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A thread on writing contemporary history and getting older:
I’ve been teaching a lot of contemporary British history this term, encouraging my students to reflect upon the challenges of writing history which falls within living memory.
We’ve been thinking in particular about perspective, about Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that ‘every historian has his or her own lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world.’
When I first studied contemporary history I was, like my students, in my late teens/early 20s. To be honest, there wasn’t that much ‘history within living memory’ for me to remember.
A lot of the time I was studying how *other* people remembered Britain’s recent past, mostly by reading the work of older male historians, eg Peter Hennessy & Paul Addison on the post-war consensus that shaped them.
Anecdotal family memories aside, they might as well have been writing about the 1550s as the 1950s, so little connection did I feel with the events they were describing.
Two decades on, my vision has changed. I’ve lived long enough to feel I have a personal stake in historical claims that are beginning to be made about the 1990s and 2000s - but I’m not always sure what to do with it in analytical terms.
Hennessy writes of a ‘powerful desire to make sense of your own time & to place configurations upon it while avoiding excessive patterning, mono-causal explanations or the condescending urge to tell veterans how they should have felt if only they had thought about it harder.’
Which seems a good starting point. I also think a lot about the significance of Hobsbawm’s ‘private perch’ idea – about how where one is situated shapes the contemporary historian’s interests & subjects. Two great examples:
First, this piece by @KConnellWriter in @HistoryWO on how a multicultural childhood brought him to write Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (2020) https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/researching-race-in-contemporary-britain/
Second, the micro-family history which makes up the first chapter of @JonHistorian's Me? Me? Me? The search for community in post-war England (2019)
Broader question: does this mean that contemporary history must - at least in part - be biographical? Are there other strategies for putting memory & reflexivity at service of historical explanation? Can the lure of introspection sometimes prove too alluring? ENDS
