philosophers, and Lionel Gossman is a French literature scholar. Alan Megill and Lynn Hunt contribute an introduction and postscript, and the author also interviews herself. The book deserves serious consideration as a higher level text. Hearing these notables talk in relaxed, undogmatic and open language is a good way for students to encounter figures who are reduced to schematic positions and impenetrably compacted phrases in most texts. The interviewer has an interesting and flexible menu of questions which elicit different areas of interest, though she does return to certain common themes, such as "Is there a crisis in history?" (consensus: No), and "Do history and literature differ?" (consensus: Less than is generally thought). Inevitably postmodernism looms large. None are violently opposed to it -- indeed there is a refreshing absence of polemic throughout -- but only Ankersmit and Kellner are committed exponents. Hayden White, bete noire of so many antipostmodernist historians, obligingly covers himself with labels: "a kind of Marxist," "a modernist ... formalist and structuralist ... cultural historian" (pp. 19, 26-27) -- but most explicitly not a postmodernist, nor a philosopher, nor even an intellectual historian.

In a sense the whole book is a sort of seminar on Hayden White, unanimously acknowledged the single most influential force in modern historiographic theory (Foucault being the next). He acknowledges that Metahistory made him rather an outsider in his own profession, viewed with suspicion by his fellow historians but celebrated in literary and philosophical circles because his book "pretends ... to deconstruct a mythology, the so-called science of history." He emphasizes that Metahistory was not intended to be prescriptive, "not meant to be applied, or its concepts even meant to be taken literally" (p. 25). Ponder that remark: a common objection to historiography among historians being that it is not useful; doesn't this make it a particularly fitting companion study for a discipline that prides itself on its own "uselessness" -- on history for its own sake? White knows his own profession well enough to know that historians are highly resistant to theory and to "anyone trying to tell them something about what they are doing" (p. 29). He agrees with most historians who believe that there can be no "ultimate theory of history," but he believes that it is possible to have "a theory of historical writing" (p. 17). This is where his interest lies, and why words like fiction, poetry and rhetoric hold no terror for him: they are simply words that apply to writing, of which history is one kind. White's voice has an attractive simplicity and candour. Particularly interesting is the autobiographical information he reveals. He came from a Southern working class family that moved to Detroit seeking work. Enabled to attend university by military service he was drawn to history by an anthropological fascination with the strangeness of the fact that society would actually support people studying the past as a profession. This little detail throws valuable light on his project, as does his comment that he was always more interested in why people study the past, and why one way rather than some other way, than in the past itself. That is a pretty good definition of historiography. Domanska elicits similar autobiographical information front her other interviewees. Scholars whose interest often seem abstract and impenetrable to students become more accessible through the question "how did you become ...?" White's intellectual background is further filled out by Hans Kellner one of his earliest students. Interestingly both White and Arthur Danto, author of the best philosophical work on history that I have ever read -- Analytical Philosophy of History (1965) -- were inspired as undergraduates by a little known but brilliant history teacher at Wayne State University, William Bossenbrook. Such unsung heroes of our profession deserve recognition.

Among Domanska's other interviewees, Rusen, Ankersmit and Topolski are particularly interesting, not least because of their non-Anglo-American perspectives. Rusen though a philosopher by training is fully integrated into the culture of historiography. Unlike White he emphasizes its practical dimension: one of his PhD students, for instance, did her dissertation on the use of historical arguments by politicians in parliamentary debates in Germany. I would certainly agree with Rusen that studying the way non-historians perceive, use, and write history is a very important part of historiography's territory. Rusen also comments on the very high level of resistance in Germany to innovative history within the profession, and expresses doubt that White would ever have gotten a history professorship in Germany. Perhaps this climate contributes to Rusen's pragmatism. By contrast Ankersmit, who is Dutch, is one of the most ardent exponents of postmodernism in historiography. And yet he makes it very plain that he approves of historians' traditional resistance to theory, especially when it comes from outside the discipline. As he very appositely notes, history's single most powerful theory, historicism (or historism as he calls it), was developed by historians themselves. He disavows any desire to push history in any theoretical direction, declaring that he is "always impressed by ... the beauty of history as a discipline, by the practical intelligence displayed by historians as a research community, and by the subtlety with which the discipline has always succeeded in adapting itself to new requirements and to new challenges" (p. 89). Plainly a very sound chap! Ankersmit also suggests the notion, which Domanska is much taken by, that the concept of experience will replace language as the next major area of theoretical development for historiography. This is sketched out only very lightly, but it is an interesting prediction whose fulfilment might have very positive consequences. The Polish historian Topolski, who is more comfortable than his fellow historians in talking about the philosophy of history, takes the view that the gap between current theories of history and its practice is unusually wide and should be narrowed by some movement from historians towards a more "ironic attitude" (p. 127) toward their work. A Marxist background perhaps makes this view particularly understandable. All in all, Domanska's book should reassure those historians who fear that current trends in historiography have subversive implications for the profession. At any rate, that seems to be the interviewees' conscious intent. They are also quite intent on emphasizing, with the exception noted of Topolski, and of course Danto, that they are not philosophers, being aware that to many historians any theorizing about history must be philosophy, and therefore a further reason for ignoring historiography.

