Methodology of historiography
This concluding section surveys contemporary historical practice and theory. As the previous section has demonstrated, there are many branches of history today, each with different kinds of evidence, particular canons of interpretation, and distinctive conventions of writing. This diversity has led some to wonder whether the term history still designates an integral body of or approach to knowledge. Although the emphasis of this article falls on what historians share, it is well to remember that deviations from these norms are always lurking.
The historian’s sources
The oldest source, oral history, is also in some ways the newest. As the emphasis of many historians has turned to social history, especially history “from the bottom up,” they have had to create their own evidence through interviews with those shut out of the documentary record. Students of Victorian England have long depended on the interviews with costermongers and other street people by Henry Mayhew, the author of London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vol. (1851–62); without these we would not know of their attitudes toward marriage and organized religion (casual for both). One of the first great collaborative efforts in oral history was the interviews with former African American slaves conducted in the 1930s by researchers working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although anyone who could remember slavery would by then have been well over 70 years old, the subsequently published interviews nevertheless tapped a rich vein of family stories as well as personal memories. An enterprise on a similar scale is being carried out with survivors of the Holocaust; now, however, thanks to videotaping, one can see the interviews and not merely read edited transcripts of them.
Getting permission to do an interview, and if possible to tape it, is the first task of the oral historian. Arrangements may have to be made to protect confidentiality; elaborate protocols about this have been worked out by anthropologists, which historians may emulate. People remember things that historians have no independent way of discovering; however, they also seem to remember things that did not happen or that happened quite differently. And, of course, they often fail to remember things that did happen. Correcting for the fallibility of memory is the critical task, and for this there is no substitute for preparation. An entire workweek spent preparing for a single interview is none too lavish. If the interviewer knows a good deal already, he may be able to jog or correct an otherwise recalcitrant memory or to know what is reliable and what is not. Except for the tape or video recorder, techniques for verifying oral testimony have perhaps progressed little since Thucydides.
Different techniques are required for investigating the history of peoples who adopted writing only recently. These used to be regarded as “people without history,” but historians are now beginning to isolate the historical content of their oral traditions. Oral epic poetry is still being performed today, in Nigeria, Serbia, and elsewhere, and studying it not only has revealed a great deal about classical epics such as the Iliad but also has shown how remarkable feats of memory could be performed by trained singers of tales, preserving the memory of historical events with much less distortion than was once suspected and recovering at least some of the early history of Africa and America.
The historian confronting written documents can also draw on a long history of criticism. Manuals for beginning historians often dwell on the problem of forged documents, but this is seldom a problem, except occasionally for the medieval historian. A spectacular exception was the alleged diary of Adolf Hitler, a forgery that temporarily deceived the distinguished British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1983. A more formidable challenge is simply to read well. This sometimes starts with learning to read at all. Modern advances in deciphering codes (stimulated by World War II) enabled classicists to translate Linear B, yielding evidence about the Mycenaean language used on Crete in the 2nd millennium bce. Computerized technology promises to assist in deciphering other languages not presently understood.
A much more usual problem calls for paleography—the study of ancient or medieval handwriting. Once the handwriting styles of past epochs become familiar, anything written by a professional scribe should be legible, but one can expect the wildest variations of spelling and handwriting in personal documents. Printing stabilizes texts but also leads to a long-term decline in handwriting. The British historian Lewis Namier, (1888–1960), who owed much of his success to being able to read the execrable handwriting of the duke of Newcastle, argued that the two “sciences” the historian must know are psychoanalysis and graphology.
