A Silver Lining Amongst the Gloom

Gloom has descended upon university history departments throughout Britain. Cambridge’s history faculty has followed that of Oxford in freezing all new appointments, perhaps for years to come. One senior historian has described the position outside Oxbridge as ‘near catastrophic’. Much publicity has been given to the University of Sussex’s decision to drop research and research-led teaching in early modern history in what appears to be yet another step towards the dominance of modern history at the expense of earlier periods. King’s College London is to lose its chair in palaeography, an obscure discipline certainly, but one crucial to the production of scholarly editions of, for example, Anglo- Saxon literature. Mark Goldie, reader in British intellectual history at Cambridge, is surely right when he says that a ‘decent history syllabus cannot be so present-centred’.

Yet there may be some benefits to all of this in the long run, a concentration of minds. Clearly, given current economic conditions and the loss of £950 million from higher education budgets over the next three years, historians and their departments, like other academics, will be compelled to go in search of private endowments, as has been common in the United States for decades (with remarkable success) and to forge closer links with the public (something too many historians are still reluctant to do).

Commentators such as Simon Jenkins have even suggested that some universities should seize the opportunity to privatise and charge the market rate for their courses, enabling them to provide scholarships to those unable to afford the full fees. But would government be willing to cede control of educational institutions?

The options for university departments will become more apparent when Lord Browne of Madingley’s report on the funding of higher education is published later this year. Whatever the conclusions reached, it will be wise to recall the words of the Oxford historian and President of the Board of Education H.A.L. Fisher, written in 1919, but still relevant to the teaching of history, not least because they are so utterly at odds with the current mania for ‘relevance’ and ‘utility’:

‘The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgement, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.’

The Odd Couple

News in yesterday's Daily Mail that historian Niall Ferguson has brought his marriage to a conclusive and high-profile end:

The Harvard professor has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali lawyer threatened with death for scripting a film critical of Islam.

Our favourite quote was definitely the one from Belinda Luscombe, the editor of the Mail on Sunday Magazine's arts editor:

In all the years I have known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys.

Read the article in full on the Daily Mail website.

A Swiss Family Historian

Today is the birthday, in 1505, of Aegidius Tschudi, the first historian (of a fashion) of the Swiss Confederation, an entity still mysterious to many. His most celebrated work, De prisca ac vera Alpina Rhaetia, published in 1528, is a history of the Raetia, the name of the Roman province and its people that now makes up much of eastern and central Switzerland. The Helvetii, the Alpine tribe who give their name to modern day Switzerland – Helvetia – were their western neighbours. Until the 19th century, Tschudi’s writings were highly regarded but were found to be misleading, a means of advancing his own family’s claims to a supposedly noble past. So, all in all, not the greatest or most trustworthy of historians, but Swiss practitioners of the craft are not numerous so I thought I would bring him to your attention. You probably won’t find his work in your local Waterstones.

David Birmingham looks at how the invented traditions of 19th-century Swiss history cemented a sense of national identity, in The 1848 Unification of Switzerland

Starkey on Today

David Starkey is becoming something of a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the edition edited by the thriller writer and all round good egg P.D. James he talked eloquently (and courteously, tamed by the grand dame) on English national identity, musing on whether the English now inhabited a ‘post-nation’. Today he mused on the Staffordshire Hoard and the continuing camoaign to raise funds for a permanent home for the collection in the West Midlands. He thought it important that it should remain in the old kingdom of Mercia, as it was a symbol of the origins of ‘Angle-land’, and threw light on issues of Englishness that needed to be considered and embraced. The English, after all, have as much right as anyone else to muse on the nature of their identity, reluctant though they seem to be to celebrate it too loudly. The significance of the Hoard is hard to overestimate.

Listen to the Starkey segment of the programme by clicking here.