But what about professional philosophy? Should a historiography course include some work by a philosopher de metier? The message Domanska's interviewees convey is basically "No." Even Danto seems to bear this out. It might be objected that Foucault was a philosopher, and so he was by training, but I agree with Topolski that he ended up doing history. C. Behan McCullagh, by contrast is a professional historian who has switched to a philosophy department, which would seem to bode well for the interest to historians of his The Truth About History, the next book I will consider here. However its title should warn us that the author has enlisted in the history wars as a standard bearer for truth against relativism and postmodernism. But anyone expecting the old fashioned definition of truth -- absolute, eternal and entire -- will be disappointed. Since the demise of the covering law model of historical explanation, those few philosophers who take an interest in history have devoted themselves to assuring us (and persuading their fellow-philosophers) that what we historians do is epistemologically legitimate.(9) Such assurance is of course welcome, if hardly necessary. McCullagh continues in this vein. He offers a "realist theory of truth" intended to assure historians that they can and do provide a "true and fair account of the past," whatever cultural relativists and postmodernists may say to the contrary. True, in McCullagh's usage, is largely synonymous with likely, probable, adequate and reasonable. To historians who are reluctant to use the word out of reverence for its absolutist connotations, McCullagh's advice would be "Go ahead: use it." If according to the best professional practice and standards, something is deemed very likely to be the case, the historian is entitled to say "it is true," even if, against the odds, it happens not to be. It does seem to me not so far from this position to Richard Rorty's argument that we should dispense with the word true as not really necessary, "truth" being "simply a compliment paid to the beliefs which we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is; not needed" (p. 50). But McCullagh apparently regards truth as a word worth contesting and holding on to, since postmodernist argument attaches an unattainable standard of certainty to it in order to challenge the legitimate use by historians (and others) of a culturally prestigious term that they are fully entitled to use -- they including Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, whose title his own consciously echoes.

In this connection McCullagh contests the contention of the arch theorist of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard, that "historians should never try to represent the horror of the Holocaust for fear of making it banal" (p. 41). There is an uncomfortable unstated connection between this view and that of Holocaust deniers who refuse the truth of the Holocaust by requiring an impossible level of precision and certainty of its evidence and hence existence; anything less is untruth, which equals falsehood. The notion that postmodernism is somehow complicit with Holocaust denial is challenged elsewhere by Danto who shrewdly remarks to Domanska that since belief in absolute troth is central to the deniers, they can hardly draw comfort from postmodernism, which denies its possibility. McCullagh tends to overdichotomize. And he does not engage any historians sympathetic to postmodernism, none of whom would be found holding the definition of truth he attributes to postmodernism. I'm not sure that historians need his assistance that much. He has sensible things to say on matters such as troth conditions, for instance. But he goes through several of the standard themes that interest philosophers more than most historians, such as causation. The "ideal historian" whom most philosophers seem to have in mind still tends to be the traditional diplomatic/political/military, high event historian.

