James M. Banner Jr’s The Ever-Changing Past and the collection What Is History, Now? share a concern that is at once perennial and especially pressing at this moment. They address the ever-evolving character of the discipline of history and the relation of contemporary concerns to the study of the past. What Is History, Now? appears sixty years after E. H. Carr’s What Is History? and is inspired by it. A volume published by a commercial press that seeks to expand the horizons of popular history, it is edited by two historians who are well-known in the popular sector. Suzannah Lipscomb has written a series of books on the Tudors, Helen Carr a great man history in the form of a study of John of Gaunt. Each also has a foot in the world of academic scholarship: Lipscomb with a study of Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc, Carr (who is E. H. Carr’s granddaughter) via her doctoral studies in the history of emotion. They enlist seventeen further scholars.

To contextualize their volume it helps to think of two areas of historical production beyond the history that occupies most of the history sections in bookshops. One is academic history, of the kind produced by most university-based historians. The other is radical history – serious scholarship with an explicit political edge, usually published neither by university presses nor major commercial imprints. In recent decades, academic history, especially in the United States, but increasingly in the United Kingdom, has absorbed many of the interests that were previously more the preserve of radical history. This broadening of academic interest has fuelled bad-faith allegations of universities as bastions of “cultural Marxism” or “wokeness” and therefore the wider narrative of a culture war. Popular history has broadened less. With just a little, deliberate exaggeration, Sarah Churchwell notes in her contribution to What Is History, Now? that “British history, if judged by the publishing marketplace, might be thought to consist of only three epochs: the Tudors, the First World War and the Second World War”. So it is especially welcome that the collection looks much further, while still being aimed at a wide audience. Its broad range of topics has been selected as an invitation for readers “to enter and share in the many ways in which history can be enjoyed and interpreted”. Subjects include family history, global history, queer history, East Asian history and the histories of empire, disability, religion and emotion. There are also chapters on statuary and memorial representations of history, museums and historical films, and one on the relationship of literature to history.

There is no evidence of a tight editorial rubric. Simon Schama’s closing chapter is an orthodox overview of the historiography of interconnections between human history and the natural environment. Gus Casely-Hayford chooses to answer the question “How can museums open doors to the past” obliquely, spending much of the essay reflecting on his youthful travels in Morocco as an insight into the generation of an ethos of hospitality and inclusivity. Bettany Hughes riffs on the relationship between ancient history and wisdom. Among my favourite contributions is Onyeka Nubia’s “Why diversity in Tudor England matters”, for the way it brings extensive historical subject-matter into its reflections on present attitudes to the past. Nubia draws on the themes of his Blackamoores (2013) and England’s Other Countrymen (2019) to show, with reference to the social integration of Africans in Tudor England, that diversity can be found in unexpected places and that, contrary to historical expectations shaped by subsequent developments in law and racist ideology, racism in Tudor times was not “institutionalised or systematised”. Justin Bengry’s “Can and should we queer the past?” achieves a similar balance between historical content and present-centred concerns in arriving at the conclusion that Queer history “teaches us much about the present, about the incredible variety, diversity and changeability of gender and sexualities today by recognising how radically unfamiliar – or queer – the past always was”. Miri Rubin’s model overview of changing approaches to her topic over the past few generations, “How do we write the history of religion?”, is also interspersed with historical content.

Taken in tandem, the editors’ introduction and the perspicacious chapters by Dan Hicks (“Glorious Memory”, on monuments and memorials) and Charlotte Lydia Riley (“Why history should always be rewritten”) elaborate a key theme for a volume such as this, in that they constitute a response to statements intended to stoke the “culture war”. Those statements include the prime minister’s tweet, written after the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history”. The phrase “We cannot pretend to have a different history”, was taken up by the then secretary of state for culture, Oliver Dowden, when he cautioned the trustees of Hackney’s Museum of the Home. The museum had recently altered its name from that of the slave-trader Robert Geffrye and was publically consulting on moving a statue of Geffrye from above its entrance. The culture secretary also wrote to a number of national museums and galleries and other Arm’s Length Bodies stressing his expectation that such organizations’ approach to “contested heritage” should “be consistent with the Government’s position” that “Removing difficult and contentious parts of [the historic environment] risks harming our understanding of our collective past”. Continuing to behave “impartially”, he continued, was “especially important as we enter a challenging Comprehensive Spending Review, in which all government spending will rightly be scrutinised”. There are two issues here. One is the problematic governmental attempt to influence how institutions relate to history, which is separate from the legal questions involved in the Colston episode, whatever one might think about that affair from an ethical perspective. The other issue is as relevant to Colston’s downing as to the other matters, and concerns the philosophical position about historical inquiry that the government pretends to propound. The government affects to favour “impartial”, warts-and-all investigation into the past as against those forces who seek to “edit” or “censor” the historical record. In fact, it is engaged in defending against criticism established forms of selectivity in remembrance and perpetuating those traditions of collective memory in which awkward questions about the past are avoided or deflected.

