Why would anybody go to a History lecture in the 21st century? In a world where electronic media – websites, podcasts, YouTube, blog posts, and Substacks – can provide us all with access to an infinity of resources without leaving our desks or beds, the anachronism of going to a hall to listen to a lecture seems astonishing. And yet the pattern of attendance at lectures of all forms in the History Faculty has shown very little change over recent years, and has recovered strongly since the enforced intermission of the pandemic, when many lectures were delivered on-line. We are no longer in the world of the 1950s and 1960s when, if the photographs of the time are to be believed, hundreds of students (largely male, often dressed in jackets and ties, as well as gowns) crammed into the Exam Schools to listen to A.J.P. Taylor and others deliver their thoughts on the evolution of British (in fact largely English) History. Since then, the History curriculum has become much more diverse, and so thankfully have the audiences; but the appeal of listening to lectures and a wide variety of more specialist seminar talks has endured. Partly this may be because lectures nowadays are much more engaging: the easy availability of the tools of PowerPoint, and video and audio clips means that lectures comprise much more than words. And of course, there are plenty of other reasons for attending lectures: the hope of a quick solution to the week’s essay question, a legitimate reason to meet friends, or simply the opportunity to be seen to be doing something more purposeful than reading a book, are all factors that prompt students to leave their rooms and the libraries to go to the Exam Schools and other venues across central Oxford.
But, more than that, there is something about the nature of History which draws people to lectures. The huge success in recent years of History festivals, and of podcasts, such as The Rest is History hosted by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (the latter an Oxford History product), shows an appetite among a public much broader than those who would define themselves as students of History for what is in effect a lecture-lite format, with the advantage that it can be consumed while travelling or doing the washing-up.
But the classic lecture format also retains its appeal. Hilary Term is when many of the Faculty’s principal lecture series take place, open to all members of the University, notably the Ford Lectures in British History, first delivered in 1897. This term’s lecturer, Peter Mandler (once Oxford, now Cambridge), has been giving a very well-attended series on ‘The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life’, tracing the ways in which the principal concepts of identity current in twentieth-century Britain, both individual and collective, are derived from the social sciences. The ways in which we think about ourselves – notably our contemporary categories of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and generation – rest on categories conceived by social scientists. But how we consume those concepts, and use them with agency in our lives, is emphatically a historical subject.
Recordings of Peter’s lectures are available on-line, and they are well worth a listen. But, if you do so, you may well end up reflecting on how the appeal of lectures is not just about their content, but also about their intangible context: the opportunity they provide to be in the company of others, to sit still and listen to an argument, and watch the accompanying images, and then to walk away reflecting, no doubt sometimes critically, on what you have heard. That is how we do History in our heads, and will long continue to do so.
Professor Martin Conway
Chair of the History Faculty Board
