Chapter 1 A history of the history seminar: the ‘active life’ of historiography at the Institute of Historical Research

Modernist historiography and Christian heritage

The history seminar emerged as a method of learning in English universities at the turn of the twentieth century. Momentum was created by re-casting the theory and practice of what had become a feature of American and German and tertiary education, originating with the contrasting experiments of the history library seminar hosted at the University of Königsberg (1832) and the history discussion group (1825–31) at the Berlin home of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886).²

Changes to the English curriculum were formative.³ The nineteenth century saw the Bachelor of Arts transformed from a multidisciplinary academic apprenticeship to a programme of study for just one subject. The University of Oxford established its single honours degree in history in 1872; Cambridge followed suit three years later; Owens College Manchester – which became the University of Manchester in 1904 – by 1882; and University College London by 1896.⁴ Subject specialization went hand-in-hand with a certain sense of professionalization whereby historiography shaped a new strand of pedagogy. In contrast to the catechetical form of tutorial teaching which prepared students for exams, select historians developed schemes of learning in their own area of expertise. Professors shared their scholarship with students and introduced them to the practical methods of primary source analysis – an early expression of the fabled art of ‘research-led’ teaching that gave rise to the history special subject. A move that also reflected a threefold modernist mission to supersede whiggish historiography, champion historical enquiry as an empirical science, and set about discovering the truths of the past.

Learned sociability was given a new lease of life at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1882 when the visiting scholar and alumnus of Harvard University Samuel Brearley (d. 1886) enlightened his peers and teachers in the ways of German-American seminar culture. The stimulus was enough to establish the Oxford Historical Seminar. Renamed two years later as the Stubbs Society in honour of William Stubbs (1825–1901), sometime regius professor of history and chaplain at Balliol, the seminar had history students deliver papers – often, although not exclusively, based upon the final-honours exam – with subsequent discussion overseen by a tutor.⁵ Research mingled with machismo and naivety: assertions about national history, for example, were grounded in the political assumptions and moral codes of the young men who articulated them.

One counterbalance to these pursuits was to be found at Girton College, Cambridge. Here Ellen McArthur (1862–1927) reached first class in the history tripos of 1885 and thereafter established herself as the College’s first designated teacher of history whilst undertaking postgraduate study under the direction of the historian and clergyman William Cunningham (1849–1919). McArthur not only tutored at Norwich House, a residence for women studying at the Cambridge Training College for Women Teachers (which later became Hughes Hall), but personally ran a hostel for women postgraduate students at Cambridge from 1896 to 1903.⁶ These locales would have provided ample scope for academic discussion in ways suggestive of seminar culture. One of the College’s first intake and a student of its principal, Elizabeth Hughes (1851–1925), later recalled, ‘we paid visits to one another for a good-night chat’ and in being ‘quite untrammelled by having read any philosophical works, we brought fresh minds to the deepest problems’.⁷ The extent to which McArthur’s own lived experience operated at the intersections of teaching, postgraduate study and published scholarship also indicates a mode of ‘research-led’ teaching no less significant than that being advanced through the special subject. Indeed, McArthur’s approach to scholarship ushered in a generation of leading women historians that included Lilian Knowles (née Tomn) (1870–1926), Caroline Skeel (1872–1951) and Eileen Power (1889–1940).⁸

At the same time as McArthur was innovating at Cambridge, Balliol alumnus and medievalist Thomas Tout (1855–1929) was developing the curriculum beyond the sphere of Oxbridge. As professor of history at Owens College, Tout’s experiments in teaching helped to inaugurate a library seminar in history by 1895. Students gathered with their teacher to work with and amongst the books and documents they needed for their studies. They were then encouraged to enter into oral and written discourse on the subject of their own specialization. This ‘hot house method’ turned students into practising historians: ‘of the forty-three students who graduated from Owens College in history between 1895 and 1904, eighteen published historical work’.⁹

These developments were part of a wider flourishing of seminar libraries, a phenomenon that was particularly evident at UCL.¹⁰ Professors Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) and Ernest Gardner (1862–1939) founded seminar libraries for Egyptology (1882) and classical archaeology (1886), respectively; whilst, from 1898, the professor of German, Robert Priebsch PhD (1866–1935), enlivened his seminar teaching with practices imported from his time in Germany. In his 1904 inaugural lecture as professor of constitutional history, Albert Pollard (1869–1948) lamented that whilst ‘English universities have maintained their hegemony of the national intellect; they certainly do not contribute so much to our intellectual prestige as German universities do to that of their Fatherland’.¹¹ These reflections were complicated. Pollard had graduated in 1891 with a first-class history degree from Jesus College, Oxford; but without an academic position he had spent a long time eking out a meagre living under the auspices of the Dictionary of National Biography. As much as this was worthy toil, it was some way from the intellectual heights of the kind of advanced study that led to being a Doctor of Philosophy. Pollard’s old tutor, Reginald Poole (1857–1939), had been a student at Balliol and a tutee of Stubbs before gaining a PhD at Leipzig in 1882. Whilst a piecemeal experiment in postgraduate study was underway in England, for example with UCL’s MA and DLitt (the latter awarded in recognition of published scholarship, but not as it is now a ‘higher’ doctorate above the PhD), it was still something of a coincidence that Pollard found himself a colleague of Priebsch before English universities started awarding PhDs.¹² At Oxford, Charles Firth (1857–1936) had battled, largely in vain, to implement Tout’s innovations with a view to developing postgraduate study; but at UCL Pollard sensed an opportunity, declaring in 1904 that he had serious ambitions for a ‘postgraduate school of Historical Research in London’.¹³ Some practical impetus came by way of UCL’s Evening School of History, which followed in the wake of the Historical Association (est. 1906) to give adult learners a degree with a view to them becoming teachers of history.¹⁴ Here, Pollard and like-minded contemporaries found scope to participate in the seminar method. Such was the success of this venture that an increasing number of students showed a tendency to stay on for further study, albeit mainly on a part-time basis; by 1913–14 there were thirty-four postgraduate historians at UCL.¹⁵ And, through 1919–20, momentum was re-established by the London Evening School of History with fifteen intercollegiate postgraduate seminars covering various aspects of historical studies.¹⁶