By contrast Martin Bunzl's rewarding little book, Real History: Reflections on Historical Practice, manages to go beyond some of the conventional limits observed by philosophers writing about history. For one thing, his examples of historians significantly go beyond the traditional. For another, he doesn't just offer the usual philosopher's reassurance to historians, but he even suggests that history has something useful to teach philosophers about an important matter. That matter, his central concern, is realism and its different meanings to the different disciplines. Bunzl has noted the vehemence with which historians like Appleby, Hunt, Jacob and others have defended their right to use words like objective, true and real, postmodernism notwithstanding. Yet among philosophers, he states, realism has been an unfashionable position for nearly half a century. The problem with pure, "metaphysical realism" -- "the position that there exists a mind-independent world, claims about which are true in virtue of their correspondence with features of that world" -- (p. 8) is the extremely heavy ontological burden of proof required for its defence, as compared with the far easier burden of defending the opposing, antirealist position. Bunzl agrees with the position of Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, what they call modified practical realism -- modified, that is, to avoid naive realism -- and sees in the practice of historians a philosophically respectable basis for resisting anti-realism. This realism is a style of reasoning particularly appropriate to historians which works as long as the historian avoids excessive theorization, generalization, and abstraction. Realism is local and specific, dealing with the everyday world as lived: it is very close to historicism, the indigenous theory of the discipline. Bunzl's argument is the more noteworthy for addressing harder cases, such as intellectual and cultural history, where the theoretical level is necessarily higher, to look at the question of how "meaning ... can be causally efficacious even as we think of it as a theoretical entity" (p. 93). He tests his ideas against the work of Joan Scott on gender and identities, showing her caught between the demands of theory and of localism. He devotes a chapter to Foucault, who he argues was always consumed above all with the claims of practice over theory, and closer to the realist than the anti-realist pole, unlike Derrida whose theories are so global as to be effectively useless, if not positively corrosive, to history. Both Bunzl and McCullagh defend realism as a means of strengthening the intellectual defences of history against postmodernism, but Bunzl's more tightly focussed, less condescending and polemical work conveys more effectively the philosopher's stake in the issue, as well as addressing the practicalities of the historian's activity.

The part of historiography most controversially affected by postmodernism has been its reflections on current historical practice in what is now, according to its proponents a new historical era -- the postmodern period. But what of historiography's other sphere of interest, the history of history? This has received much less attention in the burgeoning literature of historiography, and the term postmodern has been less freely employed here. This is to a degree understandable, as the history it considers has long since been written and is not going to change, whether there is such a thing as postmodernity or not. But while it may not change as physical evidence -- as written record, that is -- our reading of it may change a great deal. It is worth emphasizing that Hayden White's epochal Metahistory is history of history, a dramatically original reading of classic works of nineteenth century history by Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt and others as products of the imagination as much as the archives. His work has inspired a small explosion of studies of history as literature with particular emphasis on the Romantic period, frequently written by scholars trained in literary studies, Lionel Gossman being one of the most distinguished.

One of the most frequently cited definitions of postmodernism is that it is a condition of distrust towards metanarrative -- not just the grand narrative of Marxism which so long seduced intellectuals and others, but also the Enlightenment-inspired liberal capitalist narrative of progress. Most historians avoid the sweep of grand narrative, except in the lucrative and exempt genre of textbooks, because it is difficult to reconcile with professional standards of research and documentation, and because its very high level of selectivity and omission necessitates decisions that are unavoidably literary and ideological. So the microhistory of the traditional monograph is perfectly orthodox, even if postmodernist microhistory tends to mean something narrower still, such as Natalie Davis's story of Martin Guerre. But can one study, or teach, the history of history without some kind of metanarrative? Disciplinary histories, as is well known, particularly of the sciences, are almost invariable whiggish -- success stories marching inexorably towards the glorious present with wrong turnings and failures erased. Most historians probably have some rough version of that type of story in their heads for history itself, from Herodotus and Thucydides to the present, even if its trajectory describes a J curve from a precociously brilliant start to a recovery and resurgence in the late Renaissance. Intellectual historians have tried to combat this condescension by challenging the implicit essentialist assumption that there exists some sort of ideal entity which the actual practice of history strives to approach. They have increasingly emphasized that what passes for history in other times and places may take very unfamiliar shapes.

This approach informs Bonnie Smith's The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. She argues that since the emergence of the modern historical profession, from the mid-nineteenth century especially, the discipline has been gendered masculine and the notion of what constitutes proper history determined accordingly. Her book attempts to show how this happened, and how some women historians responded. She starts with an improbable heroine, Madame de Stall, the excessively rich, narcissistic, sex-and drug-crazed self-proclaimed genius who enjoyed an international celebrity rivalling Byron's at the turn of the nineteenth century. If we have difficulty thinking of her best-selling novel Corinne as a work of history, Smith suggests, that is because a masculine paradigm of history has made it unthinkable. Smith is fairly persuasive in demonstrating the exclusionary methods by which professional history became a male preserve. Not surprisingly Ranke figures prominently. The Rankean seminar (connected by incorrect etymology with semen, Smith notes) was praised for its "male beauty." Archives were characterized as "virgins" awaiting the penetrative researcher. Some readers may be less convinced by her case for a feminine counter-history on which she confers the fraught, adjective "amateur," though not in the pejorative sense, but as the necessary excluded opposite of a male defined and dominated professionalism. She dates the full masculinization of history about 1850, a date that roughly corresponds with history's winning credibility in universities as an autonomous subject freed from philology, philosophy and theology. Recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which prior to this time history was regarded as a subject particularly suited to women.

