Gove's School History Reforms "Debated" Again

First as farce...

OK - so the original title of this post was too flippant a way of drawing your attention my thoughts on the interchange you can find here and here between the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as ‘Fire-His-Ass’ (hereafter FHA) and the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as Regius Prof, or Sir Regius Prof as he now likes to be known, on the subject of Michael 'Pob' Gove's reforms of the schools history curriculum. So I've changed it to something more 'vanilla'.  It is, after all, a pretty serious subject.

But anyway, now that I’ve drawn a bit of traffic and attention, let me meditate on the implications of all this for History.  As it stands this all looks (especially, I imagine, to outsiders) more than a little bit pathetic: like a pissing contest between two overgrown schoolboys.  You have to think that if this is the best that modern history can do the discipline really is in a parlous state.  You could say that the fact that this became an exchange at all was a victory for FHA (see here for an analogy).  Regular readers of this blog will know that I have quite a lot of time for Sir Regius even if, as in this episode, he sometimes makes you want to give him a good shake.  The British Medical Association, I believe, tells us it’s dangerous to shake small children who become vexatious but I’m not sure what its stance is on Regius Professors of History, even where, as here, the boundary between the two categories becomes a little blurred.  Really, though, you do wish that sometimes he’d just forego his desire to have the last word and rise above the provocation offered by FHA who, as a cleverly commercially-manufactured, million-selling crowd-pleaser is surely little more than History’s answer to Justin Bieber or, perhaps better, given his age, origins and likely lack of consequence, The Bay City Rollers.  [Actually that doesn't really work as I suspect it'd be the parents rather than the teeny-boppers that would mostly be into him; we'll come back to glib analogies.] After all, if you read his initial piece in the London Review of Books and compare it with FHA’s response, Sir Regius wins hands down.  His response to FHA’s goading only undermines that.

So this was never going to be a clash of intellectual heavyweights but it descends to such a level that I suggest the referee steps in and disqualifies the pair of them for bringing the game into disrepute.  You might say I’m in no position to criticise anyone on this count, and you’d be right, but then I’m not a Regius Professor or a knight of the realm and I never will be.  Nor am I a Harvard professor with a senior research post at Jesus College Oxford, and nor will I ever be.  How does it make any sense at all to judge competence to think about these things by the number of popular books sold or TV appearances, let alone the number of school-aged children?  If we go by the first two then we’d have to proclaim Andrew Roberts and Dan Snow as the greatest living historians, and then God help us all.  As to the third, when did fecundity become a historical qualification?  I suspect that all this – like those academics who feature pictures of their children on the web-pages – comes down to a statement that, believe it or not, I’ve had sex and here’s the proof.  By those lights – I doubt I’ve sold even 10,000 books, only have a personal chair in a provincial university, never went to Oxbridge, have never had a TV series and am a mere divorcee whose loins have, to date at least, proved fruitless – I’m a nobody (perhaps there is something in it after all…) and I doubt either of them gives a damn what I think, probably rightly too.  That said, I suspect that my first (and worst) book may have had more influence upon my own little corner of the discipline, and the way people think about the practice of history and archaeology within it, than their oeuvre has thus far had on their (admittedly rather larger and more populous) patches.  On the other hand, my father was a history teacher so I do have some (though maybe not much) experience of what professionals in that field might think.  I also like to think that I am rather prettier than either of them but let’s let that pass.  [That last bit was irony by the way; I know that some people who read my words aren’t good at spotting that.]

This debate, if we can even call it that, barely reaches the dizzy intellectual heights of a playground ‘I may be rubbish at football but at least I don’t smell’ exchange, but it brings out a crucial issue.  It takes us to the heart of the crisis facing history.  When thinking about raising what I have called ‘the siege’ this gives us a choice (but in detail I’ll have to come back to that another time).  It may not be a proper choice, as both Sir Regius and FHA are conservative in their views of history (the difference being whether the c in conservative is upper or lower case).  The way they do history does not differ, fundamentally; it's just that Sir Regius is (in my view) rather considerably better at it.  But there's an important choice to be made all the same.  There is a vital difference between them and it behoves everyone with any sort of claim to being interested in history to choose on which side of that difference they stand.  As will become clear, my view is that (although, clearly, they don’t) serious, committed historians ought to take their stance on the side of Sir Regius, for all its eventual limitations.  My view will come as no surprise, given that I have made – on this very blog – many points similar points to his.  This is not to say that I don’t think there are two or three points that Sir Regius makes in his LRB article that are fundamentally mistaken (one or two examples of incoherence are pointed up in the letters), but there’s no space to delve into those.