Founded a year before the BBC, the IHR was seen as uniquely resplendent in contributing to the national reconstruction after the Great War (see Figures 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3): a point made clear upon the formal opening of the Institute by historian and president of the Board of Education Herbert Fisher (1865–1940). Politics conspired with historiography to make the scientific pursuit of historical ‘truth’ the antidote to the evils of ‘propaganda’. This quasi-hermeneutical ambition serviced a further goal to create a professional class to run the civic institutions of Britain and its empire as well as advance a new era of western internationalism.¹⁷ Building upon the historiographical and pedagogical developments at UCL and the London Evening School of History, the IHR made a founding commitment to invite postgraduate students to ‘come to the Institute to discuss their problems’ and ‘receive that oral guidance from which they are properly debarred in libraries’ whilst having the archival material they need for their studies close at hand. The IHR’s defining feature was therefore the history library seminar: a ‘workshop for historical research’, an ‘historical laboratory’, that was also a place where ‘students and staff’ of ‘both sexes’ and from ‘all universities and all nations’ could meet to pursue mutual interests in learning and history.¹⁸ Pollard’s Thursday-evening conferences were, however, the preserve of teaching staff: a non-teaching research seminar by another name that created a centripetal intellectual force in the IHR’s early life (and then carried on in a more minor role for decades). In addition, there were eight seminar series for postgraduate learning in 1921–2, growing to sixteen by 1925–6.¹⁹ Together these endeavours gave impetus to an emerging seminar culture that tacitly distinguished itself from earlier English, American and German examples by means of the vibrancy of its mixed-sex and international collaborations as well as the relative informality of its operations and its rich capacity for a sort of unity in diversity.

Modernist historiography may have been bound to explain the origins of the history seminar as part of its own foundational story, but the reality was surely more indeterminate. There were resonances between history seminars and select clubs, societies and salons in the early twentieth century – for example, the Bloomsbury Group’s Thursday meetings – as well as in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Older antecedents may be found in Humanist-Reformation discussions on history at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century universities, conventicles, seminaries, confraternities, academies and so on.²⁰ William Clark has shown how the activities of the late medieval seminarium (etymologically a ‘seed-plot’, and by metaphorical extension a place of intellectual growth) and convictorium (meaning ‘boarding school’, but with connotations of communal eating and drinking) were carried over from secondary to tertiary education and joined together in the universities of Protestant Germany from the sixteenth century onwards. This move provided scope for academic conversation between men of differing social ranks whilst establishing quasi-autonomous institutions tasked with the bureaucratic rationalization of university curricula.²¹ Incidentally, the narrower sense of a seminary being a discrete place of religious training appears to have stemmed from a renewal of clerical education initiated by the eighteenth canon of the Council of Trent (1545–63), with Catholic and then Protestant seminaries emerging thereafter.²² Stretching further back to the fourteenth-century, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life helps build a bridge to even older patterns of Christian and pagan heritage. St Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus (c.194–202 CE) revealed the inner workings of the catechetical school of Alexandria. With Christ as the archetypal teacher, mortal pedagogues were simultaneously educators of and fellow learners with their students – notably male and female – and the distinction between school and church was non-existent.²³ Isocrates’ academy at Athens preceded that of Plato by several years and advocated the practice of rhetoric amongst the broader principles of a liberal education. In his Panegyricus (c.380 BCE), Isocrates cognized history as a discipline of study, a branch of practical knowledge bound to logos, whilst Panathenaicus (c.342 BCE) represented mutually formative exchanges between teacher and students in a peripatetic prefiguring of the seminar.²⁴ As abstruse and ancient as the teachings of St Clement and Isocrates undoubtedly are, they were revived for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers in English translation by the publishing series of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (1884) and the Loeb Classical Library (1928 and 1929), respectively.

The IHR unwittingly defined itself just one letter away from the Christian logos, IHS. At least one early visitor to the Institute is known to have commented, however flippantly, that the Institute’s monogram was a ‘Jesuit device’.²⁵ Anecdotes aside, James Kirby has recently shown how the fifty years leading up to the foundation of the IHR saw a significant ‘body of historical scholarship’ exemplify ‘the Church of England’s confessional priorities’.²⁶ Historical enquiry could be initiated by scientific means, but the ends of historiography – the conversations, postgraduate dissertations, published articles and books which shaped an understanding of the past for an elite culture espoused by academics, teachers, civil servants, politicians, journalists and so on – struggled to escape, and tended to re-enforce, the paradigmatic ideologies, theologies and imaginings of the day. For all his empirical historicism, Pollard’s Liberalism was guilty of valorizing ‘the secular and sovereign nation state as the desirable terminus of an evolutionary historical process’.²⁷ If stereotypical modernist historiography laid claim to ‘objective truth’ with religious-like zeal then there were, of course, ‘heretics’. John Fortescue’s 1925 presidential address to the Royal Historical Society gently eschewed the idea of history as a science; championing, instead, the human imagination as a re-creative force of historical interpretation, before presenting historians as custodians of the honour, dignity and beauty of English prose.²⁸ Such ideas set up a curious dialectic between the historian as interpreter of past ‘realities’ and the historian as mediator between a tangible present and an intangible past, with the latter enabling a creative blurring between historical enquiry and normative cultures, ideological teleologies, literary traditions and prophetic stories. Pollard the man had shunned his family’s Methodism only to adopt the credo of a rather impersonal moralist. By contrast, John Neale (1890–1975) – Pollard’s protégé and later successor as seminar convenor – was no less demanding, but very much a Christian of an English nonconformist-Protestant strain. So, it was no simple coincidence that Neale would go on to supervise and run seminars for such Christian empiricists as Gordon Donaldson (PhD, 1938) and Patrick Collinson (PhD, 1957), who made their names in the historiography of the Scottish and English Reformations respectively.²⁹ The rigour of historicism proved a strangely irenic pursuit.

The IHR’s early seminar culture was no bastion of secular modernist historiography. Rather it played host to diverse ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ who found meaning in a communal learning process shaped by contingent forces in historiography, ideology and sociability.³⁰ Seminars were about empirical study, but this involved a suspension of disbelief in its ultimate purpose.

Gendered and international learning

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the history seminar was orientated around teaching and research as interdependent activities. This emphasis facilitated intellectual and social relations that both reinforced and reformed cultural norms in learning.

