Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study

This volume contains the text of the three Cook Lectures, delivered by Sir Geoffrey Elton at the University of Michigan in April 1990, which reviewed various current doubts and queries concerning the writing of reasonably unbiased history. The lectures offer critical advice on how such unbiased history might be achieved, together with a general critical survey of 'fashionable' theories on the writing of history. The Cook Lectures appear in print for the first time. Also included in the volume are reprinted versions of Sir Geoffrey's two Cambridge inaugural lectures, as Professor of Constitutional History, and as Regius Professor of Modern History. These tried to dispel, respectively, what Sir Geoffrey sees as the anti-historical fantasies current in the 1960s (but by no means yet gone), and the artificial attempt to denigrate the history of one's native country.