Reading is, of course, far more than making out the letters and words. Establishing the plain sense is only the first step; here the pitfalls are unrecognized technical language or terms of art. Also, the words may have changed their meaning since they were written. Furthermore, texts of any length are almost always metaphorical. Irony may be obvious (Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was not seriously advocating raising Irish babies for the English table), but it may also be so subtle as to escape detection (did Niccolò Machiavelli really intend that his praise for Cesare Borgia be taken seriously?). What is not said is often the most important part of a text. Historians have to establish the genre to which a document belongs in order to begin to attack these hermeneutical questions (a step they sometimes omit, to their peril). Almost all English wills in the early modern period, for example, started with a bequest of the body to the graveyard and the soul to God; omission of this might be highly significant but would be noticed only if one knew what to expect from a will. The British historian G.M. Young said that the ideal historian has read so much about the people he is writing about that he knows what they will say next—a counsel of perfection, no doubt, but a goal to aspire to.
Written documents of quite a different kind have come to prominence in social and economic history. These are administrative records of actions that individually mean little but lend themselves to aggregation over long time spans. Social history differs from sociology, it has been said, by having “long time series and bad data.” Records of dowries, baptisms, bread prices, customs receipts, or direct taxes are typical of such sources, and all of them are bad in their own way. Estimating a population by counting baptisms, for example, is hazardous if priests were negligent in keeping their registers or if the custom of baptism immediately after birth gave way to long delays between birth and baptism (giving the baby a good chance to die before the rite could be performed). Tax evasion is as ancient as taxation, and tax records as indexes of economic activity are likely to measure instead the fluctuation of mercantile honesty or effective law enforcement, not to mention the ever-present possibility that the records were poorly compiled or preserved. Cost-of-living figures are particularly difficult to compute even today and were more so in earlier periods. Records of prices paid usually come from institutions and may not be typical of what individuals bought, especially since they usually did not have to buy everything they ate or used. On the other hand, their wage rates cannot simply be multiplied by the number of hours or days in the working year, since they were seldom lucky enough not to be laid off seasonally or during recessions.
Even if historians find the evidence solid, records like this are usually too numerous not to require sampling, and drawing a truly random sample of historical records is much more complex than when doing survey research. Handbooks of statistics do not always reflect this fact. Nobody would think of undertaking a quantitative study nowadays without a computer (although desk calculators are quite adequate for some projects), and this raises a further difficulty insofar as historical records usually vary so much in terminology that they have to be encoded for computer use. Coding conventions are themselves interpretations, and few quantitative historians have never had occasion to curse themselves for premature or inconsistent coding. There is no foolproof remedy against this, but providing a database and a copy of coding conventions has become the recommended practice to enable other historians to evaluate the work.
Handbooks of historical method at the end of the 19th century assured students that if they mastered the interpretation of written documents, they would have done everything required to be a historian. “No documents, no history,” one said. In this century the notion of a document has been enormously expanded so that any artifact surviving from the past can serve as the answer to some historian’s question. Aerial photography, for example, can reveal settlement patterns long since buried. Napoleon’s hair can be examined to see whether he died a natural death or was poisoned; analysis of Newton’s hair showed that he was an alchemist. The architecture along Vienna’s Ringstrasse can be construed as revealing the ambitions of the liberal bourgeoisie. The history of sexuality cannot be written without the history of clothing—even the nudes in classical paintings pose in postures influenced by the clothes they are not wearing. Indeed, the ordinary things of all kinds to be found in a folk museum are one of the best sources for the everyday life of people in the past.
Artifacts do not usually tell their own stories. When written documents can be juxtaposed to them, the results are more illuminating than either can be by themselves. Unfortunately, virtually the whole training of historians is devoted to reading written texts, so that skill is hypertrophied, while the ability to interpret material objects is underdeveloped. When historians can, for example, accurately describe how the machines of the early Industrial Revolution really worked, they will have met this challenge—which is, of course, a challenge to know almost everything.