On the one hand, FHA’s view (backed by Gove) is that history is sequential fact-learning (they call it ‘narrative’ but let’s be clear) focused upon Britain.  Sir Regius on the other hand supports the status quo and the relative stress laid upon source criticism, imagination, empathetic exercise and so on, in which the wider world features at least as strongly.  The latter, says FHA, has been a disaster, although no evidence is given as to why.  All we are offered is sneering assertion, anecdote and hearsay from people (unsurprisingly) who share his viewpoint (e.g. an elitist diatribe by an inexperienced teacher in reactionary, Gove-founded rag Standpoint), rounded off with the conclusion that anyone who disagrees doesn’t have a view worth listening to.  This, I should say, is pretty typical of males of FHA’s socio-educational background and intellectual formation: they argue by swaggering assertion, shiny, glib (but paperweight) analogy and a supreme self-confidence born of the notion (drummed into them from the age of eight or so) that their views are inherently superior to everyone else’s because they themselves are, by virtue of their socio-educational background, superior to everyone else.  Ironically, this eventually makes them far worse historians than everyone else because a little self-doubt is essential to good history.  FHA is a fine example of all that (as is the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we at HotE frequently refer as Gussie Finknottle); Sir Regius rather less so (however bullish he may seem, his irresistible urge to answer back to every criticism speaks, to my mind, of a nagging and persistent insecurity in spite of all his considerable and well-deserved success, which is kind of sweet really).  Be all that as it may, the only evidence proffered in support of the Gove/FHA contention comes in the comments to Sir Regius’ LRB piece where one of the devisers of the Schools History Project (SHP) proclaims it a failure because of a flight away from the subject among students given a choice.  I am unconvinced either that this is, in itself, a disaster or that the solution is to pander to what excites teenagers.  Is the solution to the flight of teenagers away from the lab sciences the introduction of more experiments featuring bad egg gas and explosions?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

Let us consider FHA’s position.  Note, first, that everyone who does not share his position, or who defends the current situation is ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', as though his own position isn’t.  This has long been a standard tactic of demagogues of the Right, to berate educators or other holders of office as ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', essentially for not being politicised or partisan in the way they’d like.  The conservative or Conservative view, you see, is not political; it’s not Right, it’s just right: the way things should be.  This would be undercut by FHA’s desire to disrupt the status quo with a radical move back to the alleged good old days, pre-SHP, but here he makes a currently not untypical move by the Right (and pseudo-Left), which is to denigrate and thus, in a way, politically decentre, the status quo as ‘the establishment’.  The move attempts to recoup a sort of fundamental conservatism even while proposing radical, reactionary change.  Note how FHA scorns Oxbridge ivory towers, in spite of being an independent-school-and-Oxford-educated beneficiary of all the advantages (including, let it be said, access to popular media) that that background brings; in spite of having taught at Oxbridge for most of his career and retaining a grace-and-favour post at Jesus College (ironically, Sir Regius’ alma mater).

What Gove and FHA offer is narrative and fact.  I have argued before on this blog that factual historical narrative does not teach you ‘how we got where we are’ or help one to understand one’s place in the world, and that it is not ‘relevant’, as relevance is usually understood; there’s no need for me to repeat that argument.  The points to stress are that any narrative depends upon selection and choice (and is thus politically implicated) and that no facts, historical or otherwise, exist independently of language.  This means both that the language we choose to describe facts (‘victory’ or ‘defeat’, for example) is not neutral and that the function that facts fulfil within narrative depends, as in linguistic syntax, upon their juxtapositions to other facts, the choice of the mode of the narrative, and so on.  I’ve made these points before (they’re hardly novel anyway).  Simple narrative is not – it cannot be – politically neutral.  The national narrative – and this is clear from Gove’s own speech – is predicated upon being, in itself, explanation, and upon the notion that modern Britain is somehow the best of all possible worlds.  Similar points undermine the highly incoherent notion of ‘cultural literacy’, supported by Gove and other right-wingers, and ‘national memory’ but there’s no space to go into that.  It is impossible to claim that a return to a focus on British historical narrative is anything other than shot through with politically-laden ideas or that those ideas are not precisely the ones that Gove’s opponents accuse them of being.  The implications of any attempt to claim either of these things will emerge below.

