Fashioning History: Current Practices and Principles

Fashioning History

Also by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse

Fashioning History Current Practices and Principles

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.

fashioning history Copyright © Berkhofer, Jr., 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60868-9 ISBN-10: 0-230-60868-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berkhofer, Robert F. Fashioning history : current practices and principles / Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60868-X 1. History--Methodology. I. Title. D16.B466 2008 901--dc22 2008017163 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Sally

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Preface Acknowledgments

ix xiii

Part I Construing the Past as History: Processes and Presuppositions 1

Historical Methods: From Evidence to Facts

2.

Historical Synthesis: From Statements to Histories

3 49

Part II Comparing Histories: Forms, Functions, Factuality, and the Bigger Picture 3.

Texts as Archives and Histories

4.

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

133

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

175

5.

93

Afterword: The History Effect and Representations of the Past

215

Notes

219

Index

259

This page intentionally left blank

Preface Understanding the past as history changes over time in how we know about the past, what we know about the past, and what we think important about the past. Historical practice over time as a result has its fashions of method, interpretation, and meaning. Do new times bring forth new answers to old questions? What do historians do today? How do they know what to do? Why do they do it that way? Fashioning History offers my report on the discipline of history in the early twenty-first century as the historical profession tries to reconcile long-standing approaches to evidence and synthesis with the challenges posed in recent decades by the so-called postmodern critique of history as a way of understanding the past and by the explosion of sources and historical interpretations on the Internet and mass media. Each development questions in its own way how historians identify and interpret evidence, create arguments and histories, and give public meaning to the past. Postmodern theorists questioned the very ability of historians to represent the past accurately or truthfully. As a consequence, such theory seemed to undermine the very authority of the profession, and many historians reacted initially with hostility. Few attempted much explicit accommodation. With the options and outcome now clearer after a few decades of dispute, we can examine to what extent postmodernism actually influenced the discipline and profession. This is not a book about what historians ought to do as some of my previous books argued but rather my take on what they do practice today. The proliferation of historical sources and histories on the Internet has made the basic jobs of historians both much easier and more difficult and, in my opinion, more needed. The rapid and ever-increasing digitization of documents and other historical sources on the Internet has made the task of those who would infer the past from surviving evidence amazingly easier than in the days when only visiting archives and other repositories all over the world allowed access to the documents. At the

x

•

Preface

same time the increased access to such documentation also multiplies those who interpret such evidence without the training professional historians receive in these matters. Such democratization of doing history frequently challenges the long-standing rules of method and interpretation that were and are the common grounding of professional historians. When the identification and interpretation of evidence and the creation and critique of larger arguments and stories can be asserted by anyone and everyone, what is the role of professional historians in testing the accuracy of facts inferred from the evidence surviving from the past or in evolving and evaluating the larger arguments, stories, and meaning given the past? Traditionally during the last century books and articles on what historians did was answered mainly in relation to other books, articles, and learned editions of documents, which I have included among “texts” in Chapter 3. Beyond their schooling, most people today learn about the past from historical tourism or from television and motion pictures. Chapter 4 discusses how historians curate and design museum exhibits and manage and interpret historic sites of various kinds, based broadly on what I have characterized as “things.” Not only do most adults gain their knowledge today about the past from moving pictures and television but historians increasingly appear on screen as well as advise on documentary films and television shows. I discuss all these forms of moving visual imagery under the generic term “films” in Chapter 5. By examining these various types of history in relation to each other, we see better not only what historical practice actually encompasses today but also recognize more clearly the principles justifying and grounding historical practice in general. Such comparison provides deeper insight into the general as well as varied nature of history as a way of construing the past. Because I treat texts, things, and films as equally valid approaches to interpreting the past, I have adopted the awkward consumerist word “products” as shorthand for all of these results collectively instead of always listing individually the multiple forms histories take today. Thus all kinds of histories are products, and conversely all products in this usage are histories of one kind or another. Likewise, a single history is a product just as such a product is called a history. Historical methods and so-called methods books traditionally described how historians should derive their facts from their evidential sources, which were long equated mainly with texts. Even expanding methods to cover researching facts inferred from material objects and moving and other visual images covers only a small part of what historians must do in

Preface

•

xi

producing a history no matter what its form. Historians must also organize or synthesize various and often intellectually contradictory components into what they call a history. Thus I have devoted a chapter to the elements common to histories as finished or synthetic products (Chapter 2) in addition to methods and the idea and uses of evidence (Chapter 1). To indicate both methods and synthesis at times I have chosen the word “processes” to go along with products to signify that various methods and ways to synthesize exist. Moreover, I want to suggest by that word that both historical methods and syntheses apply to things and films in addition to the usual texts. In an attempt to offer my readers a chance to consider their own conclusions on the topics I discuss, I have adopted two rhetorical conventions. I often pose a series of questions as a way of looking at a problem. Although the book reveals my own answers to these questions in its organization and phrasing, I hope my rhetorical strategy affords readers an opportunity to consider their own answers to the same basic questions. Second, I try to present sides to an issue on (if not always in) their own terms for the same reason so that readers have some basis for their own conclusions. If nothing else, I want to suggest in my own efforts that fashioning histories has its own fashions. In this way I hope to illustrate as well as argue that the connections among histories as products, history as an approach to the past, and historians organized as a profession are various, dynamic, complicated, and perhaps problematic in the end.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments Intellectual and personal debts accrued while working on a book are always pleasant to acknowledge. I owe intellectual debts to all the authors cited (and often those unnamed as well), especially when venturing into fields new to me. Most pleasant to acknowledge are debts that are personal as well as intellectual to Robert Berkhofer III, Martin Burke, Robert Chester, Martin Dolan, Sally Hadden, Martha Hodes, Mary Sies, David Shorter, and particularly to the late Genevieve Berkhofer.

This page intentionally left blank

PART I

Construing the Past as History Processes and Presuppositions Fundamental to all aspects of historical practice is an idea of the past. Crucial to any idea of the past is its very pastness: the fullness of what once existed previously no longer persists as such in the present. That the past cannot be observed today as it was once lived and experienced by persons alive then poses the conundrum of understanding the past as history. How and what can we know of that past if so much of it is gone by definition and experience? Thus understanding the past as history demands assumptions about its nature, ways to study it, and how best to depict it to a modern audience. Without a relatively clear idea of—or at least definite presumptions about—the character of the past, historians and others would not know what to look for, where to look, or what to do with it when found. Thus a rich set of presuppositions about the past precedes any research into it and exposition or representation of it as history. Such presuppositions are the stock in trade of the professional historian. Chapter 1 examines the research or empirical side of the historical enterprise. Chapter 2 looks at the literary and artistic side of histories as representations of the past as history.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1

Historical Methods From Evidence to Facts

A

lthough the past is gone, historians not only presume that the past was once real but that they can comprehend what happened then from those things postulated as surviving from the past into the present. Even though the past no longer exists as such, historians maintain it can be inferred from such things as manuscripts, monuments, and other material objects that exist in the present but have been accepted as survivals from previous times. In particular, memories not only seem to offer clues to past matters themselves but also justify the reality of a past once existing as such. But texts and things and even memories do not replicate the entire context of which they are presumed part. Thus historians must envision or postulate the larger context of the survivals they study even as they explore them for clues to that larger world. Efforts to overcome this hermeneutical paradox became known as the historical method in the profession.1 The variety of techniques that come under this rubric are considered the empirical or “scientific” side of what the profession does, according to many historians and other scholars.2 The Idea of Sources as Evidence All such empirical historical research rests upon three fundamental premises. First, the past actually existed: people in the past really did think, act, and experience their own times as a living reality. Second, their thoughts and activities resulted in a variety of artifacts at the time that have survived into the present. Third, these artifacts today offer both valuable and valid clues to the actual thoughts, activities, and experiences of those past peoples. The connections posited among these three presumptions

4

•

Fashioning History

allow historians to consider surviving texts and other artifacts as “sources” or “evidence” for what past peoples did indeed do or think. Likewise, the linkage presupposed among the three suppositions enables historians to infer factual particulars, or what they call “facts,” about past persons, activities, and institutions from these sources. Both the conversion of the variety of surviving artifacts into sources and the creation of facts from those sources have been the subject proper of books on what the profession calls the “historical method.”3 Historical method, although singular in professional use, embraces in practice a multitude of techniques for converting survivals into, first, sources and, then, facts. If the ultimate end of historical method is to produce facts, or more accurately statements of fact, then survivals only become sources or evidence through inference or argument directed to historians’ ends. To call a survival a source or evidence, even a “trace” or a “remain,” presumes whole sets of assumptions orienting historians to the past as a grounding for history, to identifying specific survivals as possible sources according to certain aims and current intellectual outlooks, as well as inferring statements deemed facts from such sources.4 The term “source,” therefore, packs a series of intellectual assumptions into a seemingly simple operation that supposedly and seamlessly converts survivals into information, then that information is considered as evidence for something the researcher wants to know, and finally statements labeled facts are extrapolated from that evidence. To unpack this series of operations, the first three sections of this chapter summarize the nature of survivals themselves, their identification as sources, and their customary classification into primary and secondary sources for historians’ purposes. The subsequent two sections examine what kind of connection particular kinds of factual statements have to the evidence supposedly supporting them. Last, I consider memories as reliable historical sources, clues to providing context, and as history.5 Survivals from the Past All the things around us are survivals from the past, but not all are of equal interest to students of history. Mere persistence over time does not make them “historic” or “historical” in the eyes of historians, and it is not merely a matter of time and ancientness. Their historicalness, or historicity in one sense of that word, depends upon their utility to historians or others, and their usefulness in turn depends upon how well they fit into some framework or context employed by the historians and others to

Historical Methods

•

5

understand the selected survivals. That framework or context derives in turn from the desires and needs of the historians and their society and culture. When the historical profession stressed political, constitutional, diplomatic, and military history as the fundamental focus of any study of the past, then the records, relics, and monuments produced by politicians, generals, and others important in the stories of nation-states or empires held greatest interest.6 The development of economic, labor, intellectual, and social histories in the middle decades of the twentieth century began a shift to the nonelite and common people, often in general as a collectivity. The emphasis on feminist, minority, postcolonialist, cultural, and microhistories in the last decades of that century continued the trend towards the common people but reflected new interests and produced new stories. In each instance, historians searched for new sources or exploited existing ones with new as well as old methods and, more importantly, questions. Pictures, public buildings and monuments, coins, arms, and particularly documents suggest the main kinds of records or materials traditionally studied, just as censuses, photographs, films, electronic messages, and everyday artifacts like garbage dumps and latrines suggest the newer or additional kinds of materials investigated more recently. Letters, diaries, newspapers, legal documents, government records, statues, coins, and paintings were (and are) collected and preserved in public and private libraries, national and local archives, and museums of all kinds. The chief criterion for what was saved in general was thereby interpreted (and vice versa) according to national or local pride in the statements and deeds of great men and great families or stories of the nation state and nationality. As historians broadened what they covered in their histories, so too did they expand what was—or should be—saved for new stories of previously uncovered persons, groups, or sectors of life in the past. (Of course, they also mined the older, traditional materials with new questions.) Older museums, archives, and libraries have expanded their collections, or new museums, libraries, and archives were founded to include photographs, films, electronic data, and more mundane artifacts. Historical preservation and reconstruction broadened from great government buildings, military forts, and large private houses to whole towns like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Ironbridge Gorge in England; suffragists’ houses and slum tenements; or stops for slaves fleeing the Southern United States on the Underground Railroad.7

6

•

Fashioning History

So multiple is the number of survivals of interest to students of history today that it is difficult to find any easy classification system of their nature. Traditional classificatory systems mainly listed kinds of written documents, while recognizing the worth of material artifacts to the historian. The American historian of France, Louis Gottschalk, in a primer on historical method first published in 1950, covered almost exclusively written testimony in his chapter on “Where Does Historical Information Come From?”8 The British historian Arthur Marwick, in the third edition of his The Nature of History (1989), presents a comprehensive listing of sources “relevant to all types” of historical research. In eight pages he offers and describes a dozen categories of survivals: half of which are composed entirely of written materials and four of which combine words, pictures, and objects, for example, films, oral testimony, and inscriptions on buildings and coins.9 Just two of his categories contain only unwritten materials such as aerial photographs, artifacts, and observable practices persisting from the past. In a 2001 introduction to historical methods, early modern and medieval historians Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier discuss briefly the “evolution and complementarity” of “source typologies.” They quickly cover the traditional narrative and literary sources from diaries to newspaper articles; formal legal and juridical documents whether court proceedings, medieval charters, or mortgage papers; and such “social documents” as produced by governments, businesses, and other bureaucracies old and new. Two-thirds of that section discusses unwritten sources: archaeological, oral, photographic, sound recordings, and electronic.10 The more comprehensive the lists and the more varied the artifacts and media, the more difficult it is to find a classificatory system. Whether traditional or more recent, these systems rest on dividing records and writing from other kinds of remains and relics—in other words, between texts of all kinds and other things. They also depend upon separating texts from other kinds of media. Categories of artifactual survivals overlap in the following scheme, but the three groupings suggest implications for where they may be found and how they might be used in research. Physical/material objects versus textual. Historians have long referred to physical survivals as “relics” or “remains,” while they referred to the texts as “documents” or “testimony.”11 All survivals are physical objects or artifacts, but scholars of material culture separate the documentary from the other physical artifacts. Buildings old and new, whether palaces or modest cottages; capitols or other governmental buildings nationally or locally; churches and schools and even museums themselves; factories,

Historical Methods

•

7

shops, and other businesses, all interest some historians today. Such artifacts of past everyday living as clothing, bottles, cooking utensils, tools, and machines can interest today’s historians as much as weapons, coins, monuments, and religious relics did yesteryear’s historians. Village and city houses and streets as well as farm fields and fences gather as much attention as battlefields and roads; railroads and canals as churches and temples; jails as well as courtrooms; servant and slave quarters as mansions; slum tenements and immigrant ghettoes as suburbs. Even bodies, bones, and hair now interest some historians as much as their anthropological and medical colleagues. Physical artifacts of all sorts are found in museums of all kinds and historic sites, while textual artifacts are usually located in libraries and archives.12 Written versus other media. The bibliographies of current histories like those of older ones reveal that documentary remains still constitute the largest category of artifactual survivals of interest to most historians. These range from personal documents like diaries and letters to such public documents as local and national legislative and court records, from scribbled memoranda to local and national censuses, from signed essays and editorials to anonymously mass-produced newspapers and pamphlets, from memoirs to treaties and maps, from inscriptions on ancient monuments to codices. School records vary from pupils’ essays, university syllabi, report cards, internal communications, and board minutes. Religious documents include church membership lists, religious pamphlets, doctrinal statements, sacred books, sermons, hymnals, and official proceedings. Business documents embrace bills, receipts, accounts, and contracts as well as meeting minutes, stock certificates, and letters. Historians are always delighted to find individual diaries, whether by housewife or midwife, minister or parishioner, businessman or worker, professor or student, government official or lawyer, general or soldier in any place and in all eras.13 Among unwritten media are visual and auditory materials that still communicate directly. Pictorial artifacts have always been important to historians, but the category has expanded from statues, paintings, drawings, and maps to include photographs, films, and videotapes.14 Sound, long lost to the historian, now includes audiotapes and other sound media starting in the late 1800s, but these sources prove to be as fragile as any manuscript.15 Oral history also in a sense conveys the sounds of the past though recorded after the fact or in the present.16 Personal versus institutional. This categorization cuts across the previous two. It stresses the mode of production and distribution, both of

8

•

Fashioning History

which are relevant to their evidential use as sources. Personal artifacts stress the uniqueness of their production, whether letter, diary, or artisancrafted object, and their probable lack of wide distribution. Institutional artifacts betray their bureaucratic origins through their place in a filing system or archive, or their frequently widespread, even mass, distribution, whether coins, newspapers, or movies. Although past bureaucracies produced unique documents and other artifacts, such as a chancery letter or church edict for example, the institutional is usually associated in modern times with multiple copies of text or object, best symbolized by the mass media and mass production. Mass media began with the printing press, and mass production is a hallmark of the industrial revolution.17 Whether a textual source is institutional or personal makes a difference not only in how it is interpreted but also in how it is classified and organized in archive, library, or manuscript repository. Similarly, whether a material object is institutional or personal makes a difference in interpretation and in what kind of museum or historic site. This basic partitioning of all artifactual survivals into material objects and documents, into unwritten and written materials, reflects a long-held assumption in traditional historical method that texts contain their own interpretations in a sense (and thus can be repeated with little or no interpretation by the historian?), while material objects, such as tools, clothing, and landscapes, only yield their meaning through the historian’s active interpretation. The latter require the historian to infer meaning; the former offer their own through report, record, or testimony, and so on. On one level of understanding, this is a truism. Communication is direct in textual materials, indirect in other things. In a sense, documents are already represented versions of the past, already interpreted by those of the time in light of their categories and perspectives. Thus they appear to present their information directly. Other artifacts only offer information indirectly through inference and interpretation by the historian, even in those cases when the existence of the object is taken to correlate with the artistic or technological level of a population or indicate its social organization and cultural values. But to separate conceptually textual artifacts from other things, written from unwritten materials, implies that one is more symbolic than another for historians’ purposes when all survivals are “read” symbolically to establish one or more contexts in the past from one or more contexts in the present. Pragmatists as well as postmodernists agree today in theory that all survivals are interpreted in one way or another, and all historians concur in practice. Thus Howell and Prevenier define a source as “those

Historical Methods

•

9

materials from which historians construct meanings.”18 Statements of fact therefore are always inferred, never found, even when they are repeated from statements found in a source. Historians must always decide what are valid facts for their purposes. Even today, however, historians do not use all the artifacts persisting from the human past because in general they still consider the more recent millennia as their chief focus. Or, at least they still have not found a context sufficient to interpret all that persists from human behavior in the past, although archaeology and environmental history seem to be stretching the old boundary that separated history from prehistory. Conversely, much that historians might want from the past has not survived. Few or no events as such persist from the past, and even very old persons remember only relatively recent parts of the past. Moreover, many documents and other artifacts resulting from the thoughts and activities of past peoples exist no longer. Those that do endure sustain the idea of “traces,” “remnants,” “traditions,” and collective memories as survivals. In general, however, the older the period, the less material survives. Wood and fiber products rarely survive from ancient times; stone and metal artifacts more so. The materials of burial practices remain more than farming practices, although the latter may persist in some places from a not so recent past.19 The loss of relatively recent material happens even today to the chagrin of historians, for example, the fragility and disappearance of early movies and sound recordings. Messages and Web sites on the Internet prove even more evanescent than old manuscripts. Newspapers and pamphlets of the eighteenth century, for example, survive better than those of the early twentieth century, because of the rag content in eighteenth-century paper as opposed to the wood pulp and high acid content paper that was used later in the nineteenth century. Similarly, books published between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries are far more vulnerable than those produced before or after those hundred or so years. In the hope of preserving their books from that period, the Library of Congress, for example, plans to deacidify 8.5 million of its 18.7 million books.20 Modern technology has proved a mixed blessing in the historian’s efforts to discover as well as interpret past survivals. On one side, new technology provides new information about the past. Aerial surveys disclose old settlement patterns by tracing, for example, Roman roads in Britain or the spread of Aztec cities in Mexico and beyond.21 DNA analysis traces ancestry, most famously recently to test the two-hundred-year-old

10

•

Fashioning History

charge that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children with his slave Sally Hemings.22 The radioactive decay of carbon-14 or the comparison of tree rings dates grains, buildings, and artifacts. And of course the computer analyzes massive amounts of data faster and surer than the manual methods of old. Technology moves so fast these days that it makes obsolescent popular applications of just yesterday. We no longer possess devices to read old punch cards, hear older audiotapes, or read earlier computer inputs. These obsolescent but very recent technologies now pose problems of salvage as severe as any other preservationists face.23 Archives, libraries, and museums today face the modern dilemma of too much material. On one hand, they command ever better methods of storage and preservation. On the other hand, even the largest and richest have space and money to collect and retain only so much. If too few things survive from the long ago past, too many things are produced in the present. The National Archives of the United States contained at the end of the twentieth century 4 billion pieces of paper, 9.4 million photographs, 338,029 films and videos, almost 2.65 million maps and charts, nearly 3 million architectural and engineering plans, and over 9 million aerial photographs.24 Modern governments and other institutions are generating too many records and other matter far too fast to keep and store all of them. Should the state of Florida, for example, preserve or destroy the nearly six million punch card ballots of the controversial 2000 presidential election that introduced the word “chad” into the vocabulary of the average American voter as everyone waited for the recount and the eventual close victory of George W. Bush? The Florida Secretary of State’s office estimates that it will cost a quarter of a million dollars to move and store the documents and another one hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain them. 25 Historians assume that the many documents, buildings, pictures, and other survivals from the past constitute but a small part of all that once existed. Even most formal, written, and bureaucratic records no longer survive let alone those of oral communications, informal interactions, illegal activities (unless noted in court proceedings), and numerous other human activities, including faxes and e-mails today. One Italian scholar estimates that the ratio of lost ancient world texts to those that survive today equals at least 40:1 but believes his figure is far short of actual loss.26 An English scholar of medieval history estimates that only about one percent of the once existing documents of the era from 1066 to 1307 still survive from that country’s past.27 Thus Louis Gottschalk writes of documentary sources in his historical methods handbook under the heading

Historical Methods

•

11

“Historical Knowledge Limited by Incompleteness of the Records,” “And only a part of what was observed in the past was remembered by those who observed it; only a part of what was remembered was recorded; only a part of what was recorded has survived; only a part of what has survived has come to the historians’ attention; only a part of what has come to their attention is credible; only a part of what is credible has been grasped; and only a part of what has been grasped can be expounded or narrated by the historian.”28 With appropriate allowances for the exact nature of a given artifact, Gottschalk’s lament applies in general to other kinds of physical artifacts as to survival rate, the difficulty of contextualizing them, and their use in interpreting and narrating history. Although historians cannot “create” facts when no evidence from the past exists, they must and do “extrapolate” by educated guess from the presumed context of the existing survivals to cover the silence of the nonexistent. (Oral history can help fill the void in more recent times.) In the end, even the documented must be interpreted, and so we turn in the next section to the transformation of survivals into sources. The Identification of Sources A fundamental goal of the historical method is to convert survivals of various kinds into what historians call “sources.” Sources provide the evidence for the historians’ own representations of the past. From such evidence historians derive the facts that support their statements about the past and which they incorporate into their histories. According to modern historical methods, sources are not found so much as identified and isolated according to a historian’s research agenda. The conversion of survivals into sources depends upon a set of assumptions governing their relationship between their present-day existence and the role they presumably played in the lives and institutions of past peoples. If historians must infer factual particulars from survivals, they need to know that any given survival can be trusted to be what it represents itself to be. If the artifact is fraudulent in some way, at worse a forgery or a fake, it will cause historians to draw invalid inferences, hence to posit inaccurate factual particulars about the past. Therefore, before historians can ask what can a survival as source reveal about what happened in the past, they must ask the prior question about whether any given survival provides a reliable basis, that is, a trustworthy source, for their inferences of fact. Is the artifact what it appears to be so historians can presume it a valid base

12

•

Fashioning History

for their inferences about the peoples and times of its production? In other words, can the historian trust the document to be what it claims to be or the material artifact what it seems to be in order to derive the factual particulars she declares? Are a document’s dates and authorship accurate and its text the original one? Are the producer and the date and site of production of a material artifact correctly attributed? To validate a survival as a useful source, then, presumes a division between the facts establishing the authenticity of the artifact itself as opposed to the facts to be derived by the historian from the artifact.29 The techniques, traditionally considered the scientific basis of the profession, for validating artifactual survivals of all kinds as proper sources follow from this methodological assumption of a division between the legitimacy of a source as source and the nature of it as evidence for facts about the peoples and events of the past. The techniques vary for these purposes depending upon the form of the medium: whether charters or censuses, buildings or diaries, paintings or photographs, coins or cemeteries, battlefields or agricultural field systems, oral histories or collective memories. Or, they vary depending upon the date of the artifact and the technology used to produce it.30 The basis of the appropriate technique distinguishes essentially between whether the artifact is documentary or textual in the broadest sense or is some other kind and form of material object. An artifact, of course, often combines text plus significant material aspects. Coins or monuments contain linguistic inscriptions and pictorial matter as well as form and materiality. Murals and paintings are pictorial but also frequently symbolic or depict a story. Songs and newsreels are verbal as well as musical or pictorial. Often sources from the medieval and ancient worlds demand special techniques and skills provided by what were once called auxiliary or ancillary sciences such as historical archaeology, numismatics (the authentication and dating of coins and the deciphering of their inscriptions), diplomatics (the critical study of official and other corporate forms of documents), paleography (the study of the appearance and stylistic conventions for the dating, authentication, and transcribing of medieval and other archaic handwritten documents), epigraphy (the study of seals and inscriptions on ancient and later gravestones, monuments, buildings, and other hard surfaces), and chronology (the study and reconciliation of different dating systems).31 But even more modern sources need special skills and knowledge to detect forgeries and “read” images and maps.32 All the techniques have three or four main goals: attributing authorship of a document or the producer of an artifact; determining the date

Historical Methods

•

13

and place of its creation; ascertaining the authenticity of its form and/or the accuracy of its contents; and perhaps deciphering its content. Such deciphering may range from the translation of its language from one to another or from an ancient one into a modern one or even from past words and usage into their present-day equivalents—if such exist. A simple example would be those terms for material objects that no longer exist and for which modern people can only guess at their function. (As for example, a strip of bronze from a sixth-century English grave, which a museum staff in 1988 labeled wittily “God knows–but we don’t.”)33 Many modern documentary and other artifactual survivals are sufficiently clear about their producers, times and places of production, and genuineness, and so they pose little or no problem about serving as valid sources for the historian. Historically, scholars developed many of the classic techniques to cope with the problems posed by manuscripts, coins, monuments, and other survivals from early modern, medieval, and earlier times. The general implications of these methods alert all historians to the common premises underlying this aspect of historical method and the resulting uses of various kinds of contexts. The most basic question about any artifact as source is always about whether it is genuine or spurious? Is it by whom, from when and where, and in the exact form it was originally? The most notorious examples of false survivals, hence unreliable sources, are outright forgeries, frauds, and hoaxes. Scholars developed modern documentary techniques for studying medieval documents, with their profusion of forgeries. Scholars estimate that from maybe ten percent to perhaps one-half to two-thirds of medieval documents in some places, periods, and categories are forgeries or corruptions.34 The Donation of Constantine was perhaps the most historic of these, for, one, it had real effect for seven hundred years in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and, two, the exposure of its anachronisms in 1440 is frequently credited with starting modern critical source analysis. Supposedly an edict from Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity in 312 CE, the document gave the Pope dominion over Rome, the Italian provinces, and perhaps the entire Western Empire. Pope Stephen II used the document in 754 CE to challenge the effort of Constantinople to diminish the authority of the papacy over the Western Empire. Scholars assume the Donation of Constantine was produced in Stephen II’s chancery for that purpose. In 1440, Lorenzo Valla’s analysis of anachronisms of style and reference in the document questioned its authenticity. Historians of historical scholarship and method

14

•

Fashioning History

often point to his and other philologists’ techniques at the time as the beginning of modern critical documentary method.35 Artistic, textual, and other kinds of forgeries and their critical unmasking appear in all eras from ancient times in both the Western and Eastern worlds to the present. Textual forgeries range in time from ancient Greek authors, for example the letters of Socrates and Euripides, to twentiethcentury dictators, for example the diaries of Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. The still popularly accepted tale of romance between Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge rests on forged love letters publicized by the Atlantic Monthly in 1928. The Vinland Map, supposedly showing the Viking discovery of America and depicting the continent for the first time, still perplexes historians and other scholars a half century after its donation to Yale University in 1957. If authentic, it would arguably be the most valuable map in the world; if a forgery, as most now claim, it has fooled many an expert for the last half century.36 Forgeries of letters and other documents and artifacts will continue as long as money, political influence, propaganda, religious, egotistical, and other purposes call them forth. Probably the most notorious and harmful forgery of the twentieth century was the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose twentyfour sections supposedly revealed the conspiratorial plans of a secret Jewish government for economic, political, and religious dominion over the world. Mainly plagiarized from a French satire on Napoleon III, the Protocols culminated a century of anti-Jewish forgeries. The Protocols were first published in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century but soon appeared in many languages after World War I to fuel the virulent anti-Semitism of the times. The automobile maker Henry Ford publicized the document in the United States. Hitler used it in Germany to further the Nazi cause. The small book had been translated into at least twenty languages by the end of the Second World War, and it is still in print and on the Internet in this century. It was even the basis for a Ramadan multipart special on Egyptian television in November 2002.37 Even past photographs and newsreels of past events were doctored for propaganda or other purposes. Live soldiers played dead, and deceased soldiers were rearranged and posed by some Civil War photographers to enhance the effect of battlefield slaughter.38 In contrast, United States authorities allowed no photographs of dead American soldiers to appear in the mass media during the entire nineteen months of the First World War and not for the first twenty-one months of the Second World War.39 Edward Curtis, the noted late nineteenth-century photographer of Native

Historical Methods

•

15

Americans, carried a trunk full of hairpieces and clothing to make his subjects appear more traditional than they were when he photographed them.40 A team of English filmmakers doctored a newsreel sequence of Adolph Hitler in Paris as it fell to the German Army in June 1940 so as to show him dancing in delight as part of a British propaganda campaign.41 Great as the problems of using yesteryear’s photographs and films as evidence are, they pale before the possibilities of tomorrow’s computermanipulated simulation of past and present alike.42 Although not as bad for the historian’s purposes as outright forgeries, but misleading in their own way for historical research are garbled, corrupted, plagiarized, or ghostwritten texts. Corrupted versions result from inadvertent mistakes while hand copying texts before the advent of printing and intentional editing of texts by editors or publishers after that time. The more copiers and the more times a manuscript text was copied, the more likely words were misread or miscopied from the original. In more modern times, the published version of an article or book may contain heavy or light editing of the author’s words, so what the public reads may be quite different from what the author wrote originally. Many modern political or other leaders neither write their own speeches nor compose their own letters. Often some of the most memorable phrases in modern political speeches are the handiwork of speechwriters. Although the mechanical production of newspapers and magazines guarantees multiple copies all equally original in a sense, modern American newspapers produce variant versions by geographical region (such as the New York Times metropolitan and national versions), and magazines, thanks to the computer, can vary advertising content by postal code. Likewise, motion pictures may vary by format, length, and even some content from the original version when shown on a television or Digital Video Disk. Methods old and new, then, ask the same fundamental questions of the survivals studied to establish them as authentic. What must we know of any survival’s origins and subsequent history, its pedigree in a sense, in order to trust it as a source? (1) What are its origins (genesis): who or what, when, where produced? (2) What is its lineage (genealogy): original, copy, copy of copy, and so on? (3) What is its history (provenance, in one of its meanings): Where was it found? How was it found? Who found it? Who preserved it and how (and maybe why)? How did it come to be in the possession of its present owner? These questions elicit the source’s chain of custody and what those links disclose about the authenticity of its contents. Of course forgeries are their own kind of sources about the times, places, and peoples of their creation. This history of origins,

16

•

Fashioning History

genealogy, and provenance can become its own source of data for the diffusion and reception of an idea, memory, or myth. The public associates such a pedigree most notably with paintings, rare books, or antiques, where it is called a provenance or provenience.43 Art museums seek to know from experts whether a famous painting or sculpture is by the artist, from his workshop or school of followers, merely a copy by someone else in the past, or even a modern forgery. Whether a painting or other art object is worth millions, much less, or nearly nothing often depends on its placement in one of these categories. How much the object is worth for the historian’s purposes, however, depends not whether it is the original or a copy but whether it portrays its times accurately. Thus much of what we know of Greek sculpture derives from the Roman copies that have survived into the present. Rare book libraries and manuscript collections try to ascertain whether what they possess is the original author’s version, a later edition or copy, a facsimile, a corrupted version, or even a forgery. (Hence the importance of the debate over the Vinland map.) Once again, the historian’s purpose may be served well by a copy that is assumed faithful to the original. This is especially true if an original no longer exists, for then a facsimile or other kind of copy must suffice. The manuscripts of the ancient world were particularly vulnerable to decay, erasure, destruction, and random recopying. So, for example, the oldest full version of Homer’s writings is a copy made nearly eighteen centuries later. The writings of the ancient Romans Cicero, Livy, Pliny Younger and Older, Virgil, and Ovid only survive as traces beneath later Christian overwritings. Medieval monks copied the works of Plato as consistent with Christian doctrine but not those of Aristotle, which come to us through Arab copyists.44 A pedigree is more important for documents produced prior to printing, because the repeated scribal copying, which preserved the text in the first place, easily produced and multiplied errors in succeeding versions. It was the printing press with its capacity for multiple copies of an “original” that ensured the survival of some of them into the present. But even here the press operator or other intermediary between author and audience may have edited the text or image from what the author or artist intended. Of course, the purpose of many original documents and artifacts—old and new—was to mislead by misrepresenting matters. Thus the document might be authentic, but its content is false to the facts, whether intended to deceive an enemy in war or a population in peacetime about policy. Regardless of kind, only a small part of past documents and other artifacts survive into the present.