Historians today benefit from much more integrated and comprehensive archival and library systems than existed in previous centuries. The state papers of the United States, for example, were not in usable condition in 1933. Thanks again in part to the efforts of WPA workers, great improvements were made in cataloguing and preservation; now a new archive building in suburban Maryland has been built to cope with the tide of documents produced by the U.S. government. The same step has been taken in Britain, and both Britain and France have new national libraries. Less spectacular, but invaluable to many historians, are the local historical societies, county record offices, and the like, which have been established in many countries. These have allowed the collection and preservation of documents that originated in a great variety of places—churches, courts, city and county governments, legal offices, and collections of letters. One of the remarkable developments of the period since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the widespread sale of public and private records to Western collectors. Libraries such as Yale or the Hoover Institution (at Stanford University) are now in many ways better places to study the Soviet period than any in Russia, and if one can fault the failure of the Russian government to pay its librarians and the wild capitalism of the new Russia for dispersing these treasures, at least they will be safely preserved. They have already answered many questions about how the Soviet Union was run.
The proliferation of libraries and archives illustrates what is in some ways the greatest difficulty with regard to modern sources—there are too many of them. Most discussions of historiography focus on how historians tease out the exiguous meanings of documents when they are very scarce. The problem facing the historian of the 19th century and even more of the 20th is how to cope with the vast array sources open to him. Computers and the Internet have vastly enhanced the speed with which printed sources can be searched—titles of all the books in all the major Western libraries are online—but the historian must know a great many descriptors to do a reasonable subject search. Furthermore, the Internet has brought as much misinformation as information, if not more.
In the 16th and 17th centuries it was taken for granted that the historian would work alone and would usually own many of his books. The library of Göttingen, the pride of 18th-century Germany, would be small even for a new university or a modest liberal-arts college today. Great reputations could be made in the 19th century for the discovery of a new archive (such as Ranke’s discovery of the Venetian relazioni). Nothing like this could possibly happen today, yet such is the conservatism of the historical profession that the model is still the single scholar exhausting the archives. The archives for modern history are inexhaustible, and collaboratively written works, already becoming somewhat common, will almost certainly have to become even more so if historians are to meet their traditional goals of comprehensive research.
From explanation to interpretation
Until quite recently almost everybody who thought about historiography focused on the historian’s struggle with the sources. Philosophers were interested in the grounds they had for claiming to make true statements about the past. This directed their attention to the process of research; it was not unusual to say that after learning “what actually happened,” the historian then faced only the relatively unproblematic process of “writing up” his findings. This emphasis aptly captured the way that historical method is taught and the understanding of their craft (as they like to call it) that historians entertain. Nevertheless, no historian can rest content simply with establishing facts and setting them forth in chronological order. Histories, as opposed to annals and chronicles, must not only establish what happened but also explain why it happened and interpret the significance of the happening.
The slightest familiarity with historical writing shows that historians believe that they are explaining past events. Criticizing the explanations presented by other historians is an integral part of historical scholarship—sometimes carried to such tedious lengths that the actual narrative of events disappears under a tissue of scholastic sludge. However, it is unusual for historians to question what constitutes a historical explanation. A few abnormally reflective ones—and those few philosophers who have turned their attention to thinking about history—have demonstrated that this is not a simple task.
One philosophical school, logical positivism (also called logical empiricism), held that all other scholarly disciplines should offer explanations like those of physics, the most advanced (and mathematicized) science. The model of historical explanation was illustrated by the bursting of the radiator in an automobile. Explanation of this mishap went as follows: first, certain “boundary conditions” have to be specified—the radiator was made of iron and filled with water without antifreeze, and the car was left in the driveway when the temperature fell below freezing. The explanation consists in enumerating the relevant boundary conditions and then adducing the appropriate “covering” laws—in this case, that water expands as it freezes and the tensile strength of iron makes it too brittle to expand as much as the water does. These are, of course, laws of physics, not of history.
This certainly explains why the radiator of this car burst; such things always happen when a radiator full of water without antifreeze is exposed to subfreezing weather. Scientific explanations are also predictions: “why?” also means “on what occasions?” But is this a historical explanation? A historian would want to go well beyond it; for him the real question would be why the owner exposed the car in this manner. Was he unaware of what happens to unprotected cars in such temperatures? Unlikely. Did he, wrongly, think that he had put antifreeze in the car? Or was he misled by a faulty weather forecast?
