Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, Richard Brown,
Authoring History, 2016, 175 pp., £7.13, paper, ISBN 9781530295234
In this retrospective but far from introspective,
autobiographical memoir Richard Brown muses ‘on the nature of History in an
increasingly challenging environment’. The author, familiar to readers of online
reviews on the Historical Association website as a prolific reviewer of a wide
range of historical resources and as a compulsive blogger on his popular blog,
The History Zone, which has a diverse following encompassing students in
secondary, tertiary and higher education, confesses himself to being addicted
to history for almost as long as he can remember. I first encountered Richard as
a fellow reviewer for the Historical Association’s flagship journal for
secondary school teachers, Teaching History, and utilised many of his
textbooks in the classroom in my own teaching, finding them always well-grounded
in classroom experience, thoroughly researched and lucidly stimulating in the
historical interpretations they offered. But this is more than a handbook for
history teachers as the equestrian photograph of the infant author on the cover
anticipates and essentially it reveals the extent to which a developing
understanding of history interweaves with our life experiences from the cradle
to the grave. It is more personal than anything else he has written and
particularly moving in its account of how as a registered carer he supported his
late wife Margaret, to whose memory the book is dedicated, in his
post-retirement years until her death in 2015.
Its starting point is the affirmation that many would share
that ‘being a teacher remains one of the most fulfilling of the professions’ and
that ‘there is nothing more enjoyable than observing students learning to become
critical in their approach to life’. What follows, he continues, is ‘an otiose
attempt to make sense of my own life by intermingling autobiography with
materials on History, teaching and learning initially written often at speed as
part of on-going debates on education and history but now revised in the more
cloistered solitude of my study’. It identifies the hybrid influences combining
the rural experience of the Fens and the traditions of his mother’s family with
the urban experience of his father and his family, mediated initially largely
through memories and stories but with an increasing recognition of the
importance of historical evidence in creating ‘a narrative to explain the
evidence’ and a developing focus on how students learn history throughout his
teaching career influenced strongly like so many of us by the Schools History
Project.