Why does it matter to study British history?  “Surely”, says FHA, “they [Sir Regius and his ilk] can't sincerely think it's acceptable for children to leave school (as mine have all done) knowing nothing whatever about the Norman conquest, the English civil war or the Glorious Revolution, but plenty (well, a bit) about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement?”  Surely.  Note the rhetorical strategy.  It’s there too in a response by another Cambridge professor (let’s, for legal reasons, call him ‘Grave Robin’) to Sir Regius’ LRB article: “I doubt that anyone [anyone] interested in history, professionally or otherwise, thinks that the purpose of studying the past is to acquire skills, let alone that what Evans describes as ‘the transmission and regurgitation of “facts”’ is unimportant.”  Let me say, first, that I don’t see any reason at all why it is ipso factobad to know ‘nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty … about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement’; at least I don’t see that leaving school knowing nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement is any worse than leaving school knowing nothing about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement but plenty about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution.  The only argument in Gove’s or FHA’s favour is the ‘cultural literacy’ one, that not knowing about the facts they list puts a student at a disadvantage in a culture where political and other participation requires the ability to talk knowledgably about the Norman Conquest, etc.  But what if we want to create a culture where it’s important to be able to talk knowledgably about the civil rights movement or the New Deal (no prizes for guessing why the latter wouldn’t be on FHA’s list!).  Even speaking as a specialist in pre-modern history I have to say I’d rather the latter culture than the former, but I’d prefer, to either, a culture where people had the skills to be able to think critically about a historical event and look up and assess the facts of the matter, rather than just thinking that fact-knowing was all there was to civil or political engagement.  So, even as someone interested in history, at a professional level, actually I most certainly do see the fundamental purpose of a historical education as the acquisition of skills (maybe Robin and I differ over what is a skill) and I do see the regurgitation of facts as unimportant.  So, FHA, we surely do, and, Robin, you doubt wrongly.  And?

Then the defence becomes, via the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we will refer as Long John, author of that mighty historiographical work British History for Dummies (a tome curiously absent from his Anglia Ruskin web-site but of which I was the reader – you can fill in your own ‘target audience focus group’ gag here) - just, you might say, the man to advise the Tory Party - that ‘the kids’ want to know what happened.  They like stories; they want to be entertained or excited.  Sure, but I return to my science analogy.  Can you imagine a lab science curriculum based upon considerations like these?  It would involve the listing of things that happen, a descent to the experiments with the most dramatic results.  Add X to Y and … Bang!  Woo!  Cool!  So what?  You could make an analogous, and equally coherent, argument (to FHA’s about history-teaching) that all ‘hard science’ teaching should focus on the learning of results: knowing what happens when you mix X and Y, add A to B, or do Z in fashion C.  It’d be useful, practically.  It’d certainly give students some orientation in the world they inhabit.  But science (I’m not a scientist as I keep saying but I don’t think I’m way off-beam here) is about knowing principles, knowing why these things happen and how you’d test the notion that they do, or that they necessarily do, not just that they do.  The question one then has to ask of Gove, FHA and the rest, quite apart from querying their assumption that history teaching of the current kind is necessarily not exciting or interesting (and Sir Regius in a letter replying to the replies to his article – yes, again – provides decent evidence to the contrary), is why they think that historical education should be less than scientific? 

In my view, one produces politically-engaged citizens through teaching general principles and the skills of finding out if or why, of testing the extent to which, those principles are valid, not by drumming into them a series of events whose importance is held to be self-evident in a story which is explanation and whose justification is the idea that the present is the best of all possible worlds.  Unlike the author of the Standpoint piece, I just cannot see the notion that teachers challenge supposedly eternal canonical ‘truths’ in ‘progressive’ education as a bad thing (it’s telling that ‘progressive’ is employed a dirty word).   Grave Robin feels he’s scored a real point by pointing out that this Tory view is in fact … wait for it … a ‘Whig’ view of history (a point that Sir Regius had made in any case) but it’s a point that goes nowhere except to the curious counter-factual that if we had a view of history, now, that was based around Tory views of the eighteenth century it would be – get this – different.  Blinding.  The drumming of a standard factual narrative into schoolchildren will not produce critically-engaged citizens, it will produce uncritical acceptance of the status quo as the inevitable and best outcome of ‘our island story’ – that’s why the Right like the idea.  Would the ludicrous parody of a science curriculum I set out earlier produce better scientists or citizens better equipped to deal with the world around them?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

So let’s return to the Glorious Revolution.  How would knowing about it make you a better citizen than knowing about Rosa Parks and MLK?  What on earth is there in learning about the English Civil War, let alone the Norman Conquest, that would make you a more engaged citizen?  OK, next time the issue of the Divine Right of Kings or the legality of levying Ship Money without parliamentary consent become political hot potatoes, the next time that the King of Norway and the Duke of Normandy team up for a cunningly simultaneous invasion of England, we’ll be looking to you for political and strategic advice.  For Gove/FHA and co., there are two responses available to this admittedly facetious point.  One (the better) is that the significance of an event transcends its factual specifics; that it’s not the what but the how and why that matter.  The other is that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists simply in the fact that they, in and of, themselves led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today, whereas the civil rights movement (rather arguably) didn’t.