Questions like these made historians disinclined to accept this as an example of a satisfactory historical explanation. The author of the example, the philosopher Carl Hempel, granted as much. As he understood, historians do not explain but give “explanation sketches” that have to be filled out before they attain that dignity. One prodigious difficulty is that no covering laws of history have been discovered. One candidate for such a law is, “Whenever two armies, one much larger than the other but equally well led, meet in battle, the larger one always prevails.” The difficulty with this is that there are no independent standards for evaluating leadership. There are examples of much smaller armies beating larger ones, and one counterexample is enough to disconfirm a law. If one tries to save the law by saying that, in those cases, the armies were not equally well led, the argument becomes circular. Another candidate for a historical law is, “Full employment and stable prices cannot exist at the same time.” Some would argue that these supposedly incompatible conditions were achieved in the U.S. economy in 1997. It all depends on how full employment is defined. It is an additional complication that this law, if it is a law, may be restricted in its application to capitalism.
For many years the lack of well-warranted covering laws seemed to be the chief difficulty with this conception of historical explanation, but chaos theory has recently raised another problem: the boundary conditions cannot be exactly specified. Even a minute and imperceptible variation in the original state of a system may have large and entirely unpredictable consequences at some time in its future state. (This is picturesquely dramatized in the image of a butterfly sneezing in Africa and the ensuing hurricane in Florida.)
Hempel subsequently modified his position by substituting high probabilities for invariable laws. In other words, an event might be explained by showing that, under these conditions, the outcome was what usually or almost always happened. This maneuver gave up the ideal of the unity of scientific explanation—that explanation in history would have the same logical structure as that in physics—because showing what almost always happens does not explain why, for this particular event, the outcome was the more- rather than the less-usual one. On the other hand, many generalizations in history have a high degree of probability but are not certain—including the likely result of going into battle with far inferior forces. It is also highly useful to know whether outcomes were almost certainly going to occur or whether they were complete surprises. And it is worthwhile trying to discover more such generalizations.
Such generalizations in fact play an important part in the other principal account of historical explanation, which focuses on the reasoning processes and intentions of historical actors. This approach is more congenial to historians than the one that attempts to work with historical laws, and it has been formulated by philosophers who were either historians themselves (R.G. Collingwood) or particularly acquainted with historical work (William Dray and Louis Mink). Its classic statement, by Collingwood, was that the historian’s “why?” is not “on what occasions?” but “what did he think, that made him do it?” Collingwood believed that the historian could rethink the thoughts of the actor (as one can work out the same geometrical reasoning as Pythagoras); thus, historical knowledge could be based on a kind of acquaintance. Although Collingwood did not discount the presence of irrational elements in historical action, other historians put more emphasis on understanding these elements through empathy or intuition.
It is difficult for explanations of this kind to avoid a kind of circularity. People deliberating on an action usually have reasons to do more than one thing, and they are very seldom in the habit of leaving a written record of their deliberations. Consequently, the historian almost always has to work backward, from what was done to the reasons for doing it. But the evidence that these were the reasons for doing it is that it was done. So what is supposed to explain an action is instead explained by it. The “logic of the situation”—showing that, under the circumstances, what was done was the right or reasonable thing to do—is commonly advanced as an explanation by historians, and it can undoubtedly be convincing if one is not too fussy about what constitutes an explanation. But this means that the explanation is plausible or persuasive, not logically compelling—in other words, it signals a shift toward rhetoric.
