Ofcourse, a lot ofhistorians never even realized there were these postmodernists out there, so the sense ofcrisis was not universal in the historical profession. Yerxa: Was history in a state of crisis in the mid- to late 1990s? Evans: There was a widespread feeling of an epistemologica! crisis. So I developed my lectures, and as I shared them with some colleagues, they encouraged me to expand them into a book. There were angry and dire wailings about this, without any real attempt to come to grips with it. As I read more, particularly in the journals, I found that there was a good deal ofdebate among historians about postmodernist and post-structuralist skepticism and hyper-relativism. Clearly, there was room for an up-to-date statement about historical knowledge which argued for its possibility, while taking on board the criticisms of the postmodernists and trying to deal with them openly, rather than simply ignoring them. As I read in preparation for the course, I discovered that the literature on questions such as 'What is history?' and 'How do we find out about the past?' was either very out of date (Carr and Elton, for example) or written in a spirit of extreme skepticism by postmodernist theorists (people like KeithJenkins and Frank Ankersmit). Evans: In Defense ofHistory came about because I was asked to teach a lecture course on historical epistemology at Birkbeck College in London, where I was professor ofhistory at the time, before I moved to Cambridge. Yerxa: Why did you feel the need to defend history in the 1990s? Richard J. He is currently working on a three-volume history of the Third Reich, of which The Coming ofthe Third Reich will bepublishedby Penguin Books in October, 2003The following interview was conducted on March 21, 2003. Carr's What is History? anda new afterword to G.R.

Professor Evans has recently written a new introduction to E.H. A specialist in German social and cultural history, Evans is also widely known for his historiographical writing, especially In Defense of History (1997 firstpublished in the United States in 1 999), for his role as principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial (2000), and his work on the clash ofepistemologie! when history enters the courtroom (see his 'History, Memory, andthe Law: The Historian as Expert Witness ' History and Theory ). EVANS is professor ofmodern history at Cambridge University.

June 2003 An Interview with Richard J.

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In defense of history richard evans