In
September [2013] a headmaster predicted most exams would be undertaken only by
computer/tablet devices within 10 years. Five days later a news report stated
that Lloyds List [substantially a ‘factual’ publication related to shipping and
insurance], with a 279-year print history, will be available only in electronic
format after 20 December 2013. A survey indentified that only 25 subscribers read
the paper, as distinct from the digital, edition. These two items indicate that
the digital and computer revolution sweeps on but can further consequences be
predicted? How many saw a link between the development of out-of-town retail
parks and diminished ‘High Street’ prosperity? It can be claimed that there is no
necessary connection: improved access to high streets and parking provision
could have made different situations.
These comments
bring to mind how historians seek to establish connections between events. In
the Sempringham office we admire the approach of Michael Oakeshott on these
questions [see On History, Basil Blackwell, 1983]. Oakeshott claims historians
can not provide overarching reasons for historical events but only evidence that
one event was connected to another. Oakeshott provides a memorable analogy,
quoted in Undergraduate History Study –
The Guide to Success by Gilbert Pleuger [Sempringham, 1997]:
‘When an historian assembles a passage of antecedent events to compose a subsequent he builds what in the countryside is called a ‘dry wall’: the stones (that is, the subsequent event) are joined and held together, not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes. And the wall, here, has no premeditated design; it is what its components, in touch, constitute.’ [On History, p. 94]If this view is accepted then History students are freed to see the analysis and claims of ‘causal connections’ presented in History books as historian's attempts to pattern History in a step to understand and present the past but that is not the same as to claim that such analyses are a 'picture' of what really was the past.
Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk]
eLearning Office.
