What Is History

Blurb

What Is History? is a study of historiography that was written by the English historian E.H. Carr. It was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1961. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history.
The book was originally part of a series of G. M. Trevelyan lectures given by Carr in 1961 at the University of Cambridge. The lectures were intended as a broad introduction into the subject of the theory of history.
Some of Carr's ideas are contentious, particularly his alleged relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis. His work provoked a number of responses, notably Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History.
Carr was in the process of revising What is History? for a second edition at the time of his death in 1982. He had finished a new preface, in which he discussed the pessimism of westerners in the 1980s, which he contrasted with the optimism of the 1960s, and pondered his own status as a "dissident intellectual".