Over at Slate last week, our Junto colleague Eric Herschthal reviewed some of the latest popular histories of revolutionary America , including two new studies of the years around by Richard Beeman and Joseph Ellis. Why should history be any different? To me, the answer seems self-evident. When scientists conduct their research, they are governed by laws of the scientific method. Progress in science rests on systematic testing, observation, and measurement of phenomena, normally requiring that results can be repeated if experiments are carried out with the same conditions.
This allows new knowledge to be integrated into scientific scholarship once the validity of testing has been accepted. Historians, by contrast, are always, necessarily, dealing with incomplete information. Indeed, we lose more of the raw material we need to understand the past the further away we get from it.
When we talk about new research on the past, very frequently what we mean is a reinterpretation of the materials that formed the evidentiary basis of older monographs. That might be by comparing groups of archival material previously thought not to be linked to each other; alternatively, it might involve the adoption of a new theoretical lens.
In any case, is it that surprising that historians especially from different generations might read the archival material differently? History is not science. Math problems were always interesting to me, and certainly intellectually fulfilling. There was always a disappointment, though, in the finality of completing a math problem.
No matter how logical, rigorous and thorough you are in the course of writing history, you still get to have an argument at the end of it. If previous generations of historians, studying the same sets of sources we have, came to very different conclusions, what makes us so certain that we are right?
Or even a third formulation — if modern research is so correct in interpreting the past, why is the reading public so resistant to its insights? One answer comes down to the quality of our storytelling. While I was an undergraduate at Oxford, Richard Beeman was visiting professor for a year. He was a fantastic teacher, and an even better lecturer. He gave the only lecture series I saw where more people attended his final lecture than his first one. If all historians were as good at engaging an audience as Beeman, then we would live in a considerably more historically literate world.
Though there are other journals and monographs that deal with the same subject perhaps in a more academic manner, too , I set the chapter on slavery for my class on the Constitutional Convention. At the end of this semester, one of my students came to me and thanked me for setting the reading, as it had helped him see the Constitution in a new light.
Another answer comes to the sorts of stories we tell. I can think of numerous books in the past few years that speak to questions of leadership from a decidedly more subversive angle than Joseph Ellis.
Academic historians know that there are many alternative stories to be told about the operation of power and the role of popular activism in the Revolution. But instead of trying to tell these stories which I think, if well told, would have significant popular appeal , the latest trends that Herschthal particularly identifies in his review is that of the neutrality of most people in the Revolution. With the best will in the world, this is never scholarship that is going to excite a wider audience though it may well invigorate new and innovative studies of political leadership.
We are naturally most interested in stories of change over time. Histories of the early twenty-first century will focus on the Arab Spring, or the astounding leaps forward in technology, or popular movements like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, rather than the vast swathes of people who have little time for political discussion.
But nor should we ignore topics that are. Of course, academic historians are more than just storytellers. Many popular histories are reductive and fall victim to that linearity. When we study history, we are not providing answers to definitive scientific problems. A man who goes through either, and takes a good place in his Second Part, has laid a broad foundation for future work, and made a good start with the critical study and comparison of original writers…though he may still want special help from the philosopher, the antiquarian, the palaeographer, the economist or the teacher of languages.
Still more confident and circumstantial were claims made for Greats in a later symposium on examinations edited by the educationist Philip Hartog. Candidates brought to Lit. In philosophy they were. Moves to interest undergraduates in research are recorded from the late s. They learnt…to go back as far as possible to the first authority. They were told that method, attention to detail, thoroughness, and accuracy are the hallmarks of the true scholar…They learnt further the use of anthropological parallels, the value of self-criticism, detestation of humbug, caution against plausible theories, and the necessity of first collecting the evidence and then determining what conclusions can logically be drawn from it.
Clark, Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford —34 is described by a pupil as taking a class. We saw the possibilities of his own special methods and it is still second nature, when faced with a textual dislocation, to count the letters with or without the help of a pin.
I came to prefer dialectic to history, more special to broader inquiries, a grain of proof to a bushel of sweeping suggestion, and I did my best to be as candid as I could…In Cambridge…we followed an argument in the spirit of adventure…In our view nothing was final but the rules of sound navigation, and everyone seemed ready to be argued out of his fundamental conception of the term before.
At Oxford, too, studying philosophy could be a strenuous experience. The Socratic method, wrote the author of R. For serious students, the Balliol historian A.
Smith set an equally demanding standard. According to one pupil, the Edinburgh graduate p. You read your essay to him; if it was a good one the effect was to stimulate him…He rose from his chair…pouring out…a torrent of criticism, of leading questions, of points missed…On a good day, the whole thing reminded you of a superbly able counsel tearing to pieces the speech of his opposite number…Smith gave you illuminating points, and criticisms and references, but on principle he never elaborated them.