Smith describes some of the forms of history written by nineteenth century women, which included biographies of famous women, novels (though rarely explicitly historical novels, a largely male genre, as Smith does not, I believe, remark), books on "trivial," "inferior" matters (by male standards) such as travel, culture and everyday social life -- in some respects the precursors of social and cultural history. She refers to this literature as "narcohistory," a means of escaping, working through, or in de Stael's case acting out, such "traumas" of womanhood as poverty, reproductive pain and inequality (not that de Stall suffered particularly from these particular traumas).

Not all readers will be persuaded that history, however, capaciously defined, should include all that Smith wishes it to. After all, the realist novel, of which women were some of the supreme practitioners especially in nineteenth century Britain, is surely history by Smith's criteria. George Eliot certainly thought so: perhaps Smith would too. Amateurism gives way to high amateurism by the end of the last century, a sort of high bourgeois, globe trotting, intellectual avant garde which includes some of the women who first tried to breach the walls of academic history, such as Ricarda Huch, one of the first European women to receive a history doctorate though her historical writings are still confined by librarians to the fiction shelf. Entering the twentieth century we meet some of those who first made it into academic teaching, the glamourous Eileen Power, the eccentric Lucy Maynard Salmon, and the "repulsively iconoclastic," "boldly lacking in scruple," Mary Beard, in whom Smith's rather startling phrases pique one's interest. The author's ingenuity and argumentative energy seem to dwindle somewhat towards the end of this book, which terminates at 1940, the year of her birth. Perhaps this justifies her self-exclusion from the book, for there does seem to be a certain absence of self-reflexivity in it, despite all the psychologizing -- its erotics, narcotics, traumas and agons -- which seems at odds with the topic and argument. Significantly only once, I believe, does the term postmodern sully her text, perhaps to avoid giving further hostages to critics, for the book certainly meets many of the standard criteria for the label: it challenges the high/low rules of genre, dissolves the boundaries between history and fiction, and submits practice to the interrogation of gender. It is no accident, as Marxists used to say, that many of the most valuable and innovative recent work in history has been done by women. The sense of liminality in her subjects that Smith conveys is often conducive to innovation and willingness to break from the calculated safe course of professional orthodoxy, which in any case until recently offered fewer professional rewards to women. But however Bonnie Smith chooses to label herself, her book is a stimulating and welcome addition to an underexamined historiographical topic.(10)

Another historian who makes no claim to the postmodernist label, yet offers an unusual formalist and rhetorical perspective on the history of historiography, is Anthony Grafton, whose The Footnote: A Curious History I found quite fascinating. Through its rather specialized lens we are given a surprisingly full vista of key historiographical developments over the past four hundred years -- this in a relatively short text of which about a quarter is, appropriately, footnotes. The account is also unconventional in starting at the present and marching steadily backward in an anti-whiggish narrative that both underlines and undermines some conventionally whiggish assumptions about the development of historical scholarship. Historians have something of a reputation among academics as footnote fetishists. We often read the footnotes first (particularly to see whether we have been cited), and sometimes only the footnotes, for a quick indication of the interest and originality of a work. As Grafton points out, footnotes form a second narrative -- a production-oriented narrative of investigation and research -- of the infrastructure of historiography too often neglected by philosophers of history who focus on the consumption-oriented, superstructural narrative. Yet it perhaps testifies to the consumer orientation of historians that resistance to the footnote is an enduring theme in historiography. For all their attractions as sites of combat (Grafton mentions footnote warfare tactics) and of display, footnotes are considered by many to be aesthetically displeasing and reader-unfriendly (Grafton mentions Noel Coward's famous remark that having to read a footnote is like having to go downstairs to answer the door in the middle of making love). They also impugn the author's own authority by implying that the reader needs additional testimony before believing the author. Germany is thought of as the footnote's homeland ("the age of German footnotes is on the wane," exulted one chauvinistic Oxford academic during WWI), yet the great Ranker himself didn't really like footnotes, it seems. Once he had become a great man he tended to leave it to his students to find the appropriate documentation after he had written the text, sprinkling the footnotes like a garnish for the sake of appearances (though he too thought they spoiled the look of a page). He admitted to using more of them when he was a young scholar having to "make his way and earn confidence." Grafton devotes almost two chapters to Ranke, since one of his targets is the Rankean myth which endures even among historians. Not that he wishes to discredit Ranke, whose important contribution to modern critical history, he claims, was twofold. One was the seminar, which gave the discipline an equivalent to the laboratory, a prestigious, mystique-laden site where the specialized skills of the craft are transmitted. The other was to create a rhetoric of documentation that "gave a new literary life to the process of research and criticism" (p. 222), conveying to the public a sense of the romance of historical scholarship -- the mysteries of the archives, the aura of the original document. But Ranke exaggerated his originality, and his disciples and epigones did so even more, implying that prior to Ranke's revolution, historians were "journalists," depending on other historians and ignoring the original documents.

