EMH EarlyModernHistory

  A Short Note on Lawrence Stone’s article on ‘The Revival of Narrative’ Quite by chance, I came across Lawrence Stone’s 1979 article on this subject yesterday evening. It was originally published in Past and Present and subsequently appeared in his 1987 collection of essays, The Past and Present Revisited . I have commented before on the way in which Stone, who was at Princeton University from 1963, lost touch with the evolution of historiographical thinking in the U.K. about the origins, course and outcomes of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Inevitably, perhaps, Stone was surprised the development of ‘revisionism’ from the middle of that decade onwards. This sense of disassociation has something to do, I suspect, with Stone’s account of the works of “the new British school of young antiquarian empiricists” led by Conrad Russell and John Kenyon and urged on by Geoffrey Elton. According to Stone, they were writing political narratives implicitly denyi...

Being a Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher then and now I was a postgraduate researcher and aspiring early career researcher in the 1960s. The context in which I lived and worked was radically different. After the Robbins Report was published in the autumn of 1963, there was a rapid expansion of new universities and the creation of a significant number of history departments across the country. A cohort of young postgraduates and early career researchers took up posts in these departments. Unfortunately, the sterling crisis of 1967 brought this process of expansion to an abrupt end. It became much more difficult for postgraduates like me in the middle of their research to get one of the few posts being advertised while the new incumbents naturally enough stayed put. Looking back, there were all sorts of issues that I was not aware of at the time. As an undergraduate, I had been relatively well off: as a postgraduate on c.£500 a year, I was pretty hard up, especially in compar...