He expected you to go away and work them out or look them up and then write a revised precis of your original essay. If you did this, you got all that he had to give you; if you did less, you got next to nothing from him. But the fundamental issue—how to combine preparation for unseen examinations with training for research—remained unresolved.
An alternative approach, giving undergraduates hands-on research experience, was developed in the Manchester History Department by two Oxford-trained medievalists, T. Tout and James Tait.
Tout taught third-year Special Subject classes in the Freeman Library a History room in the University Library in German seminar style, setting each student a topic to research in printed primary sources.
He also introduced a compulsory undergraduate thesis, an example that was followed in some other civic universities. Powicke went back to Manchester as research fellows; both were, as critics of the Oxford p.
The man who wishes to pursue his studies farther is sufficiently equipped on taking his degree to be able to do so, provided that he is willing to learn and to go slowly. At the ancient universities an initiation in research often came through the fellowship and prize systems, the main routes to advancement for the academically ambitious. Some FBAs who did not write prize essays or dissertations had instead published substantial books by the age of Many FBAs had studied abroad, though it is not always clear what that entailed.
Only two in our sample went so far as to take continental PhDs, both at the University of Leipzig. The philosopher G. Hicks studied there for four years; but R. Of the historians who did attend continental universities, A. Fisher, a Lit Hum. Brooke to the Vatican Library, the diplomatic historian C. Webster on a tour of continental archives before the outbreak of war in , Richard Pares in the s to archives in the United States and West Indies.
British philosophers of an earlier generation had gained much from their visits to German universities: for philosophers in our sample the benefits were less obvious. Bradley, though always controversial among professional philosophers, had widespread influence, but was not seen by its British adherents as derivative from Hegel. Pringle-Pattison, who did work on Kant and Hegel, gained little from his time —82 at a series of German universities, where Idealism was out of fashion.
Hicks in Germany. Whitehead was among those of his generation who did not study abroad, despite the importance for his early work on mathematical logic of the ideas of Hermann Grassmann, and the influence of Giuseppe Peano and Gottlob Frege on the collaboration with Bertrand Russell that produced Principia Mathematica — I had reasons for wishing…to reside in Cambridge and I still feel very doubtful whether I should have got as much benefit by studying in Germany as I did by staying at home.
This was a golden age for Cambridge philosophy and its analytical style owed little to foreign influences. In classical studies, however, there was not only a need to visit sites and museums but also a lasting sense of the superiority of German scholarship.
In most cases this did entail attendance at lectures and seminars at German universities, or residence at the British School in Athens or Rome.
That said, there were classicists who achieved distinction without studying abroad. The Cicero scholar A. Clark travelled in search of manuscripts rather than training but his editions were nevertheless well regarded.
Grenfell and A, S. Hunt at Oxyrhynchus and Arthur Evans at Knossos. Opinion among academics remained divided as to how far research training for the ablest Honours students should become part of the BA course and how far it belonged instead to the post-graduate years.
This lack of p. Most of them were, however, not students but young dons. Among those published in the Oxford Studies though it is not known whether she attended the seminar was the only woman historian in the sample, Helen Cam, then a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge and later Professor of History at Harvard — Low attendance at graduate lectures remained a perennial problem. Manchester, with humanities departments that were relatively small and controlled by their professors, and London, re-founded as a teaching university in , offered more favourable conditions for post-graduate education.
Conway was an inspiring supervisor who. The Institute of Historical Research became a focus for research training on a larger scale, catering for graduate students from colleges of the University of London and open to visitors from other universities. By it accommodated six preliminary courses on historical sources and palaeography and seventeen graduate seminars.
The book-lined rooms shown in early photographs of the Institute, without a fixed seminar table, may reflect memories of the Dictionary Office. Webster held a weekly seminar at his home, his wife dispensing tea. If the Seminar be held as alien to the genius of this University, the friendship of older with younger scholars is not alien to our traditions. In the s and 30s pressure to adapt to American norms could be equally unwelcome. In the humanities the PhD was relatively slow to acquire status as a qualification.
He passes from the superficial study of wide periods to a specialisation that is too narrow, too intense and too hurried. In conclusion, then, it did not look in the s as if further adaptation of British practice was likely to come about in the near future. Research training in the humanities clearly did have its limitations: it produced fewer scholars and a much lower output of scholarly work than European or American universities, and it relied on the presence in universities p.
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The university of the future: Boyer revisited. Higher Education — McAndrew, P. An open future for higher education. Educause Quarterly Nyiri, K. Towards a knowledge society. InforA Newsletter on Digital Culture 6. Pearce, N.
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