The great age of the footnote came before Ranke as Grafton makes clear. We all know about Gibbon's footnotes. He too disliked them for aesthetic reasons and regretted having been persuaded by Hume to have them in Decline and Fall. But unlike Ranke he devoted great care to composing them. Footnotes had a bad reputation among those who aspired to be historians as opposed to antiquarians, and who aspired to write elegant narratives of literary merit rather than merely to compile information. According to literary prejudice, footnotes were dusty cellars crammed with the sterile pedantry beloved of antiquarians. Gibbon turned the cellar into an elegant ground floor arcade where the reader could stroll around, guided by the graceful scholarship of the author, and admire the structural supports and take in the surrounding view. Gibbon's footnotes often offered an ironic commentary on the text, Grafton remarks. According to the view elaborated by Momigliano especially, Gibbon brought together in one work two somewhat antagonistic traditions in history, the rhetorical mainstream, and the antiquarian sidestream. But Grafton's real heroes lie behind Gibbon in the great erudits of the seventeenth century, particularly Pierre Bayle and Richard Simon. His last chapter, revealingly titled "The Cartesian Origins of the Modern Footnote," identifies the footnote as the battlefield on which the forces of philosophical scepticism about the epistemological validity of history, epitomized by Descarte's corrosive critique of historical knowledge, were met and ultimately defeated: "The vast pages of that unlikely best seller, Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary, offer the reader only a thin crust of text on which to cross the deep dark swamp of commentary" (p. 191). It was this obsessive erudition, minute documentation, and relentless pursuit of error, that demonstrated the feasibility of solid historical knowledge -- something worth keeping in mind in these postmodernist times. This undercelebrated achievement made Gibbon possible, and Ranke too, for as Grafton notes, analysis of the footnotes to Ranke's history of the Reformation reveals that under ten percent of them cited original archival sources, the remainder referring largely to published primary sources, the work of scholars from the sixteenth century onward. Historians, particularly when they laboured under the name of antiquarian, are not immune to the "enormous condescension of posterity."

A more conventional contribution to the history of historiography is Owen Chadwick's Acton and History. It gathers together the numerous papers he has written over the last quarter century, adding a new first chapter "The Making of a Historian," into an illuminating study of the man who called Ranke "my master." Lord Acton was not actually Ranke's student, but he received all his training as a historian in Germany and he shared Ranke's zeal for the archives. He famously declared that with virtually all the great archives now open, the truth was finally out: "all information is within reach and every problem has become capable of solution." Chadwick is informative on the Vatican archives, that holy grail of historians, whose secrets were believed to hold answers to many of history's mysteries, such as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre that particularly obsessed Acton. Plots, state secrets, and strange but true stories fascinated him. With his exalted international connections, British political clout, and his Catholic faith, he was able for a time to penetrate the Vatical archives, his access ending when he became persona non grata to the Papacy for his bitter campaign against Papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council. Chadwick is good on Acton's increasingly tenuous connection with the Catholic Church.

