Introduction i This book is about how we study history, how we research and write about it, and how we read it. In the postmodern age, historians are being ...

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this confuses (...) memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator," "victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 457 - 467 This reply to the critiques by Daniel Woolf, Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Nolan of my book _Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History_, takes each of their contributions in turn, and reasserts the centrality to counterfactual history of positing definite, long term alternative timelines rather than a vague claim that things might have turned out differently to the way they actually did. Such alternate timelines have no claim to either truth or (...) utility since they ignore the many possible contingencies that would most likely have taken place following the initial deviation from the real timeline of history. (shrink)

This text brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Richard Evans trad in 2000 op als expert-getuige in het proces dat historica Deborah Lipstadt aanspande tegen haar collega David Irving. Lipstadt beschuldigde Irving ervan in zijn geschriften een grote hoeveelheid goedverkopende historische boeken over de Tweede Wereldoorlog, stelselmatig de Holocaust te ontkennen. Evans, eveneens een historicus, kreeg de taak te onderzoeken of er inderdaad sprake was van verdraaiing van de feiten in het werk van Irving. Zijn bevindingen, die hij in dit essay uit de doeken doet, en het uiteindelijke (...) oordeel van de rechter leiden hem ertoe na te denken over de verantwoordelijkheid die de geschiedschrijver heeft tegenover de waarheid. (shrink)