The Courage of Tony Judt

There was a very moving interview conducted by Ed Pilkington with the contemporary historian Tony Judt published in Saturday’s Guardian. Judt, London-born, US based, is enduring the hell of a rapidly worsening motor neurone disease, ‘one of the worst diseases on earth’, as he puts it. Judt has specialized in chronicling the lives of that rare band of fearless progressives who held out against the tyranny of Soviet totalitarianism: his excellent book, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago University Press, 1998) is both a study and a celebration of three Frenchmen – Raymond Aron, Albert Camus and Leon Blum – committed to the ideals of democracy as so many of their compatriots dealt with the devil. In the interview, Judt revealed himself to be a man of similar courage.

TV History in the Cultural Ghetto

Tristram Hunt was today dragged into the dispute over Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain, discussing the issue of history on television with Marr’s vociferous critic Charles Moore on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The package began with three excerpts: from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation (all clipped tones and cultural certainties); Laurence Olivier, raising the art of narration to its zenith in Thames TV’s The World at War; then Andrew Marr talking about posh, possibly very cruel, people in hats.

Moore gave the impression of a man who simply doesn’t like television, regarding it as an intrusion (sometimes I know how he feels) into his Trollopian, High Tory world. Tristram Hunt is a fan of TV: since the debacle of his series on the Civil War (which Moore, then the Daily Telegraph’s editor, urged the BBC to pull halfway through its run), Hunt has proved himself to be an inspired public historian (if you want proof, read his excellent column in this week’s Guardian).

But I have to disagree with him on one thing. He talked of his recent experience watching Andrew Marr’s series with a class of 14-year-olds in Walthamstow, north-east London. Despite its silly stunts and simplicities, they find it boring. I suspect that some children find everything boring. From this single experience, Hunt concluded that to grab the attention of ‘inner city’ youngsters one would be inclined to make ever more whizz-bang TV, with fast edits, crude simplicities and trite modern-day parallels. At least that is what Hunt’s logic dictates.

But I simply don’t believe that to be the case. Inner city youngsters are just as capable of understanding proper history as anyone else, but it is quite unlikely that they have ever been exposed to it, certainly not on television in the way that an ‘inner city’ youngster of my generation was.

As I remember (and I watched every episode when it was originally shown, with great anticipation) The World at War was shown prime time on ITV. It was superbly written by proper historians, brilliantly narrated (by Olivier) and edited, by Jeremy Isaacs. Civilisation, similarly, and such programmes – and there were many others – appeared on BBC1, mingled with light entertainment, sport and news.

That is no longer the case. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity is tucked away on the cultural ghetto of BBC4 (and will probably eventually appear, late night, on BBC2). A bright, curious working-class teenager is unlikely to come across it by happenstance after an episode of Eastenders (though it is considerably more uplifting).

OK, one might say, what kind of teenager will be interested in MacCulloch’s programme other than those families who have BBC4 and Radio 4 as default channels. Fair enough. But the BBC has just thrown away a remarkable opportunity to attract a great number of youngsters to engage in serious history.

Its series, A History of the World in 100 Objects launches early next year. It’s a brilliant premise: each programme takes as its subject an object from the BM’s vast collection – a flint hammer from stone age Africa; an Aztec serpent; the statue of an Indian god or the Roman Emperor Hadrian; a relic from the Industrial Revolution – and its fascinating story is told.

What a visual treat, what wonderful stories, perfect for all the family, they will follow or precede Eastenders on a daily basis. Or rather they won’t. The stories of these visually remarkable objects will be told on – Radio 4. These stories, it seems, are too good for the proles who also pay the licence fee. Which suggests that the BBC no longer speaks or even seeks to speak to one nation, but two. There is BBC4, Radio 4 and (the utterly superb) Radio 3 for the educated and aspirational. And there is BBC1 and, increasingly, BBC2 for the rest. Or shall we call it ‘BBC2, D’. It is a shocking betrayal of the BBC’s historical role to inform, educate and entertain, and they will pay a heavy price in the long run.