The IHR quickly established a reputation as the place of postgraduate study in history.³¹ Yet no director of the IHR came to the post with a PhD until Michael Thompson in 1977. Such contrariness owed something to the time-lag of generational renewal, but it may also have reflected a gendered politics of learning. A symbiotic relationship between civic professions of political import and the professorial historiographer worked to galvanize a select group of relatively young men. Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) was little more than thirty when he was elevated to a chair at King’s College London in 1919; and by 1928 he had secured an ostensibly research-only professorship at the University of London so that he could also continue to work as director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House, est. 1920), a post he held from 1926 to 1955. Albert Pollard had only been thirty-three when he became a professor, but his ‘higher calling’ was to be found in creating and sustaining the IHR. Such men were Oxonians with no formal postgraduate training but nevertheless went on to play a significant role as seminar convenors and PhD supervisors. Their credentials as researchers and teachers were rather subsumed into authoritative roles of academic patronage and public service. The waning of the gentleman-scholar may have given way to the waxing of the male impresario professor.³²

Such ambition was not, however, all consuming. With a national sense of higher education in its infancy, academic professionalism rarely equated to a full-time, career-long university position. (When Pollard started out, he did so as a part-time, underpaid professor who found inspiration and succour in public service, which in the case of the London Evening School worked at the interface between secondary and tertiary education.) Multiple careers, constructed either concurrently or sequentially, were not uncommon and satisfied a range of personal interests, financial needs and public duties, in times of war and peace. Whilst far from a social leveller, experiences of such plurality and precarity may have formed an underlying point of solidarity for up-and-coming historians of different backgrounds and nationalities, and of both sexes.

The University of London quickly established itself as home to the greatest number of full-time overseas students. Within this context, the IHR and its seminars served to reinvigorate both national and international histories by way of inter-cultural exchange. From the early 1920s onwards, there was healthy representation from the United States of America, Canada and Australia, as well as a growing number from Wales, Scotland and continental Europe. Whilst complicated by power dynamics arising from early twentieth-century attitudes to race, colonialism and internationalism, a small but not insignificant number of (mainly male) students of colour participated in the IHR’s seminars to mutual benefit. In 1923–24, Tung-li Yuan (1895–1965) attended the preliminary course on sources and archives before returning to his native China where he would later become director of the National Library at Peiping, now Beijing (1942–49). That same year, Muhammad Shafik Ghorbal (1894–1961) attended Arnold Toynbee’s Near and Middle Eastern History Seminar.³³ In 1924–5, the IHR had a designated seminar on British India convened by Henry Dodwell (1879–1946) and this was attended by Bijan Raj Chatterji (1904–87) who subsequently became a pioneer in the study of Southeast Asian cultures. Such dynamics also operated in similar ways closer to home. Less than a decade after the Irish Civil War, the Ulsterman Theodore Moody (1907–84) and the Dubliner Robert Edwards (1909–88) gravitated to the IHR for doctoral study. Such a coming together was as cathartic as it was constructive. The Institute and its seminars instilled in Moody and Edwards such an appreciation of ‘proper research training’ and ‘collaborative enterprise’ that it inspired their role in the ‘Irish Historiographical Revolution’ of the 1930s.³⁴

Women played a significant role in the development of history seminar culture.³⁵ By 1919–20, a fifth of the postgraduate seminars at the London Evening School were led by women, including: Lilian Knowles, who had achieved first class in the history tripos at Girton College, Cambridge, and a DLitt from Trinity College, Dublin,³⁶ before becoming reader in economic history at the LSE; Hilda Johnstone (1882–1961), who graduated MA from Manchester in 1906 and was reader in history at KCL, and also sister-in-law to Thomas Tout; and Eliza Jeffries Davis (1875–1943), who had begun her career as a teacher at Bedford High School, before graduating MA from UCL in 1913 and the taking up a post as lecturer on the sources of English history at the same institution. By 1928–9, six of the seventeen seminars at the IHR were convened by women: Eliza Davis, by then reader, had established herself as leader of the London History Seminar whilst her colleagues included Hilda Johnstone, by then professor, and the up-and-coming scholar Lillian Penson (1896–1963).³⁷ And, by 1930–31, 21 per cent of academics at London were women, compared to 11 per cent at Oxford and just 5 per cent at Cambridge.³⁸

These women, and others like them, did not appear to suffer any straightforward reversal of opportunity as the history seminar was institutionalized at the IHR.³⁹ In 1921, Penson had become one of the first, and possibly the first, to be awarded a PhD in history by the University of London. She was appointed professor of modern history at Bedford College in 1930 and vice-chancellor of the University of London in 1948, the first woman to hold such a position anywhere in Britain; a damehood followed three years later. And throughout her illustrious career, Penson convened a seminar series on diplomatic history that ran from 1928 to 1963 (see Figure I.2). Davis never pursued doctoral study and published very little of her own work and yet became a formidable director of studies to PhD students. In 1923–4, she started supervising Norman Brett-James (1879–1960), a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, whose doctoral research was worked around his day-job as a housemaster at the nonconformist Mill Hill School, London. Brett-James’s labours resulted in the five-hundred-page Growth of Stuart London (1935) – still cited in the twenty-first century – wherein a preface made clear how the author was not only ‘indebted’ to ‘Miss E. Jeffries Davis’ for her ‘advice and criticism’ but to ‘the London Seminar which she presides over’.⁴⁰ Surviving minutes from Davis’s Seminar indicate her dynamic pedagogy. She would interject with comments about useful secondary and primary readings, historical details that were either probable or possible, queries about or answers to questions, as well as correcting discrepancies and errors.⁴¹ The first outing of Pollard’s Seminar in 1932–3 comprised six students, all women. Amongst their number, ‘Miss Skinner’ and ‘Miss Stafford’ together addressed ‘Elizabethan finance & foreign policy … [and] Anglo-Scottish relations at the end of the C16th’, respectively; whilst ‘Miss Puddifoot’ queried the ‘quantities of printed material surviving & not surviving’, contrasting the Stationers Register with the Short Title Catalogue.⁴² Caroline Robbins (1903–99), completed a PhD in history at Royal Holloway in 1926. Her attendance at the IHR’s seminars not only informed her dissertation but her future approach to teaching at Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA. According to Lois G. Schwoerer, Robbins conducted her graduate seminars through the 1930s, 40s and 50s ‘with a great sense that she was training the next generation of historians’. It was said that she had an ‘elliptical way of speaking, which required students to grasp her meaning’ by reading works from set reading lists. ‘Students’ oral seminar reports received searching questions and sometimes sharp criticisms’ and on at least one occasion ‘reduced an apparently ill-prepared student to tears in a seminar’. Robbins ‘did not approve of the feminist movement’ but instead believed that women could succeed without major socio-political change if only they ‘applied themselves seriously to their work’.⁴³ Whilst many pioneering women historians advanced the cause of feminism, not all escaped stereotypes of being either self-effacing or teaching-focused, or both, and some shunned feminism as a determining factor in their achievements.

