Hello,

I'm a History undergrad and for a long time aimed to go the graduate study route and one day hold a post in a History Department at a major research university. But after reading a lot of the standard texts on theory and historiography along with the thinkers who have impacted the discipline the most over the past forty years, I'm less confident about why or what I should be doing in history. Chiefly, I am searching for an epistemology which would allow me to defend history to an external critic - if I were cornered and someone demanded to know what I studied and why, I wish to give a good response.

Why do you study History or teach it in a university environment? Why should the general public care about it? How is History different from ideology or fiction (a crass oversimplification of the postmodernist attack on academic history in the 1990s but you get my drift). Is History even worth practicing given the generational shifts in historical consensus?

If you have any perspectives to any of these questions I would love to hear them.

Thanks