Historical Methods

•

17

Tracing the history of the artifact over the course of its career or life, so to speak, ensures that the present-day document or material object survives from the claimed or purported time and place and results from the purported or claimed producer. Such a pedigree allows historians to know when and where, by whom, and probably how any given artifact was created and, therefore, whether it can be trusted as a source from which the historian can infer correct factual particulars about the times (and contexts) of its creation. The importance of a good pedigree for a document even became an issue in recent international diplomacy after the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. Questions arose immediately after the release of the Osama bin Laden videotapes about their authenticity. Journalists, television pundits, politicians, and scholars all debated how the tapes had been obtained and by whom, who had made them and when, and why they surfaced when they did. (Also debated was the adequacy of the English translation provided by the Bush administration and whether the tapes supported the contention of the White House about Al Qaeda’s role in the destruction.) One of the main businesses of museums, archives, and libraries is the certification of the artifacts in their possession as genuine, whether pictorial matter of all types, manuscripts, books, maps, films, recordings, and written records or material objects of all kinds. Such certification allows historians to be certain of the date of creation, the authorship or producer, and other details vital to the establishment of those artifacts as authentic sources for deriving factual particulars of and for a history. The most important function of museums, archives, and libraries is the preservation that allows survival of past texts and other artifacts into the present. Students of historical memory therefore see archives and museums as sites of official and collective memory(ies). Officially, these institutions are places designed for receiving records and other artifacts, organizing and cataloguing them, and storing them safely and systematically for their retrieval and viewing. Unofficially, as many researchers discover, numerous documents and artifacts are not catalogued, their retrieval is not as certain as hoped, and many artifacts remain in private hands outside these institutions. Although of recent origin by historical standards, scores of motion pictures and sound recordings are lost, and many of those remaining are in fragile or worse condition. We have even less of an idea of how much electronic data has been saved, let alone created. (But Google’s massive Internet scanning and storage may prove invaluable to future scholars.)

18

•

Fashioning History

Museums, archives and libraries are not impartial preservers of past survivals. Their guardianship of local or national heritage skews their collections toward the concerns of those in a position to influence such decisions or who pay for the acquisitions. Until recently art museums exhibited the great and not-so-great (male) artists as defined by the Western tradition. This stance neglected women and minority artists as outside this tradition—usually not even defining their work as art. Perhaps the most invidious distinction is the division of art into the “prehistoric” kind usually housed in natural history and archaeological museums and the “historic” kind, especially European, displayed in “art museums.” Manuscript repositories customarily preserved and perhaps preferred the documents of the powerful and the upper classes. Even state archives reflected the same biases in their collections, and historians thought this appropriate when they concentrated on the history of elites so long traditional in the discipline. As the British oral historian Paul Thompson graphically described this bias, “The very power structure worked as a great recording machine shaping the past in its own image.”45 To see how this principle worked in a concrete physical setting, one has only to remark the survival of the great Southern plantation mansions in the United States and the disappearance of the slave quarters surrounding them.46 Even though museums, archives, and other repositories are trying these days to compensate for previous biases by searching out new artifacts and documents, historians need always to remember to ask of all these institutions: what they save or saved and why? What they neglect or neglected or destroyed and for what reasons? Such questions hint at what data is missing from the past. Primary versus Secondary Sources Different kinds of artifacts require different kinds of techniques for their validation, dating, authorship, and accuracy or authenticity, but the major assumptions underlying these techniques are similar across mediums and disciplines. Although the practitioners of oral history, documentary research, visual image analysis, and historical archaeology may differ in their specific methods, they share the basic critical methodological assumptions for understanding and analyzing survivals as sources.47 Survivals become certified as sources through relevant questions, and those are framed according to one or another presumed or postulated context. These questions are traditionally discussed in the classic methods manuals in terms of “external criticism” or in newer ones as “source criticism.” External or source criticism establishes the authenticity of the survival:

Historical Methods

•

19

that it originated at the time and in the place (its when and where) it was supposed to. It was called external criticism (as opposed to internal criticism discussed in the next section) because that confirmation occurs through operations external to the artifact itself, usually through comparison with the same or similar kinds of artifacts. Though the object of analysis is the document, the context of that analysis depends how it fits in with other texts, or its intertextuality as literary theorists call it. Negatively, external criticism looks for, among other things, anachronistic words in texts or objects in pictures, anomalous paper and canvas or other medium and material, and variation of its general appearance from others of its kind. Positively, it proposes a date for the undated, attributes authorship if anonymous or wrongly signed, and places it in a tradition of form and content if that is not clear from the artifact itself. Since the latter are attributions, such placements have proved wrong at times. The main goal of all these techniques from the viewpoint of historians is to warrant that artifactual sources are really contemporaneous to the times of their production, because historians prefer to work from such “original sources.”48 They believe those sources coming most directly from the times they are researching offer the best clues to those times. Historians emphasize this preference in their research by distinguishing between what they call “primary” as opposed to “secondary” sources. Primary sources are those documents and other things both from and about the times being investigated. Secondary sources are those referring to matters and times earlier than their own time of production. In that sense all history books are secondary sources (except for a history of history-writing), but so too are historical re-enactments, documentary films, simulated artifacts, and virtual computer images of past texts, artifacts, peoples and places. Such a distinction always depends upon the question asked, for what is a secondary source for one question may be a primary source for another question, but this is a topic for the next section on facts as statements about particulars. Conversely, that a single source can be both primary and secondary shows the importance of using contemporaneous evidence in historical research that applies to the question asked. Even many sources historians accept and use as primary may be secondary in a technical sense. In traditional historical methods manuals, only eyewitness, that is, actual witness as opposed to hearsay, accounts constitute original or primary sources. Were they written down at the time of occurrence or only later from memory? What if the source is a report of rumor or hearsay? Newspaper accounts? Are the court records or legislative journals verbatim transcriptions from stenographic or sound

20

•

Fashioning History

recordings, or merely summaries of what occurred? Memoirs or autobiographies, even though written long after the events they chronicle, may recount matters for which there is little or no other evidence. For lack of better survivals about these matters, all these latter kinds of documents could, might, and, often, must serve as primary sources. Even though removed from the persons or events reported, they are closest to what is represented or reported. Thus, although not original in the sense of being contemporaneous, they become primary in terms of what is to be known. Historians also accept as primary sources such hybrid materials as photocopies, facsimiles, microfilms, published editions of manuscripts, and, increasingly these days, digitized versions of texts and artifacts. Such hybrid materials save the researcher much time and money and allow a more deliberate study of the materials than a hasty visit to archives, rare book library, or museum. Increasingly, these repositories do not allow study of the originals in order to save them from the deterioration wrought by too many researchers physically handling them. (The Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, for example, allows only a very select few researchers to handle the actual letters of the Founding Fathers as opposed to copies.) Although clearly not the actual sources themselves, these copies can be accepted if they are good faith and, even better, accurate, reproductions of the original sources. Even so, the researcher must ask of each such reproduction just how much interpretation the editor or compiler employed to produce the copy or edition.49 The present state of many artifacts, buildings, ships, and landscapes illustrate the problems of understanding such hybrid sources. How should one understand reconstructions and restorations as opposed to the originals of such material objects? Many wooden ships and buildings, for example, have been replaced part by part so that almost nothing original remains, but still the ship or building is accepted as the original. For example, both the HMS Victory, Lord Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the USS Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides as a result of a War of 1812 battle, lay claim to being the oldest commissioned warships afloat, and both have been so totally reconstructed that they are essentially mere replicas of their original wooden selves.50 A historic garden is a good example of replacement accepted as original, but many of the plants have necessarily been renewed, trimmed, or replaced. No matter what the ideal mode of preservation preferred by professionals, no restorer today is likely to paint the Great Sphinx and ancient Greek statues, for example, in the bright colors they wore originally. On the other hand, many a grimy painting today is restored to the

Historical Methods

•

21

supposedly vivid colors the artist intended. The brighter colors of the restored Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo and the most recent attempt to save the deteriorating Last Supper by Da Vinci provoked widespread criticism. Da Vinci, for example, used a quite unstable medium for his masterpiece, finished in 1498. Restoration began already in 1726. Each of the nine subsequent restorations tried to undo the mistakes of the previous one. Each of the restorers attempted to preserve what they thought Leonardo had intended. All contributed their own touches more or less to what we still call the original. The most recent restoration lasted twenty years, and some scholars question whether the brighter colors are consistent with Leonardo’s vision or achievement. They accuse the restorer of repainting rather than restoring the masterpiece.51 Even supposedly unrestored monuments and buildings no longer appear as they did to people who constructed them due to the ravages of time and human intervention. Of course, the greatest difference between the originals in the past and their existence now is the changed context in how they are seen, heard, and, in general, experienced today. Those who would preserve battlefields fight the encroaching sights and sounds of modern civilization, whether the threat is tall buildings, communication towers, amusement parks, or modern highways. The very surroundings that earlier people developed as part of a living environment are now condemned as unhistorical and are removed in order to capture the supposed past as interpreted by nostalgia, historians, politicians, or tourist boards. Colonial delegates used the Pennsylvania State House, or what is now called Independence Hall, in Philadelphia to declare their independence in 1776, and others drafted the Constitution there during the summer of 1787. Moderate size skyscrapers now dwarf it, and modern traffic noises and tourists now surround it. To build the Independence National Historical Park around the buildings, almost all nineteenth-century buildings were torn down, including some considered architectural landmarks in their own right. In other words, all the historical fabric that had grown up around the building was removed in the name of restoring the original environment. Yet only some of the contemporary structures surrounding the historic buildings were reconstructed to give the visitor a sense of the late eighteenth-century urban environment. The park itself contains empty but once occupied spaces and such alien buildings as the Liberty Bell Pavilion, National Constitution Center, and the visitor orientation center.52 Even documentary filmmakers must search out built environments without the paraphernalia of electric wires, anomalous buildings, and modern inventions. A 2002 documentary miniseries on Benjamin

22

•

Fashioning History

Franklin used locations up and down the eastern seaboard for historic buildings and landscapes to portray his American experience of the time but had to look to Lithuania to find eighteenth-century urban exteriors free of modern buildings or inventions to depict his years in London and Paris.53 Tourists, of course, are their own kind of context; over a million persons a year visit Colonial Williamsburg for example. The most important of the post hoc contexts historians use is knowing the future of the past and therefore the outcome of past persons’ beliefs and actions. Not only do historians know now what diplomats thought then would follow from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, but they also know how the First World War ended and what followed thereafter. And the same is true for the discovery of radium and the invention of dynamite. At the same time, much of what happened in the past and the reasons for those events, and so on, are lost to us because the sources do not survive. So we both know more and know less than those persons of the past knew.54 Divided by city-state or country, by ethnicity or religion, by class or gender, by education or association, let alone by era, past persons saw events through their own perspectives. Thus all sources come to the historian through some perspective. Just as universal omniscience is denied to persons in the past, so too is it denied to historians. Even if the future of the past is known, it must always be depicted from some point of view. The assumption of one or more kinds of context allows the historian to first collect survivals relevant to a research project and another context or two to interpret them as sources for that research. As Howell and Prevenier remark, all sources are “read” both historically in light of the context of their past existence and historiographically in light of how the historical profession looks at and understands the materials today.55 In line with this admonition, we must also remember that the historian is just the most recent person to interpret the documents and artifacts. What the historian of early modern times Peter Burke observes of documents in general applies to all sources (with allowances for the specific kind): “It is impossible to study the past without the assistance of a whole chain of intermediaries, including not only earlier historians but also the archivists who arranged the documents, the scribes who wrote them and the witnesses whose words were recorded.”56 This observation is broadly true of specific museum exhibitions and even their general collections: from producer of artifact, through successive owners, to its acquisition by a museum, through successive winnowings of selection or deacquisition,

Historical Methods

•

23

until interpreted as part of a “permanent” exhibition or saved as part of a general collection, until the next round of selection, and so on. At the heart of historical research therefore lies a certain circularity of reasoning about the relationship between past and present through the study of these surviving artifacts as sources: survivals or traces found in the present tell us about the past just as the past is made known to us through these survivals and traces. For this circularity to achieve its methodological ends, historians use context in several ways. First, historians use currently accepted historical knowledge and interpretations to provide one or another kind of context to “read” these present-day survivals as clues to the past they postulate and hope to describe. They, in short, must have some idea of what they are looking for and whether they have found it. They gain the basis for doing this from the context of current interpretations and knowledge. Second, historians organize the facts they elicit in the present from these survivals according to some context said to operate in the past. They presume some kind of a context created, so to speak, the survivals, and, in turn, those survivals will yield through study that self-same context. In that way, such a context not only organizes the data about the past but also gives meaning to those facts adduced from the survivals studied. In these ways, the overall context of historical methodology and modern methods presumes the context (intertext) of current knowledge to understand the traces and data of the past in order to see them as (and in) context in order to produce further knowledge about the past or to correct that knowledge. The penultimate context for such factual derivation therefore is the consensual and traditional practices of the historical profession. The ultimate context is, as neopragmatists, Marxists, and many traditionalists alike point out, the society (and culture) that both fosters and polices the historical genre by how it supports archivists, museum curators, historians, and other specialists as professionals.57 The assumption of the historical method that artifacts assumed to come from the past can now reveal how the once living lived presumes a peculiar kind of relationship between past and present peoples and, in a sense, vice versa. To what extent must historians presume that past and present peoples think and act similarly in the same basic situations in order to derive facts according to the historical method? But is such an assumption the temporal equivalent of ethnocentrism? Or, should historians assume that the past is a “foreign country,” but then how do historians escape the temporal equivalent of solipsism that follows such an approach to the otherness of past peoples? Naturally, historians prefer a middle path between these extremes, but where that lies may depend

24

•

Fashioning History

upon how long ago the historical actors lived or how different their culture was. It is not clear how well either memory or social tradition can bridge quite different eras. This suggests the hypothesis that the farther away in time and/or culture, the more difficult the reconciliation between past and present; the closer to our time and culture(s) the easier the historians’ task. The basic conundrum is clear, its resolution far less so. The proliferation of historical techniques and the multiplication of so-called auxiliary sciences and disciplines are meant to alleviate if not solve these dilemmas. In the end, as we shall see, the past and the present are always linked through contextual assumptions—often with some metanarrative as intellectual foundation or ultimate context. In the end, then, what converts survivals into sources are the questions asked of them and the postulated contexts used to judge the answers about their credibility, authenticity, and utility. As a consequence, there obtains no one-to-one correlation between any given survival and its interpretation as a source, because one survival can be interpreted in multiple ways and, therefore in effect, as many sources. For a similar reason, no one-to-one correlation obtains between a source and the facts inferred or hypothesized from it. As we shall see in the next two sections, a source can yield through interpretation multiple facts, and, conversely, a single fact can be developed from many sources. Facts as Re-presentations The ultimate goal of the historical method is to produce facts about past persons, their ideas and actions, their experiences and institutions, and the events involving them. The working assumption—some postmodernists might say prevailing myth—of historians is that their productions rest on an empirical basis of factuality. That factuality is presumed to constitute the accuracy of history and therefore its truthfulness. That truthfulness is both produced and warranted by the techniques of the historical method. Thus the factuality, accuracy, truthfulness, and methods of historical practice all depend upon one another in both theory and practice. In fact, many, but especially traditional, historians argue that the whole historical enterprise, and therefore the theoretical nature of history itself, should and can be understood only in light of its empirical practices.58 The relationship between assertion of fact and use of evidential sources can be divided into two broad categories. The first, covered in this section, I label “re-representation” or “re-presentation” for short, because the historian repeats, that is presents again, one or more statements (to whole

Historical Methods

•

25

arguments and stories) that she accepts as factual just as given in one or more sources. The second, treated in the next section, I label construction because the facts (let alone arguments and stories) need not only to be inferred but developed—that is, constituted—by the historian from one or more sources. The basic distinction between re-presentation and construction, then, hinges not upon how simple or general or how concrete or abstract the factual statement adduced but whether it comes directly by way of quotation or paraphrase from the source or sources or indirectly by interpretation and development from the source or sources. Re-presentation always implies the possibility of comparing the text or other artifact with a verified, authentic original. Without the possibility of such comparison, an alleged copy or simulation must be considered a representation constructed by the historian. Both depend equally upon inference and interpretation by the historian. Both represent the past as history. Representation, however, is the more inclusive term. All re-presentations are representations, but representations can take many forms other than re-presentation. If the historian re-presents factual statements originally recorded, reported, or otherwise presented in one or more sources themselves, then the sources must be presumed to communicate such statements in the first place. This approach explains why historians traditionally studied sources that were testimonies or reports, or at least documentary or textual in a general sense. Classic methods manuals developed rules particularly for this level of historical practice.59 If testimony and reports are to constitute the foundation of re-presentation as a historical practice, then the documentary sources must be as authentic, as trustworthy as possible in the first place. Only after the pedigree of a document or other textual survival establishes it as authentic can historians investigate it for the particulars it can reveal as a source for their goal of re-presenting facts about past peoples’ ideas and beliefs, activities and behavior, institutions and experiences, events and transformations. Such re-presented facts can range from statements about simple physical and behavioral manifestations to abstract, symbolic constructions, from, say, uncomplicated plain everyday beliefs and activities to complicated imagery and social events to complex statistics and poetry. If external criticism asks whether a source can tell us what it claims to or seems to represent, then internal criticism inquires what a source can tell us about the past that we want to know. If the task of source criticism is to establish the trustworthiness of the source, especially documentary, then the job of internal criticism is to extract the factual particulars from it. If

26

•

Fashioning History

external criticism seeks to establish the factual basis of the document, then internal criticism seeks to derive historical knowledge from it. Historians’ dependence on the author or other producer of a document or text for the discovery, validity, and authority of their information led to a set of basic rules in traditional historical methods manuals. Although these rules were meant to apply to constructed as well as re-presented facts, they seem particularly appropriate for the latter, especially since the source can be quoted or paraphrased. The rules sought to answer as best possible: who (or what in the case of institutionally produced documents) knows best and how and why. The most fundamental rule was summarized in the stress on original or primary as opposed to secondary sources. The more the text was produced at the time by someone or some group who witnessed or participated in the event, the better the evidence and the more probable the historian could trust (and repeat) the facts stated. So a basic rule looked at the degree of removal of the testimony, report, or other document from the specific place and time of the event. Was it firsthand eyewitness knowledge, secondhand hearsay, thirdhand information, fourthhand speculation, or further removed? Was the testimony, report, or other text produced by someone or some group at the time, a little later, or much later? In all instances, but particularly in these latter ones, is the report or testimony consistent with other sources? Do different documents report the same fact or set of facts? Ideally, corroboration depends upon two or more independent witnesses, but historians are often lucky to have one witness to an event. Another set of maxims deal with how good a witness or reporter was the producer of the document. These maxims query the witness’ credibility, reliability, and authority. How competent was the witness to understand and report the event, to ask the right questions about it, or come from the right social group to best comprehend matters? What were the witness’ biases in the matter and in whose favor? Did the witness have personal interests or purposes in the matter or in views of the matter itself? Did the witness desire to please a certain audience then or later? These rules assume certain conditions are more favorable to credibility: the testimony or report was a matter of indifference or, better, prejudicial to the witness; the matter was common knowledge at the time; the matter was purely incidental or even contrary to the expectation of what the witness usually says or does. Last, what of the style of the document and what does it tell the historian about the credibility of what is expressed in the contents? Was it satire, pathos, or other literary form that may not

Historical Methods

•

27

mean what it seems at face value? Does the document follow standard conventions used in letters, laws, reports, or treaties at the time? The sentiments of letters and diaries often follow the conventional sentiments and formulas, so to speak, of their time. Thus they reveal more of what was expected at the time (which is valuable too) than report what the individual may have actually felt. Such rules eventuated in a hierarchy of documents based upon their time of production, the size of the intended audience, their private versus their public nature, and, of course, the accuracy of their rendition. These maxims are expressed as probabilities or what is more likely to be the case in any given instance. First, contemporaneity to the event is valued over subsequent production, because it is assumed that the closer the testimony is to the event the better it is remembered. Thus letters, diaries, and newspaper reports from the time are thought more likely to be accurate and better testimony than memoirs and autobiographies written long after, especially if they are ghostwritten. This seems true of memories and oral history too. Second, according to these rules historians preferred private and confidential letters, reports, and dispatches to public ones, because the rules presumed the smaller in number and the more discrete the producers and consumers the more likely the testimony was not slanted for public consumption. (But what of slanting for an audience of one, especially a powerful or influential person?) Thus letters of all kinds, whether business, political, family or otherwise, whether addressed to one or a few persons, are considered more likely to reveal what actually happened and why than newspaper reports, public speeches, or other medium directed to a large or mass audience. For the same reason, a private diary is preferred to a published memoir and a confidential military or diplomatic dispatch to general information released to the public, even though the diary entries may be highly conventional in their expression of feelings or formulaic according to the standards of the document or time. Third, the accuracy of the testimony is assessed. Is it as close to what was said, thought, or experienced at the time? British parliamentary proceedings, for example, were secret until well into the eighteenth century. After that time what records of the debates were published were summaries by reporters. The British House of Commons only supported a “substantially verbatim” record of their proceedings beginning in 1909.60 Although in the United States the House of Representatives opened its galleries to the public including reporters from its founding and the Senate a decade later, not until the establishment of the Congressional Record in

28

•

Fashioning History

1873 was a “substantially verbatim” record kept of the speeches and debates in the two chambers.61 Did and do public opinion pollsters receive the unvarnished thoughts of their subjects, and do the aggregated opinions projected from sampling procedures represent how the “public” perceives something? Autobiographies and memoirs often embody the combined thoughts and talents of the subject and the ghostwriter. Who writes a letter signed or a speech delivered by the president of the United States, or, for that matter, any major leader around the world today? These problems plague all historians’ use of documentary materials but are especially important to those seeking to repeat, paraphrase, or otherwise re-present facts from documentary sources.62 Re-presentation of evidence as fact limits the nature of the sources to texts that can be understood like testimony. Material objects without writing, for example, even when their very existence is taken as indicative of a fact about the nature of a society or culture requires the historian to infer that fact (such as coins and commerce, palaces and power, or weapons and war). Thus objects in museums, for instance, need labels at a minimum, if not lecturers and booklets, as noted later in Chapter 4. Even though such texts as poetry, songs, novels, and other creative and symbolic materials can be reproduced by the historian, they only become represented facts through the historian’s interpretation.63 Similarly such visual materials as paintings and photographs can also be reproduced, but the historian needs to provide the facts they are said to prove. Oral histories and memories only become textual evidence through the intervention of the historian or someone else in the first place, but they can be quoted or paraphrased as fact. And of course the existence of a textual source rarely proves facts about its reception at the time and certainly not later or by whom. Louis Gottschalk declared that the primary purpose of the historical method is the derivation of factual particulars.64 According to him, historians should investigate documentary sources not as wholes but for specific answers to the classic questions of who, what, when, where, and how (and maybe why). Although historians may pose the questions when representing the facts, they expect and, more importantly, accept and reproduce the answers given as such in the document itself. To re-present facts as given in an authenticated source means that the historian agrees with and therefore accepts what is presented in the document at face value. The more facts historians repeat as given in the document, the more they tend to adopt the actor’s or actors’ points of view or ways of understanding the matters under study. At its most inclusive, that means the historian

Historical Methods

•

29

adopts the document’s point of view of who are the actors, what took place, where it occurred, how it happened, and maybe even why. The more historians re-present the facts as given in the document, the more they allow the historical actors to define the situation, to frame the questions, to explain the matters at hand, and also, most likely, to shape the overall point of view on the matters. Thus, the re-presentation of facts works best in those cases in which historians seek to offer actors’ views of matters. Explanation proceeds by intention, desire, and motive as actors describe, understand, or profess to understand events. The historian acknowledges that how the historical actors understood social categories and groupings, social and physical environment, culture and politics describes matters best and most accurately. Thus factual re-presentation worked well for discussing elite goals and actions in the old political, diplomatic, military history. It also serves well in the newer cultural and microhistory as shown in such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error.65 But there is a fundamental problem with using the views of a single social group, whether subaltern or dominant, whether oppressed or elite to represent matters. Without extreme care, the actors’ orientations and presumptions can all too easily become the historian’s own way of looking at these matters. Even the mere quotation of a view can imply the historian shares it as the correct and accurate one. For example, what if a historian quotes at some length a source disparaging French Canadian colonists, African American slaves, or Native American males as “lazy” in her book as if she accepted that biased description as her own and correct? Recent attention to the histories of racial and ethnic groups, women, gays and lesbians, subalterns or other subordinated persons caused historians to search out new documentary sources. The new documentary sources could now be investigated for factual particulars not found in the traditional documentary sources produced by the elites in a society. At the level of re-presentation, though, this still means the acceptance of the facts as presented in the sources themselves. In recent decades, these re-presented facts about minorities were added to the sum total of historical information. As a result, these facts challenged general interpretations of the nature of society as presumed previously by most professional historians. If questions convert sources into facts, then multiculturalism changed the questions asked of old sources as well as fueled the search for new sources. It also provided new kinds of contexts in which to ask and answer those questions. This challenge

30

•

Fashioning History

is better explored in the next chapter on historical synthesis with its focus on explanation, generalization, story, argument, perspective, and meaning. As these considerations remind us, newly accepted facts can contradict old facts, challenge generalizations, and perhaps even revise older interpretations. The most obvious and elementary rebuttal occurs when one derived factual statement discredits another. Somewhat more complicated is the challenge of a new fact or facts to a generalization. In this sense, the factual particular proves useful as a check or test of others’ generalizations. While a compilation of many facts may not prove a point, just one well-chosen fact can disprove a generalization. Still more complicated is the revision of prevailing interpretations through questioning the previously asserted and accepted facts and offering newer, presumably more accurate factual statements. I suppose that is the hope and remedy expressed in the phrase “sovereignty of the sources, tribunal of the documents.” 66 The phrase implies that even a complicated synthesis of facts, argument, viewpoint, and moral outlook can be tested as a whole by simple recourse to the facts. Interestingly, however, proof of inaccurate statements or disputed facts need not overturn a historical synthesis by themselves, since an interpretation or synthesis is much more than just the sum of its inferred factual statements as we shall see in the next chapter. It is at the level of factual re-presentation that the empirical foundation of historical practice, hence history, seems most evident. But even in the re-presentation of the most rudimentary facts, the historian must interpret the sources’ interpretations. At the least, historians must understand the language of a documentary source, including the possibility that the text is a satire in which the words do not mean what they appear to. A good example of whether a statement should be read as satire is provided by Benjamin Franklin’s comments on the possibility of the colonies forming a union in a letter to James Parker, March 20, 1750/1: “It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union, and be able to execute it is such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.”67 For many years that sentence was interpreted as anotherexample of Franklin’s penchant for irony, but recent proponents of the significant impact of the Iroquois Confederacy on (white) American ideas of federation accept the statement as not only justified and prophetic but

Historical Methods

•

31

also as utterly sincere and serious in spite of its prejudicial reference to “ignorant Savages.”68 The problem of translation extends from interpreting the words of one language into those of another to interpreting from the conceptual categories of one time into those of another. That words and concepts had different meanings in their own context from how historians had long understood them is the argument of Quentin Skinner and others reclaiming the supposed meaning of tracts and debates in early modern European political thought.69 Thus even elementary re-presentation of the facts from a document must surmount the hermeneutic conundrum of the historian translating from how actors interpreted matters in their time through their own views and viewpoints to how the historian can understand actors in the past through today’s views and viewpoints.70 That such translation occurs guarantees the necessity of anachronism to smaller and larger degrees in historical practice.71 How and what did actors understand as the appropriate context of their thoughts and actions, and how and what can current historians understand and re-present of that context? Must the historian share social and cultural traditions and maybe even language, customs, and politics with past peoples in order to interpret past artifacts and records? If the past is really different from the present, to what extent can the present-day historian use re-presentation as a means of expositing that past for a modern day audience? To what extent do the contexts of today determine what of and how we today understand the past, and vice versa? Even though the contexts of past thoughts and actions give meaning to them, it is the contexts of the present that must provide understanding of those earlier contexts. The role of living tradition both helps and blinds us at the same time to past contexts. It provides context to past documents and artifacts that are still in use or at least recognizable. But tradition also blinds us to past texts and objects by making them seem familiar when they are not necessarily so, as recent arguments in intellectual history and political theory show about the words of John Locke and others.72 Even at this basic level of factual re-presentation, documents are read in light of accepted history in spite of the admonition of historical methodologists, for the assessment of valid particulars is as much a function of current professional knowledge of a period in general as what is given in the source. Where do the questions asked of the documents come from: within or outside the documents? If inside, then the historian risks accepting the author’s viewpoint as her own. If outside the documents, then what provides the context? First, that context may derive from the

32

•

Fashioning History

historian’s knowledge of events from the future of the time studied. Second, that context comes from the history profession at the time of the research. Sources are always read from a historiographical context that poses certain standard questions and screens certain answers as plausible about a period or set of events. Last, collective memory and heritage shape and influence the questions and answers, even if negatively. These problems arise even when the historian quotes or paraphrases the sources. Facts as Constructions Historians also construct factual statements fashioned from one or more sources. A history, no matter how short, is obviously constructed, but so too are many or most of the facts comprising such a history. Any resort to more than one source for any matter other than simple corroboration (that is, the same fact across sources) of a re-presented factual particular involves the construction or constitution of factual statements. Any fact not repeated or paraphrased from a source is constructed, and even paraphrases may be constructed to a smaller or larger extent. The two kinds of facts, but especially those constructed, always depend for both their creation by historians and their acceptance by other professionals and the public alike on the framework used to derive and interpret them. Factual statements have to be constructed for all nontextual sources, for the historian must develop their meaning through interpretation. Material objects and even visual artifacts do not yield their factual information without the historian’s inferences. Although some persons profess to believe that material objects “speak for themselves,” the presence of labels if not more elaborate interpretive aids in museums suggests the opposite. Even if the artifact itself is taken as direct evidence—a direct correlate—of what it is said to prove, the historian must still construct the facts. Historians take the very existence of a network of roads, aqueducts, railroads, airports, or Web sites as indexes of technological skill and bureaucratic organization. The distribution of coins and the nature of artifacts map the extent of commerce and trade routes. Censuses, court records, and legislative proceedings prove governmental organization by their existence as much as by what they say. Body and building ornamentation like murals and paintings signify certain artistic techniques and taste. Poems and stories suggest cultural premises and moral values. The nature of the medium can disclose a great deal about its producer if not always its consumer. Handwriting in a document, for example, can reveal a lot about the author: quavering strokes might signify age or condition of health;

Historical Methods

•

33

spelling and grammar might demonstrate level of education.73 Maps not only show an image of the landscape and even the world but also suggest navigational skill, trade routes, printing skills, political power, and cosmology among other things.74 That historians take the very existence of a source to prove factual points relies ultimately on the context constructed by the historian to interpret the evidence in that manner.75 To the extent that historians reject any one document’s or set of textual sources’ versions of facts, be they presented as testimonies, reports, observations, summations, explanations, statistics, stories or otherwise, the more they must resort to the development, that is, the construction of facts through inference, analysis, interpretation, or other means from one or more documents. Historians are forced to resort to constructions of fact or facts in several instances common in documentary research. If sources disagree on a fact, then the historian must either select one version to re-present or construct a fact by inference and interpretation. Comparison of variations among sources may suggest the best version for re-presentation but more likely it results in a constructed fact. A fact may be created by inferring it from several sources. My study of the Ordinances in the United States Articles of Confederation Congress from 1784 to 1787 creating separate territories and eventually self-government for them in the area between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers used all these methods of construction to arrive at the facts. Almost no letters or legislative debates exist to provide motives or reasons for the changing proposed ordinances over time. For many of the changes, therefore, we have only the bill itself reported out of committee. Sometimes the only alteration in a bill was the word “district” being replaced by “territory.” That the word “territory” replaced ultimately the initial word “colony” and then “district” indicates, I believe, that the politicians of the time thought they had originated a new kind of colonial system that gave the inhabitants equal status eventually with the original states in the Confederation, even if they had to recapitulate the sequence of the thirteen states from colonies to independent states. Thus the reasons for the modifications must be inferred or constructed rather than re-presented. I concluded from the scanty evidence that the first scheme of governance usually ascribed to Thomas Jefferson was actually first proposed in outline before he arrived to take his seat in late 1783. He did flesh out the nature of government, and he particularly named and bounded the eventual states. However, Jefferson’s own proposal for the location and size of the new states-to-be violated the maximum size specified in his own state’s cession to the new United States of its claims to this region in the

34

•

Fashioning History

first place. I arrived at this conclusion by measuring his proposed states’ boundaries against a map of the time with which he was likely familiar and might have used himself. Last, in a more controversial proposition, I argued that the evolution from initial dependent territory to full-fledged statehood in the final Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was not as different politically from Jefferson’s 1784 Ordinance as other historians had long argued. They portrayed Jefferson’s plan of self-government in the beginning stage as liberal in keeping with the Progressive school’s interpretation of the man himself, while denial of self-government in the first stage in the final 1787 Ordinance was characterized as conservative just as was the Federal Constitution of that year compared to the Articles of Confederation of 1780 in their view. I hypothesized rather that the two documents may not have been as different in Jefferson’s eyes as Progressive historians argued, because he had not discussed any changes very much in his usually voluminous correspondence. Moreover, he never mentioned the change in governance as such. Whether such negative evidence proves my contention is debatable, but these disputes show that the facts derived from such scarce evidence rely more on the political views and historiographic school of the historian than empirical extrapolation. If nothing else, it is clear that scarce sources point to the constructed nature of most historical facts derived from them.76 Historians commonly reconstrue the facts already interpreted in a document to create different or new ones. The most obvious reinterpretation occurs when there is great difference in cultures, worldviews, and standards for behavior between the historian and the producer of the documentary evidence. The greater the difference between past and present persons, the more obvious to historians is the bias of the sources. Past documents can be good sources for the values and actions of their authors but less so as they describe or categorize the values, activities, and institutions of the others observed in the source. Facts about these matters may therefore be re-presentations or constructions. Such documents, however, may be poor sources for the thoughts, experiences, and at times the behavior of the others described in them, particularly when dominant people depict those subordinated in a society or when those of one “culture” describe those of another. In such cases of past obvious bias, for example, against slaves, witches, and aboriginal peoples from today’s viewpoint, historians prefer to reinterpret the sources in light of modern-day standards and sensibilities. Thus so much history about the discriminated