Research, politics and conviviality

A desire to free up academic discourse from the burden of pedagogy was in evidence at the IHR from its inception. Pollard’s Thursday-evening conference set an early precedent, but this was a distinctly after-dinner affair which reflected a clubbable sensibility. The performative act of eating and drinking together may have symbolized a sense of community, if not an equity amongst members, and helped to initiate a transformation from day to night, from mundane toil to creative thought.⁴⁴ Befitting the occasion, the academic discussion, at least in the early years, was typically free flowing with ‘no agenda, no programme, no opener for discussion’.⁴⁵ As delightful and constructive as this would have been for participants, no less significant were the experiments of Eileen Power, who ‘turned her medieval history seminar for a time during the late 1920s and early 1930s into a research project’ that drew in not just students but ‘visiting foreign historians, as well as other academics from outside the LSE’.⁴⁶ Power’s own scholarship went from strength to strength, and in 1938–9 she became the first woman to deliver the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford.

Yet, for the most part, the history seminar at the IHR continued to work as a forum for teaching and learning. With the ability of hindsight, former students and junior staff had mixed feelings about this environment. From the vantage point of 1993, Joan Henderson (d. 2002) – schoolteacher, Tudor historian and doyenne of the IHR – recalled how Neale’s Tudor History Seminar of 1948–9 was concerned with ‘what his students had discovered in the past week’ and how in the midst of discussion ‘people were sent round the room to fetch printed Elizabethan records’; but then it was also the case that ‘conversation afterwards was discouraged by one of the librarians of that time and the professors did not adjourn to discuss matters elsewhere over glasses of wine and beer’.⁴⁷ In his memoirs of 2006, the military historian Michael Howard (1922–2019) recounted how, as a lecturer at KCL in early 1950s, his ‘Oxford superiority-complex withered in the face of such an array of talent – such professionalism’ and yet he also grew weary of ‘God Professors’ and ‘their obedient acolytes’.⁴⁸

Through the mid-twentieth century, the history seminar outgrew its base function in undergraduate and postgraduate learning to establish itself as a multipurpose endeavour within a newly dynamic intellectual ecology.⁴⁹ In 1947–8, the IHR took up permanent residence in Senate House: an ostensibly new building, completed just a decade before, but with an art deco design which reflected a tragically outdated sense of 1930s optimism (see Figures 1.4 and 1.5). In that same year, the German-born émigré of Jewish heritage Gottfried Rudolph Otto Ehrenberg became a naturalized British citizen; and under his anglicized name, Geoffrey Elton (1921–94), established himself as an historian with a doctoral thesis on Thomas Cromwell, supervised by John Neale. In an emerging post-1945 paradigm, historical research and political ideology once again met at the IHR with a view to national and international reconstruction.

In 1953, Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960) retired from his professorial chair at the University of Manchester to take up a leading role in the History of Parliament project, which had been re-launched in 1951 with financial and political backing from Churchill’s government.⁵⁰ Namier was still at the height of his powers, but a bitter, cantankerous soul who had suffered prejudice all his life. Born Ludwik Bernstein, he was a Russian-Polish-Jewish émigré, who changed his name, and graduated from Balliol College, before becoming a naturalized British citizen in 1913. Whilst antisemitism was a determining factor in Namier being passed over for prestigious professorial appointments at Oxbridge and London, his final role offered an opportunity to imprint both a historiography and a national history with ‘Namierism’ – a prosopographical approach to political history, construed as a function of individual agency and self-interest. Whilst the IHR and its seminars constituted a multifaceted organization, irreducible to any single interest, the History of Parliament project drew upon the contrasting expertise of Namier and Neale and, in so doing, re-shaped their respective seminars in the pursuit of collaborative research beyond the confines of doctoral study. By 1956, Neale’s Seminar had demonstrably altered from its pre-1950s state. As one member noted at the time: ‘the seminar is a joint committee dedicated to research and evaluation’; for ‘just as its members before, at tea, take their problems and difficulties to discuss with Professor Neale [by this time also knighted], so it is the professor who will outline his latest work, binding the threads together with a wealth of illustration in a torrent of extempore analysis’, and then ‘it is he who stands on trial before the seminar, before the lynx-eyed Mr Gabriel with his colleagues … Miss Henderson [etc.] … lined up together on the right side of the table’.⁵¹ In a similar vein, Namier’s Seminar was ‘nominally on British parliamentary history in the second half of the eighteenth century’ but was ‘in effect an extension of the work of the History of Parliament, and brought collaborators and students together’. Yet, Namier remained very much the leader for ‘so marinated was he in the sources that … he always seemed to be remembering history as personal experience’.⁵²

At the other end of the political spectrum, Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was coming of age. A British citizen by birth but a ‘non-Jewish Jew’ with parents of Polish and Austrian descent, Hobsbawm grew up in Vienna and spent time in Berlin before moving to England in 1933 – just after converting to Communism following his attendance at the last legal demonstration of the German Communist Party. As an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, Hobsbawm thrived, but his membership of the elite discussion group known as the ‘Cambridge Apostles’ was perhaps no less influential than his formal studies. After the Second World War, his Cambridge PhD dissertation, ‘Fabianism and the Fabians, 1884–1914’ (1950), was supervised by Michael Postan (1899–1981). Hobsbawm was a founding member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain that typically met, either at Marx’s House at Clerkenwell Green, or at Garibaldi’s Italian restaurant off Farringdon Road, to engage in seminar discussion on historical problems. Between 1946 and 1956, the Group, which also counted E. P. Thompson (1924–93), Christopher Hill (1912–2003) and Dona Torr (1883–1957) amongst its members, was a major force in institutionalizing British Marxist historiography and galvanizing relations between like-minded students, teachers, academics and political thinkers, both nationally and internationally. Founding Past and Present (1952), and participating in an historical colloquium in Leningrad upon the invitation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences shortly after Stalin’s death, were just two of their notable achievements.⁵³ Hobsbawm’s political entanglements had a detrimental effect on his academic career: his rise to the rank of professor in 1970 was inordinately slow and he never secured a meaningful post at Cambridge despite trying; yet, he found a professional home at Birkbeck College in 1947 and there he remained. By the 1960s, Hobsbawm’s teaching seminars were celebrated multisensory experiences. One of his students later recalled that he would often ‘sit cross-legged on the top of the desk facing his students whilst we took turns at reading our most recent essays aloud to the group’; Hobsbawm would ‘listen intently’ and then provide ‘comments’, all whilst entertaining the various physical processes of preparing and smoking a pipe.⁵⁴ The IHR took a while to come round to having Past and Present on its bookshelves, and Hobsbawm did not make his debut as an IHR seminar co-convenor until 1965–66, pairing up with Oliver McGregor (1921–97, cr. Baron McGregor of Durris in 1978), professor of social institutions at Bedford College, to run the seminar on the ‘social history of industrial society, with special reference to modern Britain’. But by the mid-1970s, this seminar was very much Hobsbawm’s seminar; and, despite it being still predominately focused on doctoral research and learning, it bore testimony to how ‘history unfolded in breadth and depth’, marking for at least one student ‘the pre-eminent intellectual experience’ of their lives.⁵⁵ Around the same time, Hobsbawm also collaborated with George Haupt (1928–78), sometime director of Soviet and East European Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, to establish at Paris a seminar series on social history in which papers would be designed to foster learned discussion but, significantly, ‘with no expectation of publication’.⁵⁶

