History Isn’t Objective — and Pretending It Is Is Dangerous

What E. H. Carr can teach us about fake news, denialism, and the stories we tell about the past

I’ve recently completed my second historical fiction novel, The Silence of the White Shadow, set in Victorian Britain.

That means my desk — and my head — are cluttered with research: industrial towns, social reformers, courtroom dramas, even the odd ship’s manifest.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I found myself returning to What Is History? — not because I needed another list of dates or events, but because we’re living through a moment when the past itself feels unstable: contested, rewritten, and increasingly weaponised.

Carr’s book was first published in 1961, yet its central argument feels uncannily modern. In an age of ‘fake news’, historical denialism, and governments attempting to legislate memory, his warning still lands with force: history is not a neutral record of facts — and pretending it is can be dangerous.

A note on Carr himself

Carr was not a historian in the narrow, conventional sense. He trained as a diplomat, worked in the British Foreign Office, and later became a journalist and political thinker, best known for his work on Soviet history.

That background matters. Carr did not encounter history as a sealed academic archive, but as something actively made — negotiated, contested, and shaped by power in real time. He understood that narratives do not emerge innocently. They are selected, framed, and defended.

What Is History? grew out of that insight, and it shows.

Carr’s inconvenient truth about history

Carr’s central claim is deceptively simple: there is no such thing as pure, objective historical fact — at least not in the way we often imagine.

Facts do not march up to the historian, tap them on the shoulder, and politely announce themselves. The historian must choose what to include, what to leave out, and how to connect events into a meaningful story. Even deciding what counts as a “fact” is already an act of interpretation.

This does not mean that events did not happen. The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 whether one approves of it or not. But the meaning and significance of that event are not self-evident. They are shaped by the historian’s perspective, their questions, their time, and often their moral instincts.

The historian as interpreter, not tape recorder

Carr famously described history as ‘a continuous dialogue between the past and the present’. It is a deceptively gentle phrase that carries a radical implication.

History is not a static inheritance we passively receive. It is an ongoing conversation — and the historian is an active participant in it.

Rather than neutral tape recorders, historians are closer to conductors. The past provides the notes, but the historian decides which instruments are brought forward and which are left in the background. The music that emerges depends on those choices.

The objectivity trap

If there is one idea Carr would happily bury, it is the myth of total objectivity.

He saw objectivity not as something historians could ever fully achieve, but as something they could approximate only through discipline: by recognising their own assumptions, testing interpretations against evidence, and remaining willing to revise their views when the facts push back.

That idea matters far beyond academic history. In journalism, politics, and social media, the same illusion persists. ‘Just the facts’ is rarely just the facts, because someone still decides which facts you see — and which you never encounter.

Why things happen (and why it’s rarely one person’s fault)

Carr was sceptical of ‘great man’ theories of history — the belief that major events can be explained primarily through the actions of a handful of exceptional individuals.

Instead, he emphasised structural causes: the social, economic, and political conditions that make certain outcomes possible, even likely.

The Industrial Revolution was not simply the result of James Watt inventing the steam engine. It was the product of capital, labour, resources, markets, and historical circumstance. To focus on one inventor alone is to miss most of the story.

Individuals matter — but they operate within systems.

History is written in the present

Every historian lives in their own time, and Carr was blunt about the consequences of that fact.

We decide which stories to tell about the past based on present concerns. That is why interpretations change. The British Empire looks very different in history books today than it did in 1920, even though the underlying events have not changed.

This is not historical relativism in the sense that ‘anything goes’. It is a recognition that history is never final. It is continually rewritten as our questions, values, and moral horizons shift.

Carr’s cautious belief in progress

Carr was no sentimental optimist, but he did believe in progress — not as an automatic march towards perfection, but as something hard-won and uneven.

Abolition, suffrage, civil rights: none were inevitable. All were achieved through struggle, resistance, and moral conflict over time.

In an age where every advance seems matched by a setback, such a belief can sound unfashionable. Yet without some faith that societies can learn and change, history collapses into cynicism.

Why Carr matters now

More than sixty years after its publication, What Is History? feels unsettlingly current.

We live in a moment when facts are weaponised, when governments attempt to legislate historical memory, and when denialism can spread at extraordinary speed. In that environment, the myth of history as objective truth is not just mistaken — it is dangerous.

Carr reminds us that historical literacy is not about memorising dates or battles. It is about understanding how narratives are formed: the choices, omissions, and interpretations that turn events into meaning.

The unfinished conversation

History is not a closed book. It is a living process, always in dialogue with the present.

The real question is whether we choose to be passive consumers of someone else’s version of the past, or active participants in asking who is speaking, why, and to what end.

Carr’s answer to the question ‘What is history?’ resists easy soundbites, but it can be distilled to this:

History is the interpretation of the past in light of the present — and if you do not pay attention to how that process works, someone else will decide it for you.

That is a lesson worth keeping. Not just for historians, but for all of us.

Author’s note

This essay grew out of the research behind my historical fiction, including Unseen Souls and The Silence of the White Shadow. Both explore how power, silence, and memory shape which lives are recorded — and which are forgotten.

I write fiction and essays because I believe the past is not finished with us yet, and how we interpret it still matters.