Making History • HIST 1105
E. H. Carr, What Is History? (1961), Chapter 1. Five quotations.
Page numbers refer to the Penguin edition PDF in our Zotero library.
Before we start · What Carr is arguing against
“History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 9
Carr sets this up in order to knock it down — and he comes back to the fish fourteen pages later. Everything in between is an argument about why the facts are not lying there waiting to be collected.
Quote 01 · Who gets to testify
“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 11
Notice that the metaphor is a courtroom: facts are witnesses, and someone decides who is called to the stand and in what order. That decision comes before the evidence and cannot be settled by the evidence — it comes from the historian’s question. Carr’s example on the same page: Caesar crossing the Rubicon is a fact of history, while the crossing of that same “petty stream” by millions of other people “interests nobody at all.” Same kind of event, totally different status.
Selection is the argument. Somebody decided which facts got the floor.
Quote 02 · Fact vs. historical fact
“The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 12
This is Carr’s answer to our discussion question about “fact” vs. “historical fact.” His example: at Stalybridge Wakes in 1850 a gingerbread vendor was kicked to death by an angry mob. Documented by an eyewitness — and for a century, not a historical fact at all. It became a candidate only when Kitson Clark cited it, and Carr says it now “awaits a seconder and sponsors.” Whether it survives depends on whether other historians find the interpretation it supports convincing.
A historical fact is a status that gets conferred, not a property that gets discovered.
Quote 03 · The record was curated before you got here
“Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 13
History has been called a jigsaw with missing pieces — but Carr says “the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae.” Fifth-century Greece looks the way it does because the picture was “formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens”; we know almost nothing of how it looked to a Spartan, a Persian, or a slave. Medieval people look devoutly religious because the chroniclers were religious professionals. That picture, Carr says, is indestructible — the contrary evidence “has been lost beyond recall” (p. 14).
The gaps in the record are not random. Always ask who did the keeping — and why.
Quote 04 · Against the fetish of documents
“No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought — what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 16
Carr says the nineteenth century’s “fetishism of facts was completed and justified by a fetishism of documents”: they were “the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts.” His Stresemann case shows the filtering stack — Stresemann’s own records make him the winner of every conversation; his secretary Bernhard cuts 300 boxes down to three volumes; the translator Sutton cuts Bernhard by a third. Yet Sutton, Carr notes, is what “represents for the western world the authentic voice of Stresemann” (p. 18). Three layers of selection before a historian even opens the book.
“Primary” does not mean unmediated. Every source is someone’s account of something.
Quote 05 · The method that follows
“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 23
“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use — these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch.” p. 23
Here is the payoff of the fishmonger image from p. 9. Because “the facts of history never come to us pure… they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder” (p. 22), our first question about a book should be about its author. Carr’s test case is Trevelyan, raised “on a somewhat exuberantly Whig tradition” — that upbringing is his tackle. Hence Carr’s advice: “always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.” And the conclusion: “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”
Before you ask whether a history is true, ask what it was fishing for.
Guardrail · What Carr is not saying
“In place of the theory that history has no meaning, we are offered here the theory of an infinity of meanings, none any more right than any other — which comes to much the same thing. The second theory is surely as untenable as the first.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 26
Carr is steering between two wrecks — he actually names them the Scylla of history as pure objective fact-compilation and the Charybdis of history as pure subjective invention (p. 29). His mountain analogy: just because a mountain looks different from different angles does not mean it “has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes” (p. 27). Interpretation being unavoidable does not make all interpretations equal.
“Constructed” is not a synonym for “made up.”
Where he lands · The answer to the title question
“My first answer therefore to the question ‘What is history?’ is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Carr, What Is History?, p. 30
The relationship is reciprocal, not hierarchical: “The historian is neither the humble slave nor the tyrannical master of his facts… The relation between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take” (p. 29). Facts constrain interpretation; interpretation decides which facts count. Neither gets priority — “the historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless” (p. 30).
History is not a container of findings. It is an argument that is still going on.
Recap · The five points
The historian decides which facts get the floor, and in what order.
“Historical fact” is a status conferred by historians, not a property of events.
What survived was kept by people with a view they wanted supported.
A source tells you what its author thought, or wanted you to think he thought.
Read the author before the argument. Listen for the buzzing.
Not relativism: an unending dialogue between present and past.
Discussion · Carr wrote in 1961
The archive, the printed document collection, the translator, the textbook. Human gatekeepers you could in principle name, and whose bees in the bonnet you could go and ask about.
Search rankings, digitization budgets, recommendation feeds, and models trained on whatever happened to be scraped. The selection still happens — but who do you ask about the buzzing?