Ramsay Lectures
Are the History Wars Worth Fighting?
An exclusive lecture by Robert Tombs
Robert Tombs
Is our past being misrepresented in our schools, cultural institutions, and the broader society; leading to the history of the West being presented as one only worthy of shame, apology, and reparations?
Or are the ‘history wars’ merely an invention of the paranoid, to stir up synthetic controversy and prevent belated recognition of dark sides of our past?
To help explore this vital topic, the Ramsay Centre is pleased to present our eighth Ramsay Lecture for 2023, eminent UK historian Professor Robert Tombs on Are the History Wars Worth Fighting?
Professor Tombs outlines the forces he says are driving this campaign, ranging from intellectual and ideological forces to the professional managerial class, technology, and geopolitics. He examines the cost to society from historical half-truths, whether in the form of violence, a loss of sense of community, or a belief that violence, racism and exploitation in the past is a permanent feature of the West in the present day.
Professor Tombs argues that while we must recognise difficult aspects of our past, we need to “…urge society to remember accurately, fully and honestly, and to understand the vital differences between the past and the present, crucial to understanding both our forebears and ourselves.”
Please join us for this thought-provoking lecture with Professor Robert Tombs.
Robert Tombs
Robert Tombs is a historian at Cambridge, where he is Emeritus Professor of French History and a Fellow of St John’s College. He has served on the Conseil Franco-Britannique and holds the French Palmes Académiques for service to French culture. Recently, he has written The English and Their History (Penguin, 2015), which he has just finished revising to bring it up to 2023, and This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (Penguin, 2022).
He is a frequent commentator on history and politics, including on British, French, and Australian television, and in the New Statesman, The Spectator, Le Monde, the Financial Times, the Australian Financial Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph.
He is also co-editor of the pro-Brexit website Briefings for Britain and in August 2021 he set up an international group of historians called History Reclaimed, to combat the ideological distortion of history.