From A.J.P. Taylor’s mesmerising lectures in front of a black backdrop to technicolour Civilisation and the ground-breaking World At War, Taylor Downing looks at the early days of history on television in Screen Saviours: History in Television

Moore V Marr

Charles Moore has endured heroically all of Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain and passes judgment on it in the Telegraph today. Moore is a practiced contrarian who has it in for the BBC, but he does make valid points. Marr’s series is predictable in its establishment views, lacks the mischievousness of the best television histories (think of AJP Taylor) and the visual gimmicks are embarrassing (dodgy Home Guard uniforms, silly bathing suits etc). An opportunity missed.

In Our Time's Free Archive

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio 4 programme, is one the jewels of BBC broadcasting. Each Thursday the ageless Lord Bragg sits down with three distinguished panelists to discuss subjects ranging from the Anabaptists to Newton, Babylon to Dante. Today it was announced that the full 11-year archive of programmes is to be archived online, free to listeners. It’s a valuable, compelling and entertaining resource for anyone interested in history in all its remarkable diversity.

Some Exciting Histories in the Pipeline

Continuum are one of the more enterprising of our small publishing houses. Their most recent innovation is a series called – wait for it - Continuum Histories. These are small format reprints of selections from classic historical narratives introduced by a leading modern authority. The first three are already out and highly recommended: Lord Macaulay’s History of England, introduced by John Burrow; William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, introduced by John Elliott; and J.A. Froude’s The Reign of Mary Tudor introduced by Eamon Duffy.

They make excellent introductions to anyone concerned with the shifting sands of historiography or serve as handy reminders to those who engaged with the ‘history of history’ at university. Burrow, author of one of the best general introductions to historiography, A History of Histories (Penguin, 20007), is especially good on the great Whig historian who, whatever his faults – most notably a deluded faith in progress – wrote in magnificent prose to an enormous audience. There really is no serious historian of such popular appeal today. Future titles in the Continuum Histories include Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution introduced by Ruth Scurr; and, one I am really looking forward to reading, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire introduced by the excellent Tom Holland.

Death of David Underdown

Read my obituary to one of the most original of the scholars of early modern England born between the wars, David Underdown, in the Guardian. Underdown was author of Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (1971)

Almost four decades on, the book remains a fixture of undergraduate reading lists. Underdown went on to pioneer the study of local history, popular politics, gender and sport... [he] combined a prose style of enviable clarity with a complete mastery of the archive.

David Underdown looks back to the Tudor age while discussing the upheavals of the mid-17th century, in What Was the English Revolution?

Criticising Right-Wing Historians

As anyone who watches BBC Television’s Newsnight Review will know, the journalist Johann Hari has a tendency towards the excitable. This appears to be especially true when it comes to right-wing historians. Today, in his column in the Independent, Hari launches an attack on Andrew Roberts, whose new study of the Second World War, Storm of War, has garnered considerable acclaim (and a trite profile of the author in last week’s Observer). Roberts is capable of defending himself against the allegations made by Hari of consorting with apologists for apartheid and neo-fascists. But his assertion that Roberts, the author of some of the outstanding historical studies of recent years – Eminent Churchillians and Masters and Commanders will suffice - ‘would be shunned in a culture that takes human rights seriously’ is absurdly juvenile.

It reminds one of the spat that Hari had with another distinguished right-wing scholar, Niall Ferguson. Empire, Ferguson’s critical (often highly critical) defence of British imperialism broadcast by Channel 4 in 2003 was described by Hari as ‘a startlingly obscene TV series’ which means, presumably, that he would have liked it to be banned. Ludicrously, in his critique of Ferguson, Hari described the British Empire as a ‘psychopathic form of totalitarianism’ equal to that of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Quite where one goes when historical debate has descended to that level is hard to fathom. Ferguson proposed that Hari read some Solzhenitsyn.

I often disagree with both Roberts and Ferguson, as with almost all historians, regardless of their political views. But both are extraordinarily good scholars who make compelling arguments that demand to be taken seriously. To call Ferguson ‘an apologist for mass death’, as Hari did, is to reduce serious historical debate to that of the playground.

Andrew Roberts will be writing about the first use of Blitzkrieg in the September edition of History Today.

Meet Roberts and more of our most distinguished contributors on our Authors page.