Consider the first response.  It produces, in return, two questions.  First: how does one evaluate issues of how and why without source criticism?  Second: if the significance of knowing about 1066, 1642 or 1688 does not consist in the specifics of those events, if its value is more than simply learning a triumphal ‘island story’ narrative, if its role in forming a politically-engaged and responsible citizenry transcends the event itself, then why learn about that particular event rather than the end of the Roman Empire or the coronation of Charlemagne or the revolutions of 1848?  If there is a transcendent value to the study of events, is it not in explaining and evaluating them and their significance?  If one is to explain an event, rather than just learn it, then one has to question the idea that it simply followed on naturally from the preceding event in the sequence – that other things were possible.  Thus one questions narrative as explanation (and thus, at least implicitly, the importance of narrative context).  If one wants to evaluate an event, rather than just learn it, one has to weigh up its positive and negative effects - unless of course one simply wants to teach children that all things are for the best that lead to the best of all possible worlds.  Weighing up positives and negatives, critically, implies looking at the problems of the sources (or ‘identifying bias’ in the awful language of school history that we have to spend so long trying to exorcise at university): source criticism.  If one wants to get away from a simple depersonalised history of institutions or Great Men and Battles (and note that the triumphal island story does rather minimise any sort of attention to gender), evaluating the consequences of an event involves an exercise in trying to think how people at the time, of different sorts, experienced them – unless, as I keep saying, it’s all for the best in our celebratory island story.  Doing that means an appeal to a shared humanity, in other words an exercise in imagination and empathy.

What I am arguing, then, is that the FHA/Gove/Long John approach cannot logically remain within the terms of its own rhetoric - unless it aims actively to suppress critical evaluation, and/or unless it aims no higher than the promulgation of historical facts, whether as an empty-headed Lang-esque series of lame puns or a Deary-esque sequence of gory factoids, training history students to be no more than prurient raconteurs, or as a triumphal, teleological nationalist narrative, unless – in other words – it does exactly what its critics accuse it of doing; unless – in fine – it ceases not merely to be a historical education but an education of any kind.

Let me put that another way.  Unless it adopts the second response listed above to the question of how the value of knowing about an event transcends its factual detail (that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists in the simple fact that, in and of themselves, they led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today whereas, say, the civil rights movement didn’t) and thus admits to the charges its opponents lay before it, the Gove/FHA idea of school history cannot logically remain within its own rhetorical parameters.  The moment it tries to transcend the accusation of narrow, teleological, triumphalist, nationalist fact-learning, it transgresses – it cannot but transgress – onto the territory, aims, ideals and principles of the ‘progressive’ SHP history-teaching that it claims to despise.  The moment it claims to be other than what its opponents accuse it of being, it empties its own rhetoric of any and all content and reveals itself as what it is: a narrow-minded reactionary attempt to play politics by pandering to the lowest common-denominator amongst Daily Mail columnists (like FHA himself) and the more gullible elements of their readership.

The reason why schools history prepares pupils so badly for university history has nothing to do with the current curriculum or the ways the subject is taught, or by whom.  The problem lies in political interference in schools and in the examination processes that that has engendered.  There are great history teachers, there are mediocre ones, and there are terrible ones, as in any other subject.  I had a mix at my school, from wonderful to dreadful.  The problem came (and here things do get ironic for the FHA view) with the Thatcherite and sub-Thatcherite (New Labour) mantra of choice.  The desire to ‘enable’ parents as consumers and give them a choice of local schools led to the production of league tables according to exam results (everyone knows how problematic those tables are).  Once that happened then – naturally and indeed rightly – teachers demanded more transparency about the marking of examination papers, how marks were awarded and so on.  That has led in turn to the current situation where teachers have to teach to the test, where they have to drill their students in mark-scoring.  That leaves the legacy that we have to deal with in universities, a deep-seated, ingrained belief that there will be measurable ways to get specific marks.  Recently I was asked (not by a bad or lazy student) ‘how many historians do I need to cite to get the best mark?’  Students write in specific ways because they are drilled into thinking that they will get them marks.  None of any of that has anything at all to do with the ‘progressive’ history curriculum.  It certainly wouldn’t get any better under Gove’s reforms.  What would really improve schools history would be to remove political interference from it.  But, as Sir Regius says, that’s unlikely ever to happen.  History is (or it ought to be) dangerous.  I tell prospective students that a history degree is (or ought to be) three years of thinking dangerously.  FHA benefited from precisely that, you might say.  It’s a shame he now wants to make it so safe for everyone else.

'The Siege'

[I have started writing my next book, provisionally entitled Why History Doesn't Matter.  Much of its subject matter will not be surprising to anyone who reads this blog.  Here, in any case, for your amusement is (in very rough, first draft form) an extract from Chapter 1, which deals with a subject I have long threatened to deal with here: what I call 'the siege' - the way in which academic history finds itself beset on all sides by unqualified or barely qualified dabblers in the study of the past and just how serious this situation is for the nature, and future, of the discipline.