Unlike the fabulously prolific Ranke, who at age 83 began a universal history of which he had completed seventeen volumes before his death at ninety, Acton is of course most famous for the greatest history never written, the History of Liberty. Of it one might say that he managed to write only the footnotes, those legendary boxes and boxes of slips of paper bequeathed to Cambridge University which have served as a mute warning to generations of historians to "just do it." Acton was tragically the victim of his own impossible expectations. The man held in awe by contemporaries for his omniscience was, as he confessed to Gladstone's daughter, "appalled at the gaps" in his knowledge. In bitter jest he called his great undone project "The Madonna of the Future" after Henry James's famous short story. The question remains, however: how did he become so famous for so little? Acton did write, as the library shelves testify; but he wrote articles, which he wrongly thought more influential than books. And he did become Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, an appointment for which his high connections did him no harm, though according to Chadwick he was probably the best available candidate. That position, in turn, made him the obvious candidate for editorship of the Cambridge History of Modern Europe, a work that stands importantly to his credit even though he never wrote the opening chapter he planned for it, nor did he live to see its completion. Interestingly his famous inaugural lecture as Regius Professor when published contained more notes than text: Acton did not feel that he could claim sufficient authority to dispense with them. But for the Cambridge History he decreed that there should be no notes, the authors of each chapter being preeminent in their field. In addition he hoped that the History would reach the wider audience footnotes were believed to alienate.

It was as Regius Professor and as editor that Acton made those pronouncements for which he is notorious and such an ideal target for postmodernist critics of history, such as his instruction that the chapters for the Cambridge History be written from "30 [degrees] W longitude," a mid-Atlantic version of the unattainable "view from nowhere," and that its readers should not be able to tell where one historian stopped and another began. "Be colourless" was one of his rules for writing history. Such maxims add up to a strong version of objectivity, which of course had many critics among historians long before postmodernism was ever thought of. But sitting uneasily with the ideal of objectivity was his even more passionate belief that historians must sternly judge their subjects by an eternal code of ethics, "and to suffer no man and no crime to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong." Nowhere perhaps does Acton stand further from us as professional historians than in that ringing declaration. Though the seeming arrogance of its claim to God-like status may make us shrink, it is worth remembering that this continues to be the duty of history according to public expectation -- witness statements like "History will absolve me," and "History will be my judge" uttered by politicians (albeit often the most unsavoury).

Perhaps the commonest ground for criticizing Acton among professional historians has been that he was an amateur. He was indeed a rich aristocrat who could afford to pursue history as a hobby in his legendary 70,000 volume library and not have to test himself in the intellectual marketplace by publishing. But as Chadwick tells us, he was only rescued from bankruptcy due to falling estate revenues by the sale of his library to Andrew Carnegie, who after paying a generous sum for it, allowed Acton to retain it until his death, when it passed to Cambridge University. Professional historians owe Acton a greater debt than they realize, Chadwick suggests. Surveying his short tenure (1895-1902) as Regius Professor he emphasizes the enormous boost Acton's reputation, lectures, and leadership gave to the prestige of history as an academic subject. He helped it overcome its reputation as a soft option to the subject that serious men studied -- classics. The proof? History enrolment at Cambridge tripled during his professorship. Today more than ever professional historians -- meaning academic historians -- should recognize the value of a contribution like that.