Liberalism was not to be outdone at the IHR and found a champion in Conrad Russell (1937–2004) – son of the philosopher Bertrand Russell – who in 1958 graduated from Merton College, Oxford, and began, but did not complete, a doctorate under the supervision of Christopher Hill, before starting what would become a distinguished academic career as an historian of early Stuart England at Bedford College in 1960. At this time Russell’s politics leaned towards Labour, but when in 1987 he was elevated to his hereditary peerage he sat on the Liberal benches – later taking on duties that aimed at reforming social security. At the IHR, Russell led the Tudor and Stuart Seminar from 1984 until his retirement in 2002, during which time he was professor of British history, first at UCL and then KCL. Members of the Seminar found Russell’s intellectual enthusiasm ‘contagious’ and commended him for undertaking serious reading ‘not merely for his own research but also for theirs’.⁵⁷ This feeling was mutual. The book that emerged from Russell’s 1987–8 Ford Lectures, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (1991), was dedicated ‘to the members, past, present and future, of the Tudor and Stuart Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research’, and in a telling preface Russell wrote of a ‘special debt’ to the Seminar for supplying ‘some forty pairs of spectacles to pursue almost every problem’ and ‘usually, one of them has the right focus’.⁵⁸ Little wonder that this chain-smoking professor, feared and revered by his students, was a first amongst equals whose tenure as convenor of the Tudor and Stuart History Seminar is remembered nostalgically with much admiration.

Reflecting on the combined experiences of the Seminars associated with Namier, Hobsbawm and Russell, it seems that the IHR’s seminar culture witnessed no strategic or uniform transformation from student-orientated to staff-orientated research. The extent to which the history seminar as an institution had expanded and diversified its remit to incorporate pedagogical, historiographical, professional, political and social interests was significant.⁵⁹ The PhD was still not an essential prerequisite for gaining either esteem as a scholar or an academic post at a university and seminars attracted a varied crowd of occasional visitors, including a smattering of amateurs drawn from the general public.⁶⁰ Notwithstanding social hierarchies, different approaches to research could converge upon mutual experiences in learning. That said, taken in the round, this environment was more blokeish: leading historiographers were ‘men of affairs’, and the overriding system was slow to respond to the calls for equality and inclusivity that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

The social component of this expanding history seminar culture appears to have been something of a given, although quite difficult to find documented. Formal seminar discourse was often followed by more informal discussions over dinner and drinks in a manner that combined the principles of good hospitality with a base desire to lubricate conversation with alcohol. Here, more candid and exploratory conversations could take place about what one really thought of the earlier proceedings. Finding someone of like mind could be just as important as finding someone to have a good argument with. Talk could easily drift between topics on historiography, teaching, administration, university gossip, politics, sport, music, art and even relationships – with all the pros and cons such discussions brought for making, breaking and segregating friendships. In the best traditions of pub culture, professors were to be found drinking and speaking freely amongst students, junior colleagues and others from outside academia. In the light of the #MeToo movement (est. 2006), however, it would be naive not to worry now about an unknown darker history of those who suffered harassment or assault in the aftermath of a seminar. More positively, though, seminar culture can lay claim to be a sensitive matchmaker. Those who shared a passion for research in the social environment of the seminar could find their interests affirmed and extended through interpersonal bonds of friendship and romantic love. Elfreda Skelton married her former supervisor, John Neale. Eileen Power married her former research assistant, Michael Postan. And Conrad Russell married his former student, Elizabeth Sanders. Elton and his future wife met as students at the IHR, and in later years,

colleagues and pupils who enjoyed the hospitality which Geoffrey Elton and his wife, Sheila Lambert, herself a historian of distinction, dispensed liberally and frequently at their home in Cambridge saw him in his Anglo-Saxon mode, in turns the genial raconteur or sharp-tongued savager of fools and knaves, so far removed from the staid restraint of an earnest Teutonic.⁶¹

Accountability and accessibility

Since the 1970s, but more noticeably since the 2000s, the multiplication, diversification and fragmentation of historiographical enquiry has become mixed up in battles over the hegemonic norms of teaching, learning and researching history. This has been further complicated by a revolution in the relationship between universities and the state, or rather universities and their ‘stakeholders’, especially in Britain.⁶²

A resurgent instrumentalism has not just complicated empirical historiography but opened it up to the hermeneutical and methodological challenges of political historicism and popular historical culture.⁶³ The principles of academic historicism are being redefined in negotiation with various, sometimes conflicting, political, social and ethical imperatives. This process may be seen as an ongoing function of the discipline of history renewing itself. However, what does appear to be causing a more profound change is the extent to which university political culture has not only become unhinged from academe but is increasingly taking the lead in determining the nature and purpose of historiography as it is crafted and taught by historians on the payroll of universities.

The last part of this essay offers a more personal perspective, based upon sector-wide experiences of teaching and researching history in British universities since the late 2000s. That said, it reflects, however contentiously, a reality which, whilst not necessarily representative of experiences at Oxbridge and a handful of other select institutions, serves as a warning to what may happen to the IHR’s seminar culture if it cannot be insulated from the vagaries of managerialist agendas that now overwhelm much of the university sector.