Do not read this post unless you also read the second instalment of these thoughts here.  It clarifies the argument.]

... [W]hile the discipline has been bogged down in post-empiricist soul-searching, history itself has been, to a considerable degree, taken over by non-specialists.  It is a platitude that ‘the past’ has become public and that academic historians do not have sole access to or control over it.  Most of the volumes shelved in the history sections of bookshops are not written by what I consider to be historians.  The history that appears on television is similarly dominated by non-specialists.  Usually styling themselves ‘writer and historian’, ‘journalist and historian’, ‘broadcaster and historian’ or whatever … ‘and historian’, they are in most cases, in fact, writers, journalists, broadcasters or whatever who have written books about history.  Having written a book about history does not make you a historian.  This does not mean that these books and broadcasts represent ‘bad history’ (though frequently they do), that they do not present factually accurate accounts, that they do not contain valid and valuable ideas and interpretations or – most importantly of all – that they do not play a huge part in getting people interested in the past.  The problem for history is in important regards the opposite.  What they do, they do very well.  That leaves the academic discipline of history in a very difficult position.  What exactly do proper, qualified, university historians have to offer?  In the current political climate the surfeit, ubiquity and (by its own lights) quality of popular history places the discipline very much under siege.

The implication of the situation just described is that anyone with basic literacy can write history and call themselves a historian.  When you think about it, there are not many intellectual disciplines where anything like this is the case.  I cannot, for instance, buy a chemistry set and a subscription to New Scientist, come up with some cranky idea about ‘bad egg gas’, and go on television as ‘Hubert Grumpy, writer and chemist’.  If I didn’t have a degree in the subject, I could not dig up my back garden and appear on documentaries as ‘Hubert Grumpy, writer and archaeologist’.  At the very least, the word ‘amateur’ would have to be appended.  The purveyors of television and ‘bookshop history’ do not (with notable but fairly rare exceptions) carry out actual historical research but are still called historians; they are not academically qualified beyond, on occasion, a first degree and have no university post but are nevertheless referred to as ‘media dons’.  They work from the published research of academic historians.  Sometimes (especially in the case of the presenters of television history) they don’t even do that; they have researchers to do it for them.  Parasitically, they make money from other people’s labours.  Any university historian who works on any subject even remotely interesting to the wider public will be able to tell you how she has been contacted by a TV or radio researcher expecting them to spend a large amount of time on the phone conveying (free of charge) the results of her work so that a broadcaster can make money out of it through a television or radio broadcast and spin-off volume.  I am surely not the only one who, in refusing to do someone else’s job for free, has been accused of ‘not being interested in communicating’.  It is difficult to imagine many other academic disciplines where this problem is anything like as significant.  If we take the most successful purveyors of popular science, almost all are academically qualified (well beyond first degree level) in the subject about which they talk.

Now, one might reasonably wonder what is wrong about any of this.  In some ways there is nothing wrong with it at all.  As I will argue later in this book, no one owns the past or any segment of it; indeed, the dangers with which this volume is concerned chiefly involve over-identification with, a claimed ownership of, a particular vision of the past.  But there is something rather unnerving for the future of the discipline of history about the current situation.  Let us look briefly at how one gets to be an academic historian.  Especially in the current situation in universities in Great Britain and beyond, to acquire a university post is (even while acknowledging the nepotism, favouritism and wilful avoidance of actual merit that pervades the profession in different ways and to different degrees) to have passed through a series of tests of quality.  To receive funding to get onto a post-graduate course requires one to be among the best in an undergraduate cohort, usually with not merely a first class degree but with one of the best first-class degrees in the year.  When one considers the small fraction of the population to get a good university degree in a popular and thus competitive subject like history, we can see that, in intellectual terms, we are already in at most the top percentile or two of that section of the population which is seriously interested in history.  To move from an MA to a PhD requires a good performance (usually a distinction) at that level, and to find employment after a PhD, in a situation where permanent jobs are few really requires one (however rightly one may be sceptical of the process) to be at the forefront of a very small percentage of all those who took a history undergraduate degree.  It demands the successful completion of a thesis which convinces established historians of its quality and significance and, increasingly, demonstrated success in getting published (again convincing more established academics of the high standard of work) and indications of ability as an effective teacher and administrator.  It must be considered a serious situation for the profession when someone who has never subjected themselves to any of this qualitative scrutiny, but does have the ability to write a book and (and this is rarely related to any rigorous assessment of quality) find a publisher, is accepted as a historian to the same degree as the person who has passed all those tests.  Increasingly, the circle of ‘writers and historians’ has become something of a closed circuit.  Reviewing each other’s latest efforts, they hail their friends as ‘the most interesting/exciting ancient/medieval/modern/military historian writing in Britain today'.  At the same time, they use their greater access to the media to damn any attempt by actual historians to point out the short-comings and inaccuracies of their work and to sit in judgement as reviewers of any work of professional historians (as if they were their peers) that makes it sufficiently far into the public sphere as to be deemed worthy of review in the broadsheets or literary supplements.  Again, it is difficult to imagine many other disciplines where a comparable situation arises.

