Responding to SHP 2025: Part 1, Arthur Chapman on Narratives

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In the following two posts, I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The first post, here, discusses Arthur Chapman’s workshop on stories and narratives.

What is a story? This deceptively tricky question lay at the heart of Arthur Chapman’s workshop.

Here, I want to pick up on one issue in particular which was discussed during that workshop. It’s an issue which has prompted a number of very interesting questions and got me thinking again about stories, narratives, and arguments.

That issue is: narratives as historical interpretation.

Introducing this issue, Arthur provided the following interpretation (or, if you prefer, narrative or story) about Adolf Hitler. If you read it carefully, it’ll probably give you a jolt:

In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In elections held soon after he became chancellor, he won a massive majority of the votes. Pictures taken during his chancellorship suggest his popularity with the German people. He presided over an increasingly prosperous nation. A treaty signed with France in 1940 enabled Hitler to organize defences for Germany along the Channel coast, and for a time Germany was the most militarily secure power in Europe. Hitler expressed on many occasions his desire to live peacefully with the rest of Europe, but in 1944 Germany was invaded from all sides by Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unable to defeat this invasion of his homeland by superior numbers, Hitler took his own life as the invading Russian armies devastated Berlin. He is still regarded as one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century.

 

This interpretation, as you might guess, was written to make a point about how interpretations and narratives are constructed, not to out the author as a genuine supporter of Hitler.

In doing so, it reveals something very important. The interpretation is composed as all such texts are of a series of statements. In sum, it is an outrageous and egregious misrepresentation of the past which is overtly and unreasonably sympathetic to Hitler. And yet, except for the second sentence (assuming it is referring to the March 1933 Reichstag election in which the Nazis gained 43.9% of the vote share and 288 of 647 available seats), each statement is basically factually correct.

Discussing this text, and the issues it raises for interpretations and narratives, prompted me to ask a number of questions:

1.      What is the relationship of “fact” to “opinion” in historical writing?

2.      What should we (and our students) take from an interpretative piece of historical writing?

3.      Does the whole of a text equate to the sum of its parts?

Here, in draft and inevitably incomplete form, are my current thoughts and some very tentative conclusions. I’d love to know people’s thoughts, especially if you disagree with me!

 

The first question, of the relationship of “fact to opinion”, had originally struck me in relation to advice that AQA have given to help students deconstruct historical interpretations at A-Level. One piece of (what I’veargued previously to be actually very unhelpful) guidance is to instruct students to work out what statements of a text constitutes “fact” and which is “opinion”.

I’m not going to claim that distinguishing “fact” from “opinion” in general is a bad exercise, especially in the present world of mass misrepresentation and misinformation of current affairs. However, when considering history writing, I don’t think it’s a valid approach to take.

Firstly, “opinion” (a jarring word in any case when we talk about historians’ writing) rests (unless a text uses fabricated evidence) squarely on a basis of “fact”. That means that any “opinions” expressed will rely on a selection of “facts” presented (or implied) in a text. In this case, disentangling statements of “fact” from statements of “argument” becomes a very difficult and often impossible exercise.

Secondly, and by extension, “opinions” are often expressed as “facts” in historical writing. Indeed, in order to present a valid interpretation of the past, historians typically choose to place emphasis on a particular piece of evidence which lends weight to an argument they are trying to make. In this case, the “opinion” of the historian is typically not expressed in the form of a statement to the effect of “I believe that…”, but rather in individual words or phrases inserted amongst “facts” which indicate the register, or tone, of the piece. Going back to the text chosen by Arthur for his workshop, for example, words including “came to power”, “expressed…his desire to live peacefully”, “invasion of his homeland”, and “devastated Berlin” are deployed to indicate sympathy for Hitler.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, by focusing on what appears to be individual statements of “opinion” expressed in a text, we risk missing out on the overall argument expressed by the text. This is what I really think is the problem with dividing “fact” and “opinion”. A single text may have multiple statements which, in isolation from one another, appear to be “opinion” (even if they are also “fact”), but it’s only by taking all statements in combination with one another and through intelligent inference from the reader that the main point really comes through.

I think that we should, therefore, be trying to take (and get our students to take) the overall line of argument from an interpretation, rather than pick out individual statements which appear to be, in some way, particularly subjective or “opinion”-oriented. If this is the case, though, it suggests that the whole of an interpretation such as the one rhetorically constructed about Hitler, is greater than the sum of its parts.

What do I mean by this?

Maybe it makes some sense formulated thus. Whereas:

a)      a valid historical interpretation, or narrative, must be composed of a series of statements which rely on factual evidence;

b)      those statements taken in isolation do not represent what the historian is trying to convey.

In other words, and put more simply, we need to be able to zoom out and see the “whole picture” of a text before making a judgement on its argument. We must be able to make global inferences of a whole text, rather than localised judgements of its component parts.

Given this, I think teachers and students been very badly let down by exam boards, who at GCSE level have pedalled the nonsense that an interpretation can be “analysed” by pulling out individual statements and attaching bits of own knowledge to them, and at A-Level are telling us to instruct students to isolate individual statements of “fact” from individual statements of “opinion”. We need a better way.

Here are a few thoughts as to what a better way might look like:

• After reading through, and identifying the different statements made in an interpretation, ask students to look for one or two lines – be they “fact” or “opinion” – which best summarise the point the historian is trying to make.
• Ask students to read a text through in totality and then consider what tone it gives on the issue it discusses: is it negative, positive, oppositional, supportive, questioning, doubtful, believing, or something else altogether? Once they’ve done that, ask them to go back through the text and pick out the words which reveal that tone.
• Ask students to read a text through in totality and then consider what focus it has on a particular topic. Is it targeted at political, social, economic, cultural, religious issues; does it focus on achievements, failures, negative or positive consequences, etc. Again, ask them to then go back through the text and identify which words or statements demonstrate this.

 

In the case of the narrative of Hitler given above, I think these approaches actually tell us far, far more than its individual, factually accurate statements do.

For example, picking out the line(s) which summarise(s) what the author is really trying to say, we might go for the last line, “He is still regarded as one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century” (a clearly factual statement but one which also implies a judgement by the historian). Of course, it doesn’t have to be the last (or first) line of the text, and it may actually be a combination of lines at different points in the text.

Considering the tone of the piece, as discussed above, individual words and phrases are specifically deployed to demonstrate sympathy for Hitler.

And considering the focus of the text, its preoccupation first with the achievements, and then with apparent victimhood, further emphasises its positive and sympathetic take on Hitler.