Historical Methods

•

35

against, the subordinated, and the subaltern comes from constructed facts about them according to a modern as well as past context. In line with modern-day sensibilities in these and other instances, historians infer or postulate, then, quite different facts to describe who, what, where, and how or to explain the why than given by the authors of those primary document(s) seen as biased. Historians today, for example, must sort out what they accept as facts from the assumptions about racial, ethnic, and other inferiorities so long the context in which so many documentary sources were produced. This reinterpretation applies most obviously to ethnic, racial, gender and minority groups, because so often elites, oppressors, or others dominant in a situation or in a society produced the sources. Postcolonial histories, subaltern studies, and the pasts of native peoples until recently rested mainly on such constructed facts.77 Construction of facts through reconstruing past evidence often comes into play when describing the aggregate actions, values, social groupings and categories by social class and other methods common to social analysis today. Although the British political historian Geoffrey R. Elton thought such theory contaminated, even concealed, the facts from the past, each historian must nevertheless construct or at least construe how any given past society worked and what were its parts. Such analysis may not be the explicit goal of the historian’s research, but her facts will presume these categories. The historian must be particularly careful about assuming that persons in the past would act just like those in the present when faced by a similar situation.78 Construction also results from historians using modern-day statistical analysis to provide new data about a past society. Often such analysis results in facts about a society that its citizens may have experienced but did or could not describe or report in their documents as such. Economic historians, for example, create previously unknown statistical facts about the degree of unemployment, the impact of international trade, or the gross national product. Social historians construct statistical facts about social mobility, the literacy rate, and the social background of participants in voluntary associations or riots. Demographic historians construct birth and death rates or age at time of marriage. Political historians use statistical analysis to determine the presence and role of political parties in the electorate and the government or the issues salient to voters. Such statistical analysis not only generates new facts but also new explanations of past phenomena different than the people at the time may have conceived. While documents from the time are utilized in such analysis and some past observers may have given the same generalizations and causes,

36

•

Fashioning History

modern-day statistical and other kinds of analysis allows denial or confirmation of those facts given at the time or provides new ones.79 As these paragraphs suggest, a good many constructed facts result from the levels of abstraction and synthesis used to give content to social categories. Many generalizations about groups of persons, sets of events, institutions, societies, and other collective subjects are examples of constructed facts. A notorious example is social class, but others are ideologies and moral values. Although these constructed facts may be derived from a single document, they usually are developed from several or more. Statistical descriptions, for example, may re-present what is given in one or more documents, but more likely they are constituted from an analysis of many sources. Statistical analysis aggregates and analyzes data in many individual documents to produce facts about general matters. Facts are obviously constructed when they describe what past peoples could not have known explicitly in the same way as a modern-day historian does. Perhaps the most important type of this reconstruing comes from the historian knowing the future of past actions and beliefs. That historians know the future of the past enables them to have post hoc predictive powers. They know how plans and actions, economic cycles and political movements turned out. Such knowledge allows historians to construct facts about the unintended as well as intended consequences of aimed-for actions. Sometimes historians quote or paraphrase documents by later persons describing the effects, particularly in the so-called old political, military, and diplomatic history. In the newer social and political history, the historian derives the effects of past demographic and economic trends, electoral cycles and legislative coalitions from a multitude of documents through sophisticated techniques. Other, usually later, sources may mention one or another effect, but the historian needs to look specifically for differential effects on specific sectors of the population. This is the domain of reader formation, reception and audience response theory.80 Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990) describes, as part of her general story of mass production workers and the labor movement, how African Americans, Mexican Americans, various immigrant groups, and poor white Southern Americans each reshaped mass culture to their own purposes in the 1920s and early 1930s.81 If the hazard to the historian of re-presented facts is adopting the source’s viewpoint on matters, then the risk of constructed facts is substituting the historian’s viewpoint for that of the source as the basis of the fact. Both kinds of facts, however, result only from questions put to the

Historical Methods

•

37

sources. Those questions are framed according to the historian’s purposes, social theories, explanatory models, understanding of human affairs, social and cultural traditions, and what the historical profession endorses. The resulting facts, or more precisely factual particulars, are of various sorts depending upon what the factual statement refers to, how it refers to it, and what the nature of the supporting evidence is as found in the sources. If one were to conceive of factuality and truthfulness in historical practice on a scale of how much and closely the evidentiary sources are used to make assertions of fact, then at one end are factual particulars given in the source itself. At the other end of the scale are complex, summative or classificatory statements developed from many sources. The English Civil War and American Revolution, for example, are both “facts” in the sense historians use that term. Facts on that level, however, embrace a myriad of other facts about battles won and lost, generals’ plans and soldiers’ actions in the field, the behavior of wives, politicians, merchants and others at home, and millions of other facts, and they in turn rest on countless other facts. Even to ask what was revolutionary about the events of each revolution elicits still other facts as answers. 82 Historians consider all these many kinds of statements factual and truthful in their way, but the way matters greatly and varies widely in historical practice. And, of course, all depend upon one or more contexts of use and understanding. They may, and more probably do, depend on some social theory or model of explanation or even some interpretation or moral or political purpose, but that is left to the next chapter. Whether offered as descriptive, explanatory, or interpretive, all such statements, however, are proffered as (and believed to be) factual in historical practice. All are considered part of historical knowledge. As we move from facts about specific, concrete matters to facts as summative statements, classificatory terms, and abstract matters, even though all are based (more or less) on empirical evidence, we can begin to see why historians argue over what is a fact and what are the facts in a specific case. Some facts are agreed upon by all (professional) historians. These facts, on the whole, are those corroborated by many documents and are re-presentations of what is given in those documents or easily inferred according to professional standards. These are so accepted as true that no one goes back to the documented sources. Historians accept as historical facts that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, that French citizens captured the Bastille in 1789, that George Washington became the first president of the United States in the same year, and that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. These facts mark what historians consider still other facts: the

38

•

Fashioning History

end of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Roman Empire; the end of the ancien régime and the beginning of the French Revolution; the end of the Articles of Confederation government and the beginnings of the federal government under the United States Constitution; the end of the cold war and the beginnings of whatever the post–cold war era will be called. Such second order statements are recognized as facts by professional practice and social custom and are therefore considered knowledge. These second order facts may be constructed but they are considered factual and therefore true to the past. Some statements about the past are considered true, that is factual, by only some historians. Such facts are more likely to be constructed than represented, because of the greater degree of interpretation needed to establish the fact. Historians might differ over which documentary evidence is pertinent, what the evidence really means, and what statements are therefore factual. Differences among historians over the truths of such facts are likely to sort according to interpretations, schools, theories, or methods as we shall see in the next chapter. Whether a document can and should be accepted at face value illustrates well this point and its associated problems. Historians can agree on the authenticity of the document as such but disagree over how to interpret it factually. The two proclamations, for example, issued by the English king Charles II at the end of the 1676 Virginia rebellion that was associated with the name of Nathaniel Bacon receive quite opposite treatments by the standard authorities on the subject. Wilcomb Washburn argued in 1957 that the proclamations “designed as propaganda leaflets to aid the governor in breaking up the rebellion, placed a price on Bacon’s head, but promised pardon to all his followers who would lay down their arms within twenty days of its publication.”83 Both an earlier authority Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker and later Stephen Saunders Webb accept the documents at face value.84 To them the king indeed was more lenient than the vengeful Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley. The reader of these three experts can only conclude that their differing versions of these two documents depend, first, on their appraisal of the character of the two protagonists, Berkeley and Bacon, and, second, on the larger interpretive context they use to understand all the relevant documents. Washburn favors Berkeley over Bacon and excuses all his actions, no matter how vindictive they appear. In this case, he defends Berkeley’s own more vengeful proclamation condemning the rebels by devaluing the King’s more lenient proclamations as propaganda. Wertenbaker portrayed Bacon as the “Torchbearer of the Revolution,” as one of his books

Historical Methods

•

39

is titled, because he saw the rebellion as prelude to the American Revolution. In line with this grand narrative of the growth of American democracy, he sides with Bacon as a democratic forerunner and depreciates Berkeley as an aristocrat opposing democratic advances. Hence Wertenbaker sees Berkeley’s own proclamation as furthering aristocratic ends even if it meant disobeying the king’s orders and proclamations. Webb places the events of 1676 in an imperial context, in which the English officials were trying to consolidate a more centralized and bureaucratic imperial administration—“the end of American independence,” as his subtitle puts it. Thus they oppose Berkeley’s longtime goal of operating a Virginia independent of the crown and mainly for the benefit of the governor and his followers. Berkeley therefore saw the king’s proclamations as furthering stability in a rebellious colony, which the governor sought to undermine in order to continue his own independent exploitation of the colony’ inhabitants and resources. In each historian’s case, his larger interpretive perspective governed his reading of the document and whether to accept it at face value. In all cases, the facts were constructed, and, in Washburn’s instance, his view even undercuts any reason to re-present any statement found in the document as factual. Whether re-presented or constructed, the credibility of all facts depend upon three general sets of contexts. One set comprises those contexts derived from professional training and traditions. Another set revolve about those attributed to various past societies and cultures. Still another set includes the reception of facts by various audiences in the present. These are interconnected in practice. Thus one person’s generalization is another person’s fact. One person’s fact is another person’s hypothesis. Some statements about the Washington Monument in the United States Capitol illustrate the relationship among these contexts.85 All historians and their audiences accept the following statements as fact and therefore true. The Washington Monument in Washington, DC (to distinguish it from other monuments erected to him in the United States) is a 555-feet, 5 1/8-inch tall neo-Egyptian obelisk. The object itself is a survival that can be measured, but the attribution of its neoEgyptian style comes from historical knowledge of its documents and context, partly a re-presentation and partly a construction. That the twelve-ton plus cornerstone was laid July 4, 1848 and the one hundred ounce aluminum cap was placed December 6, 1884, are statements represented from the documents. Likewise, that it commemorates George Washington as the commanding general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and first president of United States under the

40

•

Fashioning History

new federal Constitution comes from the tradition of its name and, more importantly, from generally accepted acknowledgment of the facts.86 Most historians and many of their audiences would accept as true and probably a fact that the obelisk erected to him is a phallic symbol. Some might even say that this is appropriately ironic given that Washington could father a country but not children. The first fact owes its inspiration to the theories of Sigmund Freud. The second is an inference from the absence of records about any children with Martha Washington, even though the documents reveal she had two children with her first husband.87 Fewer historians and probably fewer of their audiences (especially males) might accept as true that for Americans to call George Washington the father of his country perpetuates the patriarchal myth that oppressed women throughout United States history. That Washington is called “the father of his country” is documented tradition. That this is a patriarchal myth and that it oppressed women throughout American history depends upon a feminist interpretation of American history.88 Almost no historian but perhaps more of the audience accept as true that the monument points upward toward Heaven where Washington has resided since his earthly death. The factuality of this statement presumes a particular interpretation of the Judeo-Christian belief system. The proponents of this statement as fact believe that the elevation of the monument indicates or symbolizes a pointing upwards. This belief in turn hinges upon an anthropomorphic interpretation of the obelisk: elevation represents direction. They of course assume the location as well as the existence of heaven. The denial of such an interpretation, let alone as a fact, shows the secular assumptions underlying modern historical knowledge and even interpretation. Of course, the east face of the capstone contains the words “LAUS DEO,” but this is an artifact of the 1880s. So what evidence is this pro forma statement either of what was believed at the time of the monument’s origin or now? 89 As these various statements suggest, historians cannot separate the establishment of a fact from its creation according to some framework of interpretation. Nor can they split the acceptance of a factual statement from the context provided by an audience, whether other professionals or members of the larger public. To separate facts from interpretation is to misunderstand and misrepresent what historians do and can do. Both represented and constructed facts use contexts and interpretation in their own ways. Many historians also argue that facts cannot be separated from one’s ultimate values and beliefs. The production of factual statements is the culmination of the historical method, but it is only the beginning of

Historical Methods

•

41

fashioning histories. Factual statements, whether re-presented or constructed, are among the elements synthesized into histories, which is the subject of the next chapter. Memories as Sources, Context, and History Memories are a special kind of survival. Our memories seem to give immediate access to the past. Moreover that impression of the past grounds and warrants our certainty that the past once really existed. Such a common sense existential notion of the past as real justifies ultimately both the profession of history as an intellectual enterprise and the historical method as its chief technique.90 People’s memories provide evidence about earlier events, customs, thoughts, and traditions. Some memories seem just like any other form of testimony about the past. In fact, historians have long used memoirs and other documents produced by individuals remembering events, activities, and attitudes from their own past. Oral history interviews of those who were famous or infamous add to the customary historical data about past lives, activities, organizations, movements, or events. In practice, the distinction between primary and secondary sources and the maxims employed to evaluate and develop the facts from secondary sources handled these forms of memory like other evidential sources. In this use of memory, such testimony supplements other forms of documentation. Some memories provide information obtainable in no other form about the past of an individual, group, or society. Oral historians query workers, soldiers, women, minorities, and other members of the subordinated and exploited for the view “from the bottom up” or “from below” in order to get a glimpse of the past otherwise undocumented. Museum and historic site curators discover the uses of tools, objects, and other material artifacts from those who used them or at least remember how they were once used. By such means they gain knowledge about obsolete machines and tools, antique toys and games, and once common household artifacts and practices.91 Museum curators and archivists also find invaluable at times the information supplied by informants who remember neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and schools no longer in existence. At times, such memories help provide a larger context for museum exhibits and historic sites. Documentary filmmakers include individuals to give firsthand accounts of their previous lives or times as a way of adding authority as well as authenticity, information as well as interest, to their movies and television shows.

42

•

Fashioning History

Memories also perpetuate traditions and customs and venerate the verities of a group’s or society’s heritage as people commemorate what they at present believe best or most important about their past. Today some museums or other repositories even collect memories to remember experiences of those events too horrendous to leave to the ordinary forms of written history. Such collections of memories are meant to guarantee that such sacrifices were not in vain and will not disappear with the death of those who experienced the events they recall. Forgetting is not an option in this urgency to remember the evil horrors of the past and propels much of the recent emphasis on the importance of memory in scholarship. Such uses of memories raise the problematic relationship between memory and history and exemplify the difficulties of applying the traditional maxims of evaluating sources as evidence for facts.92 To students of memory, everything seems based on it—personal identity, culture, gender, ethnicity, and nationality as well as heritage—because everything not of the present moment is from the past and therefore a memory or depends upon a memory. Such an approach to memory absorbs all other kinds of study and is too imprecise for the use of the historian. To students of history, memory is at best a source, although it also serves as context for historians and heritage for others. If everyday experience tells us memory of the past can be vivid, it is also warns us that memory is fallible as we forget. As fundamental and elemental as memory seems to the historical enterprise, it poses problems as survival and source, resource and context, heritage and history.93 One major problem stems from memories being both personal and social. On one hand, all memories are those of individuals about their lives, families and friends, neighborhoods, regions and nations, rituals and places of worship, professions and occupations, schools and schooling, military service, ethnicity and gender, and a multitude of other matters. That almost all memories are shared by at least some other persons and often by many in a society poses problems of description as well as explanation for the scholar of collective memory. Even most immediate individual memories and their local contexts are social: family, friends, neighborhood, workplace, church, school, and military camp. But even at this level do all the participants share the same memories of the same events let alone of a longer past? That peoples’ memories of matters, frequently the same matters, so often vary by the person’s age and generation, social class and organizational position, place and time, ethnicity and gender among other contexts suggest both their social dimension and the problem of descriptive aggregation. Hence whether a person is a general

Historical Methods

•

43

back at headquarters or a soldier in the field, a grandparent or a grandchild, a boss or a worker, a master or a slave, a patrician or a proletarian, in one ethnic group or another, a member of an old aristocratic family or a new immigrant, a nurse or a housewife, a politician or a professor, a priest or a poet, a suffragist or a nun makes a difference in memories, oral recollections, and folk and formal histories.94 Even more difficult to describe and explain are memories seemingly shared by all within a society or culture. Yet it is these collective social or public memories that have most fascinated historians and other scholars in the last few decades. According to Pierre Nora, the editor of a sevenvolume compendium of scholarly essays on French sites or realms of memory, such “lieux de mémoire” are “specific objects that codify, condense, anchor . . . national memory.”95 They can be immaterial as well as material, for he includes mottoes, festivals, speeches, treaties, customs, flags, and holidays as well as commemorative monuments, palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries, school textbooks, national founding documents, paintings, and archives among the many such sites. According to Nora, these sites embody and reinforce as they trigger and represent the past in the popular consciousness. Such memories are cultural to the extent they are shared and constitutive of a culture to the degree they comprise and perpetuate the collective identity of those said to share it. They are historical both in the sense they survive from the past and they symbolize the past of (and to) a society. In pursuit of the mechanism and medium of cultural or collective memory, scholars have studied a wide variety of social phenomena: public holidays, rituals of all manner sacred and secular, school lessons and texts, commemorative parades and ceremonies, patriotic monuments and memorials of all kinds, street and other place names, museum exhibitions and heritage displays, preserved or restored old buildings and towns, jokes and popular songs, children’s stories and television programs, and visual and verbal objects of all sorts that exemplify as they prompt memories (so-called mnemonic memory). Today television is one of the great mnemonic memory generators. As a result of its dissemination then and its frequent repetition later of the collapse of World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, people across the globe instantly recognize the scene when played. Of course the differing interpretations of that event across organized groups and nationalities hints at the difficulty of generalizing about what a supposedly collective memory signifies to different persons, let alone what it shows about popular historical consciousness.96

44

•

Fashioning History

The profusion of terminology in the field indicates the disagreement on how best to describe let alone explain such phenomena. As the several terms—collective memory, social memory, public memory, national memory, official memory, vernacular memory, countermemory, and even at times the older terms remembrance and myth—all suggest, the problem revolves around who shares what and how. As the various terms imply, some differences result from the varying assessments of who creates the memories and how, who perpetuates the memories and why, who uses the memories for which purposes, and what are the traditions and modes of representation by which they are transmitted.97 Thus, for example, notions of national and official memories presume they are shared throughout a society, though the latter probably originates from governmental or other bureaucratic sources. Vernacular and countermemories suggest that memories are situated in differing social sectors and may derive from an oppositional impulse to the national and official ones. Students of social or collective memory agree that present-day concerns screen the memories of the past, that many past events are not remembered by social groupings, that memories serve present-day political and other purposes, and that such memory is objectified because it is public and therefore intersubjective. Just who shares and how is open to argument but memories are always mediated by time, space, cultural values, and social position. In that sense and way the problems of description and explanation in collective memory are no more or less problematic than most other inquiries into social and cultural phenomena. Another major problem concerns the connection between collective memory and history, or more precisely, the relationship between historical scholarship and popular or vernacular historical consciousness. Whether collective memories of past matters agree with historians’ interpretations of those places and times is once again an important—and open—issue. Once upon a time not so many decades ago, memory and history were considered opposites in goal and reliability. Historical scholarship was thought to describe the past as it really was, while collective memory imagined a past that never existed as remembered. Historians proved such memories all too often to be merely nostalgic or even mythical in the sense of being false. Pierre Nora asserted, for example, that history and memory are in “fundamental opposition.” He declared dramatically in his 1984 introduction to Lieux de Mémoire, “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation,

Historical Methods

•

45

susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. . . . At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory.”98 Compare the similar distinction historical geographer David Lowenthal makes between “dead” history and “vital” heritage in Possessed by the Past: “[H]eritage and history rely on antithetical modes of persuasion. . . . Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and error. . . . Heritage is immune to critical reappraisal because it is not erudition but catechism; what counts is not checkable fact but credulous allegiance.”99 History employed documentary analysis because living memory of the past was extinct or disappearing. However, with the modern disbelief in standard grand narratives of progress, or other grand narratives, to provide a larger context for heritage and the seeming postmodernist reduction of so much historical scholarship to textual representation, the gap between memory and history narrowed in the opinion of many scholars. As historical representation becomes more invented and fictive according to postmodernist assumptions, collective memory becomes another important form of representation of the past. Scholars study how memories come about and are shaped and transmitted in the hope of learning how societies come to understand their past. Thus historian of recent Germany Wulf Kansteiner defines collective memory as “the result of the interaction among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests.”100 The ultimate question about collective memory as heritage is how and to what degree popular historical consciousness fashions the past even in professional histories. (Of course, individuals’ memories of historic events offer valuable evidence for historians through oral history.) To what extent do the social and temporal positions of individual historians in relation to collective memories of their time shape their histories? Those claiming to be the 1960s generation prefer to remember those times and their generation more favorably than those coming before and after. From the clashing experiences of the 1960s come the contending memories of that and other generations as they all age.101 Many historians from that generation distrust big institutions, public or private, national or international, and all huge processes, whether the global spread of capitalism or mass media (usually depicted as working in union). They therefore

46

•

Fashioning History

frequently prefer the local and transnational over the national and international, countermemory to the official version, and even the people’s experience and memory over long- dominant formal histories in the profession. While older historians in the United States still enthusiastic about the possibilities of politics, as manifested in the New Deal for example, trusted modern liberalism and the national government, a younger generation of historians condemned that liberalism for the actions of the big state it justified and the warfare, racism, gender inequality, and continuing poverty it allowed, or even fostered.102 Thus a historian’s individual autobiographical or shared collective memories offer a resource that provides personal guidance for measuring what is factual, plausible, and moral in the documented past. On one side, postgraduate seminars often question what the aspiring historian had learned as official memory in elementary and secondary school and perhaps even in college. On the other side, historians bring their own family, social class, political, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, regional, national, and other experiences to the formal training they receive in graduate school. These memories may challenge prevailing professional knowledge and interpretations. In that sense, family traditions and vernacular memory may act as counter-memory in a historian’s life and work. Surely some of the reason for the rise and popularity of oral history must be ascribed to efforts of historians and others to counteract official memory as represented in earlier twentieth century histories with the experience and knowledge embodied in the vernacular memory they possessed, whether of workers, women, or subalterns. Perhaps the greatest influence of background as opposed to professional training may show in what a historian accepts as realistic and ethical in a history. That Armenian and Turkish histories still differ over the 1915 massacre of Armenians, or Japanese and Chinese histories over the so-called Rape of Nanking, Hispanic and Texan memories of the Alamo, or Irish and English accounts of Northern Ireland, for example, shows the influence of background and tradition versus professional training in the production of histories as well as memories.103 Continuing social traditions and “living” collective memory provide historians and their audiences with a context for understanding the past as history. When memory and tradition are shared by historian and public alike, there seems little need to describe and less need to explain those institutions, customs, languages, societies, cultures, governments, economies, tools, weapons, and other things still used and shared. Living memory, for example, provides a ready-made context for understanding past artifacts no longer used in the present and customs no longer prevalent. Whether

Historical Methods

•

47

and how much living memory is required to understand a past society was raised provocatively many decades ago by a president of the American Historical Association. He suggested to loud dissent that American historians who came from families of recent immigrants and were reared in cities could not really understand the rural and Protestant lives of English colonists in what became the United States.104 What experiences and background enables a historian to cross religious faiths, gender boundaries, racial groupings, ethnic cleavages, and quite different cultures is a matter of controversy. As social traditions change or become extinct and memory becomes weak or nonexistent, the more the historian must approach the past like an anthropologist in a foreign land. Without living memory and continuing social tradition, the more the historian needs to imagine a context to make sense of the documentary and other artifactual survivals in order to understand the past as history. That context is generated by formal training to interpret documentary and other remains through the historical method. Those once living documents, monuments, and other sites of memory are studied now for what they reveal about how past peoples imagined and represented matters: to embody communal values; to exemplify virtue; to offer warnings and lessons; to legitimate practices and institutions, to provide self and/or collective identity. Commemorations, memorials, and other forms of collective memory now become sources to be interpreted as representations by a past society of its then present and past.105 That both collective memories and professional historical interpretations have their own histories, then, complicates their relationship to each other and their uses in understanding the past. The question of continuity or discontinuity of tradition and memory between a given past, a later point, or now (or vice versa) is posed starkly in the idea of invented traditions: those rituals and other practices purporting to be ancient in origin but actually recent in creation. Many such invented traditions arose to create and support a collective identity, like the Scottish Highland tradition, the rediscovery of Celts, the cult of Shinto in Japan, or Confederate flags and other symbols. Other traditions sustain the hegemony of a modern national state, like British royal pageantry, the French Joan of Arc Day, or the American Thanksgiving and Memorial Days. The discovery of such invented traditions demands customary historical analysis.106 Even though such traditions misrepresent the ancientness of their practice, they constitute their own kind of historical data about past and present societies and cultures. They just cannot be accepted at face value as

48

•

Fashioning History

an accurate representation of what they claim occurred in the actual past. The very idea of an invented tradition challenges the validity of social tradition as a guide to the past. On the other hand, official and collective memories and professional histories may accept the same metastories as their ultimate contextualization. In the end, memory studies and professional histories share the same problems and often demand the same approaches as a result. As Kansteiner concludes, memories like professional historical representations “are negotiated, selective, present-oriented, and relative, while insisting that the experiences they reflect cannot be manipulated at will.”107 To the extent that memories are collective they offer important intersubjective clues to how a society conceives and represents its past. To the extent that collective memories are about history, they pose the same problems of analysis and interpretation as any other survivals converted into sources, hence, for example, both the value and problem of oral history. As invented social traditions demonstrate about the past of a society, collective memory as a guide to the actual history of society can perpetrate its own kind of obfuscation. What collective memories can tell us about the past that historians seek to explicate in their own works elicits a different approach to memory as source than what such memories reveal about how a group of people represent(ed) their past to themselves. In both cases historians use memories as sources but to different ends. In exploring sites and realms of collective memory for clues to popular historical consciousness, historians ask who are the makers and perpetrators of such memories in a society, through what means and to what ends, and how and why were these memories received and interpreted in the ways they were by a group or society. In investigating memories as sources for the historians’ own interpretations of the past, they ask what kinds of facts can be developed from what kinds of materials and how reliable are the inferred or hypothesized facts about the past? In both cases, historians approach sites or realms of memory with the same critical attitude and often the same basic questions as they would for validating any other artifact as a reliable historical source.

CHAPTER 2

Historical Synthesis From Statements to Histories

T

he historical method does not produce histories, only statements that can be used in a history. The procedures do not even produce a story or argument as such unless these are repeated directly from a source. Every history is much more than a simple summary or compilation of factual statements. Each history in its very form as well as content navigates the tension among the many grander and lesser goals historians and others pursue in representing the past as history. In the end, then, any history must be judged by what it is: an organized or synthesized totality. Historians consider this complex production the literary or artistic side of their practice. Histories as Form and Content Many schemes exist for classifying kinds of histories. Some stress forms of presentation and the nature of the medium: monographs, reports, essays, lectures, documentary films, museum exhibitions, historic sites, and reenactments among others. Alternate schemes categorize by the intended audience: general surveys and films destined for classrooms; television programs, popular histories, and historical pageants for the lay public; scholarly monographs and articles directed to the professional historian; the preservation of historic sites and reconstruction of old buildings and villages for antiquarians, preservationists, and historians. One can sort histories by the sectors of life covered: political, legal, diplomatic, military, economic, social, intellectual, cultural, ecological, and so on. These in turn are further divided. Social histories, for example, include urban, educational, medical, working-class, women’s, minority, and old age among

50

•

Fashioning History

other topics. Still newer kinds of histories focus on diasporas, tourism, the human body, emotions, masculinity and gender, books and reading, memory, childhood, and local everyday life or microhistory. Other classificatory schemes center on technique: biographical; statistical and quantitative; narrative; and analytical among others. Some stress space—local or national in the age of the nation-state; regional, world, comparative, or transnational in more global times. Some concentrate on time: from a few days to centuries and eras, from stable times topically organized (synchronic) to dynamic times and change diachronically organized. Historians often see various historical works as belonging to one or another school. Thus they might distinguish among Marxist, bourgeois, French Annales, or social science histories. Or, they might designate various schools of what they call interpretations. The basic interpretation of United States history, for example, is said to have moved through the so-called progressive or economic interpretation, consensus or counterprogressive, and the New Left or neoprogressive schools during the twentieth century.1 All these are reasonable and standard ways of classifying types of histories, but they do not identify the general and common component parts of histories as such, especially across mediums and schools. Professional historians and those who theorize about historical practice agree that “proper” histories are more than mere assemblages of factual statements but much less than grand speculations on the ultimate meaning of the human past. Historians deprecate compilations or lists of facts as a “chronicle” or “annals” at the same time as they repudiate giving some overall pattern to the entire past as “universal” or “speculative” history. Beyond agreement on these extremes, however, historians differ on the nature and purposes of historical synthesis and therefore its component parts. Nevertheless, such disagreements suggest starting places for a general scheme of categorization. Long-continuing disagreements over whether a history is an art or a science, an empirical study or a literary synthesis suggest one basis for a general categorization of components.2 Older disagreements over whether “proper” explanation in histories is best provided by narration or (social) science-like reasoning points to the various modes of connecting the facts of a history as another starting place.3 Social science historians as well as theorists of history also propose considering the modes of explanation broadly conceived as theories and models.4 More recently, rhetorical and narrative theorists add categories for understanding the modes of exposition chiefly as text and discourse.5 The enduring conflict over the possibility of objectivity in historical practice and pervasiveness of bias in historical works indicates the role of evaluation and

Historical Synthesis

•

51

perspective as another basis for categorizing the general component parts of a history.6 Regardless of the forms the many kinds of histories take or the topics they cover, each one embodies in varying proportions description, argument, and/or narrative as forms of exposition; generalization, explanation, and/or interpretation as modes of connecting the facts and providing perspective on them; and politics, morals, and/or other lessons and uses as ways of evaluating past matters and giving them meaning. What distinguishes among different kinds of histories in this view is not their length, specific subject matter, or medium as such but how the many synthetic components discussed above are combined in any given project. At the risk of separating what is combined in text and practice, let me briefly discuss each of these general components before looking at examples of their combination in the next three chapters. From the standpoint of this book, each component must also be considered in relation to re-presentation or construction in the uses of evidence.7 Narratives and Arguments Forms of expression may vary by the kinds of histories and media, but they all show the use of language or image to present a story and/or make a case. For some scholars, narrative is the traditional and preferred mode of historical synthesis, as the words “story” and “history” indicate by being the same or allied terms in so many European languages. To convey this idea in English, some scholars resort to parentheses: (hi)story. Other historians choose argumentative, topical, and analytical approaches to make a case or prove a thesis. Usually both narrative and argument are combined in a proper history, even if the overall combination is categorized under one or another name. In practice each kind presumes the other, frequently explicitly but always implicitly, for both are modes of organization and of making connections. As modes of organization, all are process as well as product in historical practice.8 A narrative is considered the genre of time par excellence, because it answers the question what happened by tracing the development, changes, and resolution of events over time. Agents, aims, actions, settings, and outcomes are plotted to reveal the changes from beginnings to conclusion. Stories are told as events are sequenced into a series as situations change, lives are lived, and meaning is given to their modifications and transformations. Narratives are organized by the author who orders the events, actors, and settings into coherent temporal structures of plot and subplot.