One reason for this, for sure, is that many, probably most, academic historians [though not me, obviously] do not feel especially comfortable standing on their academic dignity.  It looks faintly ridiculous to academic historians (though not, evidently, to specialists from other disciplines dabbling in history), to append their academic titles to their by-lines, especially in more popular writings.  Most university historians are well aware that one does not have to have had a historical training to produce at least certain sorts of good historical work, and most accept the view that many interpretations and accounts of past events are possible and valid (leaving aside the point that a great deal of popular bookshop history, especially around its fringes, concerns interpretations of the past that are neither possible nor valid).  They see the dangers of any restriction of access to the past to routes that go via the approved priests and priestesses of the discipline.  This is all correct and laudable, but the current laissez-faire attitude is equally dangerous to the discipline and indeed to history in general, if not more so, and, in my view, it cannot be left to continue unmodified.

The current state of affairs may also owe its rise to the end of Rankean positivist history.  This has removed what was surely one of their most powerful weapons from the arsenal of the professional historian, the claim that they were better able to tell it like it was than anyone else.  More to the point, what the consumer of popular history has come to expect from such work is indeed, generally, a story that tells it as it really was.  More complex and sophisticated histories, however accessibly related, are often kept off the shelves and screens by the gatekeepers of those outlets: the ‘trade’ publishers and marketers, the editors and producers.  The latter are, of course, often close associates of the authors and presenters of popular history. 

In one of my own areas of specialism, the so-called ‘barbarian migrations’, there has never been a TV documentary on the subject that has not retold the same old story of how the barbarians conquered the Roman Empire, in spite of attempts (including my own) to try and pitch an alternative and more accurate version.  I once acted as a consultant to an historical atlas produced by a major publisher of lavishly illustrated books and attempted to have the spread on the barbarian migrations designed in such a way as not to perpetuate the old myths through the repetition of the usual swirling arrows starting in central Europe and ending in Africa or Italy.  But my advice was entirely ignored.  What was published was yet another map with spaghetti-like arrows tipped all over it providing the same misleading idea to another generation of potentially interested readers.  Why?  I asked the editor and was told that that was what people wanted from a historical atlas.  Such publishers and TV editors, with no actual educational experience, apparently know what people can and cannot grasp.  It is an astonishingly elitist and patronising attitude.

This has a far more insidious effect upon the historical profession.  The last Labour government of the UK (yes, a Labour government) placed British universities under the control of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, which is some ways says it all.  Part of that policy was to ensure that all university activity was ‘useful’ and the means of measuring such utility was to judge the ‘impact’ of research.  Leaving aside the more general questions about such a policy, what it means and how it is to be done is still somewhat mysterious but for a long time the advice generally bandied about was to get one’s work used in broadcasting of some sort.  In other words, the profession was being compelled to place itself at the service of the purveyors of popular history and their agents, editors and directors who set the rules for, and indeed control access to, the market in which academic historians were now being told they had to compete.   The further implication, of course, was to restrict the type of history being written.  The Royal Historical Society made no serious complaint against this development.  This should not surprise; a few years later, it made no protest at all at the revelation that government funding for research, via the Arts and Humanities Research Council, would be given to work that furthered the Conservative Party’s nebulous non-idea of The Big Society.

Related to this is perhaps most revealing indicator of the perilous state of play.  Recent debates upon the teaching of history in schools have largely been played out in the newspapers through the pens, not of professional historians, but the writers of populist books.  The qualified historian has even lost a place at the table where historical educational policy is made.  Advice has been publicly sought from the writers of pulp history rather than from more respected specialists or the learned society of the historical profession, which is left – typically enough – meekly bleating from the side-lines.

What does one do about this?  There are, to be sure, steps that could be taken by the profession.  Its learned society could issue a set of standard fees for advice and consultancy.  That none exists currently is absurd.  I have recently (how accurately or fairly is beside the point) been kindly described as ‘our leading authority on early medieval warfare’.  Television researchers regularly contact me expecting me to give out my time and expertise free of charge.  Yet, the same researchers would never approach ‘our leading authority’ on business law or pre-nuptial agreements without expecting to pay through the nose for their time.  That the situation is different for historians is entirely the profession’s own collective fault but, while steps could and should be taken to remedy it, that is not part of my argument.

