What Is History?

Carr's first and most famous answer is that history is 'a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past' . He rejects the commonsense view—that history consists of a fixed body of ascertained facts the historian merely collects—by arguing that not all facts about the past qualify as historical facts. The distinction depends on the historian's judgment, which is shaped by the standards and concerns of his own age. Facts are refracted through the recorder's mind; the historian's own time and place determine what he selects and how he interprets it .

Carr contrasts two views of historical facts using a fish metaphor. In the commonsense view, facts are like fish on a fishmonger's slab: the historian collects them and cooks them however he likes. Carr rejects this. Facts, he argues, 'are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch' . The historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.

Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History (1967) became the definitive rebuttal to Carr. Elton criticized Carr's distinction between 'historical facts' and 'facts of the past' as 'whimsical' and reflective of 'an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it' . Elton defended a more empiricist approach, insisting that historians should serve the evidence rather than impose their own frameworks. Carr, by contrast, argued that historians cannot divorce themselves from the outlook and interests of their age and that the selection of facts is necessarily interpretive. The Carr-Elton controversy became a standard starting point for debates about the standing of historical knowledge .

The book originated in a series of lectures Carr gave at Cambridge in 1961 and was immediately recognized as a major intervention. Richard J. Evans said it 'caused a revolution in British historiography in the 1960s' . Keith Windschuttle called it one of the most influential books written about historiography, noting that very few historians working in English since the 1960s had not read it . However, Carr's views were controversial. His relativism and rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis drew sustained criticism from historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper, who argued that examining possible alternative outcomes of history is essential to understanding causation .

Carr explicitly wished to be seen as a radical, writing in the preface to the second edition that 'in recent years I have increasingly come to see myself, and to be seen, as an intellectual dissident' . However, critics argue his contribution lies precisely in how he failed to be an epistemological radical. Alun Munslow contends that Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as definitive, devaluing his radicalism . Carr rejected 'total scepticism'—the idea that history is 'something spun out of the human brain' with no objective truth. He believed in the power of empiricism to deliver truth, even if historians cannot guarantee objective interpretation .

The book remains a key text for history undergraduates, though many historians now find Carr's views outdated or dangerous to the practice of History . The fifty-year retrospective in 2011 examined the book's connection to decolonization and the decline of the British Empire, seeing Carr's work as a historical document of that transformative time . Contemporary historians influenced by postmodernism and deconstruction argue Carr was less radical than he claimed, ultimately defending a version of objectivity that later theory has undermined . Yet his warning to 'interrogate documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer's motives' remains widely valued .