52

•

Fashioning History

The author emphasizes some matters and subordinates others to give interpretation and meaning to (and to explain, in a sense) the changes selected to be part of the story. Such selection in the historian’s hands cuts the complexity, indeed chaos, of the past down to (narrative) size.9 Narrative in historical practice is always a stream of events unfolding in time. The order of statements in a history need not follow the actual chronological sequence of events as such for stylistic and/or explanatory reasons. Historians may telescope time for dramatic reasons or use flashbacks and flashforwards to point out implications. Thus one can analyze the relationship between the form of a historical narrative as textual or discourse time in contrast to its content as calendar time in the telling of a (hi)story. Regardless of any such separation of chronological and textual time, a historical narrative is always presented as accurate to past persons and events—or at least the surviving evidence about them—unlike fictional stories. Histories share the narrative as a literary form with many other genres such as novels, certain paintings, operas, many songs, films, comic books, and jokes. These other genres may even include actual persons, events, and settings as part of their stories, but only histories promise nothing but the truth based upon past evidence. Historical narratives presume that their characters, the events, and the larger context into which they fit characterize accurately the pasts of those persons, actions, and matters.10 Many histories are not explicitly narrative in form. Their content is organized by argument, theme, analytical category, or topic.11 Argumentative histories, as the name suggests, present one or more arguments rather than stories as such about past persons, events, and times. Analytical and topical histories organize their contents by argument and/or theme. Synchronic histories stress an extended middle over beginnings and endings by showing the interrelationships among matters at a given cross section of time, be it a year, decade, century, or more. While each of these histories eschew traditional narrative explicitly, they presume some larger or overall (hi)story as context for their subject matter and their own forms. Sometimes that historical context is no more than the standard history that frames the times that the arguments, analyses, and topics are about. The cross-section of time elaborated in a synchronic history, for example, presumes standard history as the narrative that contextualizes the times that lead into and away from the era it explores extensively for the multiple interconnections among ideas, events, and institutions.12 Narrative and nonnarrative histories alike espouse explicitly or, more frequently, implicitly one or more larger stories as a way of contextualizing

Historical Synthesis

•

53

their data, offering an interpretation, and providing perspective and meaning. Variously called in the profession grand, master, dominant, or governing narratives if explicit and metanarratives and metastories if more implicit, all offer the larger context needed for organizing the subject matter and form of individual historical syntheses. The advance of (Western) liberty and democracy, the struggle of the masses versus the elites, and the imminence of ecological apocalypse are just some among many such contextualizing master narratives. Their larger truth depends not upon evidence so much as the outlook and values shared by historians with their audiences. Many historians feel that narrative is more congenial than other discursive forms to historical synthesis because it stresses the actions of individuals as the causative agents in the unfolding of events. By concentrating upon the actions of concrete individuals as opposed to abstract forces to explain how (and why) what happened in the past, narrative histories allow for contingencies, choices, and other acts of human agency in influencing peoples’ destinies. In such a case, actors’ intentions, desires, judgments, and beliefs connect as they explain the sequence of occurrences. The emphasis on concrete actors’ intentions and choices allows narrative historians in their syntheses to lay blame or lavish praise upon specific individuals in causing wars and peace or depressions and prosperity; in leading social movements and cultural trends; in formulating political ideologies and scientific ideas among many matters. To American intellectual historian Thomas Haskell, causal attribution, including narratives, and ethics and moral responsibility are “two sides of the same coin.” As he argues, “To be an agent is to be causally efficacious, a producer of intended consequences. To hold people responsible is to presume that they are causally efficacious agents and therefore capable (within limits) of which consequences to produce. Judgments of praise, blame, responsibility, liability, courage, cowardice, originality, deliberateness, and spontaneity are just a few of the quintessentially ethical qualities that ride piggyback on perceptions of cause and effect.”13 For this reason, historian of American women Nancy Isenberg posits “individuals who shape their destinies” as the basic “canon of historical behavior.”14 Such a connection between human agency and narrative raises the issue of the relationship between narrative as a literary form and the actual course of past events and lives. Postmodernists argue that historians impose, that is, create, narrative structures in their efforts to organize their factual and other statements into some sort of synthesis. Other historians argue that narrative is natural to human affairs, because individuals

54

•

Fashioning History

plan their lives and understand what they do and did in terms of narrative sequences.15 The sociologist Margaret Somers throws light on this debate by arguing for four different kinds or uses of narrative. Ontological narratives are those that the social actors use to make sense of their own lives in order to act. They define who one is; they provide a notion of self and an identity for the individual, though developed as the result of interactions over time with various social structures. Public, cultural, or institutional narratives are those used by “publics” to understand and explain family, workplace, religious groups, government, nation, or society. (Is this social or collective memory?) She designated narratives constructed by social interpreters or researchers as conceptual, analytic, or sociological narratives. Such narratives speak of social forces, market patterns, cultural practices, or other constructed entities as the “actors.” The challenge from her view is how to combine ontological and public narratives into the analyst’s or historian’s own analysis or narrative. Metanarratives, her fourth kind, depict the epic forces of modern times such as Capitalism versus Communism, Individual versus Society, or the Rise of Nationalism or Capitalism or Democracy as some teleological unfolding of events in a cosmic drama.16 All histories offer description, argument, and narrative in various proportions, even though a specific work may claim to be mainly narrative or argument. In practice if not in explicit exposition in any work, narrative and argument presume each other, even if only between the lines or subtextually. Almost all narrative histories today contain sections devoted to argument and analysis in addition to description and storytelling. All analytical, argumentative, topical, and thematic histories presume an implicit, if they do not contain an explicit, narrative. From the perspective of the last chapter, the big question is whether the narratives, arguments, reports, and descriptions in a historical work are re-presentations accepted as true by the historian from the sources? Or, are these elements constructed and integrated as going together from the inferences and creativity of the historian? And from whose point of view are they presented? Explaining and Interpreting Historians make connections among their facts in their syntheses by offering explanations and interpretations, especially in proper histories. Argumentative and analytical works provide explicit reasons and causes as explanations and even, at times, use generalizations, models, and theories of human behavior, institutions, and societies to make their cases. Narrative,

Historical Synthesis

•

55

topical, and synchronic works offer implicitly always and usually explicitly reasons, causes, explanations, and influences among diverse ways of connecting their factual statements and patterning their generalizations. If description answers the traditional reportorial questions of who, what, when, and where, and maybe how, then explanation answers the question why. Questions and answers are always dependent on the knowledge of asker and answerer as to what is to be explained (explanandum in philosopher’s parlance) and what explains (explanans). For some askers, learning who, what, when, or where answers their why questions. Even these seemingly simple questions become complicated when asking, for example, what makes a revolt a revolution, or a cultural awakening a renaissance? For many other inquirers, learning how something came about explains why it happened, and that is often the common mode of historical explanation, especially in a narrative synthesis. Tracing the course of events—or recounting—is basic to one form of narrative explanation. But explanation, in the sense of accounting for, asks why it was who it was, where it was, when it was, what it was, or how it was. This is the explicit goal of analytical and argumentative histories—and good narrative histories as well.17 What constitutes appropriate answers at this level of why question? At a minimum, we should distinguish between the type or form of an explanation and the content of it. Types of explanation cluster around two poles. Those theorists advocating understanding as interpretation believe that human beings and their affairs are best explained by the webs of meaning the actors construct to understand and interpret their world. Making connections in this way presumes that the observer can understand the actors and their world(s) as they understood themselves and their world(s). Interpretive explanations in this mode stress such matters as intentions, desires, motives and rationales, beliefs, patterns of meaning, cultural practices, values, and worldviews as the keys to explaining why actors did what they did. Those theorists who support explanation as causation construct images or models of the actors’ behavior or circumstances that might be quite different than seen by the actors themselves. Explanations of this kind may range from the statistical correlation of variables to expositions of the material or ecological circumstances of peoples to the nature of bureaucracies and other complex social organizations. Whether a narrative explains depends on how and what one accepts as proper explanation in all these cases. The content of an explanation is not just what it includes explicitly about the connections it makes in explaining its subject but also the philosophical premises and social models

56

•

Fashioning History

that ground those connections. What does the theory, model, or even image presume about social reality that justifies the relevance of its use even as it shapes the content of its application? Historians frequently rely on so-called common sense versions of understanding and explaining human affairs. They often divide explanatory causes into long and short range; primary and secondary; necessary and sufficient; definitely or probably; sequential, cumulative, or interacting. Often such attributions are done without explicit, rigorous comparison or analysis to isolate the cause(s) or to provide an explicit patterning or hierarchy of causes. Sometimes historians offer thought experiments on what if so and so had not happened or something else had occurred, in effect counterfactual arguments. Historians, for example, speculate in a recent book on what if Charles I had avoided the English Civil War or what if Soviet communism had not collapsed in 1989.18 Historians all too often explain human goals, actions, and outcomes by armchair psychologizing about what any human would do in the same situation. (To what extent does this approach presume a basic and universal human nature, which was until recently usually a male rather than a female version?) They often treat social classes, institutions, and whole societies through ad hoc theorizing and impressionism, supposedly justified by their immersion in the sources. Many historians belittle the social and psychological sciences for their pretension to theory, because the results seem all too often trivial, tautological, and, worse from a historian’s view, ahistorical. Rather historians seek not generalizations about all human beings and institutions, as the positivistic social sciences once did, but explanations for what they take to be particular occasions and events occurring at specific times in specific places among specific persons and groups in the past. As the Australian scholar Inga Clendinnen writes, “Large theories may generate good questions, but they produce poor answers. The historian’s task is to discover what happened in some actual past situation—not to produce large truths. The most enlightening historical generalizations tend to be those that hover sufficiently close to the ground to illuminate the contours and dynamics of intention and action in circumscribed circumstances.”19 With such an impression of the profession’s goals, historians’ basic theories and models of human behavior, institutions, and societies are frequently more implicit image than explicit structures but no less determinative of their explanations.20 Once upon a time (in the 1960s and 1970s) social science history in the United States sought to make historical research and exposition

Historical Synthesis

•

57

organized and orderly by making the theories and models explicit and the operations systematic.21 The so-called new economic, political, and social histories never achieved the revolutionary results promised in their manifestos. Meanwhile the interests of the profession shifted to more pressing political and moral concerns. Consequently, much of what was once the approach and content of these new histories has returned to the social science departments from which they were borrowed in the first place. In recent decades the ahistoricity of the social sciences has been mitigated by a historic turn in all human science disciplines. The rapprochement between the social sciences and history is marked in the United States both in books and other productions and the many joint appointments between history and other departments.22 The content of social explanation cuts across the forms of social explanation. Philosophers of social science range the basic content of social explanation between two extremes they have christened “methodological individualism” and “methodological holism.”23 Individualism asserts, as its name suggests, the primacy of the individual in determining what happens in human affairs, while holism declares the dominance of the social whole in explaining human affairs. Individualistic explanations emphasize the conscious intentions and beliefs of individuals to account for their actions. This view of the efficacy of human agency assumes that social institutions are individuals acting in association. A society as a whole is the aggregation of all acting individuals in it. This approach to social explanation is known as methodological individualism, because it views individuals as both the real creators and the real foundation of (a) society. The voluntary actions of individuals can really change social institutions and collective outcomes. Such a view of individualistic explanation is presumed to ground as it flows from a classic nineteenth-century liberal view of society. Holism, or collective or social structural explanation, stresses the coercive effects of the social whole upon the beliefs, actions, and so on, of the individuals in it. A social organization, system, or structure persists over time and can be considered independently in some ways from a set of specific individuals in it. Although not really separate from the individuals comprising it, it nevertheless constrains their behavior in certain ways and acts apart from their individual volitions. A bureaucracy is a good example of such a social structure with its rules, roles, and lines of authority, but so too are economic organizations and systems (capitalism or land tenure systems, for example), political systems and organizations (political party systems or government bureaucracies), multinational or international

58

•

Fashioning History

relations (diplomatic customs and treaty systems), religious organizations and doctrinal systems (church hierarchies and liturgies), and cultural systems (persisting values and languages). Historians like social scientists can study why such structures arise, persist, or end in terms of the social context and other social factors. In this view, society is composed of (individuals operating as and through) classes, institutions, and other organized entities. This position is termed methodological holism, because the existence of a society as a whole shapes, some might say determines, the reality of the various lives within it. This view of a society as the collective causative foundation for understanding the totality of human interaction in it derives from a version of Marxism or of French social theory following Émile Durkheim.24 Scholars, of course, seek to reconcile or find a middle way between these two methodological extremes, but let me use the extreme views to highlight some of the implications of interpretive and explanatory models for historical research and synthesis. Even my brief summary of methodological individualism and methodological holism suggests some implications for the historical method and the derivation of facts. Proponents of the two views read sources differently, because they see social reality and its explanation differently Individualists are more prone to accept peoples’ expressions of intentions, desires, and motives in sources at face value, because they accept the autonomy of the individual in explaining social behavior. They therefore prefer re-presentation and paraphrase to make their points. A holist might see these same expressions as “false consciousness” because “common sense” beliefs all too often conceal the “real conditions” governing individuals’ existence. Most persons would not understand their true interests because of hegemonic manipulation of one sector of society by another. Any system of common beliefs becomes an ideology justifying the way the inequalities of the social whole are organized. At worse, power so determines knowledge, desires, and hopes that explicit expression of such in the sources must be taken with a very large methodological grain of salt. Individualists might accept polling results, for example, as truly indicative of people’s attitudes, while holists see just another demonstration of false consciousness. In this latter case the historian understands the true interests of people as a result of their class or other societal location as opposed to what they themselves say (and presumably believe). Historians of this persuasion resort to construction as their main mode of deriving and expositing facts. In line with their basic premises holists have trouble with the positivist empirical bent of individualists, especially those who rely on statistical

Historical Synthesis

•

59

analyses of census data. Opponents of this approach to social science history argued against assuming the aggregative behavior of individuals to be the explanation of (a) society. As one American social historian pointed out long ago, numerical analysis “is based upon the fiction that the actions of different individuals or cultural groups are, epistemologically speaking, the same—that they are identical and discrete entities that can be compared with one another in a scientific manner.”25 Opponents of this kind of statistical history argued that its results like its premises are those of political liberalism. Each side in this debate, like so many in social and political understanding, accused the other of assuming what it needed to prove and proving what it assumed. The plainest implication of these differences over the nature of social reality and its explanation is for the historical method. Individualist acceptance of sources’ testimony at face value encourages the re-presentation of facts through quotation or paraphrase. Holist suspicion of ideology and false consciousness on the other hand encourages constructing facts by inferring from the sources’ content or perhaps re-presenting the views of those people considered to have the most informed, that is, correct, view from the analyst’s standpoint. Many historians interested in the subordinated and the marginalized, for example, see persons in those social positions as a better guide to the nature of what “really” went on in society than those placed in high positions. As historian of science Donna Haraway phrased this position, “‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.”26 To some poststructuralist theorists the treatment of peoples on the margins of a society reveals best the central values of that society—or at least of its elite sector. But Jesse Lemisch, the first American historian to advocate in print viewing the United States’ past “from the bottom up,” argued before poststructuralist theory was popular in the United States, “sympathy for the powerless brings us closer to objectivity.”27 If nothing else, proponents of each position would judge the reliability of a witness and maybe of a source itself by their views of what an individual is and can do and the overall organized (structured) nature of a society in general. In the end, a historian’s social theory influences how she determines whether, for example, a cluster of ideas in a source should be denominated an ideology, false consciousness, and an example of hegemony on one hand or reasons, values, and proof of a belief system on the other hand. Thus the sorting out of what are actors’ views and what historians’ views in a history often reveal the latter’s allegiances

60

•

Fashioning History

to specific social theories (as we shall see below in the fight over cultural history and the proposed rehabilitation of social history). Proponents of holism and individualism might see the factuality of summative classificatory terms differently. Those leaning to holism might be willing to accept the “reality” of social structures as terms because of how they see societies working. Those tending to individualism, on the other hand, deny the reality of social structures and thus their value even for analysis since they believe such entities are mere social fictions. Although both sides might accept such concrete organizations as labor unions, corporations, churches, governments, and armies as empirically real, they might differ over according that status to the identity of classes and other social structures and systems. In any case, individualists would always deny causative agency to postulated structures and disaggregate empirically real ones. Do divergent premises lead to different methods? If the historian accepts actors’ ideas and beliefs at face value, then does she use empathy, interpretation, or imagination to reconstruct the actor’s so-called logic of the situation or cultural framework? If the historian suspects such hermeneutic methods, then does she employ causal analysis and explanation? We have already seen the argument over statistics. In any case, the content of social explanation influences the choice of explanatory form. That the two positions differ so much in what they take social reality to be and how best to explain it has implications not only for deriving facts from sources but also how to put them together in a synthesis. The differences show up in vocabulary, in the identification of historical “actors,” and in the way the “story” is told. The most obvious differences are the “actors” in each position’s story. Concrete individuals, their decisions and aims, and their groupings into associations are the actors in individualist stories and explanations. Social actors, so to speak, take pride of place in holist stories and explanations. Even to discuss the two positions means (mis)using vocabulary favored by and based on one or the other side.28 If differing vocabularies make hazardous any description of what the two sides stand for, they make easier their identification in historical productions. What are ideas and belief systems for the individualist become ideologies for the holist; texts and language become discourses and hegemony; rank and strata become classes; and perhaps sex and ethnicity become gender and racial systems. What are competing choices for the individualist become conflicting interests as the result of contradictory social locations for the holist. Interest group demands for the individualist become evidence of class struggle for the holist; social systems become social

Historical Synthesis

•

61

structures or formations; leaders or elites become ruling classes. The individualist describes society as associations of people banding together voluntarily as churches, corporations, governments, and other organizations, and society itself is essentially conceived as a voluntary association of individuals. Society for the holist is conceived as a complex, organized set of structures. Racism, for example, is a mainly a matter of psychology and individuals’ prejudices under individualist premises and a system of power and structured inequality under holist assumptions. Racism has a psychological cause and solution for the former, and a social structural cause and solution for the latter.29 Individualists in the end portray history as a series of events in which actors’ views and actions determine to a large extent the social outcomes. Change is explained by the actions of individuals. In traditional political, military, diplomatic, and religious history the spotlight was on kings, generals, ambassadors, bishops, and other leaders. Many argue that the narrative form is particularly congenial to this approach to history. The dilemma of individualistic explanation is to cope with supraindividual formations and macroscopic change. Holists depict history in terms of structures in which their contradictions cause conflict and change for the individuals in them. Argumentative and analytical histories seem the form best suited to this approach. The once new social history preferred explicit theory, social categories, and even statistical analysis of causation in opposition to the implicit model of human behavior and social theory of traditional history. To its critics the weakness of too much social history (and all of social science) was explaining change through abstract entities and external forces as opposed to concrete individuals and their choices. The American colonial historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich indicted this approach to social history, which “in abandoning the individualistic and institutional biases of conventional narratives sometimes substitutes one form of exclusion for another, freezing people into a collective anonymity that denies either agency or the capacity to change.”30 As I pointed out earlier in this section, scholars in practice attempt to avoid the dilemmas posed by individualism and holism by seeking some middle way. It is easy to condemn the oversimplifications of individualism and holism but difficult to surmount their problems and premises. That reconciliation or middle way must try to balance the agency of the actors with the constraints imposed on them by social institutions and their position(s) in them. Such a way must resolve the conflict between the autonomy of individual action based upon free choices in spite of social constraints versus the denial of any human agency in an oversocialized

62

•

Fashioning History

model of human behavior. At the same time the middle way must explain why groups of individuals choose to create social rules, coercive collectivities, and inequitable distribution of social benefits and power. To steer the delicate course between total societal determination of individual lives and the complete societal laissez-faireism of individualism, these theorists maintain that one must delineate how individuals initiate, maintain, or transform a group or society. The continuing existence of any social whole needs to be explained, not just assumed—especially those called a nation, a society, or a culture. Ideas are not simply ideological reflections, and culture is not simply reducible to the political or social. The only choice denied historians in this matter is no conscious choice: for some theory, implicit if not explicit, on the nature of human behavior and the workings of a society always grounds every history.31 The conflict between agency and structure in historical practice particularly came to focus in two schools that became increasingly popular in the profession after the mid-1970s. Microhistory originated among Italian scholars and alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, among German scholars. At the risk of neglecting their differences, both schools revolted against the impersonal structures and large-scale processes of macrosocial analysis, whether exemplified in the long-term trends studied by the Annales school or the impersonal aggregation of individuals, even nonelite ones, by the social science school. Both groups of historians explored the relationship between structure and agency through concentrating on the microcosm of specific individuals or small communities for clues to the macrocosm of institutions and society. Both favored anthropology over sociology as inspiration, particularly the intense local ethnographic study and the “thick description” of Clifford Geertz. Both concentrated on concrete life situations and the forms of daily experience and perceptions of individuals as the basis of their generalizations. How did ordinary individuals perceive, cope with, accommodate to, resist, innovate in small ways, creatively modify, or support the larger forces with which they lived and to which they contributed? How did such individuals alone or as a small group mediate between what they wanted and what they were forced to do by custom, law, religious and government agents, or material circumstances? Both schools sought out and emphasized the ambiguities, fluidity, and contradictions of thought and behavior of the “small people” they studied. Microhistorians produced noted works on rebels, heretics, criminals, or other individuals whose confrontations with social customs and official institutions produced detailed records. Although microhistorians

Historical Synthesis

•

63

studied both premodern and modern times, their work mostly explored early modern persons and situations. Carlo Ginzburg’s intensive analysis of sixteenth-century inquisitorial records to reconstruct the heretical cosmos of a northern Italian miller was a microhistory best seller of this kind.32 Some historians of alltagsgeschichte studied peasants and folk culture in the early modern era, but most preferred studies of workers, popular culture, or support for Nazi ideals and institutions in the modern period. The alltagsgeschichte exploration of ordinary people’s relationship to Nazism in their mundane experience and behavior particularly showed the nexus between lives at the micro level and societal macrotrends.33 The debate over social explanation goes on today in the discussions about the nature and place of the social as opposed to the cultural in human affairs. Those uneasy with the seeming arbitrariness of the cultural seek to resuscitate a more sophisticated social history and particularly class analysis in order to once again organize their histories through some sort of structural explanation.34 As even this section’s brief exposition of social explanation reveals, social theory, whether explicit or implicit, presumes political and ethical choices. These choices have implications for perspective, meaning, and morality. The editors of a reader on the “new social theory” observe a normative turn by the 1990s in the field. As they conclude, “we always theorize or do research from a socially situated point of view, that social interests and values shape our ideas, that our social understandings are also part of the shaping of social life.”35 Historians are agents in regard to histories about the past but also members located in their societies in the present. To paraphrase Karl Marx, historians make their own histories but not always under conditions of their own choosing. The historian’s own social context derives from social traditions, collective memory, and professional socialization. Whether the historians’ multiple social locations have little or no influence or mostly determine their social theory and explanations depend upon who theorizes the situation and according to what kinds of social explanation. And, of course, this choice affects whether the explanations are re-presented or constructed from the evidence. Perspectives and Meaning History, once promoted as philosophy teaching by example, still has its instructive side in the right hands. Politicians, generals, and social scientists are more prone than historians to draw lessons from the past, but some historians do draw explicit lessons from their subject for policymakers

64

•

Fashioning History

and the public. Historians of military affairs, foreign policy, and education are particularly generous in offering lessons learned from the history of their subjects. The historian of military affairs Michael Howard offers his essays simply as The Lessons of History.36 The historian of American foreign policy Ernest May has written two books whose very titles indicate his purposes: “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy 37 and Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers with Richard Neustadt.38 Likewise, the title of the volume of essays edited by Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform,39 shows the same for educational history. Many more historians make their lessons less obvious in their titles than these examples but still offer such instruction implicitly if not explicitly. Most environmental historians, for instance, particularly point out the dire implications of their studies.40 Debunking time-honored heroes and heritage is also an ancient and honorable tradition in the history profession. While some historians urge the profession to reinforce tradition and patriotism, others seek to expose the myths of classroom pieties and national heritage. In the latter vein, one author titled his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.41 The authors in The Invention of Tradition exposed how recent many a supposedly ancient tradition was, including Welsh and Scottish national culture, British royal rituals, and the celebration of May Day.42 If popular history is society’s memory of the past, then these historians hope to set the record straight. Some historians seek to restore a submerged or subordinated group to its (rightful?) place in the nation’s or the world’s history. The goal is encapsulated in the very title of Hidden from History.43 Chief among those hidden from traditional history was the half of the population who were women. To the extent that standard history had focused on politics, foreign policy, and wars, the nation-state as the arena, and the so-called public sphere over the private or domestic, it emphasized male roles and de-emphasized or concealed entirely female roles—except for such women as Queen Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia.44 Likewise to divide prehistory from history was to hide, even deny, the “people without history” their place in the past. 45 Aboriginal peoples may have been first on the ground, but they were last to get a spot in the “white man’s history.” (Canadian scholars now call their native societies “First Nations” as a remedy.) When historians write about subordinated or oppositional groups, should they side with them? Does that mean not only presenting but even adopting their views on matters?46

Historical Synthesis

•

65

The new National Museum of the American Indian on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC, exemplifies in architecture, grounds, and exhibits the dilemmas of representing minority viewpoint in majority institutional setting. After extensive consultation with diverse Native American groups and individuals, the museum planners focused on three main themes to organize the exhibits. “Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World” presents indigenous cosmologies as vital today to native understanding and life as they were yesterday. Such an approach reinforces native religious traditions as it educates others about the overriding importance of the sacred in native lives past and present. “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories” seeks to correct through tribal histories the “narrow and inaccurate ways” the dominant society has portrayed the past of native peoples in its story of imperial conquest and achievement for the past five hundred years. On one hand, native societies were victimized: “In the struggle for survival, nearly every Native community wrestled with the impact of deadly new diseases and weaponry, the weakening of traditional spirituality and the seizure of homelands by invading governments.” On the other hand, it is “not entirely a story of destruction,” for it is also about “how Native people intentionally and strategically kept their cultures alive.”47 To emphasize this point, the last exhibition’s theme, “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities,” shows that native peoples, their cultures, and their identities not only survive but flourish in the twenty-first century even in the midst of economic and other hardships and contrary to white perception. Through these themes, the museum’s planners hope to refute the usual cultural imperialism long expounded and exemplified in dominant society media and institutions. Through the shape of the building, the layout of its grounds, the arrangement and purposes of interior spaces, as well as the nature and message of the exhibits, the planners seek to adapt a dominant cultural institution to traditional (and traditionalist?) native ends. Critics of the museum believe that the efforts of its Native American staff to discover and disseminate the values and outlooks of the many Native American peoples go too far in creating a new kind of museum that crosses borders supposedly separated in other museums: the secular and the sacred, history and heritage, scholarship and advocacy, and lay versus professional authority.48 In the end, the problems of perspective, morality, and political partiality exist beyond explicit political and other partisanship. That a historian takes the side of a political party or government, a religious or ethnic group, the working classes or the entrepreneurs, and so on, is clear enough to those

66

•

Fashioning History

not convinced of those arguments already. So too are the judgments rendered on the evils of the past. All professional historians these days are against slavery, racism, and genocide and for justice, democracy, and equality in general. But what do such commitments involve in the end? Aside from praise for abolitionists and Allies and condemnation of slaveholders and Nazis, for example, what does such a commitment entail? Ought the historian also use the past to expose the inner workings of today’s society that still perpetuates social and racial inequality, hegemonic and oppositional ideologies, and globalism and imperialism? Should all history be critical history that seeks to challenge, even subvert, the status quo as some historians advocate? Such critical history can point out past options not taken by a society, provide alternative frames of reference to its members, defamiliarize the long accepted in the society, and demystify the institutional facades hiding the people actually running the social machinery.49 In the end should historians in the West, for example, praise or condemn, uphold or oppose the gap between the ideals of liberal society and how they were practiced at home and particularly abroad? These questions about politics suggest how perspective and meaning penetrate to the very core of the historical project. The only unacceptable answer is no answer to such questions as any brief examination of the role of perspective and meaning in historical synthesis shows. Both historians and their audiences use history and therefore histories for their own purposes. The study of history is justified for many reasons: to entertain and edify, advance cultural literacy, instill patriotism, challenge the status quo, show God’s works, encourage toleration, teach lessons, expose social evils, promote social identity, empower minorities, portray everyday past lives and institutions, foster or condemn nationalism or religion, study the past for its own sake, and prove the usefulness or inutility of history among the many professed uses. The audiences and those interested are many: the state through educational curriculums, financing, and certification; social and political movements through propaganda and organizational recruitment; religious groups through identity and boundary maintenance; museum exhibitors and documentary filmmakers for information, audience appeal, and funding; historical sites and pageants for commemoration, identity, and support; publishers and entertainment moguls for service, amusement, and remuneration; ethnic groups for preservation of memory and identity; and not least the profession itself for almost all these reasons. These interests, audiences, and indeed historians themselves disagree on how best to attain their goals. All agree that histories should provide perspective on the past, offer lessons

Historical Synthesis

•

67

(especially including the denial of any), and give meaning to their subject matter, but they differ over what History conceived as an overall approach to the past proves and therefore how a normal history achieves their ends. The differences result from—as they show—the complexities of modern societies and the multiple social locations of their citizen/subjects.50 Professional historians agree that proper histories offer perspective on the past and give meaning through their syntheses, but the means to these ends not only vary but are also in dispute. Perspective implies distance from past peoples and events, and that distance supposedly lends objectivity to the historian in her understanding of those past persons and their actions. What distance in space lends to perspective in painting, distance in time supposedly lends to perspective in history.51 The greatest perspective undoubtedly arises from the historian knowing the future of the past: the outcomes of past aims and actions. At its extreme such retroactive prediction underlies titles that contain such words as “The Invention,” “the Individual,” or “the Event” followed by a phrase like “That Changed the World.” A best-selling recent example of the genre is How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill.52 Some argue history(ies) should show how today’s peoples, their societies, material objects, and ideas evolved from those of yesteryear’s. Such mottoes as the present grows from past or the past is prologue to the present embody this somewhat teleological approach.53 Others propose history(ies) should show how the past was quite different from the present. This anthropology of time, so to speak, issues forth in a maxim like “the past is a foreign country” or speaks of the “otherness” of the past.54 In either case, the job of the historian is to recontextualize the past so as to make it mean something to the present-day audience. At the least, the historian must adopt a context understandable to a modern audience. At best, the historian renders a new perspective, exhibits a new context that makes the past memorable or useful or interesting to people in the present. Given this necessity of connecting to an audience, the traditional caveat about avoiding present-mindedness oversimplifies and distorts what historians do and must do in lecture, book, exhibition, report, or film. Part of the perplexity about political and moral judgments and perspective and meaning stems from the incompatibility of the dual tasks of Clio, the ancient muse of history: to exhort her listeners to great deeds on one hand and to record their feats on the other hand. Exhortation entails advocacy at the least and justifies propaganda at the most. Reporting demands accurate representation and even fair-mindedness about past

68

•

Fashioning History

persons, events, and institutions. To what extent then should historians allow purpose to shape their projects and perhaps even control their findings? How open and explicit should political, social, and moral commitments therefore be? Should historians confess them in preface, prologue, or other place? It seems easy enough to confess the explicit commitments, but what about the implicit ones entwined in choice of subject, research design, framework of interpretation, or even what is considered historical reality or the nature of time?55 It is the imputation of meaning that arouses claims of bias, partiality, partisanship, and the like. At their most fundamental histories give the past meaning through the arrangement of their stories, facts, and generalizations into syntheses, and those syntheses in turn provide the meaning of the story and the context of the facts and generalizations. Historians believe only through such organization does an assemblage of facts become a proper history. Modern historians search not for the essential meaning of all the past, once the domain of universal history or the philosophy of history. Rather they seek arguments, stories, explanations, interpretations, and perspectives that fashion a multitude of factual and other statements into a meaningful synthesis—one that an audience can understand and appreciate. It was and is here that grand and metanarratives play such an important role in providing meaning for the profession and audiences alike, especially implicitly, by offering a larger framework for the narratives, arguments, moral and political evaluations, and other statements. What seems objective and factual to one audience or interpretive community, however, appears biased and implausible to another. At times what is profoundly meaningful to one audience makes little or no sense to another audience. Voice and Viewpoint Both perspective and meaning, whether explicit or implicit, find their expression through voice and viewpoint. Questions about voice ask who speaks and for whom in the text or other medium, and the analyst inquires how and in what form. Questions about viewpoint ask from what and whose viewpoint, that is, for what and whose perspective. Once again the analyst queries about form as well as content. Only by taking a viewpoint can the historian select and organize her factual and other statements. Viewpoint gives coherence to facts and statements about the past; voice gives expression to them. At the same time, it is adoption of a viewpoint that leads to what others label bias, partiality, and lack of objectivity. The

Historical Synthesis

•

69

big question (from the perspective of the preceding chapter) is whether the voices and viewpoints are found in the sources or supplied by the historian. Are they re-presented or constructed?56 Do the historical actors speak for the historian as well as themselves, or does the historian speak for them in and through the construction of the history? In a re-presentation the historian often accepts the actors’ viewpoints along with their statements. Is the best mode of exposition then quotation with paraphrase a second choice? In a construction the historian always speaks for herself, but frequently in the name of the actors. Can the actors speak for themselves or only through the historian in each synthesis? Who speaks for the unrecorded, the undocumented? Oral historians claim their approach recovers evidence of such activities and thoughts not available through traditional means.57 Must a historian share class, gender, ethnicity, religion, or politics with the actors in order to speak for them? Must biographers admire, or at least like, their subjects to be fair in their representation of them? Ought historians make a contract with past peoples, so to speak, to represent their actions and their viewpoints as honestly and authentically as possible as one noted scholar once avowed in a session of the American Historical Association?58 Historians efface their personal presence in a history by using the third-person voice. Such effacement is supposed to enhance objectivity. Historians are warned and usually criticized for using the first-person pronoun outside of footnotes, introductions, or their equivalents in other media. At the same time such effacement of authority implies an omniscient viewpoint. Would use of first-person voice better cue the reader to the viewpoint of the historian in a specific work? Arguing and narrating from a viewpoint differs from arguing for a viewpoint. The second is usually explicit in story or argument as theme or thesis, but the first is usually implicit. Both select and shape the facts presented, but, if the viewpoint is implicit, the audience must read between the lines or look behind the image to find it. Viewpoint in a history may be from the perspectives of the historical actors or the historian, that is, from within or outside the historical world being conveyed. Whether historians re-present or construct statements about a historical time and place, whether they adopt viewpoints and voices from the past or offer their own, they must consider and combine at least four different kinds of viewpoints in lecture, book, film, report, or exhibit. First, viewpoint may be perceptual. From whose perspective or angle is the physical world perceived or represented? Point of view in film is a good literal illustration of this viewpoint. How much is seen through the

70

•

Fashioning History

eyes of the actors and how much from beyond them, even an overall bird’s-eye or synoptic view by the director? How is the landscape conceived as well as perceived in a history? Historians visit the locality of the events they describe, although the events occurred long ago, because they hope to see what past persons saw. For the same reason, some historians join others in trying to preserve some historic buildings, battlefields, and sites from modern development. What and whose names are on the land and what does that show about its comprehension in the past? Whose ecological understanding is conveyed by whether aboriginal or conquerors’ place names are used? How did those living then understand spatial and social matters as opposed to how we look at them today? Historical and perceptual geographers as well as historians try to convey a “sense of place.”59 On the other hand, for historians to imagine the past as people then felt and perceived it becomes ever trickier if not harder as transportation and communication speeded up over the millennia. The transition from oral to scribal to print to cyber cultures not only determined the nature of the surviving evidence of past worlds but also offers its own evidence of different perceptual and conceptual worlds. The almost instantaneous communication of the telegraph and the increased speed of travel first by steamship and railroad and then by the airplane shrank the earth and increased the interchange among peoples. As the result of these communication and transportation changes, historians need ever greater imagination to picture the physical and social context of peoples the farther removed they are from the present.60 It is of course fashionable for scholars in today’s world to stress how great social and cultural interchange was even in the farthest past and among all peoples, even those once considered “primitive,” as if the world of yesteryear was similar to the global now. Hence past societies and cultures once pictured as isolated, self-contained islands outside the stream of history are now depicted as archipelagos wide open to constant commercial and intercultural exchange very much in the flow of world history.61 In fact, the very conception of a culture or a society, even in the extreme past, has only an attenuated meaning in scholarly usage today given the extreme permeability of their borders and their continuous change, hence the vocabulary of transnational, intercultural, translation, negotiation, creolization, and hybridity to describe the past and present encounters of peoples, the effects of decolonization and subalternity, and the impact of border crossings and diasporas.

