In Defense of History by Richard J. Evans

Author:Richard J. Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

III

DESPITE the increasing specialization and fragmentation which many have observed in the historical profession in recent decades, there is still in some respects reason to doubt Novick’s pessimistic view of its future as a community of scholars united in a single discipline. With the globalization of communication, more historians in more countries are saying more to audiences in other countries than ever before. Certainly, for instance, the translation of books by French and German historians into English has been undertaken on a far greater scale in the last two or three decades than previously, while English and American historians now find a much wider readership in other languages than they did even a generation ago.

Historians in every country have been steadily more influenced by their colleagues elsewhere. Nothing could be further from the truth than John Vincent’s assertion that historical writing “remains conspicuously national in character. French, Germans, Americans, English, go their separate ways.”31 In fact, the Annales school has had an enormous influence on scholarship in England and America, while the work of the British Marxist historians has had a similar international impact, despite Vincent’s curious belief that E. P. Thompson has had no influence on other historians or in any way “affected historical practice.”32 Postmodernist theories have been imported into the United States from France and spread back from there to the historical profession in Europe. Translations of history books from one language into another are now more frequent than ever before; cheap international travel and instantaneous transcontinental communication through E-mail and the Internet have effectively abolished the boundaries between scholars of different nations; conferences and seminars on an international basis are held almost daily; international scholarly centers have sprung up everywhere, from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, the Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris to the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra, and no historian’s curriculum vitae can be held to be complete without the now virtually obligatory listing of lectures and seminars given in London, New York, Jerusalem, or San Francisco. In the international marketplace of ideas, no one can afford the luxury of intellectual autarky any longer.

The fact that Novick’s own excellent book on the “objectivity question” in the American historical profession has been so widely debated in so many different branches of the profession in the United States is itself a persuasive falsification of his views. Just because we all have a different idea of what history is, or should be about, does not mean that we no longer read one another’s works. But there is no denying that this has become more difficult, for over the last thirty years in history there has been an almost exponential increase in the total volume of historical knowledge, occasioned not least by the unprecedented growth in the number of historians that has taken place over this period. Not only has there been an expansion of history’s subject matter, but there has also, just as important, been a widening of

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