For many undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes, the history teaching seminar has become subordinate to the contrivances of prescribed learning and assessment objectives. Here, educationalists have been instrumental in stealthily turning the seminar from a learning method to a mere format: a type of meeting which plays host to a ‘range of activities that may take place when working with small groups of history students’.⁶⁴ Academic convention may once have assumed that such seminar ‘activities’ were in keeping with an established method of ‘a gathering, preferably round a table, of a group with a presiding teacher in which individual students present views or even papers [on history] for guided discussion by the group’; but since the 2000s this has no longer been the case.⁶⁵ The trajectory from historiography to pedagogy that has traditionally given the history seminar its distinctive value has been eroded, even inverted, by the forces of managerialism, discombobulated by various competing demands of accountability and accessibility within a neoliberal paradigm. A marketized curriculum fetishizes what students want. Much of ‘higher education’ has become predicated upon maximizing degree outcomes in ways that foreground knowledge exchange to the detriment of both the principles of tertiary learning and their capacity to engender an intellectually heterogenous student body. The advance of modular degree programmes, the decline of end-of-year exams and the rationalization of timetables have also fundamentally changed the student experience. In reflecting these developments, a fair portion of the history seminar’s autonomous historiographical discourse has been hollowed out so that it can be ‘embedded’ with homogenized activities that supposedly evidence ‘engagement’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘employability’, ‘critical thinking skills’, ‘communication skills’, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, ‘citizenship’, ‘student satisfaction’ and so on.⁶⁶ As a result, the history special subject – the cornerstone of history seminar culture writ large – is being turned into just a standard option module with no particular commitment to the seminar as the method of learning history: a point readily underscored by browsing the webpages detailing third-year modules for the BA in history at a range of institutions (including the University of Manchester, of all places).

Research postgraduate programmes are not in a dissimilar place. For the government-backed designs of Doctoral Training Programmes/Partnerships (DTPs) combine with the criteria of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to establish an approach to research that can be unduly prescriptive in both its framing of historical projects and its insistence upon knowledge exchange. History PhD students are also increasingly being mandated to take time out from their studies to attend workshops on things such as media training and non-academic career skills. As well-meaning and pragmatic as this may be, such activities risk diluting the capacity of doctoral history students to undertake research, participate in seminars and become credible scholars.

If the historic fluidity between teaching, learning and research in the history seminar is being lost, then this does not bode well for the role of the history seminar as a method of scholarship. The university staff of today were the students of yesterday, so it only takes a few generational cycles for changes to be accepted without question. There are, however, other factors to contend with.

On a practical level, the job of a university academic is all but unrecognizable from what it was twenty or so years ago. Overworked staff ruthlessly prioritize their time, or else have it prioritized for them. Collegiality can suffer under the weight of internal politics shaped by experiences of asymmetric power relationships, precarity and poor mental health. Now, the history research seminar is perhaps seen less as a necessity and more as a luxury, and one that few can afford. In a target-driven environment, it can be quite easy for staff to become habituated to the absence of seminar culture precisely because it rarely imparts immediate tangible benefits. If outright non-attendance does not scupper proceedings, then the practice of taking notes on laptops, tablets and smartphones provides cover for undertaking other more pressing bureaucratic tasks whilst ‘listening’ to someone speak; and in the case of webinars such infringements may be legion. Attempts to make seminars a more discernible feature of a ‘professional’ working day can be counterproductive. The advent of PowerPoint presentations may have led to something of a trend for presenting research findings in a lecture style rather than delivering a seminar paper with a proper, albeit developing, sense of argument. Facing a projector screen in a multipurpose room also means that seminar participants may just as likely line up in rows as sit collegiately around a table. The art of robust questioning and debating may be losing its lustre: partly because there is little consensus on what the terms of engagement are, or should be, and partly because it is harder to get a critical mass of expertise in a room to actually get a conversation going. The hermeneutics, methods and cultural norms of disciplinary rigour are getting confused or overlooked amidst a clamour for ‘interdisciplinarity’, which if taken seriously and followed to its logical conclusion spells the death of history as a discipline – and a prefiguring of this is already upon us with the decline of the standalone history department. There is less time and money for post-seminar sociability which in theory, although rarely in practice, can become something of a moral minefield. And what blended and online events gain in formal inclusivity they lose in excluding informal but vital discourse through the conviviality of meeting people face-to-face.

All is not lost. A recent job advert for a lectureship in history at UCL explicitly requested that the successful candidate should be willing and able to teach an undergraduate research seminar and participate in at least one of the IHR seminars. Yet, the nature and significance of this commitment will depend upon how the respective parties come to understand and value the history seminar. To avoid ambiguity, there must be a re-affirmation and re-invigoration of a protean seminar culture that acts as a custodian of the working needs of historians, considered properly as both means and ends, scholars and people.

Afterword

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, calls to further democratize historical knowledge are being complicated by partisan attempts to shape and control it. A long-lived symbiotic relationship between academic historiography and political culture is becoming more transactional and asymmetrical. ‘Public history’ is no panacea. Despite its many virtues,⁶⁷ this approach to doing history is particularly vulnerable to commodification and may give licence to a reductive view that the study of history is principally about political access to and control of historical knowledge. But the difference between knowledge and understanding is not insignificant; and the leap to appreciating how and why and with what value academic historians work critically within a methodological, and hence disciplinary, framework to create intellectually credible claims about the past is no mean feat.

Whilst recourse to Arendt does not address the contemporary problems of access, representation and inclusion, her thesis on action helps to re-envisage the academic history seminar as a public good in and of itself. For a century, the IHR’s seminars have served as a hive of industry enabling historians and their historiography to set agendas in teaching, learning and researching history whilst informing wider cultures. But what reading Arendt hopefully allows us to understand is that material outcomes are not the real issue here. For the history seminar is a living tradition that aggregates, incorporates or otherwise transforms discrete events into evolving processes that bind scholarship to people and people to scholarship. The history seminar makes historiography qua historiography a feature of the real world. In being free unto itself to write, read, listen and discuss, in both the manner it does and upon the subject that it does, the history seminar creates – to borrow a line from Arendt – that ‘space of appearance … where I appear to others as others appear to me’; and the beauty of this action is that it ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement that brought it into being’.⁶⁸ Such practices, as they are freedoms, must be constantly re-enacted for them to live on. And it is essential that they do, for they engender critical understanding, the like of which is now needed more than ever.