Most of what philosophers and historians have thought about explanation has centred on how to explain single events or actions. History, however, is about far more than these, and historical writing in the 20th century moved steadily away from emphasizing individual action and toward the history of large-scale social structures. Furthermore, history is not composed of well-thought-out actions that accomplish their goals; it is instead full of the unintended consequences of actions. These result from social processes that obviously were not anticipated or understood by the actor. While the existence of unintended outcomes obviously poses insuperable difficulties for explanations in terms of individual intentions, it is exactly what theories of universal history are equipped to explain. The first articulation of the providential theory, Genesis 50:20, shows that Joseph’s envious brothers had inadvertently performed God’s will when they sold him into slavery, since he rose to high office in Egypt, managed the food supply so as to avert famine, and so had food to give his brothers. As Joseph says to them, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.”
In a similar vein, Vico’s “rational civil theology” recognizes that “men have themselves made this world of nations” but goes on to assert that “this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves, which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth.” Intending just to gratify lust, humans create the institution of marriage; intending to exert power over others, they wind up with civil laws.
Much the same argument can be found in Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, which produces for society the optimum distribution of goods even though homo economicus acts totally selfishly. Hegel’s great men, or world-historical individuals, such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon, are similarly moved only by ambition, but the result of their actions furthers the development of Spirit in spreading Greek culture and a rational code of law. Hegel calls this the “cunning of Reason.” Finally, for Marx, individual capitalists, and the bourgeoisie as a class, act only to increase their power and perpetuate their profits, but the result of their actions is inevitably to increase the number and misery of the proletarians who will eventually overthrow them.
Theories like this necessarily suggest that history is being made behind the backs (or over the heads) of actual humans, since they cannot “make history” by achieving the goals of their actions. It appears that some sort of commitment of faith is required to accept one of these master narratives. God, or a cosmic teleology, is the ultimate explanation of everything, which means that there is nothing that cannot be explained in those terms. Logicians, however, say that universal explanations are vacuous, since nothing could happen that would show that the explanatory principle was inapplicable.
There are thus serious difficulties with explanation by laws, by intentions, or by appeal to providence or teleology. If historians believe they are explaining things, it might be that they pay little attention to these philosophical arguments, or it might be that they tacitly abandon the goal of giving a logically compelling explanation and settle for one that is highly plausible. A third possibility is that they looked in the wrong place for a warrant for their explanations. Perhaps they should have looked to the explanatory power of narratives.
During the ascendancy of social-scientific approaches to history, narratives acquired a bad name. The term suggested the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc—the belief that simply arranging things in chronological order proved a causal sequence. As the quantifiers suffered various reverses, some of their old supporters moved back to the claim that constructing a narrative was essential to the historian’s activity and that narratives could convey understanding of the past in a distinctive fashion. If so, the autonomy of history as a discipline could be defended against the charge that it was a defective science.
During the 1970s in particular, there was a surge of interest in narrative throughout the human sciences, including anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Literary critics developed “narratology,” the systematic study of narratives, especially novels and histories. In the process they greatly enriched the simple Aristotelian notion of narratives, making it possible to see that many histories, including quantitative ones, were narratives that achieved their persuasive effects in part because they were narratives. Many features of historical interpretation could be understood as properties of narratives. The choice of central subject, the decision as to when to begin and when to end the story, the characterization of the principal actors, the drawing out of moral import, and the identification of turning points are all activities that both historians and novelists perform.
The cogency of the analysis of historical narrative was enhanced by emphasizing that historians use ordinary language. Although they may borrow technical words from other disciplines, they are committed to words such as so, hence, thus, and therefore and hence to the causal linkages that these words imply. Similarly, there is no way to purge ordinary language of its normative connotations. It is therefore vain to dream of a value-free historiography or one free of any causal inferences.
One might expect the rehabilitation of narrative, even more than the emphasis on explanation through intentions of the actors, to give historians a sense that theoreticians of history were finally attending carefully to actual historical practice. As it turned out, the reaction of historians was less than enthusiastic. Narrative might convey understanding, but its advocates usually avoided using words such as explanation. There seemed to be no way for explanations to be anything more than highly plausible.
