an ocean of facts
From Tuesday’s lecture:
Oakeshott:
“History is the historian’s experience. It is ‘made’ by nobody save the historian: to write”.
This reminds me of passages from E H Carr’s “What Is History?”, in which Carr argues that it is up to the historian to set his own agenda and choose the sources which fit this particular agenda of his, out of “an ocean of facts”.
“He has the dual task of discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts of history, and of discarding the many insignificant facts as unhistorical,” Carr asserts.
“The history we read… though based on facts, is, strictly speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgements… The dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes and chroniclers has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past.”
Take medieval history, for example. We might read in a history book that “the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion.” But Carr points out that “what we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else.
“Our picture has been pre-selected and predetermined for us… it never occurred to me to enquire by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of facts [that we call 'medieval history', for example], out of all the myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts of history.
“… the few known facts are all facts of history… History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts.”
(E H Carr, What Is History?, pp. 7-9)
