Thread by @DrFrancisYoung

An unfashionable view I hold is that history is the study of the past.

I understand what historians mean when they say they don’t study the past; that history is the study of sources created in the past, and that we never have the opportunity study the past directly because it is always filtered through the limitations and interpretations of sources

But it’s hardly unusual for the object of a field of study to be something that can’t be studied directly through first-hand experience. And to say, in effect, that I can’t study the past without a time machine seems to me an excessively strict exercise in semantics

Some historians even go so far as to say that there’s no such thing as the past, or that history is really the study of the present (the study, in other words, of how we currently interpret the past). Of course it's true much of what the historian does is rooted in the present

But whether the past ‘exists’ (and in what sense it exists) is a question for philosophers, not historians (and having been a philosopher, I've no desire to go back there...)

It seems to me self-evident that history is more than just studying sources for their own sake, more than just the study of some tradition of interpretation of those sources (although those are valuable activities); it is an attempt to recover what the past *might have been like*

Even if historians are not prepared to admit it, I am convinced that most of them are interested in *what the past might have been like*, and in conveying that - indeed, I am convinced that most historians are driven by such a desire

Now, it may be that the desire to know *what the past might have been like* is a striving destined never to be fulfilled (I suspect that’s exactly what it is, actually). But again, that’s hardly a unique experience in the human condition…

In this respect the historian might be compared to the theologian; they are studying something that can never, in the end, be known. But the study is still worthwhile

Because there is always the possibility that you will draw a little closer to what *might* be the truth about the past (or, for the theologian, the truth about God)… even if the whole truth about the past is tantalisingly unattainable

So I would argue that history is, indeed, the study of the past. But learning to be a historian is largely learning the difficulty of understanding the past, the pitfalls of thinking you do, and (in the end) the unattainability of such knowledge…

So the process of becoming a historian is a pretty depressing one, really - it's about discovering you're engaged in a Sisyphean task, that your job is spinning ropes of sand -but ropes of sand that are nevertheless of great importance to our understanding of who and where we are