A blind woman playing the violin, c1860. The question of how to tell the stories of people with disabilities is tackled in Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb’s book
GETTY IMAGES/NICHOLAS DAWKES
ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST
Matt Elton Your new book is entitled What Is History, Now? What does it set out to do?
Helen Carr It manifests the realisation that 2021 is the 60th anniversary of the What Is History? lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge by my great-grandfather, EH Carr. Those lectures were then published in a book that has become very well known among students of history, because its main point – that history is interpretation – was really ground-breaking and, in some ways, quite an antagonistic perspective at the time.
I felt that the anniversary provided a good opportunity to give the book a reappraisal – and this was before the momentous events of 2020, including the tragic death of George Floyd and the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, which sparked so much conversation about history. I felt it was a very timely moment to revisit some key questions. What is history? Who does it belong to? How can we talk about it and tell it? And what are the ways in which people get into history?
Suzannah Lipscomb Other books have revisited EH Carr’s work since it came out. David Cannadine edited an excellent one entitled What Is History Now? (without a comma!) in 2002, for instance. But our book is subtly different, and not just because of the extra punctuation. It’s designed to allow lots of different people to give their perspectives on what history is today, and covers a whole range of subjects. Jaipreet Virdi discusses how we can write the history of disability, for instance; Caroline Dodds Pennock and Leila K Blackbird explore how history changes when you take the perspectives of indigenous peoples; and Maya Jasanoff looks at how we can write the history of empire. Some offer perspectives that EH Carr would have shared, whereas others have views he would not have thought of. There are fields of history, and ways of understanding history, that have been pioneered in the past 60 years, and we wanted to explore those.