The Pursuit of History

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A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (Yale University Press, 1999) Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Hard and heavy: toward a new sociology of masculinity,’ in Michael Kaufman (ed.), Beyond Patriarchy (Toronto, 1987), p. 176. The claim to epistemological radicalism on behalf of Carr does not seem to me especially convincing. Why? My doubts about the message in What is History? is the product of my present intellectual situatedness as a historian (a writer about the past). Today, with our greater awareness of the frailties and failures of representationalism, referentialism, and inductive inference, more and more history writing is based on the assumption that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past. It would be tempting, but wholly incorrect, to say that history's pendulum has swung far more to the notion of history as a construction or fabrication of the historian. Rather, what has happened, is that our contemporary conditions of existence have created a much deeper uncertainty about the nature of knowledge-creation and its (mis-)uses in the humanities. It is not about swings in intellectual fashion. Masculinities in Politics and War: gendering modern history; joint editor with Stefan Dudink & Karen Hagenamm (Manchester University Press, 2004) Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), p. 189.

Social theory historians (constructionists) understand past events through a variety of methods statistical and/or econometric, and/or by devising deductive covering laws, and/or by making anthropological and sociological deductive-inductive generalisations. For hard-core reconstructionist-empiricists on the other hand, the evidence proffers the truth only through the forensic study of its detail without question-begging theory. These two views are compromised by Carr's insistence that the objective historian reads and interprets the evidence at the same time and cannot avoid some form of prior conceptualisation - what he chooses simply (or deliberately loosely?) to call "writing" (Carr 1961: 28). By this I think he means the rapid movement between context and source which will be influenced by the structures and patterns (theories/models/concepts of class, race, gender, and so forth) found, or discovered, in the evidence. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). For her theoretical reflections along these lines, see Sinha, ‘Giving masculinity a history: some contributions from the historiography of colonial India’, Gender and History 11 (1999), 445–60.

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For a study which engages with Queer theory, see Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke, 2005). The sixth edition of John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History is a clearly written, informative and absorbing introduction to the practice of ‘doing’ history. While retaining the most useful features of earlier editions of the book, this latest edition introduces new, valuable material on public history, digitised sources, historical controversies, transnational history and the nature of the archive. It includes an expanded range of examples and case‐studies, including additional material on American history, along with an updated reference list, making it an invaluable text for both tutors and students of history alike."

The Pursuit of History has many strengths. It is extremely well‐written and lucid. It strikes a very nice balance between tracing historiography, delineating historical methodology, and discussing the major historiographical developments over the last few decades. Comprehensive, insightful and conversant with the latest historiographical currents, it is essential reading in any undergraduate or graduate theory and method course." A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992). Ten years later, following the establishment of state elementary education, Stubbs spelt out the democratic implications: Callinicos, Alex (1995) Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge, Polity Press.R.W. Connell, Arena 6 (1996), quoted in D.Z. Demetriou, ‘Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: a critique’, Theory and Society 30 (2001), 340.