What Is History, Now? successfully indicates how historians have expanded the range of their subject, and the forms in which they produce it, but how does it deal with other facets of the historical undertaking? I mean the aspects alluded to in Carr’s famous utterance, which appears frequently in this book, that history “is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his [sic] facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”. The picture is mixed concerning method in the narrow sense. Lipscomb’s essay “How can we recover the lost lives of women?” is consistently strong in discussing the treatment of evidence. Others, including Churchwell’s “Vernacular History” and Carr’s “Can our emotions have a history?” have important methodological passages, too. Other essays need more practical elaboration and illustration to enable readers to implement this or that approach. Jaipreet Virdi’s is an eye-opening and deeply compassionate contribution, but it does not directly answer its titular question “How can we write the history of disability?”. Leila K. Blackbird’s and Caroline Dodds Pennock’s “How making space for Indigenous peoples changes history” would have been even more interesting had they elaborated on the day-to-day intellectual dynamics of the partnerships they mention between Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, teachers and students in Mexico. Ideally, Casely-Hayford would have provided more on the nuts-and-bolts of exhibition design.

When it comes to matters of methodology in the broad sense, touching on the epistemic status of historical inquiry, the problem lies less with what is said than what is not said. E. H. Carr’s pronouncements on the past–present relation are, with the signal exception of Hicks’s chapter, venerated rather than unpacked, interrogated and where necessary qualified or rejected. Indeed, at the outset of the volume, What Is History? is lauded as “timeless”, which sits especially awkwardly in a collection featuring Riley’s chapter on the constant requirement to rewrite history. In support of his contention that “History means interpretation”, the editors merely paraphrase in a way that raises more questions than it answers. Carr, they write, divides

facts into two categories: facts of the past and facts of the present. A fact of the past, such as “the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066”, is indisputable but basic. A fact of the present is a fact an historian has chosen to be a fact. In an analogy [sic] you’ll see oft-repeated in this book, Carr wrote: “by and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants”.

The editors disapprove of Stalinist distortion and selectivity but when it comes to providing an antidote, they merely note that Carr called on historians to be “discerning”. The content of this discernment is not disclosed. They also aspire “to prove … that history can be flexible, malleable, colourful and without bias … This is why this volume hosts a multiplicity of voices”. Here, “a multiplicity of voices” is presented as an antidote to “bias” – as opposed, say, to multiplying biases – but “bias” is never defined. Nor are objectivity and subjectivity, so we do not know what it means when we read that at one point Carr “embrace[d] objectivity” and at another he “wave[d] the flag of subjectivity”.

These lacunae matter because if the point of the volume is to inform a popular audience, and to do so at a time when historical inquiry is so politically sensitive, that readership might be concerned to ask what does and does not follow from declaring all works of history to be interpretations, or all subjective. Bluntly, how do we know a relatively good from a relatively poor interpretation, irrespective of the philosophies driving them? If all works are cast together as subjective, what additional criteria exist to differentiate qualitatively between them, as all of the academic contributors to the book routinely differentiate when they mark student essays? Only tiny, dispersed hints about such matters are found in this volume. In other words, while there are points of similarity between What Is History, Now? and Banner’s The Ever-Changing Past, the latter is alone in dealing seriously with investigative norms and criteria of discernment.

Further, since Carr’s and Lipscomb’s collection is shaped by a concern for diversity in the present and past, the impression created by their book is overwhelmingly one of history’s changing in accordance with the advent of different perspectives, interests and approaches, and the attributions of different meanings. This is all absolutely fine, but what of substantiated argument? We can all appreciate that looking at hitherto unexamined topics will expand our understanding of the past, and that looking at familiar matters from new perspectives will shed new light on those matters, just as looking at any object from a different angle may produce a different impression of it. But historiography is frequently characterized by interpretative clashes over specific historical problems, and at such points different historians are not talking past each other about essentially separate matters, they are engaging one another as they engage evidence.

One of the points of similarity between these two books is occasional confusion about anachronism. In her essay on the history of emotions, Carr writes that “we cannot then search for the term ‘emotion’ as we understand it before the eighteenth, or even the nineteenth century”, because the term was coined by Thomas Brown in 1819. “Our ancestors did not have emotions, they had feelings.” But then she also writes that “To feel emotion is an inherently human experience” and repeatedly uses the word “emotion” in relation to periods far before the eighteenth century. Banner claims that “the term ‘revisionist’ is anachronistic when applied to a work of ancient creation; it is a word of the late nineteenth century, not of distant coinage”. (It is not a precise comparison to the assertions of either Carr or Banner, but the mind nevertheless turns to the sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion that, contrary to the claims of scientists who had examined the mummified remains of Ramses II, the pharaoh could not have died of tuberculosis because the bacillus was only “discovered by Robert Koch in 1882”.) He then finds that it is nonetheless “fully appropriate and legitimate” to apply the term to pre-modern works. Well, legitimate it is – but precisely because it is not, after all, anachronistic. With revisionism and emotion, or for that matter feudalism or genocide, the point is not when the particular terms were coined, but whether the concepts they now express refer to properties actually possesed by things that antedated their coinage. The first obligation on historians is to define what they mean by any such term. Historical evidence can then be engaged to see if, so defined, we have grounds to believe it applies.

