Is the study of history simply a matter of uncovering the facts about what happened in the past? 

Or is history always a matter of interpretation (it is always about the historian) and there is no historical truth. 

In a famous set of lectures in 1961 at Cambridge University, British historian Edmund Hallett Carr aimed to show that the question of What is history? is always colored by the age in which we view it. 

Carr: History nearly always has a purpose for the societies that produce it - and individual historians are always part of a society.

There are, of course, some historical facts. It is important to know that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066 and not 1070. But getting the facts right does not alone make you a historian. 

“To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function.” E.H. Carr

The essential function of the historian is judgment: deciding which facts to expose and highlight, and in what context. Billions of facts are created each millisecond. It’s the historian’s job to select which ones are meaningful. 

We often think of history as being defective because we don’t know all the facts. But the bigger problem is that “history” is written by a tiny group of people, and carries their particular view of reality. 

For example, it’s always assumed that people in the Middle Ages were obsessed with religion. But this view may simply be the result of the fact that medieval chroniclers were mostly clerics or in the pay of the Church, and so focused on religion to the detriment of all else. 

It’s commonly believed that if you have full access to “the sources” e.g. documents, then the facts within those documents will “speak for themselves”. This is a fallacy, E.H. Carr says.