The Pursuit of History

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Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, c. 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003); Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, 2005). Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The female world of love and ritual: relations between women in nineteenth-century America’, Signs 1 (1975), 1–30. Joanne Bailey, lecture delivered at conference on ‘Masculinities and the Other’, Balliol College, Oxford, 29 August 2007. See further Joanne Bailey’s chapter in this volume. Furthermore, any presentation of history may be received and interpreted in ways unintended by the public historian

If the study of history can really be made an educational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation who not only know how to vote, but will bring a judgement, prepared, trained and in its own sphere exercised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of life. The tendency “for fatherhood to be reduced to a providing role, since the relational nurturing aspects of parenting were deemed ‘feminine’” (7); andTosh’s Pursuit of History, in its newest edition, remains the definitive introduction to historical criticism and historiography. Well‐structured, up‐to‐date, highly readable and drawing on a wealth of fascinating illustrative material from the author’s own research, it stands out as the best text combining fundamental method with key theoretical approaches and research trends." John Tosh (March 2007). A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12362-3 . Retrieved 22 July 2013. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s sodomites: homosexual behaviour and Western culture in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Social History 11 (1977), 1–13; Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England. The nature and scope of that 'public' has however changed over history; only recently has it been considered a mass audience, with a universal franchise History in Higher Education has long provided a path through which more demanding history reaches a wider audience of potential opinion-formers

Norman, Andrew (1991) "Telling it Like it Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms", History and Theory Vol. 30, pp. 119-135. John Tosh’s Reader begins with a substantial introductory survey charting the course of historiographical developments since the second half of thenineteenth century. He explores both the academic mainstream and more radical voices within the discipline. The text is composed of readings by historians such as Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Scott and Jordanova. This third edition has been brought up to date by taking the 1960s as its starting point. It now includes more recent topics like public history, microhistory and global history, in addition to established fields like Marxist history, gender history and postcolonialism. Robert A. Nye, ‘Western masculinities in war and peace’, American Historical Review 112 (2007), 438. Similarly, most of the contributors to Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, write about politics or war at one remove from party meeting or the battlefield, as if experience can take care of itself while they focus on the complexities of representation. One must then be clear about the purpose of public engagement. Does the historian aim (as Thucydides, and many thereafter him, considered themselves to have aimed) at simply providing a useful storehouse of examples for posterity? Or does one have to admit that any attempt to make history 'matter' to a wider audience must at some level commit to a particular politics, and this in turn must align with a particular interpretation of history? Whilst John Tosh is clearly liberal and left-leaning in his politics, Why History Matters makes an admirable attempt to incorporate the views of people with whom the author disagrees. But I am not sure that historians should be offering a synthesis view with which most members of the profession could agree. If our interpretations are not to some extent partisan, are they actually politically engaged at all?The Pursuit of History has many strengths. It is extremely well‐written and lucid. It strikes a very nice balance between tracing historiography, delineating historical methodology, and discussing the major historiographical developments over the last few decades. Comprehensive, insightful and conversant with the latest historiographical currents, it is essential reading in any undergraduate or graduate theory and method course."