When writing an essay nowadays and I feel what I am writing is dumb, I get comforted that a Professor of History at Oxford, who later became a Baron, once declared: “It is fashionable to speak today as if European history were devalued: as if historians, in the past, have paid too much attention to it; and as if, nowadays, we should pay less. Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history. Barring recent statements by the first lady of Nigeria, I am, with respect, surely going to struggle to find something dumber!
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 10:41:16 +0000
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