Dominic Sandbrook: Historians ignore the human element at their peril
[Dominic Sandbrook is a freelance writer on history and current affairs. His most recent book is White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006). He is the regular columnist for BBC History Magazine.]
...To scour the latest scholarly journals often means ploughing through pages of detailed analysis in which the human element is almost entirely absent. All too often, historians underestimate the personal and elevate the general: as the excellent medieval historian Ian Mortimer once pointed out, it is bizarre to read a monograph on Henry IV in which the death of his wife – presumably one of the central and most affecting moments in the king’s life – was dismissed in eight words.
Indeed, many academics have long believed that the individual has no place in serious scholarship. “Biography?” the late Geoffrey Elton once exploded when his pupil David Starkey mentioned that he fancied writing a life of Henry VIII. “Biography? Leave it to the women!”
In many ways this is merely another example of the yawning divide between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ scholarship. As academics abandon the human story for yet another thrilling discussion of the trans-gendering of public space in a Staffordshire village, so it falls to the likes of William Hague and Roy Hattersley to give us their thoughts on William Pitt or the Edwardians.
A few brave souls have ventured out from the ivory tower to embark on major biographies: Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler springs to mind. By and large, however, young scholars are discouraged from the biographical approach. When one eminent American historian discovered that I was writing my PhD on an individual politician, Senator Eugene McCarthy, he turned pale with shock, quite a sight given that he was rather florid.
And yet the truth is history books only last if they reconcile the individual and the general. Painful though it may be for some academics to admit, history is nothing more than the sum of countless individual decisions, most of them now lost forever. Even Christopher Hill, one of the greatest Marxist historians of all, recognised the importance of the human element, which is why his book on Cromwell, God’s Englishman, is such a splendid read....
Read entire article at BBC History Magazine
...To scour the latest scholarly journals often means ploughing through pages of detailed analysis in which the human element is almost entirely absent. All too often, historians underestimate the personal and elevate the general: as the excellent medieval historian Ian Mortimer once pointed out, it is bizarre to read a monograph on Henry IV in which the death of his wife – presumably one of the central and most affecting moments in the king’s life – was dismissed in eight words.
Indeed, many academics have long believed that the individual has no place in serious scholarship. “Biography?” the late Geoffrey Elton once exploded when his pupil David Starkey mentioned that he fancied writing a life of Henry VIII. “Biography? Leave it to the women!”
In many ways this is merely another example of the yawning divide between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ scholarship. As academics abandon the human story for yet another thrilling discussion of the trans-gendering of public space in a Staffordshire village, so it falls to the likes of William Hague and Roy Hattersley to give us their thoughts on William Pitt or the Edwardians.
A few brave souls have ventured out from the ivory tower to embark on major biographies: Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler springs to mind. By and large, however, young scholars are discouraged from the biographical approach. When one eminent American historian discovered that I was writing my PhD on an individual politician, Senator Eugene McCarthy, he turned pale with shock, quite a sight given that he was rather florid.
And yet the truth is history books only last if they reconcile the individual and the general. Painful though it may be for some academics to admit, history is nothing more than the sum of countless individual decisions, most of them now lost forever. Even Christopher Hill, one of the greatest Marxist historians of all, recognised the importance of the human element, which is why his book on Cromwell, God’s Englishman, is such a splendid read....