ABSTRACT
How can historians claim to know what happened in the past?
Historians are often described as having expert knowledge of their particular fi elds – Tang Dynasty China, the reign of Edward II, Mexico after the 1910-11 Revolution. Historians believe that they can establish facts about the past, explain why historical events happened, weigh up the consequences of those events and show how a diverse range of cultural practices and people’s actions in the past relate to each other. This is illustrated in the opening pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, where he writes that his aim in the book is to ‘explain why things turned out the way that they did’ in the world between the beginning of the Great War and the end of the Soviet era.1 Such claims to knowledge or expertise are conventionally thought to rest on two propositions. One is that the past has a singular shape and substance of its own, prior to any human attempts to conceptualise or describe it, and that the past is therefore knowable; the other is that historians have developed reliable methods for studying and writing accurately about the past. These propositions remain central to historians’ collective understanding of what they do. For example, in Telling the Truth about History (1994) Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob state that they believe in the reality of the past, in humans’ ability to make contact with this reality and in historians’ ability to establish at least provisional truths about the past.2 We can fi nd similar points made in texts such as Richard Evans’s In Defence of History (1997), Arthur Marwick’s The
New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (2001) and John Tosh and Seán Lang’s The Pursuit of History (2006), to name just a few.
