ABSTRACT
The words ‘history’ and ‘the past’ are sometimes used interchangeably. When campaigners used the slogan ‘Make Poverty History’ in 2005, it was a more economical way of saying ‘Make Poverty a Thing That Belongs Only to the Past’. Similarly, saying that someone has a ‘troubled history’ or a ‘troubled past’ is to make the same point, whichever term is used. But at other times ‘history’ and ‘the past’ are used to suggest different things. As a subject or course of study, ‘history’ is usually taken to refer to an activity (one of enquiry), with the ‘past’ as the object of that enquiry. History in this sense is taken to be about the past, but it isn’t the past itself. This sounds an obvious point because the formulation of history as being the study of the past has become so ingrained within our ways of thinking and talking about it as a subject that it requires a special effort to think about it in any other ways. Skilful historians, we are told, ‘summon up the past’. Great history books ‘bring the past to life’. Phrases like these imply two important things. The fi rst is that there is a clear separation between a determinate, knowable past (one which we can measure, which contains its own stories), and the practices of the historian doing their research. The second is that the historian’s job is somehow to close the gap between the history they write and the past that they claim to be writing about. Many historians still aspire to produce historical accounts that match up with the realities of the past that they describe. They want to ‘get it right’, to provide histories that are a kind of transcription of ‘the past as it was’.