Insofar as histories interpret rather than explain, there appears to be no way to escape a relativism that would qualify, if not altogether subvert, any claim that histories are true. Proposed explanations can be contrasted and argued about, with the aim of reaching the true explanation; interpretations can be more or less plausible, deep, or ingenious but not true to the exclusion of every other possible interpretation. In the construction of narrative, Hayden White pointed out, a fictive element is inevitably introduced. The historical narrative should consist only of true statements (that is, those most consonant with the appropriate evidence), but in making them into a narrative the historian draws on the same sorts of plots and metaphors that are common to generic narratives. Their readers are prepared to believe them not just because they accept that all the individual statements are true but also because they respond to the story elements common to their culture. Making an even more relativistic claim, White argued that the same set of events could be worked up into different histories, each containing nothing but true statements and thus not vulnerable on empirical grounds but informed by different tropes and “emplotted” in a variety of ways. What looked to one historian like a comedy might seem to another a romance. His position was not that no one true history could be written—the extreme skeptical view of René Descartes—but that a variety of true histories could be written about the same events. This variety is inevitable in the absence of an acceptable master narrative, which would allow stories to be fitted together so as to make them episodes in one overarching narrative.
For generations historians have posed this rather silly question: Is history an art or a science? Usually the comforting answer has been: Both. But in the late 20th century critics said: Neither. History certainly does not meet the criteria for being called a science in the rigorous sense of the word common in the Anglo-Saxon world. It has no laws, no essential use of mathematics, and no technical language that might stand in for mathematics. In the more lenient definition of science (scienza, Wissenschaft) found in Continental languages, it is, because it has a recognizable body of practitioners and generally accepted protocols for validating its claims to truth. The story of how these have developed has taken up much of this article, and there is no reason to downplay their usefulness. But one should not ask too much of history; it cannot be, as many 19th-century thinkers hoped, the master science. Before placing that crown on some other discipline (anthropology, say, or biology), however, a careful study of their epistemological problems and pretensions should be made.
The presentation of history
This theme naturally leads to an exploration of the artistic elements in history. It is as naive to think of the historian merely writing up findings as to picture him handing over facts to the sociologist to be allocated to the proper laws. Some idea of the literary forms that history might take are present throughout the research process, but they are also to a degree controlled by that process.
Although Aristotle said that it made no difference to the essence of a history whether it was in prose or in verse, no truly historical epic poem has ever been written. Historians do not even go in for ballads, nor is one likely to see them trying their hands at history painting or writing librettos for operas. The vast majority of historical writing will thus be discursive prose works, though the chance that some of their words may be performed by actors is greater now than it once was.
Writing with wit and elegance is like moving with speed for an athlete—it cannot be coached. Anyone, however, can learn to write clear, plain prose. Luckily, that is what colleagues and even the general public expect from historians. Besides mastering the rules that books—or computer programs—recommend for this style, such as avoiding passive verbs, substituting short or at least Germanic for Latinate words where possible, and the like, there are some problems peculiar to historical writing.
One is how much of the sources to quote. The American historian Jack Hexter wrote entertainingly about this issue, pointing out that excessive quotation breaks up the flow of the narrative and introduces discordant voices into the text. On the other hand, there are times when a point can be made only with the exact words of a source. There is no rule that shows where the happy medium lies, and this is one of the facts that justify calling history a craft. Another case for tact and discrimination is the use of footnotes. Here good writers recommend not showing off. The reader is entitled to some way of seeing how accurately the historian has interpreted—or quoted—the evidence, but footnotes should not be overlong and in particular should not be converted into minibibliographies, especially when these have as one purpose to show how many books and articles the historian has read (or wants to persuade the reader that he has read).