Notes

1. * I am very grateful to Claire Langhamer, Peter Mandler, Robert Anderson, David Bates, Penelope Corfield and Andrew Campbell for valuable comments and corrections on earlier drafts of this chapter. I alone am responsible for any remaining shortcomings. I also wish to thank Michael Townsend and Zoë Karens for helping with various archive-related queries. My own experience of the IHR’s seminar culture has been shaped by the generosity of Ken Fincham, Nicholas Tyacke and Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon at the Religious History of Britain 1500–1800 Seminar. This chapter is written with love and gratitude to my brother and my parents.

2. 1.  H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, [1958] 2018), pp. 175–80, 192–206, 320–26. This essay also strikes up a conversation with M. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), D. Cannadine, Making History Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations (Basingstoke, 2008), and J. Banner Jr, Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge, 2012).

3. 2.  K. R. Eskildsen, ‘Virtues of History: Exercises, Seminars, and the Emergence of the German Historical Discipline, 1830–1900’, in History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1, ed. K.-M. Chang and A. Rocke (Oxford, 2021), pp. 27–40 at p. 36. See also: O. Kruse, ‘The Origins of Writing in the Disciplines: Traditions of Seminar Writing and the Humboldtian Ideal of the Research University’, Written Communication, xxiii (2006), 331–52; and A. Grafton, ‘In Clio’s American Atelier’, in Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. C. Camic et al. (Chicago, 2011), pp. 89–117.

4. 3.  For developments in Scotland, see: R. Anderson, ‘University History Teaching and the Humboldtian Model in Scotland, 1858–1914’, History of Universities, xxv (2010), pp. 138–84; and R. Anderson, ‘The Development of History Teaching in the Scottish Universities, 1894–1939’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, xxxii (2012), 50–73.

5. 4.  P. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester, 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986), pp. 56–152.

6. 5.  For an appreciation of the Stubbs Society in the 1960s, see: P. Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton, 2023), pp. 227–31.

7. 6.  A. Erickson, ‘Ellen Annette McArthur: Establishing a Presence in the Academy’, in Generations of Women Historians: Within and Beyond the Academy, ed. H. Smith and M. Zook (Chem, 2018), pp. 25–48.

8. 7.  M. V. Hughes, A London Girl of the Eighties (London, 1936), p. 145; and for insights into conviviality see pp. 148–49. Cf. B. Smith, ‘Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review, c (1995), 1150–76.

9. 8.  For more on the latter, see R. van de Wal, ‘Dancing in the Kitchens of History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Groningen, 2022).

10. 9.  P. Slee, ‘The Manchester School of History: Tout’s Contribution to the Pedagogy of Academic History’, in Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929): Refashioning History for the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Rosenthal and C. Barron (London, 2019), pp. 41–56 at p. 50.

11. 10.  H. H. Bellot, University College London, 1826–1926 (London, 1929), pp. 420–21 and p. 406; M. Pendleton, ‘A Place of Teaching and Research: University College London and the Origins of the Research University in Britain 1890–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2001), pp. 169–80.

12. 11.  A. F. Pollard, ‘The University of London and the Study of History’ (1904), in A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History (New York, 1907), pp. 263–87 at p. 282.

13. 12.  Pendleton, ‘A Place of Teaching and Research’, pp. 131–4.

14. 13.  Pollard, ‘The University of London’, p. 276.

15. 14.  H. Butterfield, ‘The History of the Historical Association’, History Today, vi (1956), 63–4.

16. 15.  Pendleton, ‘A Place of Teaching and Research’, p. 173.

17. 16.  Pendleton, ‘A Place of Teaching and Research’, p. 205.

18. 17.  For context, see Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 70–91; T. G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 10–17; P. Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA, 2020), pp. 1–11.

19. 18.  ‘The Institute of Historical Research: The Building and Its Purpose’ (1921), partially reproduced in D. Birch and J. Horn (comp.), The History Laboratory: The Institute of Historical Research 1921–96 (London, 1996), pp. 13–15.

20. 19.  Institute of Historical Research: First Annual Report, 1921–22 (London, 1923), pp. 8–9.

21. 20.  D. Manning, ‘What Was Devotional Writing? Revisiting the Community at Little Gidding, 1626–33’, in People and Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities in Early Modern England, ed. E. Clarke and R. Daniel (Manchester, 2020), pp. 25–42.

22. 21.  W. Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago, 2006), pp. 141–82.

23. 22.  S. Ryan, ‘Seminary Formation since the Council of Trent: A Historical Overview’, in Models of Priestly Formation: Assessing the Past, Reflecting on the Present, and Imagining the Future, ed. D. Marmion, M. Mullaney and S. Ryan (Collegeville, MN, 2019), pp. 1–22.

24. 23.  Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, trans. W. Wilson, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, vol. IV, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1884), pp. 113–348.

25. 24.  Isocrates, Panathenaicus (c.342 BCE), 200–272: trans. George Norlin, the Loeb Classical Library (1929); and Isocrates, Panegyricus (c.380 BCE), 9–10: trans. George Norlin, the Loeb Classical Library (1928). See also: W. L. Innerd, ‘The Contribution of Isocrates to Western Educational Thought’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Durham, 1969), pp. 159–65.

26. 25.  G. Parsloe, ‘Recollections of the Institute, 1922–43’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xliv (1971), 270–83 at p. 273.

27. 26.  J. Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 221–2. See also: B. Young, ‘History’, in Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain, ed. M. Bevir (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 154–85; and Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 45–69.

28. 27.  P. Cavill, ‘A. F. Pollard’, Parliamentary History, xl (2021), 45–58 at p. 48.

29. 28.  J. W. Fortescue, ‘Presidential Address’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser. viii (1925), 1–13.

30. 29.  Later directors of the IHR, such as Geoffrey Dickens (1967–77) and Michael Thompson (1977–90), would also negotiate their academic work whilst sustaining a Christian faith. For details of Collinson’s student days, see P. Collinson, The History of a History Man: Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance. The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 69–85.

31. 30.  Cf. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 119–43 and 169–93.

32. 31.  I. Nicoll, ‘A Statistical Profile of the London PhD in History 1921–90’, Oxford Review of Education, xxii (1996), 273–94.

33. 32.  W. P. Webb, ‘The Historical Seminar: Its Outer Shell and Its Inner Spirit’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, xlii (1955), 3–23.

34. 33.  R. A. Hamed, ‘Historiography in Egypt in the Twentieth Century’, in The Development of Social Science in Egypt: Economics, History, and Sociology, ed. I. Handy (Cairo, 1995), pp. 18–40.