Finally, and very briefly, I will call attention to three recent works that deserve the attention of all who teach or pursue an interest in historiography. Daniel Woolf (of McMaster University) has edited a two volume Global Encyclopaedia of Historical Writing which should be in every reference collection and which some scholars might even consider buying for their own shelves, since it is very good value at over a thousand double-columned large octavo pages, well-printed and bound. The title accurately conveys the content. It is indeed global, which sets it apart from other proliferating guides, handbooks and companions. Some 375 contributors enable it to embrace non-Western historiography, particularly African and East Asian, as well as "lesser" Western traditions such as Basque, Bulgarian and Lithuanian, to offer short conceptual essays on topics such as contingency, antiquarianism, and chaos theory, and short biographical entries on significant historians, again with a strong non-Western representation. Useful brief bibliographical references follow each entry. A rival in this field, though complementary since it is less comprehensive, more selectively focussed and discursive, is the Routledge Companion to Historiography edited by Michael Bentley (1997). The editor's extensive contribution to this work has now been separately published with some expansion as Modern Historiography: An Introduction. This is an excellent, focussed little survey covering Western European and North American historiography from the Enlightenment to the present with thematic emphasis on the development of the profession, and particular attention given to German methodological debates, the impact of the Annales school, and the current "moods" of historiography, including the postmodern. This is a very well written work with some genuine originality, not only accessible to the undergraduate but a book professional historians can read with pleasure and profit. Though it does not pretend to be comprehensive, which is part of its strength, it might serve very well as a text for a history of history class. Anyone teaching such a class "from Herodotus to the present" is aware that the choice of texts is limited. Ernst Breisach's doggedly inclusive Historiography: Ancient Medieval and Modern has its merits, but an alternative now possible would be to combine Bentley with Donald R. Kelley's Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder. The two books join almost perfectly with a useful Enlightenment overlap. Kelley is probably the scholar best equipped to cover his chosen territory. A unifying theme in his book is the dialectic of philosophy and history and the persistence of two traditions, the antiquarian and analytical, established respectively by Herodotus and Thucydides and made familiar to us by Momigliano. Kelley is also interested in formalist themes and in the self-reflective "art of history" genre. If his book has a weakness it is perhaps that he tries to be a bit too comprehensive, including every historian writing what passed as history rather than selecting and expanding on a few of them. Reflecting perhaps his area of greatest expertise, the book opens up, breathes more freely, and becomes more original in its last chapters. Although no one would accuse Kelley of trendiness -- he is after all the editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas -- his introduction and first chapter "Mythistory" cautiously situate his work with reference to the present intellectual climate. By opening with juxtaposed quotations from the Bible and Michel de Certeau, he seems to want to assure us that historiography is alive, but not in crisis, and that postmodernism is not a threat but a challenge. I share the view.

University of Saskatchewan

(1) R.T. Vann, "Turning Linguistic: History and Theory and History and Theory, 1960-1975," A New Philosophy of History, ed. F. Ankersmit and H. Kellner (Chicago, 1995), p. 252, n. 95.

(2) Nash et. al., History on Trial, 110; University Affairs, June-July, 1999, p. 27.

(3) Geoffrey Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study, (Cambridge, 1991), p. 41.

(4) Christopher Kent, "Victorian Social History: Post-Thompson, Post-Foucault, Postmodern," Victorian Studies 40 (Autumn, 1996), p. 100.

(5) For a judicious assessment of this debate see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), pp. 206-23.

(6) Marwick may be viewed in action in his "Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including `Postmodernism') and the Historical," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), pp. 5-34.

(7) "History Wars" were not confined to the United States, as Nash et al acknowledge: "Perhaps the hardest battle I fought on the national curriculum was about history. Though not an historian myself, I had a very clear -- and what I had naively imagined uncontroversial -- idea of what history was. History is an account of what happened in the past.... No amount of imaginative sympathy for historical characters or situations can be a substitute for the initially tedious but ultimately rewarding business of memorizing what actually happened" declared Mrs. Thatcher in her memoirs (quoted in Nash, p. 128). An interesting analysis of the British battle, which mobilized many of the profession's heavyweights, is R. Phillips, History Teaching, Nationhood and the State: A Study in Educational Politics (London, 1998). Canada, despite J.L. Granatstein's rumbustious Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto, 1998) is unlikely ever to witness anything comparable, given the resolute refusal of Canadian governments to have anything to do with history, universally acknowledged among its politicians to be a no-win subject. That historians were ignored in the official planning of Canada's centennial in 1967 is revealing. See C. Kent, "History: The Discipline of Memory -- and Forgetting," The Structurist 37/38 (1997-98), 34-40.

(8) C. Kent, "Michel Foucault: Doing History, or Undoing It?" Canadian Journal of History 21 (1986), pp. 371-95.

(9) An interesting and resolutely unpostmodern attempt, by a historian in fact, to rehabilitate the covering law model at the micro-event level is C. Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park, PA, 1996).

(10) A fine recent discussion which takes a broad view of the relationships between historiography, historical knowledge and literature in women's lives and works, is D.R. Woolf, "A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500-1800," American Historical Review 102 (June, 1997), pp. 645-79. Also of interest is M. Salber Phillips, "`If Mrs. Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles': History, the Novel and the Sentimental Reader," History Workshop 43 (Spring, 1997), pp. 111-31. C. Kent, "Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen," in J.D. Grey, ed., Jane Austen's Beginnings (Ann Arbor, 1989), pp. 59-71, and the same author's "`Real Solemn History' and Social History," in D. Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social Context (London, 1981), pp. 86-104, consider Jane Austen's important engagements with history and historiography.