It seems only too obvious to say that the historian should write accurately, but this is not a simple matter. Lack of a technical vocabulary is often interpreted as a defect of history, but it need not be so. Quantitative findings, for example, look more “scientific” if they are presented as percentages, but besides the necessity to present some measure giving variation from central tendency, such as standard deviations, very few historical sources lend themselves to the sort of accuracy that makes 63.8 percent any more accurate than nearly two-thirds. Wherever possible, quantitative series should be presented graphically; nothing is drearier, as Hexter notes, than attempting to write out a series of numbers in prose. The moral judgments and causal statements in historical writing are also criticized as vague, but they may be precise enough for ambiguous situations, where moral responsibility may be distributed among a number of agents or the precise relationship between causes and preconditions is tangled. Historians can take heart from the failure of translation machines to cope with all the nuances possible in natural languages.
So advice about how to write history is readily available, but historians may lack motivation. The reward structure of the profession certainly affords few incentives to learn good writing. Graduate training overwhelmingly concentrates on research techniques; courses in writing for historians are rare and almost never compulsory. The other guarantor of literary quality, copyediting, is becoming a lost art. It is apparently considered too expensive by trade publishers, and even university presses tend to farm it out as a cottage industry, without consistent quality control. Furthermore, most historians today in almost every country write mainly or only for other historians. To be qualified for lifetime employment, a historian must produce works of original research—as many as possible—that are favourably evaluated by peers. Other professionals, in other words, are the primary audience for which the young historian must write. They may not prize literary skill very highly in comparison with demonstrated mastery of the sources, and they already know many things that would have to be explained to general readers.
It is increasingly expected that a young historian in search of a tenured teaching position will publish not only a first book, based on a doctoral thesis, but also a second and usually more ambitious one. In this respect American universities are beginning to approximate the expectation of two theses long common in French and German ones.
Insistence on early and copious production militates against choosing themes of general interest, because it takes much longer to write books about those. The professionalization of history and the invariably accompanying division of labour have also meant that historians focus on smaller segments of the historical record. Nor are they immune to the lure of the “MPU,” or minimum publishable unit—the smallest bit of a project that an editor will accept and that, duly noted in a curriculum vitae, will reassure department chairs or funding agencies of one’s continuing scholarly vitality.
Collaborative research may be one remedy against this tendency to know more and more about less and less, but collaborative writing, absent divine aid, is unlikely to achieve outstanding literary merit. (According to legend, the 70 translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek all came up with identical texts; the only example of a great literary work done by committee is the King James translation of the Bible.)
Historians consequently find themselves in a paradoxical position. Public interest in the past has seldom been higher. Some is in the nostalgic mode, and this can be expected to increase as the percentage of elderly people in the population rises. Some is in the service of political agendas, sometimes for entirely understandable reasons; for example, Jews are determined that nobody forget the Holocaust, and defenders of capitalism will continue to note that the Soviet experiment turned out badly. In addition, now that it is customary for everyone to call his ethnic background a “heritage,” the commemoration and celebration of ancestors is a growth industry.
One of the more bizarre manifestations of historical interest has been the apology. The prime minister of Britain, for example, apologized for the inaction of Britain during the great Irish famine, and the pope apologized for the 16th-century St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (actually committed by the French monarch).
Interest in history also benefits from the insatiable demand of the media for “product,” which has vastly strained the capacity of writers to meet it with purely invented materials. Thus, the “docudrama,” “nonfiction novel,” and television miniseries “ based on a true story” have proliferated to supplement the flagging imaginations of the fabulators. All this has been going on while interest in academic history appears to be declining, if figures for undergraduate enrollments or academic appointments are a fair indicator.
This paradox is both a challenge and an opportunity for academic historians. They are unlikely to see a repetition of the publishing success of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (1849–61)—significantly, not by a professional historian—but the capacity to write for the general public is not intrinsically incompatible with holding university appointments.
