5 - New historians, new histories

Summary

For all their haunting by ghosts from the past, the generations who followed the whigs believed themselves to be involved in an important process of modernization. The First World War, just as much as European intellectual influence after 1890 or the sociology of ‘professionalization’, played a critical role in confirming this notion. A post-war age, the argument ran, demanded a post-whig understanding of what had created it. Sometimes this meant that the ideologies gaining strength across Europe required historical acknowledgement. Sometimes it indicated the importance of new methodologies geared to a scientific age. But it also incorporated a natural progression towards a social history that would make more sense of a fast-moving popular culture, and a serious economic history that would place the depressed post-war years in context. It may not be completely arbitrary that the Economic History Society came into being in the same year as the General Strike, any more than that Eileen Power's swing from monastic history to the study of medieval economic and social history should have taken place in a post-war atmosphere within which the first generation of professional female historians in England cut their teeth. ‘Normalcy’ would not have attracted the new modernists even had they not rejected it on grounds of literacy. Death and disruption brought their own imperative to make a new historical world, one more ‘relevant’ to present needs and perspectives.