What is History?  I have assigned you an excerpt from Carr’s book. You will be responsible for leading the discussion on that point Monday.

• ‘The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.’ (29) [Holt, Garvey]
• History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.’ (26) [Linscott, Frydman]
• ‘History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.’ (27) [Naatz, Flood]
• ‘History is the historian’s experience. It is made by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it.’ (24) [Pack, David, Frazier, Aaron]
• ‘The facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them.’ (23) [Price, Hernandez, Ehrenhaft]
• ‘Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. They do not themselves constitute history.’ (20) [Shapiro, Burke, Shevchik]
• ‘Our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike.’ (6) [Scott, Atkins, Phelps]
• ‘Some impatient scholars take refuge in scepticism, or at least in the doctrine that, since all historical judgments involve persons and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no objective historical truth.’ [Karppi, Arnold, Wittig, Hanway]