Customer Reviews

The Practice of History

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"Meaningful interconnections in the particular, illuminating generalization beyond the individual case-- these are the marks that distinguish the inspired and inspiring historian from the hack." (p. 98) Regarding education: "The university must train the mind, not fill the untrained mind with multi-coloured information and undigested ideas, and only the proper study of an identifiable discipline according to the rules and practices of that discipline can accomplish that fundamental purpose." (p. 160) By being trained in any coherent discipline that requires effort and ability to follow rules, one becomes a better thinker in any field. "Since the whole of history... can never be got between the covers of one book, some means of rendering the material manageable must be found.... To transfer the universality of life on to paper, or even to comprehend it in the mind, is rarely possible, and without a main line of thought nothing results except the jumble which in fact is nearest to the common experience of life. This would be neither art, nor understanding, nor use. Issues and problems demand some sort of tunnel for their clarification." (p. 15) An important lesson I learned from this book is to let the topic guide your writing about it. Also, don't write history for historians and history for lay people; instead pick topics and write them as they require, and indeed some topics will only be useful for historians while others can be appreciated by lay people. Also, refusal to judge is amateurish (p. 17). Amateur history is written through "a veil woven out of strangeness and wonderment", and "cannot penetrate to fundamental explanation" (p. 18). One can read this book not just as instruction about how history should be done, but about how one should learn and do any scholarly discipline. See especially p. 19 for the intuition that a trained historian has, that his guesses are better than random because he understands setting, atmosphere, possibility, probability. His hunch "is in the nature of an inspired forecast which often leads to the discovery of evidence supporting it."

Although many of the ideas espoused by Elton in this book are very old fashioned and narrow-minded, such as his views on revisionism and newer trends in source criticism, the majority of the book deals with the subject in a refreshingly straight-forward manner. The language is, on the whole, very clear and the methodical approach in which he puts forward his arguments is very persuasive. I recommend reading this along side another historiographical work such as E. H. Carr's 'What is History?' or Richard J. Evans' 'In Defence of History'.