Most of The Ever-Changing Past is devoted to the character of revisionism rather than the propriety of using the term, and here Banner is in his element. His book is a model of accessible, jargon-free prose and reveals erudition across a range of western historiographical trends and debates. Passages on cognition and memory in the final chapter are an interesting addition. Like Riley, Banner stresses that revisionism is “the normal baked-in condition of historical thought”. By extension he debunks a surprisingly durable stereotype of historians “as people who relate the facts of the past and little else”. Banner does not claim to be first to make the basic point about revisionism without end, but the contemporary relevance of his and Riley’s point is to detach the concept of revisionism from associations with “Holocaust revisionism”, ie denial. They illustrate just how ordinary is the sort of revisiting of troublesome pasts that in Britain the present government seeks to delegitimize. “Doing history”, one might say, is a constant task of revisiting and recasting over time. With the future as well as the present in mind, we should also note that there is no set political direction in which revisionism heads. Revisionism just involves a departure from whatever is the present consensus.

Banner’s fourth chapter provides a useful six-fold typology of revisionisms. “Transformative revisionism” is embodied in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 255–339). The sort of “interpretive revolution” at issue here derives not “from the discovery of fresh evidence or from new interpretive methods” but rather from “a fresh imagining of human origins”, meaning in Eusebius’s case “divine revelation and the life of Jesus”. “Philosophical revisionism” concerns changes in the averred “purposes and uses of historical inquiry”. “Conceptual revisionism” involves reconceptualizing “the grounds of any large area or subject of historical interpretation”, as for instance with the shifts in earlier western historiography brought about by “the introduction of questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality”. “Evidence-based revisionism” and “method-driven revisionism” respectively affect established interpretative approaches via “the discovery of new historical sources” and “the application of new analytical methods to already known evidence”. “Normal revisionism” is a matter of “adjustments to previously held approaches to or interpretations of historical subjects that alter understanding of them” in some greater or lesser way. “Rare is the written history … that does not add something, even if not something earthshaking, controversial, or even challenging in a major way, to the stock of historical understanding that has gone before it. Even the third or fourth narrative of a Civil War battle is likely to provide some new details to the published record, some new emphasis drawn from long available information, some new argument that needs to be subjected to the tests of evaluation and criticism”. Quite so.

Banner’s major strength is in laying bare, by case study, the mechanics of revisionism. He provides detailed accounts of the historiographies of the origins of the American Civil War and of the French Revolution in chapters one and five respectively. He addresses arguments between contemporaries and the development of arguments across years and generations. New evidence, perspectives, conceptual reframings and changed political circumstances all play their part in complex, intertwined fashions.

We do not need as many examples as he provides elsewhere. Addressing Thucydides’ actual and asserted departure from Herodotus’ subject-matter and approach to evidence makes the point about the antiquity of historical revision amply. A few other examples from across time were also merited in order to illustrate the consistent presence of revisionism. But chapters two and three provide a continuous narrative from Herodotus to the twentieth century. While often interesting and insightful, this adds little to the argument and so dilutes it.

That extraneous material also opens the door unnecessarily to a number of criticisms. Herodotus’ Histories were not “effectively ignored for two and a half millennia”. Spinoza was not the first to criticize “biblical assertions”. Readers are not told how to reconcile the statement that Marx “relegated humans to the implementation of inevitable historical change” in accordance with the “logic of economic development” and the claim that “Marx tried … to expunge all philosophy and metaphysics from what he considered to be the central, legitimate foci of historical understanding: human agency”. Banner presents conflicting accounts of the advent of “historicism”.

Medieval historianship suffers especially. We read of “the medieval determination to reveal the hand of Providence in human affairs”, but also of an apparently conflicting medieval “assumption that, being in the hands of God, the past as well as the present was beyond comprehension”. In order to force the contrast of medieval history with pre-Eusebian historiography on one hand and Renaissance historiography on the other hand (Renaissance scholarship which “free[d] historical study from theology”), Banner produces the following caricature: “From the fourth century until the fourteenth, history was centered on the church when it was not enraptured of the Crusades, the lives of saints, and fantastic Arthurian tales and chivalric scenes”. In fact, many medieval scholars drew on classical traditions, and the place of God in their schemes varied greatly; partially secular texts displaying classical influences include Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne from the earlier Middle Ages and Anna Komnene’s Alexiad from the twelfth century. It was not only with the Reformation that “peoples, like the Germans, French, and English, [could] break free of the Italian yoke and try to interpret their histories in national terms”, and to write histories in vernacular languages. Diverse origines gentium stories had been around for roughly a thousand years before the Reformation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the twelfth-century estoires of Geffrei Gaimar, Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure, and Villehardouin’s account of the Fourth Crusade were all in vernaculars.

These blemishes should not weigh too heavily in the balance. James Banner’s book is a useful and sober contribution to specialist historiographical debate and to the understanding of the discipline of history more generally. Like What Is History, Now?, its most important mission is accomplished.

Donald Bloxham is Richard Pares Professor of History, University of Edinburgh. His most recent books are Why History: A history and History and Morality, both 2020

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