Historical Synthesis

•

71

The debate over the social construction of nature versus its independent material effect seems another aspect of perceptual viewpoint. Whose and what understanding of nature should be used in a history: the actors’ or the historians’? Those historians conveying the perceptions of the actors re-present those views as such through quotation or paraphrase. For them, the natural environment, like the social one, is the creative construction of the inhabitants. Such an approach is likely to offer the social construction of nature by those who modified it as they used it. The users’ understanding of their physical environment is a social and ideational artifact in this view. Others argue that historians willingly or otherwise judge the environmental soundness of their actors’ views and, more importantly, their actions. It is this step that contrasts the historian’s theory of what is nature and how it works with that of the actors. Of course, all historians seek varying and complex relationships between past humans and what they called or we call “nature.” Historians who point out the unintended consequences of deliberate policy and uses depend in the end on more than the social construction of nature. These historians base their findings upon their understanding of the coercive reality of the natural environment when humans tried to fool “mother nature” too much. In the end all environmental histories take a stand on the degree to which nature in a given place and time is chiefly a cultural interpretation of a society’s relationship with its physical environment and the degree to which nature possesses an independent environmental reality, or as some say a “material agency,” in those circumstances? Both actors and historians define what is natural and nature.62 Considered equally natural was the rise of nationalism and the nation in history. Romantic nationalism and modern scientific historical method arose together in the nineteenth century, especially in the Germanies as the idea of the “Fatherland” was created historically as well as symbolically and territorially. In line with these dual trends, the nation became not only the preferred unit of analysis but was presumed the most appropriate—even most natural—one for history. Historians assumed in many ways that the national histories of England or France or even the United States were not only the normative goal of actual history for all peoples but also its normal route and the focus of its narration as a result.63 Most professional historians continued until recent decades to stress the nation as the proper stage, the best context, for history (as well as the basic social actor), whether conceived as a state, a society, or a culture. Questioning the simultaneous rise of a nation, nationalism, and nationhood and seeing nation formation as a multiple concatenation of events and persons

72

•

Fashioning History

led to two distinctly different results in today’s historical practice (besides abandoning the Western European model of nationalism as normative, normal, and natural). First, historians no longer assume that the nation is a naturally occurring and normal entity or that nationalism is a primordial drive in people’s psyches and a part of human nature. Historians today increasingly explore how national territories, a national political system and state, national institutions and a society, and corresponding symbolic and cultural representations come into being through changing boundaries, the creation of governments and political allegiances, new social and institutional arrangements, revised ethnic and gender definitions, cultural inventions and symbolic attachments, commemoration and collective memory. In this manner, nations were constructed first by their citizen subjects and then by historians.64 Secondly, historians have also displaced increasingly the nation as the principal stage for histories in favor of local communities and everyday life or transnational movements and border crossings to focus on what and who was involved in past processes and what were the effects. Whether or not the extrapolation of the globalized world of the twentieth century to the past will be found as insightful in the future as now, historians today speak in terms of capitalist world systems, colonial and imperial systems, the Atlantic world, hybrid cultures, and transnationalism. They have transformed the earlier study of migrations from one nation to another that stressed the recipient society and culture into diasporas from a source society or culture that emphasizes the interaction between earlier and later times in both provider and recipient societies. They prefer to look at movements and cultures that transcend national boundaries rather than the older approach to the nation-state system and the resulting diplomacy and international relations. And last, they feel that the study of everyday life uncovers the people, events, and institutions that created, sustained, or opposed the larger trends and social arrangements previously presumed in national histories or omitted from them when using the nation as the primary focus. The transformation of local history into microhistory, international relations into transnational trends, migrations into diasporas, and newer definitions of ethnicity and nationalism all seem part of the recent movement from social to cultural history, from structural analysis to narrative agency and contingency. The last example of perceptual viewpoint concerns how the geography of the world is represented ideologically. Just by repeating, for example, the terms “New World” and “Old World” promotes European societies

Historical Synthesis

•

73

and devalues other peoples’ cultures. Such ideological geography includes the arbitrary division of the planet into continents and hemispheres; into West and East or West and the “rest”; and even the common favorable judgment of the North over the South whether in so many countries (France, Germany, Italy, and the United States for example) or continents and hemispheres in general. The longtime concentration in histories on nations, their lands, and their boundaries worked against portraying the past according to sea- and ocean-based systems until recently. Historians were slow to accept the idea of the Atlantic world of eighteenth century or even the Pacific Rim in the twentieth century unlike the Mediterranean World of ancient times and later. Confusion over the boundaries of the Middle or Near East and of North and Latin America versus North and South America reveal their ideological foundation. That presumption is even more evident in the once popular designation of the so-called European (and other “advanced” nations); the former “Communist East”; and the rest (called successively the “undeveloped,” “underdeveloped,” and “developing” nations) as the First, Second, and Third Worlds. The numbering system makes clear the Eurocentric basis of the nomenclature even as it elevates the economy and/or the political system of certain so-called Western nations as the chief criteria for making the ranking. (The “core,” “semiperipheral,” and “peripheral” zones in World Systems theory resemble in number and function if not in moral judgment the Eurocentric history of imperial expansion.) The once extensive red or pink color on world maps to designate the British Empire quite literally colored the imagination of those viewing the map about the place of that island in the planet’s affairs. The red- and blue-colored states from the 2000 electoral map of the United States have become a short hand for a host of attributions about the cultural as well as political divisions in the nation. All such “metageography” conceals complex actuality in the eyes of many scholars even as it supposedly conveys that reality to those expounding it.65 Such metageography poses the usual problems for historians. If they re-present it through repeating the views of some past actors, they must be careful not to accept its premises and perspective as determining their own geographic views. If they construct the world of past actors, they must not substitute their own geographical stereotypes for those of their actors. This is the message of Edward Said’s influential book on Orientalism, which exposes the ideological biases of Western conceptions of the “East,” particularly of the Middle East. Of course, such metageographical notions have their own history.66

74

•

Fashioning History

The most influential interpretation of American history depended upon just such ideological geography. Frederick Jackson Turner’s conception of “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to use the title of the paper he delivered in 1893, outlined how (white) American settlement recapitulated continually the evolutionary stages from savagery through agrarianism to civilization as it advanced across the United States.67 Each section of the country repeated the process from English settlement on the East Coast until the Superintendent of the Census declared the frontier had effectively ceased in 1890. For Turner, the constant recapitulation of evolutionary stages on each frontier explained why the United States differed from European nations in values, outlook, and national character: the reversion to earlier social relationships reinforced the democratic society of that level throughout United States history. The school that Turner founded dominated the interpretation of United States history until after the Second World War.68 As these last paragraphs indicate, a second kind of viewpoint may be summarized as conceptual, that is how the world is represented from the standpoint of a belief system, ideology, or worldview. This is the domain proper of intellectual and cultural history. The history of ideas from Arthur Lovejoy’s earlier mapping out of what he called “unit ideas” to recent Anglophone attention to the history of political discourses to the current Germanic interest in begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, all trace formal ideas over time. Lovejoy’s interest in the assumptions grounding the Elizabethan chain of being, Quentin Skinner’s detailed examination of how the meaning of Hobbes’ and Locke’s words derived from intended action and political context, and Reinhold Koselleck’s extended historical analyses of political and historical concepts all focus on the language of academic and other formal thinkers.69 Although cultural history also takes the human symbolic realm as its subject, it stresses collective representations, general assumptions, common perceptions, and even communal feelings, particularly of ordinary people. Just as philosophy as a discipline proved handy to intellectual historians, so anthropology provided inspiration and models for cultural historians. If intellectual historians frequently deal with the academic and formal ideas or even the so-called elite culture of a people, cultural historians attempt to interpret culture more generally according to their anthropological insight.70 Cultural history of this kind was perhaps best known first through the French study of mentalités but more recently the field has proliferated through the study of cultural practices, representations, productions, performances, and contingent but structured occasions. Two of the classic

Historical Synthesis

•

75

studies in the field utilized detailed inquisitorial records to reconstruct the worldviews of common people. The Italian microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg used the seemingly eccentric but original cosmology of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Friulian miller who was eventually burned at the stake, to portray the conflict between and yet interdependence of elite and popular culture.71 The French Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie seemed to present the very lives and thoughts of the early fourteenth-century villagers of Montaillou, whether that was the nature of their housing and habits, sheepherding and ecological practices, the relations between men and women, sexual norms and experiences, gesture and gossip, or attitudes toward death, nature, the hereafter, and the past.72 More recent cultural historians explored the image and representation of the body and its parts, Parisian apprentices massacring cats, the nature and practice of reading and the culture of the book, and common emotions and general perceptions of all kinds. Just as cultural historians enlarged their purview to include such topics, so too have they begun to apply their approaches to political, economic, and social history topics. In doing so, these historians have reversed the long-standing professional commitment to the primacy of the political, economic, and social history of culture to develop instead the cultural history of the political, the economic, and the social.73 Intellectual and cultural histories would appear a prime application of re-presentation of the evidence given their methods and goals, but construction always accompanies such efforts as interpretation, conclusion, or lesson. Although cultural history, for example, supposedly seeks to understand past worlds in terms of how their inhabitants did, such a goal necessitates as much construction as any other kind of history. Even Carlo Ginzburg artfully organizes his seemingly endless quotation from the inquisitorial records, carefully construes the significance of the questions asked and how answered in terms of his own inquiries, and ultimately extrapolates some larger conclusions about the relationship of popular and elite cultures from the recorded evidence as he re-presents it. Even the literal re-presentation of the past through authentic material objects in a museum requires much interpretive construction, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Perhaps more than in any other kinds of history, intellectual and cultural histories juxtapose past and current conceptions of reality. Such juxtaposition poses choices which in turn necessitate interpretation and construction by historians. While such choice particularly confronts the historians when their evidence describes the actuality of witches, magic, and miracles, they face the same basic problem when the sources present or posit racial, gender, or ethnic inferiority. Ultimately intellectual and

76

•

Fashioning History

cultural history probes the very foundational assumptions of professional history today. When and why did the past become considered different from the present? When, how, and why did the assumptions of source criticism allow the winnowing of facts from their evidential context? When and how were the nature of narrative and other modern expository forms accepted as the mediums appropriate to professional history? When and how were the divisions of time naturalized and made fundamental to historical understanding? How and when did factual accuracy, objectivity, neutral chronology, and temporal plenitude come to measure what was proper for professional history? The third kind of viewpoint may be designated in general as evaluative, that is, people and events are judged according to some one’s moral standards or value system. Do the values and morals come from the historical world of the past or from world of the present? Should historians (and their audiences) judge the morals of past people by our own? Or, are ethics best appreciated and applied as a matter of time and place? Absolute moral judgments condemn some behavior as bad no matter when and where. Situational or contextual ethics seem inadequate for the sins of racism, genocide, and oppression. But what about equal condemnation for poverty, sickness, illiteracy, war, and criminal executions? What of praise for the ethical treatment of animals and the philosophy of vegetarianism? Historicism as the principal insight of the modern historical profession only compounds the ethical problem. Although the meaning of the word has generated controversy since its German invention in the nineteenth century, the core of the conception lies in the assumption that thoughts, activities, and institutions are best described and explained as somehow fitting together in the era in which they are said to occur. Understanding past people’s ideas and actions in terms of their times stresses specificity, uniqueness, and temporal location, and that orientation has remained fundamental to the historical discipline.74 Such an orientation suggests two approaches to ethics and morality: (1) each era as well as people has its own standards for judging the behavior of then and there and (2) historians today have their own moral criteria as a result of their own changed times. Should historians thus accept the morality and ethical criteria of past actors as agents or the standards of modern times and society? Historicism would seem therefore to hoist historians on the petard of their most cherished insight. The historical method goes only so far in ameliorating the problem. The moral views of past persons and their societies can be re-presented as “facts” in their own words and perhaps actions from the surviving evidence. On the other

Historical Synthesis

•

77

hand, the historian can construe, that is infer and construct, past ethics from the silence of the sources on the matters investigated. Of course, the historian can eschew explicit moral evaluation but certainly imply it through the quotations and paraphrases she uses in re-presenting matters. In still another strategy, the historian can assert that her moral ends give meaning to facts about the past for a present-day audience. In all these cases, the professional principles or context of the modern historian do not resolve the moral issues of re-presentation and construction, of implicit versus explicit judgments, and absolute morality or contextualist ethics.75 The fourth and last kind of viewpoint is grounded on an emotional stance or empathetic identification. How should the historian and the audience feel about the subject of a biography, the goals of a political or social movement, or the nature of a cultural achievement after hearing a lecture, reading a book, attending an exhibition, or seeing a film? Was some moment in the past a golden age from which the present is a decline? Or, should the audience feel better about the present in light of comparison, explicit or implicit, to the past? No matter what museum curators do to forestall such implicit comparisons between past and present lifestyles, museum viewers usually note the great progress in technology at the same time as some lament the more rushed and complicated life such progress brought. In the end, should the book reader, lecture listener, museum attendee, or film viewer feel good, bad, or neutral about change, persistence, stability, or transformation in the past?76 Diverse perspectives and meanings as with other kinds of interpretations arise from historians, their critics, and their audiences being situated in specific but different social (and temporal) locations with differential access to power, knowledge, and its distribution. Their very situations surely influence, perhaps determine, what they consider truth, reality, facts, and the meaning of history. When approved of by a wide circle of people in and out of the profession, the perspectives and meanings are considered truthful and objective. When they are confined to a small circle of advocates, the majority considers them biased and subjective or just unimportant. Does this mean that truthfulness, objectivity, and factuality are ultimately a function of numbers and/or power, first in the profession and then in the larger society?77 Arguments in the historical profession over partiality and impartiality, truth and propaganda, partisanship and neutrality, fact and value have traditionally centered on the notion of objectivity.78 Conventionally, the notion of objectivity pertains to the relation between the observer and the observed object. By definition, objectivity presumes the characteristics of

78

•

Fashioning History

the object itself solely determine the understanding of its nature by all observers—as is supposedly the case in the physical sciences. In this view of matters, therefore, the perspectives of the observers are not relevant to the description of the object and maybe even to its explanation. Subjectivity in contrast assumes the understanding of the object depends upon the perspective of observer. Explanation in this view is not only dependent upon the perspective taken by the observer but so may the description of the object. For those who believe in the possibility of objectivity in historical practice, truth results from the correspondence between the presumed reality of the past and the empirical investigation of the record it generated. If interpretations differ, then the facts will determine their truth, for in the end facts exist prior to and independent of interpretation. If perspectives are many, truth is one for the known can be separated from the knower and facts from values and viewpoints. Ultimately in this view, history must and can be separated from fiction in order to avoid the evil of relativism and all that means for the justification and very existence of the profession itself. Of course, the possibility of objectivity in historical practice depends upon one’s perspective on these issues.79 Although the ideal of rigorous objectivity has long justified professional practices and products, most historians honor such strictness only in spirit today. Professional ethics, social theory, and contending interpretive community affiliations all point elsewhere. If (absolute) objectivity means being free of all (social) context and independent of all interpretive frameworks, then few today subscribe to such a view. If objectivity means that a project follows professional procedures and represents the majority opinion in a profession, then many more subscribe to this version in theory and even more in practice. If objectivity means agreements only among some and not other interpretive communities, then fewer may subscribe in theory even though they may claim that the ideal still justifies their truths versus those of others. In that sense they are all espouse realism as the most useful philosophical foundation for the discipline.80 Both multiculturalism and postmodernism highlight the existence of multiple voices and viewpoints in practice as well as theory. Accordingly, viewpoint can no longer be considered from nowhere at all, a position the intellectual historian Allan Megill cleverly named “immaculate perception,”81 or everywhere at once, usually denominated the omniscient or God view. Thus Donna Haraway warns in her oft-cited article “Situated Knowledges” against speaking universally but thinking locally. She argues, “objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits

Historical Synthesis

•

79

and responsibility.” She goes on to point out that from a feminist point of view “The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. . . . It allows us to become answerable for what we learn to see.”82 Social engagement, if anything, enhances the ability to see as well as promote the truth. To serve the end of truthfulness, objectivity need not, indeed cannot, be neutral, as the American intellectual historian Thomas Haskell argues so forcefully, “I see nothing to admire in neutrality. My conception of objectivity . . . is compatible with strong political commitment. It pays no premium for standing in the middle of the road, and it recognizes that scholars are as passionate and as likely to be driven by interest as those they write about. It does not value even detachment as an end in itself, but only as an end in indispensable prelude or preparation for the achievement of higher levels of understanding.”83 Such commitment and passion ensures conflict among rival perspectives, which in turn assures the individual scholar’s partial viewpoints become the community of scholars’ responsible pursuit of moral and other truths. (This passionate objectivity demands as it presumes open debate in the profession and the larger society.) The German theorist of history Jörn Rüsen makes the point even more forcefully: neutrality is the denial of history because without perspective historical discourse has no meaning. Neither narrative nor metastory can exist without the historian’s viewpoint.84 Or, as the British military historian Michael Howard put it so pithily, “No bias, no book.”85 Objectivity, in short, is intersubjective agreement in both practice and theory, as it derives from dialogues first within the profession and then between the profession and the divisions of the larger society.86 The truths affirmed by such a view of objectivity are idiosyncratic or political until their truthfulness is ratified by a majority of the profession voting by favorable reviews, election to prestigious professional offices, awarding of fellowships and jobs, and the conferring of prominent chairs and honors. Truthfulness and objectivity in this view depend upon how many different groupings hold how much in common about what it takes to produce a valid history. Truthfulness and objectivity are, first, a consequence of intersubjective agreement among individuals in an interpretive community and, second, negotiation between interpretive communities to expand the original circle of agreement. Historical truths result from such objectivity, and both are the products of genre maintenance and policing. Both truthfulness and objectivity constitute the rationale for the practice of professional history. As a result, both are said to ground as they supposedly

80

•

Fashioning History

result from the procedures of historical methods and syntheses. Using the rhetoric of factuality, truthfulness, and a new definition of objectivity against their supposed enemy relativism shows historians are once again being practical realists about their discipline and profession. The more viewpoints and voices in the historical guild and in general society, the more traditional history is challenged in forms of exposition and explanation. Such a challenge underlines not only the role politics plays within historical arguments and narratives as such but also suggests the politics entwined in the various kinds of histories and the very nature of history in general. No place is this political foundation better seen these days than in the relationship between gender and genre. Concentration on female work and roles in and out of family settings not only changed or expanded the facts but also the forms of history. Political and military history excluded women and large sectors of society; social and cultural history included more groups and made the past relevant to the hitherto socially marginalized.87 Indeed, some feminist theorists argue that the whole fight over objectivity in the discipline and the search for the one best story is a male approach to the world and the past. In their opinion, then, gender and genre maintenance had gone hand in hand earlier in the profession.88 Regardless of one’s positions on these matters, one must conclude that perspectives and meaning(s) pervade histories and find expression through voice and viewpoint in texts and other mediums. Sometimes they are explicit as part of the argument, story, or explanation. Sometimes they are implicit in the very framework of interpretation, choice of research design, how historical reality is defined, or subtextually between the lines. Perspectives and meaning(s) in histories can re-present those found in the sources, or historians can impose them through their interpretive constructions. Sometimes the perspectives are widely shared by other historians and their audiences, sometimes not. In the latter instance, each contending side accuses the other of advocacy, partiality, bias, distortion, or propaganda and attributes to itself impartiality, perspective, factuality, and truthfulness. Both recontextualize the past according to their viewpoint and purposes. Multiculturalist and feminist theory underscored the presence of viewpoint in every history at the same time as that understanding undermined the monopoly or universality of any one viewpoint in the discipline. In this state of diversity, then, the lessons of history will always be most manifest to those who propound them but not necessarily to others. The meaning of (a?) history will be clearest to those of the same interpretive

Historical Synthesis

•

81

school that elucidates it but challenged by those in other schools. From this standpoint, the uses of history are many but the ultimate purpose is the same: to offer convincing, yet presumably accurate, representations of the past to as many individuals as possible. The diversity of viewpoints makes such a goal a challenge. Perspective and context, meaning and viewpoint, interests and uses, purposes and products must therefore be as much a part of historical practice as they are always a part of historical theory. To put something into historical perspective is to put it into some historical context, and vice versa, and both are shaped by personal, professional, and larger societal contexts at the time. Schools of Interpretation and Metanarratives Schools of historical interpretation and metanarratives are not only the culmination but, paradoxically, often the inspiration for historical syntheses, even their foundation. Historical synthesis culminates in interpretive schools and metanarratives because of the historian’s quest for an ever-larger context to organize her story and argument, to interpret and explain the multitude of events, and to provide larger perspective and meaning for a history. Conversely, the historian can synthesize narrative and argument, explanation and interpretation, perspective and meaning into compelling relationships with each other in a history through contextualization according to the premises of some historiographic school or metanarrative. In either case, the act of contextualizing history eventuates in a historical interpretation. Interpretation is a much used term by historians, hence has many meanings in the profession.89 Interpretation is both a practice and a product of the historical enterprise. As a practice, as we see throughout this book, it pervades all aspects of historical research and synthesis. It possesses at least four meanings as a product of those practices. An interpretation, in one widespread usage, is the personal imprint an historian gives any one history through the selection of facts and generalizations, their overall organization, the pattern of meaning presented, and the lessons elicited and perspectives adopted. An interpretation in this sense refers to the style, broadly speaking, of a historical work, and is conveyed primarily through voice and viewpoint. Such “style” embodies the individualistic, creative side of historical practice—the great goal of all humanistic enterprises in modern times. Scholars presume that such an interpretation reflects the historian’s social background, political outlook, and scholarly and other commitments.

82

•

Fashioning History

To the extent that several or more histories embrace the same special methods, set of arguments, or basic perspective, they are referred to as a school of interpretation. That method is the basis of the school is clear in oral history and the quantitative and psychoanalytical schools of history.90 The terms Marxist and neo-Marxist were applied to a number of schools in the twentieth century that were inspired by the perspective and methodology of the great nineteenth-century social theorist.91 Arguably the most famous of twentieth-century schools was the French Annales school. The second name of its journal, Annales: Économies, Sociéties, Civilization, suggests its ambitious program.92 What distinguished the diverse practitioners of this school was the focus on the continuing effects of long-term phenomena as opposed to day-to-day events: slow changing patterns of trade and economy, persisting kinship and social relations, enduring intellectual systems or mentalités, or even slower climatic or demographic cycles. As mentioned earlier, successive schools of United States historiography are commonly designated the progressive or economic interpretation from the first decades of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War; the consensus or counterprogressive interpretation in the 1950s and 1960s; and the New Left or neoprogressive interpretation from the 1970s onward. Those histories of historywriting known as historiography frequently study changing interpretive schools. To consider the nature of an interpretive school begins the shift from an individual history or histories to the idea of the past as history. The search for a larger context for general histories or even history in general underlies the third and fourth meanings of interpretation. If many historians’ search for a larger context results in the same explicit overall story, then we can call it a master narrative, perhaps a dominant or governing narrative, or even a grand narrative. Such a master narrative might result from either the implications the historian draws from a more specialized history, that is, the larger story of which the special history is a part, or it might be the topic of a more general history. Some wellknown master or grand narratives are the rise and spread of Western capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism across continents and centuries.93 When the framework or larger context is implicit in a number of histories, it may be termed a metanarrative.94 Metanarratives are literally the grand or great stories behind the more explicit stories. These implicit grand narratives or major interpretive codings are the strings that hold the necklace(s) of facts, explanations, and generalizations together not only in both specialized and general histories but also in any exposition of history in general. They provide the contextual coherence for the larger truth of

Historical Synthesis

•

83

a history, and they validate that history as they organize it. Where once history revealed the working of God’s will, classic historical metanarratives since the Enlightenment relied on the ever-greater development and dominion of reason especially as seen in scientific and technological advancement, the inexorable spread of freedom as institutionalized in liberal democracy or prophesied by Marxism, and the confidence in inevitable progress to provide the ultimate, universal truths of history (even though modeled on Western themes and institutions and from a Western perspective). Recent metanarratives counter these classic ones by stressing the persistence of ethnicity and social and cultural diversity, agency over nature in creating ethnic and sexual identities; the spread of global capitalism with its many discontents; the empowerment of subordinated peoples and the rise of postcolonial hybrid cultures; the seemingly apocalyptic ecological constraints on modern economies; and finally even the arguments over the existence and effects of late industrialism and postmodernism. Like the old, the new metanarratives seek to provide ultimate answers about the origins, purposes, and fate of a people, even though the claims of the new may seem less universal and ethnocentric to us today than those of the old. What separates the third and fourth meanings of interpretation is how evident or hidden, how explicit or implicit, is the “string” holding together the necklace of facts and other statements in an individual history, a general history, a school of history, or especially in what is referred to as history in general. Whether explicit or implicit, grand or metanarratives provide the most basic and largest contexts of all kinds of histories. The larger the contextualization provided by such a narrative, the more likely it is implicit, and the more likely it is this implicit story that gives coherence to the ostensibly disparate facts, explanations, and generalizations presented. Metanarratives underlie both individual and collective memories and supply the links between them. Such metanarratives, by providing a fundamental context, shape histories regardless of medium and topic.95 Questions of identity and origins particularly evoke metanarratives for their answers. Who are the “we” presumed in a lesson, book, exhibit, or film? If national progress has abated as a dominant narrative to organize histories, the central role of the nation as the chief setting for history still thrives. While the idea of the nation no longer is accepted as the inevitable and natural outcome of a people’s history, the nation is still the normal stage for presentation of many histories, although called the state, a society, or a culture. The academic history profession is still divided mainly according to national histories. Nationalism may need to be explained in

84

•

Fashioning History

history but history departments remain mainly organized by national histories. Many major journals, such as the American Historical Review, arrange most of their reviews by geographical area as well as time. American, English, French, and German exceptionalism still thrives in metahistorical practice if not always in theory.96 Ethnicity is not only a major component of collective memory but also the basis of many a national history yet today. Whiteness studies trace the evolution of certain nationalities becoming “American” and predominant in United States history. “White” constituted the main ethnic affiliation of those Americans that figured prominently in the history of the United States from its English colonial beginnings, which concealed any Native American or Spanish genesis. Anglo-Americans long assumed themselves the majority and without “ethnicity.” Only “immigrants” or “minority” persons possessed race or ethnicity in this story. And historians seconded this opinion explicitly and tacitly until recently whenever they spoke or wrote of the “American people.”97 In a similar manner, the preferred metanarrative of the “English people” traces their roots to the invading Angles and Saxons rather than the indigenous Britons and ancient Celts.98 Such competing metanarratives of national racial and ethnic origins are common to many peoples.99 That ethnic metanarratives even ground the origins of Western civilization is shown by the heated controversy over the claims of political scientist Martin Bernal that ancient Greek civilization originated with Semitic Phoenician and Egyptian peoples rather than later Indo-European northerners. In his provocatively titled, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, he argues that this history, acknowledged by the ancient Greeks themselves, was ignored or distorted beginning in the late eighteenth century in order to give a white European ancestry to those later Greek achievements considered the foundations of Western civilization.100 By the early twentieth century this racist-motivated “Aryan myth” had triumphed over ancient knowledge, according to him. Bernal’s assertions elicited a vast outpouring of books and Web sites denying or supporting his scholarship and reasoning.101 The whole idea of otherness depends as much on a metanarrative as does sameness.102 Sameness and otherness receive visual, often vivid, portrayal in museum displays. Do the peoples depicted in the exhibit look and act like “us” to encourage identity, or are they presented in ways to show difference and relativism? The answers to this question are particularly evident in museum exhibits about early humans: are they represented as more ape-like or more “human”? Questions about similarity and

Historical Synthesis

•

85

difference can be applied to any of the so-called prehistoric peoples and their modes of life. The lives and artifacts of Native Americans and others long presumed “people without history,” to once again use Eric Wolf ’s title, are displayed in natural history or anthropological museums as opposed to history museums. On the other hand, archaic Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near and Middle Eastern peoples and their societies are represented in historical museums as well as archaeological ones. Only recently are the Mayan, Incan, and Aztecan civilizations being accorded the same status. Feminist scholars and women’s historians still fight the metanarrative of male-dominated histories that either exclude the activities of women altogether or relegate them to the margins of the story. Once again this issue is depicted visually in museum murals and dioramas of gender. This matter concerns less the physical appearance of men and women and more where they are located in a display and what they are doing. Are the men central and active while the women are peripheral and passive or even absent? Do the men’s activities, such as fighting or business, and the women’s activities, such as cooking or housekeeping, confirm traditional stereotypes of male and female roles and, more importantly, the worth of those roles?103 According to some scholars this male bias is even marked in archaeology’s naming of cultural stages by tool making. To designate human cultural epochs as Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages is to stress male activities and artifacts. Even to argue that civilization and history began with writing favors male over female activities.104 In the end, is the “master” narrative of western civilization still a male story in all too many texts, films, and museum displays? Although Enlightenment faith in the progress of civilization appears dead for moral and political affairs, that metanarrative still constitutes the implicit if not explicit basis for medicine and technology in many a lecture, book, and museum exhibition. Though the historians producing these histories deny such an explicit lesson, their hearers, readers, and attendees draw that conclusion so popular is the metanarrative. Even historians writing about the history of history all too often imply that recent interpretations are superior to older ones. That trend is reinforced by the normative turn in the return to history in the social sciences as well as the historical profession itself. Emphases on the morality of historic agents leads to judgments of their actions as better and worse, which extends to lauding newer histories emphasizing that approach over older ones seeking, even professing, neutrality if not always finding it. Particularly revealing

86

•

Fashioning History

are the changing judgments on past historical interpretations and the search for the precedents of today’s more approved histories.105 In the end, all kinds of histories, whether argumentative or narrative, whether the history of a life, a town, a region, a nation, or the world; of a day, year, decade, century, millennium, or longer; no matter how partial or comprehensive, all rely explicitly or implicitly on a larger narrative context to frame their arguments, specific stories, moral lessons, and perspectives. To cover both the explicitness of grand narrative and the implicitness of metanarrative, I employed the term “Great Story.”106 Great Stories serve as the larger or largest framework for organizing the disparate, embedded stories and arguments of a segment of history, whether partial or more general, short term or longer. They provide the coherence so necessary to make what otherwise would be a chronicle or annals into a narrative history. In current practice, such Great Stories serve as the larger context for an overall approach to a national, transnational, or even global history.107 Such Great Stories underlie even the past itself conceived as (a) history. The only question, as the parenthesis in the preceding sentence indicates, is whether the ultimate context of the past as history is one or more Great Stories. Numerous Great Stories exist in normal historical practice, but does the profession seek or at least prefer one overall Great Story as the (an?) ultimate and necessary context for all the other contexts? Historians once thought such comprehensive Great Stories were only the province of (and most evident in) the speculative or universal histories seeking the ultimate meaning of the entire human past, whether as class struggle, clash of civilizations, technological improvement, or democratic advance. Now they recognize that even less grand interpretive efforts use some sort of Great Story to provide conceptual structure in humbler, everyday histories. The construction of a Great Story or Stories as context in a history, in an interpretive school, or for history in general constitute the ultimate intervention by the historian to make “sense” of the past as history. Some scholars therefore believe the greatest metanarrative is the standard, unquestioned approach to historic time in western discourse.108 Subtextual analysis, or “reading between the lines,” of a history or history in general is the domain proper of metahistory. No longer reserved for the great universal interpretations of all history or the search for the ultimate meaning of the past, metahistory today explores on one hand the larger and largest contexts posited by histories in general in the profession and on the other hand the foundational premises of historical methodology underlying those histories and therefore the fashioning of them. In

Historical Synthesis

•

87

the former case, metahistory examines the implicit models of human behavior (classically hidden in traditional histories), the implications of the politics presumed in a history, or the premises and nature of a historical narrative. In the latter case, metahistory looks at the epistemological and ontological presumptions of a history or history in general as practiced by a school or the whole profession or examines the linguistic rules, the rhetorical strategies, and the premises of historical narrative in general. (The study of such rules and premises is known in literary theory as narratology and what is studied is called narrativity.) Metahistory in both of its forms provides as it studies the context of contexts, the framework for the embedded layers of a history, and the premises that generates them. In its most controversial form, metahistory studies the imaginative configuring historians perform to shape their material at its very foundations. Hayden White, whose Metahistory gave the term its new meaning, argues that historians emplot their (hi)stories according to the same four basic forms of romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire as other literary authors. Likewise, he insists that the imaginative prefiguring that grounds their texts takes the form of four classic rhetorical tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Whether dividing all of the historical imagination into four parts is too few, too many, or just right is of less concern to my argument at this point, then what such a scheme implies about the nature of history and historical practice. To extend for the moment White’s reasoning, are there only so many general plots by which historical syntheses can be organized? Students of literary narratives find only a limited number of plot elements and structures. Hayden White’s stress on four basic emplotments and prefigurings as common literary structures suggests that historical narratives are restricted in their basic variety in the same way, despite the infinity of actors, events, and times that such structures may contain. In the end, must all of the past be fashioned into one or another Great Story in order to comprehend the changes in human actions and institutions over time? Or, can historians postulate and conceive of the past as a big picture that cannot be fully narrativized? If the entire past cannot be narrativized as such, then must one understand that big picture as some great annals or great chronicles rather than a version of proper history? If this is the case, the past only becomes history through the creation of histories by historians. History conceived as a whole is the idealized or hypothesized story of the past postulated and extrapolated from various historians’ histories. All of history therefore shares the same characteristics common to all histories. Historical syntheses may be narrative or argument, but most

88

•

Fashioning History

histories use both. Historical syntheses unite explanation and interpretation through style and rhetoric. Historical syntheses combine meaning and perspective through voice and viewpoint. Contextualization ranges from the simple juxtaposition of factual statements to Great Stories themselves. Great Stories vary from explicit petit récits to overt master narratives, from complexes of implicit presuppositions to entire metanarratives. While all histories have common characteristics, they vary by degrees of intervention and interpretation by historians acting as supposed intermediaries between the survivals from the past and the type of historical products they create in the present. The next three chapters examine the relationships among the empirical and the literary and artistic elements within various genres of history.

