What is History? [antikvár]

The Histórián and His Facts HAT is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarna-tions of the Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press on the work which he had undertaken to edit: It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath. . . . By the judicious division of labour we should be able to do it, and to bring home to every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of inter-national research. Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.1 And almost exactly sixty years later Professor Sir George Clark, in his generál introduction to the second Cambridge Modern History, commented on this belief of Acton and his collaborators that it would one day be possible to produce 'ultimate history', and went on : Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such prospect. They expect their work to be 1 The Cambridge Modern History : Its Origin, Authorship and Pro-duction (1907), pp. 10-12.