What is part of my argument, in brief, is that what the peddlers of television and bookshop history typically produce is not what I consider to be proper history.  It will be the essential plank of my argument in this book that what history is, is not simply narratives about the past or descriptions of past events.  My argument will not just be that true history contains argument and explanation – hardly a revolutionary position – but also that it has, ineluctably, within its own methodology, an ethical and political programme.  I will argue that it is this which the profession must bring out to distance itself from the populists.

News from 'the siege' (or On 'Being Brought up to Speed')

Last week I made the inaugural ‘Historian on the Edge Dumb-Ass TV-History Moment of the Week Award’. Not, you'll agree, something that was meant (or indeed deserved) to be taken very seriously.  I went on to express a view that this bit of egregious nonsense presumably entered the programme courtesy of the director/researcher/script-writers rather than the person upon whose book it was based, one William Hastings Burke (aet. 27).

However, although on the TV he seemed nice enough, a sensible sort and certainly someone whom you couldn't fault for involving himself with a just cause, I then read this in Burke's on-line biography:
Fed up with the stuffy academic approach to history, he is part of a new generation bringing history up to speed.
http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/william-hastings-burke/

I expressed the view that, if he agreed that blurb or (worse) actually wrote it, then it smacked of more than a little arrogance. I went on to describe what sort of arrogance it was in some fairly 'up-to-speed' language rather than in the 'stuffy' discourse of actually qualified historians, as it seemed more appropriate.

None of this was meant massively seriously; I certainly never expected the outcome.  Today I heard from his publishers, demanding that I modify this ‘defamatory’ comment, which I have done, cheerfully enough. It was probably inappropriate, though I don't agree that it was actually defamatory. They make the very good points that Burke spent five years on his book, working in near poverty, devoting himself to promoting the rehabilitation of Albert Goering.

Well if that's true, (seriously and honestly) hats off to Burke for all that. But none of that is what I was talking about. The point I was discussing was his on-line biography and its claims. You might wonder why I get so angry with this sort of blurb from pop publishers; why I seem to be getting my Calvins in a bunch over one stupid twenty-one-word sentence. Here’s why (and remember that here I am entirely dealing with the claims made in his blurb, not with his espousal of the cause of Albert Goering, whom he rightly regards as a hero – good luck to him on that front and all congratulations on raising A. Goering’s profile are deserved):

Burke claims (or his 'literary and talent agent' claims on his behalf) to be part of new generation ‘bringing history up to speed’. For someone with no qualifications beyond a BA (and not even a BA in History!) to claim to be able to do this is – let’s face it – monstrously arrogant. Such is the lack of funding for post-graduate degrees that ‘stuffy academics’, in order even to get on the path possibly to being ‘stuffy academics’ in the first place, have to pass exams at a level that puts them in top few percentile of people who read history at university, making them well within the top 1% of people interested in history. They then have to work hard (and hardly rolling in wealth as they do it, even if ‘near poverty’ might be going a bit far) while they carry out their research, research which must then be judged by their elders to be of a sufficient quality to earn them their MA and then their doctorate. Then, to get a job in academia, of which there are few, they must additionally prove themselves better than significant numbers of their contemporaries in a tough competition. To get published they must again prove their right to enter the field of historical debate through acceptance by more established scholars (‘peer-review’ is in effect something you only get later on in your career). And their first book (and subsequent ones) usually take a sight more than five years. More to the point, I don’t think it unfair to suggest that ‘stuffy’ academic historians see what they are doing as a real cause for the betterment of humanity. Many stuffy academic historians (not least those who work on the Nazis) have worked hard for real causes every bit as serious as the rehabilitation of Albert Goering.

But after all this, they have to endure the likes of William Hastings Burke, and/or his publishers/agents, telling them they are stuffy and need bringing up to speed, while publishers refuse academic historians’ work because it does not tell simple enough stories. Of course I get angry, and so should all professional historians and indeed anyone who gives a damn about the place and value of proper history in modern society. If my selection of William Hastings Burke as an example happens to be fortuitous or even contingent (there are - sure as hell - more deserving targets and, unlike some I could mention, he has at least done his own research), the case is entirely symptomatic of the threat that proper historians face from pop/TV history and its perpetrators. Evidently, historical training and qualification are irrelevant.  Real historians aren't needed.  Anyone who can read or write can do history.  I refer to the situation as ‘the siege’, but I will have to come back to that anon.