PART II

Comparing Histories Forms, Functions, Factuality, and the Bigger Picture With the general elements of method and synthesis common to various sorts of histories outlined in the two previous chapters, we can turn to how these elements combine in specific forms or genres of histories. First, how do the elements of practice fit together in a particular history? How, in short, is it fashioned in both its parts and as a whole by what aspects of empirical method and textual synthesis? Second, what types of methods and modes of synthesis prevail in each genre or type of history? Historians draw upon processes from both historical method and historical synthesis for each kind of product, but various kinds of products display different mixes or proportions of the two sets of operations. Our basic concerns can best be expressed in a series of questions derived from the general processes involved in both methods and synthesis. A focus on historical method raises questions in general as to what is the relationship between the raw materials said to ground a product and its overall nature. The traditional, empirical side of historical practice assumes that the raw materials are primary sources and that the finished product is a historical monograph or article extrapolated from those sources, but general histories, archival collections, documentary films, and museum exhibitions all highlight the varying nature of raw materials as well as the different relationships alleged between raw materials and a final product. Hence various histories raise questions about just what are presumed to be the raw materials in any given case in addition to how far or closely connected the finished product is to its supposed raw materials? Can one measure crudely from the viewpoint of empirical methods the

90

•

Fashioning History

amount and kind of a historian’s intervention in a given product by the distance in a sense between the nature of the alleged evidence, the actual basis of the inferred data, the conclusions drawn from the created data, and the proportion of other synthetic elements to this data? Another set of questions arises from the processes involved in synthesis. What is the role of argument, story, explanation, and ethical judgment in the shaping of the statements in a historical product? This question derived from the processes of synthesis applies both to individual statements in a history and to their totality as an overall historical synthesis.1 What statements, for example, derive directly from the nature of the perspective, the basic values, and the preferred politics of the organizer of the synthesis as opposed to being re-produced or constructed factual statements said to be derived from the sources? How do voice and viewpoint shape the specific statements? In other words, this search presumes material can be found in a historical synthesis that is additional to what traditionalists point to as the empirical foundations of the historical enterprise. I raise these questions, not only about the nature of synthesis in any one historical product, but also how the elements of synthetic process are combined in various genres ranging from archival collections to general history books, from a collection of material objects to whole museums, from documentary films to popular historical blockbusters. These general questions guide the framework of the next three chapters as I apply them to three broad classes of historical products. Chapter 3 seeks answers to the questions raised above about what I call in short “texts,” which range from archival collections to full-fledged histories, from edited sources to grand narratives. The next chapter asks these questions of material objects, or what I dub “things” in general, which vary from specific artifacts to museum exhibitions, from historical sites to heritage parks. Chapter 5 applies the framework to moving visual images, or what I label, “films,” which embrace home movies as well as Hollywood productions, documentary films, and television news. Comparison of how empirical and synthetic components comprise histories also reveals the framework of assumptions grounding words historians commonly use to describe what they do. Thus “intervention” and often “inference” depend upon the type of connections assumed between sources, especially material objects, and their interpretation as conceived by empirical methodology. “Extrapolation” and “invention” rely more on the literary and textualist approaches to understanding the nature of histories as representations. “Interpretation” as an activity seems to cover

Comparing Histories

•

91

connections ranging from the use of sources to the adoption of a metanarrative. Last, I employ the term “emplotment” and its variants in the remainder of the book to signify that the process of ordering characters, events, and the other content of a historical representation is greater than just what is called a plot or plotting in a narrative. Such considerations as social theory, ethics, and other matters considered in the last chapter combine with the facts derived from evidence to order the statements in a text, the arrangement of objects in a museum, or the sequence of shots in a film. Emplotment in this broader usage implies that all historical representations are shaped by standard cultural and literary forms and generally based on a grand or metanarrative.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 3

Texts as Archives and Histories

T

exts became the chief focus of historians as they professionalized in the nineteenth century. Source criticism and the historical method principally dealt with documentary evidence. Historians edited documents, wrote monographs, and presented lectures as the products preferred by the new profession. Even history in general was understood chiefly as a text writ large. That heritage still influences the profession today. Processing Survivals as Sources

To consider the relationships between what empiricists deem primary sources and the interpretive elements of textual synthesis, I start with the collection, preservation, and presentation of survivals as sources by such institutional intermediaries as archives, rare book libraries, manuscript repositories, records centers, and museums of various kinds. If the historian acts today as an intermediary between a presumed past and its explication and exposition as history, then archivists, librarians, curators, and other institutional agents operate as intermediaries between today’s historians and their sources from and about that past. A brief glance at the acknowledgments and bibliography in any monograph or the credits at the end of a documentary film confirms the dependence of so much of modern historical scholarship on these institutional intermediaries. It is to these institutions’ handling of survivals, then, that we look for the historian’s earliest interpretive intervention in the process of converting survivals into sources. Archivists use the term “processing” in two different ways. For some, processing designates all the operations performed on a set of records before opening the set to public use.2 Thus the term would include what archivists call the “acquisition” or “accession” of the records from the creator

94

•

Fashioning History

organization or its successor by direct transfer or through gift, bequest, purchase, or conditional deposit from the present owner. Acquisition not only includes physical custody but legal and administrative control of a body of records. Such transfer might place some restrictions as to when the records might be opened to public research or whether permission might be needed for direct quotation in order to protect living or past persons. Such restrictions are not only common to papers of public officials but also to records from corporations, labor unions, universities, philanthropic societies, and even historical associations.3 Evaluation, or what archivists call “appraisal,” of a set of records determines what is of long-term worth in the records from the viewpoint of current and future administrative, legal, fiscal, historical, genealogical, or other uses—and what should be disposed of or destroyed as of little or no use to any current or presumed future constituency. One of the great archival problems of modern societies is the enormous amount of records generated in all sectors. Whereas, for example, the United States government produced 100,000 cubic feet of records between the American Revolution and the Civil War, it generated 3.5 million cubic feet between 1917 and 1930. By the last decades of the twentieth century, the federal government created as many records every four months as it produced between the Revolution and the First World War.4 In light of this deluge of records, it is estimated that no more than perhaps 1 percent of current records can be retained, in spite of proliferating Federal Records Centers. What is true for the output of governments today holds for other organizations as well, and the vastly increased use of electronic communications and records present problems of preservation as well as the quantity of output. Sometimes records are deliberately destroyed, sometimes merely concealed to maintain secrecy for legal or other reasons, such as with Internal Revenue Service records, United States tobacco companies’ knowledge of the health effects of smoking, Iran-Contra dealings under the Reagan administration, or bank accounts and other assets of Holocaust victims.5 Sometimes the destruction is inadvertent because of bad guesses about what will prove of value to historians, lawyers, identity seekers, and others in the future. And then there is always the expense of preservation and added storage space. In all cases, archivists and others judge what to do in each instance according to one or more contexts supplied by narratives prevalent in the discipline or their profession. “Conservation” or “preservation” refers to steps taken to maintain the records in a stable state for the foreseeable, perhaps indefinite, future and the repairs they may need to achieve that permanence. Concerns about

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

95

conservation and preservation extend to the nature and type of “storage” the records receive, such as acid-free folders and boxes; the control of humidity, temperature and amount of light; and security. “Storage” also refers to the appropriate kinds of accommodations or space for the various kinds of records received these days: paper, electronic, sound and video recordings, photographs and motion picture films, maps and charts, and paintings and posters. Preservation extends from such rudimentary practices as the removal of rusting clips and fasteners and various kinds of deteriorating tape to complicated processes for cleaning dirt, removing mold, stabilizing brittle and deteriorating paper or film, and protecting faded writing and colors from light.6 “Access” refers to the ultimate purpose of the archives: to open the records to scholars, lawyers, public officials, journalists, students, local historians, and other users. What are the policies on access? Under what rules and conditions do users get to examine the records? Are all who seek access treated equally? Are there legal or donor’s restrictions on certain records about copying them, even seeing them? Does the archival repository have rules on where and when the records can be used; on how many records the user can see at one time; and on the use of pens, pencils, and computers? What methods of retrieval exist to locate specific documents and collections? What sorts of finding aids have archives and other repositories produced to help users locate the collections and even specific documents relevant to their purposes and projects? What is the role of electronic media in offering access? Are the catalogs and other finding aids online so potential users can search them from other locations? Increasingly, archives and libraries offer access to their collections online. What kinds of documents do archives and libraries select to digitize for research online?7 Archivists generally apply the term “processing” only to the core of their efforts to gain intellectual and physical control over a set of records. These efforts at analysis and organization of the records they usually call “arrangement” and “description,” and they constitute the conceptual heart of the archivists’ job according to books on archival practice and theory. That the word “archives” derives from the Greek term for “government house” suggests the corporate or bureaucratic nature of the records that need arranging and describing in this kind of institution. France established the first centralized national archives in 1794. In the United States Alabama created the first state archives in 1901, but the National Archives was established only in 1934. The British combined the centuriesold Public Records Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission

96

•

Fashioning History

under the name of the National Archives of the United Kingdom in 2003 to create one of the largest collections of public documents in the world.8 If archives originally contained the records generated by governments, the term today applies to any body of documentation produced by a corporate body or organization that has a specific name and acts as an entity. Thus schools and universities, stores and business firms, churches and religious denominations, sports teams and recreation associations, social organizations and clubs, philanthropic associations and charity societies, museums and historical associations all generate archives of documents or records in addition to all those produced by various levels of governments. Technically speaking, archives contain the noncurrent or discontinued records of such a group. The term “archives” today refers at one and the same time to the records themselves, the institutional agency handling them at present, and the building or part of a building housing them.9 As part of their original generation and subsequent use, such records probably had some filing arrangement and system of organization employed by the creator whether a person, an office, or an agency. The fundamental, most sacred principle of archival arrangement is to “respect,” that is preserve, that “original order” and filing system. If the records arrive in disarray, then archivists try to reconstruct both the order and the filing system. In pursuit of this goal, archival theory and practice stress that each agency’s deposited collection (or fonds, the term used by the French who originated the principle in the nineteenth century) should be maintained as a separate entity and not be intermixed with even similar records from another agency. Thus the arrangement and system of organization of a set of records both exhibits its “original order” and reflects its origin or “provenance” in how the records were generated, used, and filed.10 Preferably in practice and certainly in theory, archival arrangement and description moves from the overall fonds to groups of records, to series and subseries, to file folders and finally individual documents. In that sense, the hierarchical arrangement of the records and their description replicate the bureaucratic system of the creating organization and probably its functions and structure. Thus the records themselves are evidence documenting the functions and activities of their creators at the same time as they contain evidence about what the creators were thinking and doing about their worlds. By 2003 the National Archives of the United States divided its over 4 billion items into 568 record groups, subdivided by series.

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

97

Such a hierarchical approach to archival arrangement and description presumes that documents exist in one or a few copies so that their place in the system is clear. But what are the implications for these fundamental archival principles when the same document has simultaneous multiple locations in the electronic age, because the communications structure if not the managerial hierarchy and the social organization of an agency resembles a network more than a simple tree chart? If the initial purpose of “description” is to give archivists control over their holdings, the ultimate purpose is to facilitate users’ access to the records. As a general practice, the more voluminous a set of records, the more the description of its contents is collective and the less reference to individual items or even file folders. Archivists’ inventories, registers, catalogs, guides, and other “finding aids” provide description by sets, groups, or series of records rather than individual items as is done in libraries or at times manuscript collections, because a set of records may measure hundreds, even thousands, of cubic feet. As their name suggests, finding aids are meant to provide the user with an overall introduction to a set of records. They typically discuss the record set’s individual or organizational origins, the context and evolution of the records and creator agency, the resulting filing structure, the physical forms and amount of the records, their general subject matter and contents, their relationship to other records in the repository (and perhaps elsewhere), and the chief persons, activities, and organizations mentioned in the records. When card files and printed catalogues were the common finding aids, libraries and archives could pursue their own individual methods of classification. Increased use of electronic records demands the same kind of standardization that libraries have long used in describing their contents.11 In performing these functions, archivists become what might be called historians of first resort. First, they identify the survivals and authenticate them as actual sources for the use of other scholars. To do this they investigate accession documents, peruse the contents of the records, and research the larger context of the collection. In the process, they may attribute dates to the undated, surnames to first names, and even names to the anonymous. To arrange and describe a set of records, they investigate the contents in light of its filing system and reconstruct one where necessary. They research how the records and the filing system changed and evolved over time. To achieve these ends, archivists must not only derive information and clues from the records themselves but also understand the larger history of their creation and the context of their use. In that sense archivists act like other historians in deriving facts from evidence

98

•

Fashioning History

and making inferences. They must use knowledge from outside the collection to help with arranging and describing it, so that other historians can use the surviving records as sources. To do so, they must have a general knowledge of communications systems and filing and management styles at the time the records were created and subsequently. Identification of persons and activities in a set of records depends upon historical investigation and knowledge outside the records as much as research in the records themselves and therefore upon interpretation and synthesis like any other historian. In the end, the various finding aids and inventories constitute their own form of history of the origins of an organization, its changing internal functions and structure, its personnel and their activities all the while offering guidance to the records themselves. The inventories and other finding aids are therefore one form of historical product just as the arranged records are another. A third product is the knowledge an archivist gains of a record set as she researched its contents in preparation for its arrangement and description. Although the published finding aids orient a researcher to locate and use a collection, the unwritten but deep knowledge archivists have of their holdings can be of even greater help to an investigator in uncovering evidence pertinent to a project. Thus the point at which so many historians and others begin the transformation of survivals into sources according to the historical method is the end product of the archivists’ identification, authentication, classification, description, preservation, and storage of their holdings. And this difference in customary beginning point for the historian as user of sources as opposed to that of the archivist as producer of them is also true in general of those survivals historians research in rare book collections, manuscript repositories, and various kinds of museums. Although it is common to categorize the differences among all these various institutions by purposes, sources of funding, nature of management, subject matter, physical forms of their holdings, and their different histories and cultural traditions, they all perform similar general tasks in preparing their holdings for public use, whether by historians, genealogists, students, lawyers, local historians, filmmakers, or others. At the risk of oversimplifying the differences among and within institutional types, I want to summarize briefly some of these common tasks as prelude to considering their implications for the first degrees of interpretation and intervention in the historical process. On one hand, such examination is rendered more difficult by a traditional lack of common terminology stemming from the diverse histories and purposes of these

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

99

assorted institutions; on the other hand, all the pertinent professional associations today seem to be searching for a more uniform theory of practice and a set of common standards in describing holdings and applying technical vocabulary. That search for uniform standards and common terminology goes hand in hand with the trends to increased formal training of archivists and librarians since the 1950s and the greater use of computerized data and catalog dissemination in the last few decades. The wider dissemination of finding aids online as well as increased attention to theory in professional training courses encouraged common solutions to common problems.12 Even though these institutions may differ from archives by types of holdings (books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, paintings, or material objects for example), they too must acquire their holdings through gift, purchase, permanent loan, or other means. They too must have principles for the selection of their contents, their retention, and their culling through disposal or deaccession. They too must employ some system of classification to describe, arrange, and retrieve their holdings. Libraries generally catalog their books and pamphlets individually by author and title according to alphabetical, topical, or other curator-determined system as opposed to the collective record group or series used by archivists. (Book classification systems like those of the Library of Congress or the Dewey decimal system, for example, allow each volume an individual number even though grouped according to general categories.) Given the mixed nature of their holdings, manuscript repositories usually classify their holdings both by individual items like libraries and by collective series and files like archives. To the extent that the original context of creation or maintenance no longer exists for items acquired by manuscript curators, they classify their holdings no matter when or how acquired by producer (especially famous persons), dates (regardless of how filed originally), subject and topic, and/or nature of materials and format (diaries, letters, maps, artwork, sound recordings, film). For those manuscript collections with few or precious items, the library approach to authorship, chronology, topic, and general classification is preferred. For large manuscript collections, the archival approach to collective identification of the series or file folder is used. Even in the latter case, however, manuscript collections are generally classified and identified from the bottom up unlike the archival preference for arranging and describing from the top down because the records come ordered that way. Libraries and manuscript repositories too must look to the preservation of their holdings through the conservation and restoration of the originals or their protection

100

•

Fashioning History

from users through duplication on microfilm or by electronic means. So too must they solve problems of storage, whether of finding space, regulating temperature and humidity, or providing security. They also must decide the degree and nature of access and the conditions of use. Small manuscript repositories, rare book libraries, and museums like small archives may differ from their large brethren in size and training of staff, capacity to preserve and catalogue their holdings, or ability to provide for their protection and storage, but they, just like their bigger siblings, must perform the same general tasks of acquisition, classification and physical and conceptual arrangement, selection and disposal, preservation and restoration, security and access, storage and exhibition. In performing these tasks, manuscript librarians and museum curators, like archivists, transform survivals into their own kind of historical products. Through their several interventions, they shape the nature, quantity, and use of the survivals historians research as sources to develop their histories. Without pretending to a definitive analysis of the general implications of these institutional intermediary activities for historical research, let us look at some of the most obvious consequences of these transformed historical products. Of first importance in the public eye is these institutions’ claim that their holdings are unique or unusual.13 All institutions not only point to the singularity of their collections as overall aggregations or assemblages, but also to the uniqueness of the individual items. Thus archives and manuscript repositories stress the uniqueness of each of their records, letters, and other items in their possession, even if copies of letters sent or other kinds of duplicates of missing items occur among their paper records or manuscripts. Art museums presume the singularity as well as originality of their paintings, sculpture, and many other artifacts, just as historical museums do for their historic buildings and many of their material objects. Although rare book libraries or special collections may contain items that were produced originally in multiple copies, the limited survival today of such matter makes their collection unusual if not unique. Likewise, historical museums contain many (some almost only) things that were produced in multiple copies or versions, but their association with a famous person, a governmental regime, a specific business, a particular religious group, or definite historical event or movement makes the collection unique as a whole. Museums of technology and popular culture may contain nothing but items mechanically produced or intended for mass distribution, such as photographs, films, or sound recordings, but the extent and completeness of the collection makes them remarkable

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

101

and unusual if not unique. For the public, singularity or scarcity translates into the prices the paintings by renowned artists, the letters of famous persons, or rare books fetch on the auction block. For the historian, the worth lies not in their monetary value, their uniqueness, or their scarcity but in the continued availability of these survivals as (re)sources for the study of the past. From the historian’s viewpoint, the most important claim archives, manuscript repositories, rare book libraries, historical, and other museums make about their holdings is that they are actual survivals from a certain date and place in the past. The survivals may be textual, auditory, pictorial, or three-dimensional material objects; they may be restored, mended, or altered in other ways; and they may be unique or multiple, but they are always the authentic objects and certified original to the times of their production (or as close as the historian can get). How they achieve this status through modern institutional means calls attention to the earliest degrees of interpretive intervention in the historical process. Interpretation commences with the recognition and identification of survivals as possible sources as we learned in the first chapter. Since, in theory, there is no or little intervention by the historian in producing the survivals, we might be tempted to say it is the zero point in our scale of intervention. Some theorists even argue that survivals as such are uninterpreted, but the skills needed for their identification suggest otherwise. Even the recognition of the pastness, or historicity, of a survival involves some degree of interpretation, and surely the recognition of its usefulness to any given historical inquiry requires more interpretation. Given that not all survivals are considered relevant for each historical project, the criteria of usefulness must be based upon some interpretive goal. If the historian must always construct one or more contexts to transform survivals into sources, then such interpretive intervention is at least one step removed from the survivals themselves and certainly more from the time and, therefore in a strict sense, the place of their creation. But to speak as if interpretation and intervention begins with the historian studying previously unresearched survivals as sources neglects the (elaborate) institutional apparatus that intervenes today between most past artifacts and their present use. These institutions serve as the chief intermediaries between the residue of the past and the present-day historian’s use of it through what and how they identify, preserve, store, organize, catalog, and grant access to these potential sources in their collections. Historical sources are the products that museums, rare book libraries, archives, manuscript repositories, and record centers offer historians and

102

•

Fashioning History

other potential users. And so it is to the historians of the first resort that we must look for the initial relationships between interpretation and intervention as degrees of removal from the original production, time, and location of the survivals themselves. We must always consider to what extent interpretation of the past is shaped by what is in archives, museums, manuscript and rare book libraries. In what ways, therefore, do these repositories help determine the interpretation of the past as history through their various activities? Digitization of archival materials may disseminate more broadly their use, but it does not alter their institutional origins and culling.14 Interpretive intervention commences with the recognition and identification of survivals as possible sources and affects importantly what is preserved and eliminated through accession and disposal. Historians must always ponder what is not as well as what is in a collection and why. In the case of recent manuscripts, records, objects, and books, their abundance makes retention and disposal a conscious decision. Interpretation grounds the judgment about what is saved and what discarded; what is considered of permanent value and what seems to possess no historically redeeming value. The older and scarcer the survivals, the more likely the entire surviving corpus is retained as sources today. The winnowing of earlier records arose from both the accidents of time and conscious decisions made long ago. The survival of survivals depends upon the serendipity of fires, invasions, insects, and other calamities natural and man-made. What survives from longer ago also depends upon what earlier elites and others considered important and otherwise. No wonder political, religious, and diplomatic records predominated until recent times, concerned mostly with elite men rather than women and children and all too often focused on events at the national level. Interpretation and intervention continue with the arrangement and classification of the records, books, manuscripts, objects, and visual and sound documents in institutional holdings. Arrangement and classification depend upon historians of the first resort contextualizing those holdings as sources awaiting further research by potential users. Historians of the first resort, like their peers in the profession, must not only interpret the survivals for them to become sources but, as part of that process, imagine them in the context that produced them. In general, these kinds of survivals no longer exist in the specific and never in the larger context that produced them. The problem of providing proper context to interpret survivals is highlighted particularly in the preservation and presentation of historic sites, which will be covered in the next chapter. The older

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

103

the period of production, the more likely the social and intellectual and even the physical environment has changed. Even contexts from recent times disappear quickly enough leaving their survivals needing recontextualization. Archives, museums, libraries, and other repositories provide a new context for their holdings through their arrangement and classification systems. Even archives stressing provenance and original order only embody the shell of context that created the records in the first place. Even those museums that preserve and restore historic buildings seemingly unchanged from the past exist in a changed physical, social, and cultural context, as any city, college campus, or countryside demonstrates. Last, interpretation and intervention occurs in description and exhibition. Short of a catalog of each book or a calendar of each document in a collection, interpretive choices must be made about what is featured, what is only mentioned, and what is omitted or suppressed in a finding aid or an exhibit. Perhaps the most conspicuous interpretive intervention is the title archivists and manuscript curators give a collection, for, unlike books and pamphlets, many collections come with many authors or none at all. Should the collection, for example, be named after a famous person, the chief creator, or the major donor? Should it be named after an organization or agency, and at what stage of change and evolution? Because material objects cannot speak for themselves, museum exhibitions particularly reveal the depth and nature of interpretation in arrangement, classification, titling, and display (covered in the next chapter). In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss textual products of various kinds and degrees of interpretation. Reproductions and Re-presentations When we turn from texts as sources to the production of historical texts of various kinds, we enter the processes traditional to history writing and the predominant focus of the historical profession until recently. Historical syntheses normally resulted in texts of different sorts just as the historical method was developed primarily to study textual documents. Those texts may vary from such reproduced sources as diaries and other documents to transcribed oral histories, from school textbooks to learned articles and lectures, from biographies to essays, from narrative histories to analytical monographs, from dissertations to general histories. The amount of interpretation and the nature of intervention between the supposed raw materials and evidential sources and the finished product range from the reproduction of the textual sources at one end to the construction of

104

•

Fashioning History

full-fledged histories at the other. For the sake of organizing the discussion, I have grouped the various kinds of interpretive intervention into three general categories: reproduction and re-presentation (in this section) appears to use less intervention and seemingly interpretation between sources and finished product, while construction of a fullfledged history (in next section) demands more of both. Greater interpretations such as grand narratives and metastories providing ultimate context(ualization) are left for the last section of this chapter. Historians interpret in all instances but in different ways and proportions in each kind of history. The least obvious interpretive intervention beyond identifying textual survivals and processing them as sources re-presents them in some form. When we turn to the reproduction and re-presentation of textual artifacts, differences in amount and kind of interpretation lie in whether the survival is reproduced as a whole, only in part, or merely paraphrased. Each kind has basically different uses and results in different products from the viewpoint of historians. The uses of the re-produced products may vary from their employment as accurate substitutes for the original sources to their supposed ability to convey the unmediated experience of the past directly to the reader. The products may range from electronic or photocopies to printed scholarly editions and classroom sourcebooks, from quotations to paraphrasing or summarizing what is in the sources. Reproducing all of a source. At first remove from the surviving textual sources are reproductions of them. Historical products at this level of intervention range from photographic, xerographic, and digitized or computer-scanned copies to typographic facsimiles; from edited printed diaries and journals to multivolume editions of correspondence and public records; from variorum editions of classic authors to classroom “sourcebooks.” What historians seek in and through these forms are reproductions of the originals that are as accurate, complete, and authoritative as possible. What is possible depends upon the nature of the original source, the medium of duplication, the degree of editorial intervention and interpretation, the purpose of reproduction—and of course time and money.15 The nature of the original texts influences the ability to replicate them exactly and conveniently. Are the originals in modern printed or handwritten script or in older even obsolete forms of writing, perhaps using symbols no longer used? An example of such a symbol is the Old English thorn (|p), which indicated the “th” sound. It was replaced in Middle English by y so that ye is “the” (often mispronounced and lampooned today in such phrases as “ye olde shoppe”). Do the originals obey modern

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

105

conventions of spelling, punctuation, and grammar; the less uniform practices of an older period; or an author’s idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, and grammar? Is the original a clean copy with consistent formatting, or does it contain marginalia, canceled words, interlining, or erratic spacing? Is the reproduced source an exact copy of the actual original; the only surviving copy of the original which is no longer in existence; a draft or proposal of the original; one of many successive variants of the original as it evolved through various drafts to finished document; only a copy of other copies, or even just a summary of what no longer exists? Were older copies mechanically accurate because created from the original by pressing thin paper on a freshly inked original, or produced mechanically and simultaneously by a pantograph or by a typewriter on carbon paper? Are the newer copies accurate because of photography, xerography, or computer scanning? Or, were the copies entirely new versions of the original dependent upon the skills and attention of the author, a clerk, or copyist? Do the sources contain secret codes, mathematical or other symbols, maps and scenic pictures, statistical tables and graphs, architectural sketches and drawings, photographs, sound recordings, telegrams, or electronic messages? In what language or languages are the relevant documents? Are the originals in a well-preserved state, or are they faded or decayed, full of holes and tears, and missing sections? Last, are the records scarce and few or abundant and voluminous? Are the sources part of a collection deposited in one or a few places, or are the related texts scattered across nations and oceans? And, of course, what is the purpose for reproducing the documents in the first place? Different means of textual reproduction have their advantages and disadvantages in coping with these differences. The accuracy of the medium of reproduction and the amount of editorial apparatus vary in light of purpose and audience. The less editorial intervention through annotation of the text and introductions, the more specialized knowledge the user must bring to the form and nature of the script, the names and events mentioned, and the context of its creation. The more editorial intervention between original and reproduction, the more the reproduction tends to resemble other more interpretive histories in the profession. Thus no one type of reproduction can be all things to all its potential users. Yet each form is considered an accurate re-presentation in its way of the original. The following sampling of forms moves from less to more intervention and interpretation measured by editorial intrusion between what the reader finds in the original sources as opposed to what the reader encounters in the reproductions.16

106

•

Fashioning History

The most accurate reproductions employ photographic, xerographic, or computer-scanning techniques to duplicate the text exactly. Such exact duplication solves the problem of reproducing the spelling, grammar, the nature of the writing and language, pictures, symbols, and formatting in general, but even such duplication frequently alters the size and color of the original, its general appearance, and certainly its “feel.” Archives and manuscript repositories increasingly try to preserve their fragile original documents and records through limiting their patrons to such reproductions. The compiler of such reproductions must decide like any other editor what texts to include in a series and in what order. Is the reproduction to be comprehensive or selective of its collection or archive? Should the reproduction merely duplicate a given collection in one archive or repository, or should all relevant texts be included no matter where located? Should, for example, a person’s letters sent be included with the letters received, when only the latter are in the person’s collection in a manuscript repository? If the comprehensive route is chosen then the editor must identify the location of each document, as in any other edition assembled from various places. A lesser level of accurate reproduction is a typographic facsimile produced by modern printing technology. A facsimile attempts to reproduce through modern printing as exactly as possible the appearance of the original text. This form of reproduction works best for already printed books and pamphlets. But even in such cases, should the facsimile duplicate exactly the typeface, spacing and formatting, headings and marginalia, lines and line breaks, spellings, grammar, and punctuation, very long sentences, and frequent or erratic capitalization? The ideal of accuracy demands reproduction with little or no editorial intervention to distinguish this copy from the original book or pamphlet. Once again identifying the current location of the source, its history or provenance, and something of its context poses a dilemma for the editor. The insertion of an introduction or appendix providing such information violates the exact simulation of this level of reproduction at the same time as it helps the user. The problems of transcribing handwritten letters, diaries, notebooks, legal documents, and other records into printed text increase the difficulty in accurately conveying the originals. The results can vary from facsimiles to letterpress editions, which are still another lesser level of reproduction. Special type fonts may reproduce or resemble typographically what was once handwritten script or symbols but are only a limited version at best of handwriting itself. Modern printing conventions accommodate poorly the many varying sizes of characters in handwritten

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

107

documents. Even computer-scanned documents are forms of edited transcription if converted into modern typefaces, spacing, capitalization, and so on. And again, what about obsolete or archaic symbols or abbreviations? What should be done, for example, about eighteenth-century abbreviations that superscript and underline the last letter? Should, for example, the editor lower the “r” in the eighteenth-century abbreviation of “Mister” to the line and replace the underlining with a period in accord with American use today, “Mr.”? In the best of many authoritative letterpress editions today, spacing and formatting are not necessarily that of the originals. Marginalia, interlineations, crossed out or deleted words, idiosyncratic capitalization and punctuation, long run-on sentences, and word and line breaks all present problems of duplication. Computer-driven typesetting ameliorates some but not all of these problems today.17 To what extent do both the conventions of modern printing and the expectations of the modern reader demand or make desirable the “normalization” of the transcribed text in line with today’s standards of punctuation, spelling, and so on? Modern readers are accustomed to shorter sentences and paragraphs, fewer dashes, and more commas than many older documents contain. (The English historian and editor P. D. A. Harvey offers the example of a royal charter of 1682 that is a single paragraph of ten thousand words divided into perhaps fourteen sentences.)18 To what degree should the editor accommodate the technological limits of printing and the readers’ expectations about sentence length, punctuation, and formatting when producing a transcribed source? The more accommodation the editor makes, the more the reproduced text becomes less of a simple re-presentation: more of an edition than a simple replica. To what extent should editors indicate to their readers the nature of the changes they made because of normalization or standardization of spacing, sentence length, spelling, punctuation, or otherwise? The more the editor reveals the practices explicitly, the more the transcription becomes a full-fledged published edition. Editors of transcribed facsimiles should describe the changes they made in the introduction or appendix rather than annotate the text itself in order to keep the facsimile looking more like its original. There too the editors can notify the user of the location and nature of the original texts. Printed editions of historical documents and records can run from single volumes to dozens even hundreds of volumes, but the general choices confronting the editor remain the same across projects. How can the reproduced text be sufficiently true to the original to serve as an adequate substitute for purposes of research and yet still prove understandable and