35. 34.  D. W. Hayton, ‘The Laboratory for “Scientific History”: T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards at the Institute of Historical Research’, Irish Historical Studies, xli (2017), 41–57 at pp. 56–7.

36. 35.  Cf. Laura Carter, ‘Women Historians in the Twentieth Century’, in Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain, ed. Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas (London, 2021), pp. 263–85; ‘Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History, and Heritage in Britain, 1870–1950’: https://beyondnotability.org [accessed 1 Aug. 2022]; J. Bourke, Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (Oxford, 2022), pp. 174–203.

37. 36.  See S. Parkes, ‘Steamboat Ladies (act. 1904–1907)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online, 2007): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/61643 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

38. 37.  For select minutes of the seminar series convened by Eliza Davis and Hilda Johnstone in the 1930s, see: Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/3/2/12, IHR/3/2/13, and IHR/3/2/16. See also: Institute of Historical Research, https://www.history.ac.uk/library/collections/provenance#davis-e-jeffries [accessed 1 Nov. 2022].

39. 38.  F. Perrone, ‘University Teaching as a Profession for Women in Oxford, Cambridge, and London: 1870–1930’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1991), p. 57 and p. 328.

40. 39.  Cf. J. Thirsk, ‘The History Women’, in Chattel, Servant, or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, ed. M. O’Dowd and S. Wichert (Belfast, 1995), pp. 1–11.

41. 40.  N. G. Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London (London, 1935), p. 9.

42. 41.  IHR/3/2/13 [no folio numbers], passim.

43. 42.  IHR/3/2/11 [no folio numbers]: 11 Oct. 1932.

44. 43.  L. G. Schwoerer, ‘Caroline Robbins: An Anglo-American Historian’, in Generations of Women Historians: Within and Beyond the Academy, ed. H. Smith and M. Zook (Chem, 2018), pp. 137–56 at pp. 152–53.

45. 44.  Birch and Horn, The History Laboratory, pp. 138–40.

46. 45.  Parsloe, ‘Recollections of the Institute, 1922–43’, p. 271.

47. 46.  M. Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 160–61.

48. 47.  J. Henderson, [untitled article?], Past and Future [the IHR magazine] (1993), reproduced in Birch and Horn, The History Laboratory, p. 131. For details on Joan Henderson, see: R. Strong, Scenes and Apparitions: The Roy Strong Diaries 1988–2003 (London, 2016), pp. 185–6, p. 215, and pp. 409–10.

49. 48.  M. Howard, Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (London, 2006), pp. 135–36 [italics indicate Howard’s original emphasis].

50. 49.  A. T. Milne, ‘Twenty-Five Years at the Institute, 1946–1971’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xliv (1971), 284–92; and C. Edwards, ‘Recovering History Education’s Forgotten Past: Diversity and Change in Professional Discourse in England, 1944–1962’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2016).

51. 50.  For context, see: D. W. Hayton, ‘Colonel Wedgwood and the Historians’, Historical Research, lxxxiv (2011), 328–55.

52. 51.  W. T. Jones, ‘The Seminar Today’, The Pollardian [Student Magazine] (UCL, 1956), 8–11, reproduced in Birch and Horn, comp., The History Laboratory, pp. 132–3.

53. 52.  D. W. Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester, 2019), p. 333 and p. 310. Cf. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 194–218.

54. 53.  R. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Oxford, 2019), pp. 310–14.

55. 54.  Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 422.

56. 55.  Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 423.

57. 56.  Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 500.

58. 57.  P. Croft, ‘Conrad Russell’, Reviews in History, no. 709a (2009): https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/709a [accessed 1 Aug. 2022].

59. 58.  C. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), p. v and pp. ix–x.

60. 59.  Working from developments in 1940s America, the meaning of the term ‘seminar’ expanded to include any ‘conference of specialists’, see ‘seminar, n.2.’, Oxford English Dictionary online: www.oed.com/view/Entry/175679 [accessed 1 Aug. 2022].

61. 60.  P. Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), pp. 93–142.

62. 61.  T. Scott, ‘Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1921–1994)’, Renaissance Studies, ix (1995), 344–6.

63. 62.  For context, see E. P. Thompson, ed., Warwick University Ltd (Nottingham, [1970] 2014); C. Russell, Academic Freedom (London, 1993); O. O’Neill, A Question of Trust (Cambridge, 2002); S. Collini, Speaking of Universities (London, 2017); P. Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford, 2020), pp. 72–122 and pp. 207–15; and S. Jones, Universities Under Fire: Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education (Basingstoke, 2022).

64. 63.  For context, see M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macey (London, 2003), pp. 109–111, 172–212; J. Arnold et al., ‘The Challenges of History’, in History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Arnold et al. (Oxford, 2018), pp. 3–14; D. Bloxham, Why History? (Oxford, 2020), pp. 350–58; and H. Carr and S. Lipscomb, What Is History, Now? How the Past and Present Speak to Each Other (London, 2021), passim.

65. 64.  G. Preston, ‘Seminars for Active Learning’, History in Higher Education: New Directions in Teaching and Learning, ed. A. Booth and P. Hyland (Oxford, 1996), pp. 111–27 at p. 12. See also J. Davis and P. Salmon, ‘ “Deep Learning” and the Large Seminar in History Teaching’, in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. A. Booth and P. Hyland (Manchester, 2000), pp. 125–36.

66. 65.  G. Elton, The Practice of History (Oxford, [1967] 2002), p. 151.

67. 66.  I say this advisedly with reference to what all these terms have come to connote in the British higher education sector since the 2010s. P. Scales, An Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Supporting Fellowship (London, 2017). Cf. S. Baumbach, ‘To Be or Not to Be? Crisis and the Humanities in Germany’, The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities? ed. D. Ahlburg (Abingdon, 2019), pp. 83–100 at p. 92.

68. 67.  J. Champion, ‘What Are Historians for?’, Historical Research, lxxxi (2008), 167–88; and, L. Jordanova, ‘Public History – A Provocation’, a Talk at the first Public History Prize Workshop at the IHR (29 Oct. 2015): https://files.royalhistsoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/17210240/PHW-Jordanova-Provocation-29-Oct-15.pdf [accessed 1 Dec. 2022]. The IHR’s Public History Seminar was founded in 2012 by Alix Green, John Tosh, Anna Maerker, Judy Faraday and Tim Boon.

69. 68.  Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 198–9. Cf. S. Fox, ‘Archival Intimacies: Empathy and Historical Practice in 2023’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2023), 1–25; and L. Stonebridge, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (London, 2024).

References