To expand: Burke has not had to put himself or his work, or his scholarly abilities, through any of the process above (which is certainly not to say he has none - for all I know he might (potentially) be the world's greatest living historian - just that he hasn't exposed those abilities to rigorous scrutiny) and has not had to do any teaching of history and so hasn’t had to face up to the problems of making serious history less ‘stuffy’ to undergraduates like Burke himself. That’s all fair enough; it’s not something one can be criticised or blamed for, in itself, so I don't regard any of the above as defamatory or intend it to be read as such.  What is (to me) objectionable is that he then claims to be (or his agents claim he is) in a position to "bring the discipline up-to-speed". In my book, whether on his part or his publishers’, that is arrogant, pure and simple. The claims made in his on-line biography won't win William Hastings Burke any friends among proper historians.  He may not care, and that's fair enough - there's no reason why he should - but, if he does and he didn’t write it himself, his agents aren't doing him any favours by writing and publishing it.

Here is some more from the blurb on his 'literary and talent agents'' page (try not to laugh; I assure you I am not making this up; read it for yourself here: http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/william-hastings-burke/thirty-four/):

“Enter William, a twentysomething from Sydney, Australia, who stumbles upon the tattered pieces of Albert’s history. Shelving plans for a Ph.D., William sets off on a three year odyssey across eight countries and three continents to piece together the puzzling life of Albert Göring.

“Forget staid biography. Think seat of your pants travelogue mixed with a Spielberg eye for storytelling and you start to get a taste for the energy William brings to the page. Delivering the kind of must-read story that turns history on its head, Thirty Four gives us a new hero. Standing alongside Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg is the Göring history forgot.”

No one should necessarily be blamed for the idiocies of publishers' marketing departments (when my first book came out, the CUP marketing department produced a flyer which mangled my blurb from saying that this was 'the first study in English of a part of the Merovingian world for nearly twenty years', to saying that it was 'the first study of the Merovingian world for twenty years': oh, the embarassment).  If it were true that Hastings Burke were indeed ‘stumbl[ing] upon the tattered pieces of Albert’s history’ for the first time, to ‘piece together the puzzling life of Albert Göring’, whom ‘history forgot’, to ‘turn history on its head’, then one would have to doff one’s hat to him and forgive a certain amount of misplaced chutzpah.  Likewise even if it were only the case that the claim made by his publishers in their letter me were true: that 'his book and dedication to Albert's legacy have meant that this story has been able to reach a far broader audience.  Until recently Albert was almost unheard of'.

Here are three points.  You can draw your own conclusions:
1. The documentary (at least in the part I saw – I missed the beginning) did not note that much of the story was already easily available on line, having been posted by Louis Bülow:
http://www.goering.dk/.
Bülow’s website also draws attention to the suspicious resemblance between Albert Goering and his godfather, though it at least does not explain the differences between the brothers on the basis of alleged illegitimacy.

2. As Bülow points out, the German Journalist/TV-Historian Guido Knopp had, in a book published in German in 2000, already drawn attention to Albert Goering’s work in rescuing people from the Nazis. Knopp’s book appeared in English in 2001 and is, I believe, a best-seller translated into many languages.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-Holocaust-Guido-Knopp/dp/0750937823

3. Nor (again, as far as I could see) was any mention made of James Wyllie’s book, The Warlord and the Renegade: The Story of Hermann and Albert Göring (2005) which, five years ago remember, had also drawn attention to the fact that:
“Albert deferred to Hermann as head of the family, but spent nearly a decade working against his brother's regime, intervening wherever possible to rescue the victims of Nazi tyranny, from humble shopkeepers to heads of state.”
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Warlord-Renegade-Hermann-Albert-Goring/dp/0750940255

Neither Knopp nor Wyllie are professional academic historians (though Wyllie at least has a history degree) but neither, to their credit, has made silly claims about how they are bringing ‘stuffy’ history ‘up-to-speed’.

Now, all that having been said, you’d have to be mad not to wish William Hastings Burke the very best of luck in getting Albert Goering recognised more generally or formally, but it is, to say the least, more than a little ‘naughty’ of his publishers and producers to claim that all this is ground-breaking news or fresh research. For all I know, Burke may have brought some new insights and information to all this (rest assured I will find out and let you know one way or the other) and Albert Goering's story probably does indeed need to be better known, but for historians, ‘stuffy’ as well as ‘up-to-speed’, Third-Reich-specialists or (like me) not, or for the many (hundreds of) thousands of people who have read Wyllie and Knopp's books or visited Bülow's web-site, Albert Goering’s courage and good works were not news.

Last week I suggested that being young and good-looking probably makes up for a lack of qualifications or originality in the world of Popular/TV history. Good luck to them that’s got the looks and the youth, but – please – don’t set yourself up as something you ain’t. You’ll just look silly, arrogant or w … orse.

Thanks all the same, but academic history doesn’t need 'bringing up to speed.'