Presentation - In Defense of History

Richard Evans begins his defense of history by giving the reader a history of history. Above all, Leopold von Ranke – the German historian – shifted history from a religious based endeavor to a more scientific approach. Ranke’s influence was three-fold. First, he established history as an independent discipline, separate from philosophy or literature. Second, he wanted people to understand the past through the people who lived in it and understood it. Third, he introduced a method to extrapolate texts in order to get usable facts. Through Ranke, Evans defense of an objective approach to history takes form. The author fairly and conservatively examines other historical outlooks including postmodernist, revisionist, and deconstructionalist, yet views all of them inadequate in one way or another to an objective viewpoint. His defense and objective approach are not totally original. Evans draws heavily from E.H. Carr’s book What is history? to formulate his thesis and bring about relevant examples.
Evans leaves little to the reader to ponder addressing morality, factual evidence, primary and secondary sources, and causation in a historical context. In general, Evans views the rise of postmodernism as a subjective approach that does not give enough credit to the past and the documents that define it. For example; morality, postmodernists say, are central to understanding history and giving the past a more colorful and definitive viewpoint. Evans believes a more successful way of accessing the past is to leave morality out of the equation, instead giving the reader examples of a situation. Explaining how slave ownership came to be, its effects on slaves, and the country is the true task of the historian, as opposed to a lesson of morality.
In chapter six, Society and the Individual, Evans examines the movement of political dominated history to that of more diverse disciples including social history, cultural history, and psychohistory to name a few. There is no such thing as a definitive history anymore and the ideas of a complete synthesis of historical knowledge are dwindling. Evans sees the result of this as two-fold. History is becoming more eclectic and less Eurocentric,but also allows specialists through modern communication to interact and trade ideas. Economic, Social, and Intellectual historians might differ on methodology, yet agree that postmodernisms linguistic turn is for the worse. Evans takes this postmodern critique of social history as being dead and pointless and helps to reinforce his own point. He concludes though that postmodernisms emphasis on the individual in history actually is a positive thing for historical research restoring a much needed balance between society and the individual.
For most of the book Evans uses Carr on his side, but at times disagrees with his views. For example, in chapter seven E.H. Carr states that those who had contributed little or nothing to creation of historical change as he saw it were not really deserving of historian’s attention. Evans gives a lengthy defense of the losers, conquered, and minorities who do in fact leave their mark on history and deserve the attention of the historians as much as the winners that allegedly write history.
By the final chapter, Evans has given his reader a thorough explanation of not only the objective history that he is defending, but a concise history of other historical disciplines that are attacking the former viewpoint. Evans concludes by the end, and proves through his examples, that “ when postmodernist principles are applied to itself many of its arguments begin to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.” This may be the case but Evans is quick to assert that along with the negative aspects of postmodernism, positive ones have risen. “One thing the postmodernist treatment of history as a form of literature has done is to reinstate good writing as legitimate historical practice.” In defense of history may be dense and wordy at times making Evan’s claims difficult to follow. It is important to remember that his main point is that postmodernism might have boomed in recent years, but eventually it will fall into a sub discipline of history such as cultural history, social history, or political history.