108

•

Fashioning History

useful (and affordable) to a variety of readers? The array of published editions and their different editorial practices shows no one solution is best for all kinds of records in satisfying these somewhat conflicting goals. Online, CD-ROM, and PDF (Portable Document Format) expand the media but do not solve all the editorial problems. These new media, however, allow editor and user alike rapid, systematic, and complete electronic search in a way even the best indexes of the past could not. How open should editors be about the modifications they make in the text, and what forms should that disclosure take? What changes are made silently in editing the original source, and what are revealed openly to the reader through the editorial apparatus accompanying the reproduced record? Adjustment of spacing and indentation, addition of periods and maybe commas or elimination of dashes, the substitution of new for old alphabetical letters and symbols, or spelling out abbreviations may all occur with no indication in the text and only discussed in general, if at all, in the introduction or appendix. Other editors employ different or special type fonts in the text itself and use footnotes to indicate such changes as crossed out words, interlinear corrections and additions by the author; marginal comments by author or reader; missing words and the editor’s best guesses; deciphering coded passages or spelling out shorthand words; and foreign or technical words that the editor translates or explains. Such editorial additions as italics or other type font variations, superscript note numbers, daggers, and asterisks should not confuse the user about what symbols, word placements, and formatting appeared in the original text. The more the editor’s superscripts, typographical devices, and notes, the less the reproduced text appears like the original. Some edited texts so bristle with these devices that the lines resemble barbed wire guarding the original appearance of the source from serious reconstruction by the reader. How far an editor may take normalization and standardization depends upon the nature of the original documents. While an editor might correct the spelling, punctuation, or grammar of a learned or professional person silently or with minimum notice, such a practice destroys the peculiarities and dialect of many documents, especially those produced by the less literate in a society. The conundrum of normalization arises particularly in the transcription of oral history tapes, which are verbal in origin and only become textual when transcribed. The transcriber as opposed to the interviewee inserts the spelling and punctuation, if not the grammar, unless the subject reserves review rights. The earlier custom in oral history transcription of omitting in the text the interviewer’s questions that elicited

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

109

the answers given by the interviewee particularly sinned against the most basic tenet of full disclosure in modern editorial practice.19 Which version of a document should be published when several variations exist? Such variations arise in several ways. The handwritten and the printed originals might differ in small or larger ways. Smaller and larger variations may have occurred also at each stage as a draft circulated, was revised, accepted as final, and then published in still another version. Multiple authors may have produced several texts. Committee members, legislators, and conferees may have argued for different versions of a report, a statute, a proclamation, or an announcement. Some authors chose in later life to revise their earlier writings. In these cases, should editors publish what they consider the “best” text or all the variations? Should each variation be published separately, or should the revisions be combined into one text with italics, underlining, and footnotes indicating the different versions? Such a combined text, of course, resembles no one original document.20 Similarly, should the published text of a letter, for example, include the receiver’s marginal comments and endorsement or only the sender’s text? How complete, how comprehensive should a published document collection be? Should the editor collect relevant documents or versions no matter where located, no matter who possesses them? Such a goal entails an extensive search for the relevant documents, not only among all repositories, but also among dealers in autographs and manuscripts and among private owners. Should the editor in the spirit of comprehensiveness list known missing letters, include summaries of those that now only exist as such, or repeat already published ones? What should be the editor’s policy about enclosures, especially those that are copies of documents in other collections? The more complete the collation of all relevant texts, the greater convenience for the user. Likewise, the more comprehensive the published collection, the easier it is for the user to envision the context of a document and its times. While collation re-establishes some of the context of the earlier times, it may also juxtapose documents that were not collectively available as such to readers at the time of their origin. How selective should the editor be, especially in light of budget constraints? What in other words may be safely omitted as well as what must be included in the name of comprehensiveness? The standards for selection vary by how scarce or abundant the documents are. Scarcity in one sense simplifies the editors’ job, for every scrap must probably be reproduced. Sheer abundance forces choices because of constraints of space, time, and money. Should every relevant document in a collection be

110

•

Fashioning History

reproduced even if there are multiple copies of the same or similar documents? Or should just a sampling be taken of such multiple but formulaic items as business letters and bills, deeds and other legal documents? The more comprehensive the collation of relevant documents, the more the editor faces the same problem of arrangement as the archivist. In this instance, how should the editor arrange the documents in an edition as opposed to how they are arranged in their repository? Should the documents be ordered by chronology, topic, type, or a combination of these? Should, for example, a diary be published as a separate, complete entity in itself, or should its entries be divided and published along with other items of the same date? Should a husband’s and wife’s letters to each other be integrated into a separate volume or distributed among all other similarly dated documents by them in other volumes? No one answer to such questions applies to all projects as various published editions show. Intervention begins to lapse into interpretation through such selection and ordering, for the arrangement necessarily influences how the reader perceives the past revealed through the documents as ordered. Of course, electronic networking allows the user to become her own editor compiling documents and texts according to her interests. The more contextualization the editor provides in footnotes, head notes, introductions, and appendices, the more likely such intervention becomes interpretive. Interpretation begins in the assigning of dates to undated items and in attributing authors or recipients to anonymous documents or correspondence without an address, whether based on handwriting, internal references, appearance, or chronology. It proceeds further when identifying persons, events, institutions, and other matters mentioned in the text or explaining references to obsolete technology, old customs, ancient legal proceedings, and other obscure material either in footnotes or appendix. Further interpretation occurs in biographical sketches of pertinent individuals; glossaries defining archaic, old, or technical terms; explanations of past events and institutions; and even timelines in introductions or appendices. Discussions of effects, causes, impacts of people, events, and institutions help some readers understand the texts but all these efforts just as surely embody interpretation. The more the editor tries to elaborate context to help the reader understand the texts as those at the time supposedly did, the more the editor becomes a historian interpreting the text. Such an editorial thrust to interpretation raises the problem of overannotation, in which the editor takes one side of a controversy or advocates one interpretive school over another without warning the reader.21

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

111

In these many ways edited historical documents and records approach the same degree of intervention and interpretation as that offered in any full-fledged history, for they too try to shape the readers’ perception and interpretation of the past even though purporting just to reproduce the texts. The very choices editors make about which version of a text to include; what to silently emend in its contents; and what to normalize, modernize, and standardize produces an already interpreted document as the foundations of the edited version. As American editor Mary-Jo Kline concludes in A Guide to Documentary Editing, “In documentary editions, the patterns of characters, words, phrases, and paragraphs offered to the reader are seldom the only ones that the edition’s source could have produced. Instead, they form but one text that the editor might have extrapolated from the handwritten, typed, spoken, or printed material that is the edition’s base.”22 Simple as well as elaborate editorial footnotes, headnotes, appendices, and introductions proffer interpretations in the name of supplying information and context by specialists. The more extensive such editorial intervention, the more interpretation shapes their content as in any other form of history: reproduction becomes re-presentation becomes representation. Ideally, the less intervention and interpretation introduced through the medium of duplication or editorial apparatus, the better the newly re-presented text serves as a substitute for the original. However, the less editorial apparatus the more multiple and specialized the skills the investigator must bring to reproduced texts as with the originals. There are some clear advantages to using reproduced texts. The increased ease of access allows the democratization of research, especially through digitization and the Internet. No longer need research be restricted to those who can afford to travel to the many repositories. The gathering of far-flung and scattered originals into an accurate and comprehensive reproduction enables the easier contextualization of the documents and their contents by any researcher. The ease of such contextualization is furthered through the editor’s careful collation and comparison of multiple originals. Although still too many digitized documents appearing on the Internet neglect or omit provenance or other contextual information, the ability to use a computer to search their contents makes what was once a difficult and laborious task quick and almost effortless. Reproducing a part of a source. According to many historians, the reproduction of part of a source is better than none at all, for it offers the reader some access to the original’s emotion, style, or evidence. Reproducing part of a source can range from a short quotation to a substantial portion. In either case, such reproduction is put in context by the editor’s or author’s

112

•

Fashioning History

contextualization of the material. The shorter the excerpt the more likely the recontextualization, but it occurs with the introductory and other material surrounding longer excerpts as well. Historians use quotations from original sources in books, lectures, documentary films, and museum exhibitions for many reasons: to convey the flavor of the past, to prove an argumentative point, to reinforce a moral or political position, to allow the reader to compare the original with the translation provided by the author, among others. Such use of quotations is like the display of artifacts in a museum exhibition because each snippet of source is embedded in a larger context divorced, even alien, to its original one. It is, in short, recontextualized for modern consumption in the name of insight into the past through partial reproduction. Problems of transcription, translation, and other editorial choices apply to the shortest quotation as much as to the reproduction of an entire source. Should most quotations therefore be considered an aspect of reproduction or a greater step of interpretive intervention? The same point holds for photographs of artifactual survivals in a book or on the Internet. The changed size, appearance, and other problems of partial reproduction (especially reducing the three dimensions of a material object to the two of a photograph) only add to the problems of this operation as much as what surrounds them as text or other elaboration in any display, film, or book. The organization of matter in between as well as the order and selection of the quotations is the historian’s own juxtaposition. As historians string together the quotations in this step, they usually recontextualize. Even how the historian introduces the quotation slants its interpretation by the reader. Does the sentence introducing the quotation say the producer of it stated emphatically or matter-of-factly, sarcastically or haltingly, asserted forcefully or resentfully, opined softly or authoritatively, replied angrily or compassionately, concurred or opposed, and many another interpretive verb and adverb? The rhetoric of verbs and adverbs offers the historian ample domain to recontextualize the actual words of the quoted. Even longer reproduction of sources does not eliminate these problems of recontextualization through introduction and preface, as demonstrated in what is called a source or documents book in classroom assignment. Natalie Zemon Davis offers a good example of reproducing sources in whole and part in her book, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France.23 She examines how supplicants, notaries, and perhaps attorneys shaped the narrative and argumentative elements

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

113

of their appeals to king and courts for relief from capital punishment for the various murders the petitioners committed or attempted. These “pardon tales” appear to be repeated or re-presented in the letters of remission issued by the king. While the petitioners’ words may not be verbatim, Davis believes they are close to the actual stories of events, circumstances, and motives told by those seeking pardon for homicides attempted or committed unintentionally, accidentally, or in anger. As a result of her interest in the exact ways these narratives and arguments were fashioned according to the customs and understanding of the various social classes at the time, she herself reproduces shorter and longer excerpts of these remission letters throughout the book. The most exact reproduction is a photograph of a 1548 clerk’s hand-scripted letter of remission.24 Appendices A and B reproduce eight complete letters transcribed into modern type from the originals, so her readers get a “sense of the French behind the translations, paraphrases, and summaries” of what she presents in the book.25 As she admits, these lightly edited transcriptions retain the original sixteenth-century orthography and use of “et cetera” of the chancellery copies but modernize capitalization and normalize punctuation and paragraphing to some extent. She offers her translations of almost entire letters in the several places.26 She employs numerous translated shorter or longer quotations to illustrate her argument as she discusses the many different kinds of events considered germane in the tales; the characterization of petitioners versus the adultery, drunkenness, and bad behavior of their victims; the language and emplotments used to gain sympathy for commuting the customary death sentence; and the overall mental outlooks, social customs, and other matters that both caused and mitigated the crimes and justified their forgiveness or lesser punishment. Even more numerous are her many paraphrases and summaries of parts of the documents as she fashions her own exposition. She also reproduces some pictures of the era, including two illustrating a request for ratification and a pardon.27 Re-presenting through paraphrase and summary. A further degree of intervention still supposedly re-presents a series of facts or generalizations, a story, or argument as they appeared in a source. The difference between this degree and the preceding one of partial reproduction involves the voice of the historian. In quotation the historian reproduces a description, generalization, story, or argument with a goal of injecting the voice and viewpoint of the past person and keeping to a minimum her own voice and viewpoint. In contrast, the historian in paraphrase and summary moves beyond reproduction to re-presenting a set or series of

114

•

Fashioning History

facts, a story, or an argument from a source, supposedly still with a minimum intrusion of voice, viewpoint, and interpretation but in the historian’s own words as opposed to just reproducing those of the source. The best textual examples of this step are versions of what we might call paraphrase and summary. Much of what passes for description and recounting in historical works are the result of historians summarizing or paraphrasing the words or other matter of the sources in their own projects. That such descriptions, stories, and arguments come from the sources by way of the historian’s mind and word-processor makes it less clear whose voice and viewpoint and even whose context of matters shapes this form of scholarly borrowing. The extent of what is borrowed, its organization, and what it proves are the historian’s choice. The historian selects the passages to be paraphrased or summarized. She may reorganize the borrowed material to make it coherent in terms of her own argument and story. Such summary goes a long way towards what historians call a proper history. A calendar of a manuscript collection produced by an archive or manuscript library that briefly describes the contents of each document in a collection is an extreme example of summary. When the historian re-presents through paraphrase or summary a story or argument as such from a single source, she is all too prone to adopt the narrative connections and the argumentative logic of the source as well. The historian probably also accepts its voice and viewpoint as well as its evaluations, meaning, and conception of time. The historian, in short, re-employs the thoughts and feelings, descriptions of actions and scenes, the explanatory and narrative connections supplied in the source even while eschewing the exact words. Such re-presenting in the historian’s words is another version of what the profession calls description or recounting (in contrast to accounting for).28 When the product derives from two or more sources, then the more likely it reflects the historian’s voice and viewpoint. As I said elsewhere, “the ability to paraphrase or summarize is also the power to reconstrue and to misrepresent what was given in the sources.”29 Paraphrase and summary offer greater opportunity to recontextualize through organization, argument, voice and viewpoint, and therefore they increasingly resemble proper history. As a consequence, the reader or other audience has to be more active to counteract historians shaping the story and/or argument than in the preceding steps of reproduction. When historians assemble a series of facts or compile stories and arguments found in a variety of sources, then the product like the practice might be labeled reconstruction. Such reconstruction points to

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

115

another degree of intervention, because the sequencing of a series of facts and the stories and arguments as such would not exist without the historian selecting their components from the various sources. Nevertheless, the implicit if not explicit goal of reconstruction professes to keep the historian’s voice and viewpoint to a minimum and those of the sources to a maximum. Once again paraphrase and summary are the primary modes of exposition and recounting and describing are the chief goal of this degree of intervention. For example, Natalie Zemon Davis admits using paraphrase and summary throughout her Fiction in the Archives. Like Davis, both Carlo Ginzburg in his The Cheese and Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error use long quotations and paraphrases to convey their subjects’ thoughts and actions.30 Like Davis again, the two authors depend for the re-presentation of their common people’s ideas and behavior on its original re-presentation in their evidence. In the case of these two classics, the authors depended upon seemingly detailed inquisitorial records. In each case, quotation, paraphrase, and summary are so artfully melded that the reader finds it difficult to distinguish what the Italian miller and the French peasants and shepherds thought and did from how the two historians construct their lives through their extensive use of re-presentation. Thus these classics manifest the greater synthetic intervention and interpretation appropriate to a full-fledged history. Constructing Full-fledged Histories The combination of empirical methods and textual elements culminates in the proper or full-fledged history. The more historians link together factual and other statements into stories and arguments and also comment, arrange, or otherwise interpret, the less their operations result in a re-presentation of the supposed sources and the more the products become complex constructions or creations in their own right. A proper or full-fledged history may use re-presentations of various sorts but depends for its overall effect on its own additional kinds of interpretation and invention. The category of full-fledged histories embraces a wide variety of forms: from dissertations and monographs relying on and conveying original research results to interpretive essays, from biographies to best sellers, from documentary films to museum exhibitions, from some government historical reports to the narratives supporting the application of buildings eligible for preservation status, from microhistories to global histories.

116

•

Fashioning History

Given the multilayered nature of a synthetic historical text, historians have ample opportunities to fashion their works. Such fashioning, as we have seen in the last chapter, occurs in at least three major ways in any full-fledged historical work: the voice and viewpoint adopted, the organization and shaping of the work, and the nature of the generalizations and the explanatory models. Partiality and perspective determine as they are determined by how and how much the historian “speaks” through the work and what and whose framework, orientation, or context she uses to view matters. Selection of the kinds of facts and their use in arguments and stories result from as well as in the organization and general shape of the work. The nature and generality of the facts and the kind and abstractness of the concepts employed in a work indicate its overall relationship to the sources and therefore its overall empirical basis according to traditionalist standards. Interpretive extrapolation and grand narratives are perhaps furthest removed from their supposed empirical basis, but they supply the context used to understand and organize the alleged facts. How these and other elements come together in a historical synthesis can best be demonstrated through a specific example. Edmund Morgan in the 441 pages of his now classic American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, published in 1975, uses traditional narrative, argument, and analysis to explore, and thereby provide perspective on, the close connection between the rise of slavery and the quest for liberty in early American history.31 He asks why Virginia, the most populous state at the time of the American Revolution, should contain both the largest number of slaves and so many of the new republic’s most famous advocates of independence and liberty. He sees the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom as the central paradox of American history and a challenge to the historian to explain “how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.”32 He finds the answer to the seeming paradox in the efforts of elite white colonial Virginians to solve their need for a steady, exploitable pool of labor to work their plantations and yet keep a class of fellow whites acquiescent in that solution and satisfied with their subordinate place in colonial society. After Native Americans and indentured white European servants failed to provide the desired stable supply of labor, the elite turned to African slaves by the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Slavery guaranteed a coerced but continuous labor supply for the planters at the same time as it freed other

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

117

whites from doing the harsh and degrading work of raising tobacco. Racist attitudes towards blacks unified rich and poor white classes, and a labor system based upon black bondage quieted white economic and political discontent. Thus slavery and populism, racism and republicanism came to coexist in American history according to Morgan with ramifications down to the Civil War and even to our times. How Morgan proceeded to make his case can be found in microcosm in the very first paragraph of the book. He begins near the end of his explicit story. (I have numbered sentences in brackets for the reader’s convenience in the subsequent analysis.) [1] In 1756 the people of Virginia lived in fear. [2] A year earlier General Edward Braddock had marched against the French and Indians on the colony’s western frontier. [3] Braddock had been overwhelmed, and now Virginians faced invasion. [4] The Reverend Samuel Davies summoned them to battle, lest “Indian savages and French Papists, infamous all the world over for Treachery and Tyranny, should rule Protestants and Britons with a Rod of iron.” [5] Virginians, Davies was sure, would never give up their freedom. [6] “Can you bear the Thought,” he asked them, “that Slavery should clank her Chain in this Land of Liberty.” [footnote here to Davies’ book] [7] British troops turned back the French, and Virginia was spared enslavement to papists and savages. [8] Yet in that “Land of Liberty” even as Davies spoke, two-fifths of all the people were in fact already enslaved, under the iron rule of masters who were “Protestants and Britons.”33

My observations on this paragraph only begin to suggest what a critical analysis might do with it. The paragraph mixes inference and construction with description and re-presentation of a brief bit of a source. The first three sentences provide some dates, 1755 and 1756, as temporal setting and colonial Virginia as geographical setting. Only sentence 2 offers a factual statement without speculative inference added. Sentences 3, 7, and 8 combine empirical and extrapolated or speculative facts: the defeat of the British General Braddock and the possible imminent invasion of the colony; the British army’s subsequent defeat of the French (in 1756) and the escape from “enslavement” by French “papists” and “savage” Native Americans; and the two-fifths of the Virginia population actually enslaved. Although these sentences combine generally accepted and verified facts with speculative inference, Morgan felt no need to footnote any of these assertions. On one hand, the French and Indian War, as it is called in American history, is a standard summative concept in the discipline and in survey textbooks.

118

•

Fashioning History

On the other hand, the remainder of the book will supposedly justify his speculative extrapolations, even though he does not return to these specific times and events in the rest of the book. The first sentence extrapolates from what he supposes of that time and place about the “fear” (sentence 1) of the “people” (sentence 8). The “people” refers to all or most whites but presumably not Afro-American slaves in light of the rest of the paragraph (and probably not Native Americans in light of the rest of the book). In this sense he accepts his audience’s sense of “whiteness” as grounding the meaning of “people.” He provides a surrogate for (white) public opinion about fears of “enslavement” by representing a brief portion of an original source: Samuel Davies’ tract, Virginia’s Danger and Remedy, published in Williamsburg in 1756, in sentences 4 and 6 and cited at end of sentence 6. Sentence 5 is a summary of Davies’ tract from the viewpoint of Morgan’s argument. This mixture of the empirical and the interpretive, speculation and style is typical of fullfledged histories. Viewpoint and voice. Even though Morgan repeats the derogatory terms “papists” and “savages” from Davies’ bigoted polemic without quotation marks in sentence 7, I take that omission not to be his true viewpoint or voice in light of the rest of the paragraph and book. He does put “Protestants and Britons” in quotation marks in sentence 8. Although an author frequently uses quotation marks to indicate ironic disagreement, in these two cases I think the use of both sets of terms is ironic as is the whole last sentence. Even when using quotations to show actor’s views, Morgan uses the traditional, seemingly god-like, omniscient viewpoint of the historian to set all persons and actions into the context of his overall argument and story. His sympathy for Native and African Americans comes from his liberal viewpoint rather than from quotations from them. The quotations about the two groups’ beliefs and activities usually come from (elite?) white commentary as is true for most non-elite whites as well. This raises the question whether a past white actor/observer in colonial Virginian society does or can represent black voices and viewpoints adequately. Explanation. Throughout his book, Morgan employs a variety of explanations: individual agency (particularly intentions), causes, functional correlation, and structural trends, but chiefly narrative sequencing. The first paragraph, for example, not only sets up the paradox of slavery and freedom coexisting but also uses a narrative model of events and opinions to do so. He juxtaposes sentences about the larger international events impinging on Virginia’s inhabitants, their rhetoric about slavery

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

119

and liberty, and his quantitative analysis of slaveholding in the most populous mainland English colony at the time to depict the hypocrisy of such rhetoric and worldviews. For his purposes in this paragraph, he employs an implicit social psychology to extrapolate the fears of people from the logic of the international and intercolonial situation in order to use Davies’ comments as a surrogate for white Virginians’ public opinion in that year. Even though Davies was a dissenting Presbyterian minister from the frontier and not a member of the official Anglican religion of Virginia, Morgan presumes that the parson spoke for all or most (white) people. Davies was a revivalist leader of the southern Great Awakening who evangelized slaves as well as poorer whites. He probably owned a slave or two as ministers commonly did then and certainly supported slavery as a system. Does Morgan assume that a frontier dissenting minister represented well the nonelite elements of white Virginian society at the time? Davies became president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) soon after he wrote this tract in which he made the war with the French a near-religious crusade. In any case, Morgan here, like other historians, infers general behavior and attitudes from one or a few written documents in light of his broad knowledge. Regardless of his rationale for presenting the tract as indicative of white Virginians’ psychology, the excerpted words from Davies’ sermon are so apt for his argument that any author would find it difficult to resist using them. In fact, though, this is the only appearance of Davies and his tract in Morgan’s entire book. Methods. Morgan uses mostly standard, traditional textual interpretive methods throughout the book. However, the reference to two-fifths of Virginia’s inhabitants being enslaved in the last sentence reveals Morgan’s considerable attention to the statistics of slave-holding, population growth, and indicators of social class in the colony. He includes a thirty-eight page appendix on the sources and calculations of his claims about white and black population growth, the nature of families, and wealth holding in seventeenth-century Virginia. Lessons and meaning. He draws the moral lesson of the paragraph at its end: the paradox that (white) Virginians held “under iron rule” two-fifths of the colony’s population as slaves even as they spoke of the threat of French tyranny to their “land of liberty.” His second paragraph repeats the lesson as Virginians and other colonists appealed to the inalienable rights of “all men” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but still tyrannized their slaves (and women too?). Morgan points out in that paragraph that Jefferson himself owned nearly two hundred slaves when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. (He also points out that the

120

•

Fashioning History

acknowledged “Father of His Country,” George Washington, was a slaveholder as well.) And the next five paragraphs continue to emphasize the centrality of the paradox in American history.34 The rest of the book argues why this paradox arose, and even concludes with speculation about how that paradox did not end with the Civil War but extends to this day in the contempt of better-off white Americans for the poor and the black.35 The greater ramifications of the paradox throughout American history justify the specific history he tells of its origins in his opinion. In turn that purpose provides the general organization of the narrative and the larger point to the arguments he makes throughout the book. By contextualizing colonial Virginian history in this way, he hoped to recontextualize (white?) American understanding in 1975 of the origins and persistence of seemingly contradictory long-term American beliefs. His careful fashioning of his first paragraph like his entire book is an attempt to get his mainly white readers to reconsider their premises by controlling their response through his own rhetoric and analysis. Such a larger goal seems to justify not only individual histories in his eyes but also the very pursuit of history as an intellectual enterprise. Perspective. The greatest perspective comes from Morgan knowing the future of seventeenth-century Virginian history. Does Morgan accept in the first and second paragraphs the traditional Great Story of American history in which the French and Indian War acts as mere prelude to the American Revolution? (Morgan does not refer to the French and Indian War ever again in the book.) Indeed the overall Great Story of United States history subordinates the whole “colonial” period to the coming of independence and nationhood. So too the implications of the American Revolution receive context from the Great Story that connects the founding of the new federal government with the mixture of tragedy and triumph that constitutes the traditional story of the Civil War. That the consequences of that war still reverberate in our times is yet another Great Story. In this situation, Morgan sought in 1975 to confront the long-traditional grand narrative about the triumph of American liberty and freedom with another more modern but equally powerful grand narrative about the persistence of racism and discrimination in American history. In exposing the intimate, longtime connection between the two Great Stories, he hoped in the short run to challenge the traditional one of American progress in order to bring about greater equality and freedom in the long run. How successful Morgan was in this hope depends upon how one fashions a history of those years since he wrote and Morgan’s

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

121

place in it. What, in other words, is one’s own perspective on, and Great Story of, recent decades? Rhetoric and politics. Emphasis on paradox usually indicates a predisposition to satire and irony. Morgan often uses irony to make small as well as larger argumentive points in his chapters, sometimes underlining his points with sarcasm. Metahistorian Hayden White considers satire and irony a liberal way of looking at history. Although satirists and ironists self-consciously expose the gap between ideals and actual behavior, certainly according to today’s ethics and maybe even by those of a past era, they seldom advocate really radical change in the present even while lamenting conservative policies. Although Morgan sees the results of the paradox as tragic for American history, he does not advocate in the book any activist program to correct the injustice he exposes. If conservatives oppose reform politics as too disruptive of current social arrangements, radicals castigate those same policies as mere Band-aids patching up a fundamentally defective social system. In line with these positions conservatives decry revisionist history while radicals condemn the lack of advocacy found in so many scholarly histories. The reader leaves Morgan’s book with no doubt as to his strong opposition to the brutality of both indentured white labor and black chattel slavery in colonial Virginia. Nevertheless the reader is less clear as to how much he believes the American social system still needs to change in the latter half of the twentieth century. Obviously, he feels the Civil War and its aftermath brought needed change. He wrote the book during a time when many called for the radical transformation of the American social system. Perhaps the concerns of those years account for his dramatic final paragraph: “Eventually, to be sure, the course the Virginians charted for the United States proved the undoing of slavery. And a Virginia general gave up at Appomattox the attempt to support freedom with slavery. But were the two more closely linked than his conquerors could admit? Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger.”36 In spite of this grand and heartfelt conclusion, Morgan leaves the reader wondering how his moral vision should be implemented. His portrayal of Jefferson may indicate that his politics are what an author’s resort to irony and satire usually indicate: liberalism. He depicts the founding fathers, especially the Virginian ones, as men with feet of clay firmly planted on the necks of their slaves. Nevertheless Morgan still lauds in 1975 Thomas Jefferson, “whatever his shortcomings,” as “the

122

•

Fashioning History

greatest champion of liberty this country has ever had.”37 Morgan praises Jefferson because of his ability to recognize the evils of slaveholding (for its bad effects upon white owners and their children it must be admitted) and to recognize the sovereign will of the populace (once again white of course). Morgan’s liberalism may explain the nature of his book, which is organized and argued to promote a basic attitude change in his readers by awakening them to the evils of the central American paradox. Is such an attitude change sufficient to heal the consequences of contempt for the poor and the black without changing the social system itself? But can even a basic shift in attitudes transform the very social system reflecting as it perpetuates those attitudes? He argued, of course, that it was the social organization of the plantation system and the economy it supported that perpetuated in a new context the longtime English hatred for the poor. White Virginians just transferred that contempt for poor white indentured servants to black slaves. So perhaps he expected the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to become a second Civil War and Reconstruction. Surely one can infer from the way Morgan fashioned the book that he intended it to change white Americans’ opinions at the time of its publication. Let me turn to the overall arrangement of story and argument in Morgan’s book as transition to what a proper history entails in added intervention and interpretation from edited sources, paraphrases, and other simpler syntheses. Some chapters are mainly narrative, while others are more analytical. But even chapter 18, which offers an extensive, quantitative snapshot of Virginia society around the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, has narrative elements, and the four seemingly topical chapters concluding the book present their argument through chronological narratives. The chapters’ narratives, like the overall emplotment of the book itself, frequently pair the ideal of freedom with the sad denial of it successively in practice to Native Americans, indentured white servants, even in some ways to poor white freedmen and yeoman farmers, and most of all to African slaves. Although the textual or discourse time of the book begins with a flashforward to the French and Indian War and the Revolution, the chronological time of Morgan’s history starts three-and-a-half pages later with English exploration of the Americas and raids upon Spanish shipping in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. He points out in the first chapter, ironically titled “Dreams of Liberation,” that one ostensible purpose of these raids was to free the New World Native Americans from enslavement by their Spanish conquerors. Some of these English raiders in the name of liberation took Spanish slaves and resold them, thus beginning the contradiction between American freedom and American slavery.