The challenge to historical writing for a wider readership is clear. Few historians are taught to do it; many feel they do not need to do it; and professional rewards are not given for doing it. Yet some historians are not content to leave presentation of accounts of the past to novelists and filmmakers and are responding to some of the opportunities presented by the public interest in history. Some of them are relaxing the conventions of historical writing in the interests of greater liveliness. Historians are taught, for example, never to use first-person singular or second-person pronouns. By banishing “I”—“the most disgusting pronoun,” according to Gibbon—from the text, the historian can make it appear that an omniscient observer has written it. The great Marc Bloch, however, advocated bringing the reader into the research process by recounting the difficulties and occasional triumphs that the author experienced, not only helping to signal what is well-grounded and what is more speculative but also, if well done, sharing some of the puzzle-solving excitement that inspires people to be historians in the first place.
Another convention, in place only since the professionalization in the 19th century, forbids historians to quote anything but the actual words spoken by their subjects. Even the invented speeches of Thucydides, so scrupulously identified as such, fell under this ban. However, Garrett Mattingly (1900–62), generally regarded as the master of historical narrative among American historians, enlivened his work with speeches he wrote and attributed to historical characters—without always identifying them as invented. Other historians are now following his example. The results have not always been happy, because writing convincing dialogue is difficult, but since historians often claim to re-create the inner thoughts of people they are writing about, creating dialogue for them is no more speculative than creating indirect speech.
The ability to create convincing dialogue for historical characters is essential to creators of historical plays, movies, and television series. These creators have often, for historians, been all too creative—though even the fantasies of some modern movies are models of accuracy compared with some famous historical plays. (In Friedrich von Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, for example, Joan of Arc dies in battle.) In the 1990s an American cable channel showed films about the past with commentary afterward from a panel of historians, who usually pointed out what liberties had been taken with the historical record rather than criticizing the aesthetic impact of the film. Obviously, a more satisfactory solution would be for historians to be more proactive. Natalie Zemon Davis served as the historical counselor for a movie version of the Martin Guerre story. Her services were not confined merely to ascertaining the authenticity of the props—something Hollywood studios were quite meticulous about—but extended to working with the actors on their characterizations and with the director on the plot. French directors have often worked with historical counselors; it is a practice that would improve the historical literacy of American audiences.
The technological advances of the 21st century will undoubtedly bring new opportunities for the presentation of history. In the early 2000s there was already an interactive video game whose premise was that an evil woman has torn out the pages of the book in which human history is inscribed and substituted false information for them. The player, armed with a reference work, must replace the falsehoods with the correct information supplied by that work. The game is an apt allegory. Time itself has done its best to efface knowledge of the human past and has allowed ideologically distorted versions of that past to flourish instead. The historian’s task is to defeat time and the loss or deceits of memory. Unfortunately, there is no data bank of infallible truths to which one can have recourse—but that simply means that the game is never over.
There may come a time when it no longer seems worth playing, as some postmodernist thinkers have suggested—though postmodernism defines itself as post through a historical judgment. Historical thought, turned on itself, shows that history has not always existed, nor is it found in every culture. Historians, of all people, are reluctant to pose as prophets, because they know best how various are the twists and turns of human events. It is therefore impossible to find a conclusive argument against the suggestion of Foucault that history, like the human subject, will prove to be a transitory conception.
Postmodernism taught that texts allow many interpretations and that there is nothing other than the text. Its attacks on “essentialism” made it much harder to use “history” in such a way as to attribute will or agency to it, or even a capacity to teach. (Here Hegel had anticipated this position by saying that all one can learn from history is that humans have never learned from history.) Historians cannot make the grandiose claims for their discipline that were credible in the 19th century. Nevertheless, they know that there was a Holocaust, and they know that, despite Joseph Stalin’s efforts to make him an “unperson,” Leon Trotsky played some role in the Russian Revolution. Also, it makes quite a difference whether there was a Holocaust or not. This is reducing the case against total relativism or constructivism to truisms, but truisms are nonetheless true. It is hard to imagine that humanity’s grasp of the past, so laboriously achieved and tenuous as it is, would lightly be loosened.