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

123

The second chapter treats “The Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island and the ambiguous English attitudes toward the native inhabitants as friendly allies and exploitable workers supplying English needs. It is not until the third chapter that Morgan gets around to seventeenth-century Virginia with the founding of Jamestown. The ordeal of the early white inhabitants was only increased as their dreams of acquiring land easily from the Indians were undermined by the warfare resulting from English racism and techniques of expansion. The difficulties of the colonists were rendered even more perilous by their ideology of disdain for useful work and for those who did it. Thus did Morgan provide prelude and exposition of the origins of the paradox of freedom and slavery as it came to be worked out in the rest of the seventeenth century. In eleven succeeding chapters he shows how opportunity and equality (according to English values and outlook) promised by cheap and plentiful land (taken from its Native American occupants of course) is undermined by tobacco monoculture with its demands for an ever-larger, fully controlled labor force. His argument and his story culminate in how the splits within the white elite and between rich and poor whites were bridged by turning to a major increase in black slavery after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and the plant cutters’ revolt in 1682. In other words, he argues that the white elite purchased the loyalty of the poorer whites by substituting black slave labor for white indentured labor in the plantation system and allowing free white men to exploit their legal “inferiors” economically if they could afford to and always ideologically no matter what their wealth and social standing. Any further tendency to rebellion among the whites was effectively snuffed by giving them more of a share in the system that still exploited them in the end for the benefit of the larger planters, the British merchants, and even the English crown (through tax revenue on trade). Morgan is unsure whether this solution to an adequate supply of controlled labor through bondage, a politics of white solidarity based upon racial contempt, and an improved social status for even poor whites grounded on racial degradation was entirely a “conscious decision”38 until near the end of the seventeenth century, but he sees it applied deliberately and consistently throughout the next century. He concludes the book with four topically named chapters summarizing the movement from the legally sanctioned brutality towards white indentured servants to the even greater cruelty backed by law as well as physical force to enslaved Africans; racism with its shift of contempt from poor whites to blacks and Indians; how that shift resulted in enhanced status for the white middling and lower

124

•

Fashioning History

classes and the elite’s resort to populist appeals; and, last, the adoption of republican ideals of freedom and equality as foundation for a new American nationhood by those holding slaves and those who condoned the practice both North and South. Just as the book had several textual or discourse beginnings versus a chronological one, so Morgan has several textual or discourse endings depending upon whether measured chronologically by the end of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the present. As even this brief analysis of Morgan’s book as a specific example of historical synthesis suggests, the historian intervenes actively, frequently, and in many ways between the existential present and the evidence of the once extant past to produce a full-fledged or proper history. Above all, Morgan’s book illustrates how (proper) histories are multilayered assemblages of description, generalization, rhetoric, narrative, argument, chronology, perspective, and evaluation. At the same time, it shows that such an assemblage is organized to tell a story and make a general argument. His book also exemplifies how the different kinds and degrees of inference and interpretation apply to the parts as well as the whole of a history, that subplots contribute to the overall emplotment of a larger story, even perhaps a Great Story, and his many points sustain arguments that in turn support a general thesis. In good histories, the interweaving of story, argument, generalization, inference, perspective, lesson, and rhetorical style is so seamless, the reader is persuaded to accept the underlying web of interpretation as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That Morgan’s book is so thesis driven from its title to the selection of factual details highlights the chief characteristic of histories at this stage of inference and interpretation. At this level of historical synthesis, stories, arguments, and even descriptions and recounting move beyond, sometimes far beyond, paraphrase and summary. If descriptions, stories, and arguments are partly re-presented, they are done so selectively with a larger story or argument in mind and more in the words, visualization, or other medium of the historian. The overall mixture or synthesis of facts, stories, and arguments are ultimately the creation of the historian, for the complete stories and arguments as developed in an individual history at this level are not given in any one document or even a few as such. The overall story and argument may not appear as such in all of the sources used, even though those sources are said to support them. In the end, the historian’s voice and viewpoint fashions the materials into an overall (hi)story that is unique as such. In the process the historian recontextualizes the material to make and support her story and argument. Such extrapolation

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

125

is not only integral to a proper history but is considered the very essence of a good history. Such fashioning is generally (and correctly) designated an “interpretation” in the profession. A proper history at this advanced level of interpretation provides a larger context for its subject matter that points beyond the sources even as it extrapolates from them. The stronger the interpretive thrust underlying a proper history, the more the historian can draw conclusions beyond the evidence strictly speaking and even make educated guesses about the empirically missing facts in the argument or story. Although a historian does not create facts counter to the evidence, she does generalize and expand upon stray hints in the sources to fill out their larger silences. Thus Morgan seeks substitutes for population growth in the absence of parish registers,39 guesses about the amount of tenancy among freemen for lack of records about it,40 makes “tenuous estimates” about the costs of Virginian tobacco versus West Indian sugar production because of absent documentation,41 and wonders about the rise of republican opinion in the eighteenth century when there are so few newspapers and no information about their readership.42 Although many county returns for the crucial May 1676 election of Assembly during Bacon’s Rebellion no longer exist, none of the twenty-three known delegates fit the standard description of rebels in his opinion. He thus supposes: “If the members were sympathetic to Bacon, it was because men of standing were ready to back him.”43 Lack of crucial slave-trading records even made it necessary for Morgan to extrapolate “from stray bits of evidence” numbers of slaves in various periods and their prices in his argument about the crucial transition to slave labor.44 Responsible historians disclose their degree of speculative interpretation to their readers. They use such words and phrases as “perhaps,” “probably,” “might conclude,” “not impossible,” “might have been true,” “not unlikely,” “only guess.”45 Sometimes these words and phrases conceal that the historian is empirically skating on thin or even no ice. Correlation turns into causation; Morgan opines that “it was possible” that the decline of white servants coming to the colony may have fostered the transition to slavery.46 Important as he argues the adoption of slavery was to the social stability of (white) Virginia, he believes that the planters making the switch between white servants and black chattels did so unconsciously—or so the lack of evidence would indicate to him.47 Sometimes Morgan piles inference upon inference, confident of his speculations being supported by his basic thesis and each other, his understanding of general English and Virginian culture at the time, and a

126

•

Fashioning History

psychological theory about the unruliness and discontent of freemen frustrated by lack of land and opportunity according to what he understands of their values. The “distribution of discontent” was uneven, with the “gravest concentrations of unhappiness and unruliness” lying probably in those counties attracting the largest number of freemen “living on the edge of subsistence.”48 The widespread ownership of guns combined with the freemen’s presumed disrespect for authority leads him to conclude “it took a brave man to put himself at the head of a troop of ragged but armed tobacco farmers who might regard him, and not without reason, as a source of their misery.”49 Morgan, citing a then-recent book arguing that the most acculturated slaves were the most rebellious, goes on to speculate: “One might say, in other words, that the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freemen whom they displaced, the more dangerous they became.”50 The ultimate proof for his contentions about the discontent and tendency to unruliness is his interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Still more speculative is his hypothesis about Jefferson’s and other slaveholders’ enthusiasm for, and appreciation of, republican liberty. “The presence of men and women who were in law, at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.” As a result, Virginians perhaps had “a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”51 So their solution to the labor problem and discontent of the freemen caused them ultimately to oppose the “slavery” of the mother country in the name of freedom for all (white males of course). In that way, Morgan hopes to redeem somewhat Jefferson’s character from the charge of hypocrisy and bad faith. Historians are most likely to recontextualize the past for their audiences when they offer lessons and meaning. Although lessons are drawn in the present and with a present-day audience in mind, historians do not believe that such lessons need make their histories present-minded in the sense of denying evidence or attributing anachronistic thoughts and actions to past peoples. Thus Morgan derived important lessons about the close relationship between racism and equality in his own time by exploring what he considered the roots of the paradoxical twinning in colonial Virginian history. Even though he organized his entire book around the evolution of the paradox as he saw it, he did not believe he fabricated the facts. Rather he selected statements about them to fit his thesis. Morgan hoped to avoid the charge of rewriting the past solely according to his own prejudices by confessing responsibly to the reader

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

127

both his speculations and (some of) his values. Thus he hoped to enlighten his readers through his interpretation of the past without oversimplifying or propagandizing. Whether he succeeded depends upon his readers’ perspectives (and prejudices) as much as his. As Morgan’s book demonstrates, an author’s perspective, whether defined as viewpoint or prejudice, enters into a proper history in at least two major ways. First, perspective as viewpoint provides the sieve, so to speak, to strain the inferred (alleged?) facts of history for relevancy to any given synthesis. Without a definite viewpoint, the historian would not know what to explore in the past, whether pertinent evidence existed, and what to include and omit from a book, film, or lecture. Second, perspective as meaning gives point to the past for the present. Perspective in this sense provides the context on the past that makes it relevant or at least interesting to those in the present. The interaction between these two senses of perspective would appear to justify for Morgan the kind of history he presents in American Slavery, American Freedom. So how typical is Morgan’s book as a full-fledged, proper history? As a type of proper history, it is of course only one among many, being a book rather than movie, lecture, or exhibition for example. Likewise, it is only one kind among books, such as biography, popular history, research monograph, or comparative history. That it unites perspective and analysis, story and meaning, voice and viewpoint, explanation and interpretation, facts and generalizations however makes it typical of a proper history. That he fuses these elements into a particular combination so that they embody a style that is his individual interpretation is also typical. Accordingly, his thesis-driven book is both typical in its components yet unique in how they are used and fashioned. That his interpretation is challenged is typical as well. The reader gets quite a different version of the same people and events from Anthony S. Parent, Jr.’s, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society, 1660–1740.52 He emplots his recent book as consistent, deliberate, and organized efforts by the great planters from the beginning to secure their hegemony economically, legally, and ideologically throughout the period covered by Morgan. He stresses not only the resistance of small planters but those neglected or omitted by Morgan: women, Native Americans, and most of all African Americans to this elite quest for power and control. But to make his case, he too must combine the various components typical of a full-fledged proper history. And he too has those who oppose his interpretation in turn.53

128

•

Fashioning History

Greater Interpretation: From Histories to History General histories, interpretive schools, historiographies, and metanarratives all point to products beyond constructed full-fledged histories in the proportion between empirical sources and interpretive synthetic elements by the historian. Although full-fledged histories appear the culmination of historical method according to the ideals of the profession, they do not exhaust the amount of interpretive invention exhibited in historical syntheses as texts and products. Just as there are the survivals themselves at a more minimal end of interpretive intervention, so there are historical syntheses almost totally dependent upon other histories at the other end. The beau ideal of the full-fledged, constructed history in the profession presumes the predominance of primary sources as the raw materials of good histories. In this section I want to consider those histories when the raw materials for the synthesis become generally accepted historical knowledge, other historical syntheses, and greater interpretive creativity. That the author of American Slavery, American Freedom depends at times for factual information on other historians’ findings and stories points to these other types of historical products. Reliance on findings of fact found in other historians’ articles and monographs is common in and at the level of constructed history discussed in the preceding section. What distinguishes such common use of secondary authorities at that level from a far greater level of interpretive intervention is just how dependent overall is a work on so-called secondary sources. In other words, just how much of the empirical grounding of the work depends upon the use of other historians’ generalizations, arguments, and stories as opposed to what are traditionally categorized as primary sources? At the higher levels of interpretation between past evidence and present product, the empirical base of a work is derived primarily or entirely from secondary (maybe tertiary) sources according to traditional historical method. As a consequence, historical projects at this level are based either on histories constructed by others or knowledge presumed common to the profession at the time. By common acknowledgment, general histories are more comprehensive in geographical or temporal scope than most other proper histories. Geographically, they may survey whole regions or even the world. Temporally, they may examine the entire history of a nation, a continent, or even the planet. They may be transnational, comparative, or about the world capitalist system. Topically, they may cover a history of warfare, disease,

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

129

trade, religion, or numerous other subjects. They may take the form of popular best sellers, classroom survey textbooks, or even sociological treatises.54 Generally speaking, the broader the author’s scope, the more likely she must depend upon the information and knowledge of others as the basis of her own data and generalization. The statements in a general history depend more on historical monographs and other full-fledged histories than the author’s own research into the original sources. In that sense, the empirical grounding of a general history depends upon the research of other historians and therefore is usually considered secondary. (Often the word “synthesis” is reserved by the profession for this specific kind of history.) Thus, general histories rank higher than full-fledged histories in the amount and proportion of authorial interpretive intervention in a text because of their greater distance, so to speak, from the supposed empirical base of survivals as sources. Nevertheless, authors of general histories confront the same elements of story, argument, explanation, interpretation, voice, viewpoint, and meaning as in any other historical synthesis. In those categories, a general history may be no more—and no less—constructed and interpretive than the usual full-fledged history. It also claims to be equally truthful in representing past peoples and events. The more general the history the more likely one or more Great Stories provides the interpretive armature holding together all the elements. The role of Great Stories in synthesizing history in general particularly shows in the efforts to divide the past conceived as history into periods. Historic time like all time must be divided in order to be told. The tripartite division of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods rested upon a particular Great Story that was clearly Western European in origin and application.55 Why call some period Middle? Middle in what and whose (hi)story? Attempts to apply such concepts as medieval or renaissance to other societies reveals both the ethnocentrism of the scheme and the need to find a way of telling the story of their past.56 Even recent arguments over defining postmodernism and postmodernity by distinguishing them from the modern and modernism illustrate the quest to periodize through telling a Great Story. The ultimate irony of postmodern theorizing is how many of its theorists relied on their own versions of a historical metanarrative to make their cases. Part of the postmodern Great Story was to repudiate the grand and metanarratives that modernist historians and others used to depict the history of the modern period as fulfilling such Enlightenment ideals as social and moral progress, the increased role and autonomy of the individual, and the rise and

130

•

Fashioning History

extension of democratic institutions. To contrast the Enlightenment and the postmodern era required its own kind of Great Story. That Great Story turned what were considered the virtues of the Enlightenment into the vices of the modern era, but the salient thinkers, events, and trends in the past often remained the same in outline.57 Whether conceived of as one or more great stories or as some big picture of the past, the image of History as the understanding of the past itself is extrapolated or hypothesized from numerous histories (and memories). As such a hypothetical entity, History itself (capitalized here to show this special meaning) is at the extreme pole of textualist interpretation, but still claims a basis in empirical findings through its supposed synthesis of full-fledged and proper historical products. The greatest metanarrative about History as such an entity is that it corresponds as a whole to the (an?) actual past itself. But the Past conceived as a whole (and therefore also capitalized) is an extrapolation far from the concrete interpretations of specific survivals from the past. While derived from histories, the idea of history in general as a great story or big picture extrapolates and interprets its supposed sources like any other good historical synthesis. Since the raw material of any overall version of history is only other histories (no matter what they are based upon), I place History conceived as some grand scheme at the extreme opposite from the existence of those survivals from the past identified as historical sources. From this standpoint, all of the past is not the same as history and all of what we understand as history is not identical with the entire past.58 The past and history only combine through interpretation according to certain presuppositions basic to the modern historical discipline and profession. As argued in this chapter, methods of interpretation so evident in full-fledged histories play their own kind of role in the processing of survivals and their reproduction and quotation. All kinds of historical texts depend upon one or more forms of interpretation. Whether that interpretation is done inadvertently or deliberately, it is always part of the historical enterprise, for both methods and syntheses are always from some viewpoint or perspective; always in some voice or style; always as some argument or story; always with some explanation or other method of understanding; always with some meaning or lesson. Even no message at all is a message. The greater the amount of interpretation in the construction of the text, the more fashioning, the more inventive, and, some postmodernists would say, the more fictive a history is on the whole. To call attention to the literary and artistic side of historical practice and its products raises

Texts as Archives and Histories

•

131

questions about the relationship between interpretation on one side and factuality and truthfulness in any given history (and of history in general) on the other side. Although the amount, kind, and proportion of interpretation in a product may vary by its nature, each product professes to be factual and truthful. Yet even the identification of a survival as a source involves interpretation, and that is deeply entwined with interpreting that survival as a source for factual statements and larger historical representation. Organizing those factual statements into some sort of historical synthesis necessitates still further interpretation as facts are selected and combined with other synthetic elements to that end. In that way all textual products, whether printed source editions or full-fledged histories, whether technical monographs or Great Stories, share some kind or degree of invention. No matter how inventive or interpretive the product, on the other hand, all claim to present facts and represent the actuality of the past accurately, if not always literally. This hybrid nature of all histories perplexes philosophers of history but seems not to bother historians or their audiences.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

T

he three dimensions and material concreteness of objects, buildings, battlefields, and other things surviving from the actual past seem to convey a more tangible, more insistent sense of history than the contents of most texts. Those material objects surviving from the past that I call in general “things” range from pins and needles to swords and spears; from tables and chairs to rooms and houses; from caves and cabins to mansions and palaces; from machines and offices to mills, factories, and whole industrial complexes; from barns and taverns to farms and villages; from pistols and cannons to warships, forts, and battlefields; from boats to sunken ships and ports; from ceremonial objects and graves to temples and churches. Material artifacts may be found stored or displayed individually in public museums and private collections, or they may be their own out-of-doors or open-air museums. They may remain in the same location and environment in which they functioned originally, or they may be removed from any original context. They may serve a nostalgic, patriotic, educational, or egotistical function. They may be preserved or restored from actual past objects, or they may be reproduced and simulated. They may be assembled by a specific place and time or jumbled together. Some still function today as they always did; others have been adapted to new uses. Still others are found in museums or become museums of their own because of their nature and size. Some kind of history museum seems to exist for every kind of artifact, activity, place, and period: folk customs, clothing, furniture, ships, lighthouses, photographs, sports, military arms and battlefields, agricultural tools and farms, historic houses and slum tenements, toys, industrial machines, wagons and coaches, boats, and railroads among many. The

134

•

Fashioning History

institutional settings may be small or large and supported at public expense, operated for private profit, or maintained by philanthropic foundations. Their audiences come for many reasons: for amusement and entertainment, for education and inspiration, for knowledge and escape, for a sense of place and cultural or ethnic identity, for fantasy and wish fulfillment, for feelings of superiority to the past or a desire to return to the times of yore, to legitimate social status and cultural credentials, or even to buy a reproduced artifact or how-to manual.1 In spite of their concreteness and actual presence, material objects contextualize themselves even less well than most textual sources. If history books interpret context through other texts, then museums interpret context through the juxtaposition of other objects. But they also use texts, pictures, interactive displays, and docents and tour guides to explain the temporal and other contexts of their displays and collections. Interpretation of things as with texts requires intervention between object and audience. Some idea of the nature and amount of intervention in museum practice is conveyed by the distinctions curators and other museum people make among objects, displays, exhibitions, and sites; among preservation, restoration, reconstruction, and reproduction of objects, buildings, and other structures; and among various forms of interpretation from labels to docents to reenactments.2 At the risk of oversimplifying where these terms overlap in meaning and practice, I have organized them into three broad groupings: by the general processes for coping with the objects themselves, by the nature and methods of explicit interpretation, and by the combination of material context (kind and amount of juxtaposition of various objects) and supplementary interpretive materials as found in exhibitions and museums. Topics within each of these categories are ordered roughly from less to more interpretive intervention.3 Processing Objects Institutional processing of objects includes the same general operations as for texts: accession or acquisition, appraisal or evaluation, conservation or preservation, classification and description, arrangement and access. As mentioned in the last chapter, all of these operations demand interpretation and intervention between the past and present of artifacts. Rather than describing the general operations again, I want to focus in this section on the amount of interpretive intervention involved in preserving, restoring, reconstructing, and reproducing objects. Preservation and

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

135

restoration deal with actual historical objects themselves, while reconstruction seeks to duplicate original objects no longer in existence. The objects may be as simple as a tool or a stool or as complex as a mansion or factory or even an entire neighborhood, battlefield, or mine. Preservation requires the least intervention to produce its historical product because it starts with the existing object itself. Reconstruction demands the greatest interpretation because it simulates a product that no longer survives as such from the past. Reproductions are newly created objects that can or cannot be compared to an existing original. “Preservation” and “conservation” are overlapping, sometimes competing, terms to designate the processes of stopping time for an artifact, to maintain it in as stable a condition and steady a state as possible now and into the foreseeable future.4 The interpretive questions and the implications for and of intervention are several. Which objects from the past are to be saved for the present and future and why? What parts or aspects of them can be saved? How aggressive, how active must such saving be? At the least intrusive on the object itself, conservation seeks to continue the life of the artifact by means exterior to it: protection from humidity, temperature, sunlight, theft, vandalism, and harm. Preservation, as it name suggests, also involves maintaining some artifact, historic building, battlefield, plantation, or other site as it has come down from the past, and that may well mean more active intervention hence increased interpretation. What needs to be done to halt natural deterioration from insects, climate, and the decaying nature of the materials themselves? What needs to be done to make up for years of wear and tear, neglect, war, pests, or previous botched repairs and misguided attempts at preservation?5 Even seemingly cosmetic touchups involve ever-greater interpretive interventions. How much dust and dirt is normal in the existence of an object? Should cleaning be as gentle and moderate as possible or more radical to make the object seem new, as the debate over how to clean the statue of Michelangelo’s David showed? The more aggressive the cleaning, the more preservation becomes restoration, as the controversy over The Last Supper attests. Should the object’s patina or the state of its repair remain as they are now, or as we presume they were when brand new, or after they were in use for a while? (Why are not ancient Greek statues restored to their original bright colors?) Should rust, for another example, be eliminated, preserved, or left to continue its natural course? Should or must worn upholstery or carpets be left alone to show their condition after years of use, be repaired to look like new, or replaced entirely with other original fabrics or newly woven ones? Old wooden buildings need

136

•

Fashioning History

to be repainted and their roofs replaced just to preserve them from the elements? Are the original materials still available today for repairs? Are the required skills and techniques still practiced today? In each instance, whether conservation or preservation, the original object persists from the past as the ultimate physical foundation for the interpretation. The division between preservation and restoration lies in who makes the choice about what is the proper state of the object and when in a sense that choice was made. Is the time and nature of the object fixed as interpreters presume the original creator produced it or the first possessor wanted it or had it when new? Or, do the interpreters hypothesize its appearance and condition after some or many years in use? Or, should the interpreters just accept the current state of an object as it has come down to us? Those who restore an object presume to know the viewpoint of its creator, its first or later owner, or some other user as they “freeze” or stabilize the object according to that perspective. Even simple cosmetic touchups, however, depend upon the interpretive imagination of the preservationist to re-create the past of the object.6 To conserve an object allows preservationists to leave the condition of the object as it has been modified over time without deciding on one best past state. Changes in function, shifts in style or fashion, effects of war or neglect, or previous updating and renovation may still be manifest, or they may be concealed by subsequent alterations over time. Thus an object’s general pastness or historicity is evident, but not as of any one time necessarily as generations modified or transformed it. To understand its place at any one point in history demands still further interpretation. It therefore acts as not one but many sources. Needless to say, being one or more sources does not preclude historians from still interpreting its larger context just as in any other history. Just as the layers of writing over writing are recorded in the palimpsest of certain manuscripts, so the changes over time in, say, a building can be found in its coats of paint, built over fireplaces, and covered over once-fashionable decorative features. Restoration aims to return an existing object, especially a building or site, to a specific earlier appearance or condition. That appearance and condition may be at the time of its creation or a subsequent era. The object may range from an artifact or room to a house or farm, fort or battlefield, shop floor or factory, a neighborhood or a whole town. The amount of alteration and even reconstruction may be small or extensive. The aim of restoration may be to show an object as typical of its time or maker or owner, or it may connect the object to a famous person or event. Under either impetus, later additions are removed, and missing items are

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

137

replaced or crafted anew in order to get its appearance as close to a documented, specific past time as possible. In the case of buildings, the purpose may be to show the context of a historic event, for example, Ford’s theater on the evening Lincoln was shot; to exhibit how a historic personage or family lived at some time, for example, Jefferson’s Monticello or Washington’s Mount Vernon; or to present structures and sites typical of some time and place, like the early nineteenth-century Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts or Connor Prairie in Indiana.7 Just how a house, say, looked outside or inside at any one time demands interpretive choice as well as research.8 Were there once additional wings and different decoration outside or other buildings and landscaping, and should they be reconstructed as part of the restoration? Or, should current additions be eliminated as inauthentic to the era chosen for restoration? Which wall coverings and colorings from what time should be reestablished and for what historical reasons? Are the furnishings original to a house from the beginning; authentic to the period of creation but gathered from other places; or merely new reproductions of earlier pieces? If none of the original furnishings remain, is it better to leave the building unfurnished? What choices do the yards, gardens, and grounds present? Should the plantings imitate when a garden was first planned and planted, after the garden first “matured,” so to speak, or as they exist today? Should presentday bushes and trees, for example, be left as they now are, trimmed back severely, replaced by younger specimens, or removed entirely? How should grounds be maintained if representing an era prior to the mower coming into common use in the late 1860s? Gardens, yards, and landscapes present, in brief, the same dilemmas of conservation, restoration, reconstruction, and simulation as any other historic artifact.9 The great problem is whether and how to contextualize the historic site itself when modern society surrounds it. Restoration presumes greater knowledge of an object’s past and results in greater interpretation than preservation. The restorer reproduces from pictures, textual descriptions, archaeological research, and historical imagination what the “ideal” or optimum state of the artifact was once, and then suspends it at that time through removals or additions. Whose intentions and uses are presumed in that supposedly ideal state: producer, first owner, later user, or current museological and historical thinking? And how does one know? All are interpretive judgments based upon research as in other history projects. Thus even the most fastidiously researched restoration depends upon the interpretive talents of the restorers,

138

•

Fashioning History

for they must imagine the past of the object as they select its preferred form. If preservation resembles the historian’s processing of survivals as sources, restoration seems akin to using those sources to re-present them as edited. Are, for example in a house, the furnishings original, authentic, or reproduced? Should once incomplete rooms be finished and furnished? The heirs of the George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina, are still decorating rooms in the mansion left undone from when it was built in the 1890s. To what extent must restorers substitute materials for those no longer available? What compromises are necessary to meet current safety and other laws? Should worn or dilapidated but original furniture be reupholstered or otherwise refurbished? Should machines be put back into working order in home, farm, factory, or mine, and where do the parts come from: crafted anew or cannibalized from other old machines? Reconstruction, as the term suggests, constructs again supposedly what once was, but in actuality creates an entirely new artifact. While restoration works with remnants from the past, reconstruction fabricates the tool, clothing, furniture, and building or even site environment from scratch. As with restoration, the process depends heavily upon various forms of documentation to reproduce the colors, materials, and general looks and feel of the original. The results may be reproductions copied from other originals of the era or compiled from descriptions, pictures, and plans of the time. No matter how authentically old the result seems, reconstructions are entirely new products. In that sense they are replicas, even though they may be as accurate as research, memory, or tradition can make them. Some reconstructions like the rebuilding of old parts of European cities after their destruction by bombs in World War II can depend upon memory and tradition as well as research.10 Some reconstructions depend entirely upon research such as Plimoth Plantation, which reproduces the 1627 Pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts; the thousand year old Jorvik Viking Village in York, England; or the two-thousandyear-old Celtic Village in the Museum of Welsh Life in Cardiff. Such reconstructions are just like any other full-fledged history; although constructed according to the best available information, the actual structures like textual syntheses are still the doing of the curator-historians.11 Simulated or reproduced artifacts range from items based upon a museum’s collections and sold in its store to replacements for fragile and missing originals in a display or exhibit, from tourist attractions in theme parks to souvenirs vended there. Their purpose varies from interpretive need or explanation in an exhibit to desire for profit in the store or roadside

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

139

attraction. Although “fakes” in a sense, their reliability depends like other constructed histories upon documented research and careful synthesis. Whether the reproduction should be considered a copy, a simulation, or a model depends upon its scale and accuracy in relation to the presumed original. Models as opposed to copies reproduce past reality on another scale than the original. Common models used in museums are small-scale replicas of trains, machines, soldiers and battlefields, and village or other landscapes, and, of course, models used to obtain patents. (See Ironbridge Gorge and Viking village models discussed later) Sometimes the replicas are full-sized like Michelangelo’s statue of David or Lorenzo Ghiberti’s fifteenth-century bronze doors for the Florence Cathedral. Both replicas now stand where their originals were once located, while the genuine originals are protected indoors from the weather and other hazards. The first director of Beth Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, used mainly replicas to tell the story of Jewish dispersal around the world.12 Reconstructions demand the most interpretation and therefore the most intervention, hence most problematic. Should reproductions duplicate the original in scale as well as appearance? Historians prefer full-size replicas of artifacts at this step of intervention when possible. Thus the Mayflower II, now docked in Plymouth harbor, resembles the boat that brought the first pilgrims in 1620, and the modern Half Moon approximates the vessel that Hendrik Hudson sailed up the river named after him in 1609. Since no detailed descriptions, plans, or pictures exist for either vessel, each one is constructed like boats of the era. Modifications include the extensive use of epoxy and an engine for the Half Moon, although it does sail under its own power, and stairs instead of ladders, and some electric lights and safety alterations for the Mayflower II, so its modern-day visitors can board.13 Does it make any difference that a reconstructed eighteenth-century building conceals the modern steel beams used in its structural framework, such as Library Hall in Philadelphia? And what about electricity, modern plumbing, and modifications required by law for public access these days? The terms “simulation” and “imitation” in museum practice suggest historical products further removed from originals and therefore their resulting forms more interpreted. Simulation and imitation suggest to historians a less than careful attention to reproducing the style and characteristics of the original. In other words, interpretive freedom triumphs over research, fantasy trumps accuracy in the eyes of historians. At best such collections present a mere assemblage of artifacts without context; at

140

•

Fashioning History

worse they offer fake, out-of-scale imitations of what they supposedly reproduce, as at times in Disney theme parks or the Las Vegas strip. This corruption and distortion of history is associated with what its critics call the “heritage industry.” And no name and enterprise is more associated with this distortion and corruption in historians’ eyes than the various historic theme parks associated with Walt Disney. Complaints about the “Disneyfication” of the past and present in the theme parks run by the Corporation range from the reduced-size replicas of famous buildings and deliberate omissions of their context, to the cleanliness and orderliness of the parks which gentrifies historic locales, to “cleaning up” the past itself and the general oversimplification of history. Such an approach to history all too often sentimentalizes past activities and events; glorifies militarism, chauvinism, and liberal capitalism; and always patronizes the audience in substituting nostalgia for an idealized past over a more accurate and challenging version. Disneyfication domesticates the past by reducing it to entertainment and deliberately conceals the complex and conflicted nature of the past from its audience. Its interpretive narratives are either too simple or conceal too much of what went on, with inconvenient events and stories suppressed entirely. The actual past is all too often hidden by making it seem too alike or too irrelevant to the present of the audience without challenging them to a more complex understanding of either history or the present.14 In the eyes of many historians, the difference between theme parks and the heritage industry and proper museums and historic sites is whether the educational or the entertainment function reigns supreme, whether interpretive complexity triumphs over simplicity, and whether the audiences’ stereotyped views of the past are challenged or confirmed. Of course, these criteria depend upon professional judgment and perspective derived from the practices and ideals of the historical profession. Thus the evaluative and the cognitive aspects of historical synthesis combine in judging, and those judgments are reinforced by the policing of museum practice through reviews, control of funds, and professional training. According to these standards, preserved and restored artifacts and buildings are better than reconstructed ones, and well-researched reconstructed ones are better than poor imitations and simulated ones. Historians debate whether simulations or imitations are better than none at all. But what about the virtual cyber-tours now offered on the Web sites of museums and historic sites, to say nothing of the promise of holography? If active preservation of objects parallels the processing of texts as survivals and restoration resembles edited collections of sources, then reconstruction is

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

141

equivalent to the full-fledged interpretations framing proper histories. The effects of combining these categories in practice can be seen in Colonial Williamsburg, which aims to re-create the Virginia capital for its visitors in the decades just before the American Revolution. Through the financial largesse of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son of Standard Oil’s founder, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation acquired the historic part of the town, tore down or removed 720 buildings constructed after 1800 and restored 82 structures surviving from the period. (This editing process forced a relocation of the area’s inhabitants, including many of the poor.) In the end, the Foundation reconstructed, that is built anew, 341 buildings according to colonial documents and archaeological evidence, including the burned down Governor’s Palace, the Capitol building (which held the House of Burgesses), and the Raleigh Tavern, where the Burgesses went to conduct legislative business after the Governor dissolved the body in 1774. Concrete streets and sidewalks were torn up and replaced by dirt and gravel. Electric poles and wires were removed or concealed. Gas stations and other anachronisms were eliminated. Later, modern air conditioning and heating and modern sanitary and kitchen facilities were discretely concealed from the public’s eyes. Some water fountains were disguised as barrels. Law required modern fire hydrants, but some were hidden in the shrubbery. The same principles of removal, restoration, and reconstruction also governed such matters as the selection of furniture and the colors of wall surfaces, the types and uses of rooms, the nature of outside grounds and outbuildings, the layout of fields and farms, and the plan of village and vicinity.15 The many gift shops in or near the “Historic Area” as well as online stores offer “authentic reproductions of antique furnishings, historically accurate accessories, and an interpretive lifestyle collection.” These historical items vary from rugs, china, silverware, linens, jewelry, fireplace equipment, wooden and metal accessories, and garden decorations to wreaths, cookbooks, and miniature porcelain buildings and persons. Colonial Williamsburg licenses commercial companies to manufacture authentic wall paint colors and approved reproductions of furniture, lamps, dishes, and silverware from its collections. Anomalies to the categories of preservation, restoration, and reconstruction test their application as they reveal the nature of intervention (and invention) involved in each. Are authentic original structures torn down, moved, and carefully re-created in a new location preserved, restored, reconstructed, or all of the above? Such anomalies or hybrids include various buildings gathered from different locations and times but

142

•

Fashioning History

now sited in one place, such as Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village near Detroit, Michigan; Skansen, the outdoor folk museum in Stockholm; and the Museum of Welsh Life in Cardiff (all discussed later in this chapter). The preservation of wooden structures like ships and houses demands so much replacement of parts after time (and extreme tourist use) that what was once the original artifact becomes a replica in actuality. The USS Constitution, now a museum ship in Boston harbor, is the oldest commissioned ship in the United States Navy and the oldest warship afloat and still sailing in the world. Originally commissioned in 1797 and called “Old Ironsides” as a result of a battle in the War of 1812, the threemasted frigate was completely repaired and rebuilt many times throughout the nineteenth century even before Congress declared it a national monument in 1907. Since that time repairs have been equally often and extensive, even to replica guns and reconstructed major structural hull components.16 The holiest and arguably oldest Shinto shrine in Japan is an extreme example of this constant rebuilding and replacement. An exact duplicate in size, materials, and appearance of the Ise main shrine has been constructed every twenty years for over thirteen hundred years on two alternate sites. Using ancient techniques, and without nails, the special artisans take years replicating the temple through selection and seasoning of wood, tool use, and patient craftsmanship. What appeals to the Japanese in this meticulous reproduction of the shrine is not the physical object itself so much (for the old one is destroyed every twenty years) but the accompanying ritual process and continuity of tradition in constructing the shrine.17 Museums as Interpretive Context Not all old objects are in museums and not all old buildings and battlefields are historic sites. The difference between museum artifacts and other old things lies in the institutional purpose and organization of them. Similarly, the difference between a historic site and an aging mansion, factory, battlefield, or farmstead is the nature of its management and interpretive purpose. A museum is an institution devoted to the perpetual preservation and display of its objects, whether they are housed indoors or they constitute the museum itself, as in what are called open-air or outdoor museums. How museums organize and display their collections and historic sites contextualize their holdings are the museological equivalent of historical method and synthesis.18

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

143

Objects receive contextualization in museums through two main means: in relationship to other objects as in an exhibit, a period gallery, or outdoor environment and by such interpretive devices as labels, diagrams, charts, lectures, or other means. Both involve and are methods of interpretation of various degrees. Interpretation by and through the material environment of objects can range from displays of individual objects to more organized and extensive exhibitions in museums to the even more extended environments of battlefields, industrial complexes, plantations, and villages and city districts. More explicit interpretation includes textual, pictorial, or other explication and provides story, explanation, perspective, and meaning. We can ask the same questions of material as of textual contexts. Who provided the setting and how and when was it provided? Did the juxtaposition of objects come from then, later, or now? What is the principle of organization and who chose it when? The difference between a naturally occurring and aging community of buildings and context and a museum is selection and editing, so to speak. Were the objects and structures created for the site and are they still used on site, even though now called a museum? Or, are the objects and structures now removed from or relocated off their original site? What is the size and extent of the display, exhibit, building or structure, site, village, or urban district? The greater the size, the more opportunities exist for interpretation through what is selected, how it is organized, and modes of presentation. Curators can show trends by presenting a story of objects through time. They can draw the lesson or meaning of progress through explicit or implicit comparison of past with present. They can appeal to nostalgia by implying that some things were better then than now. At the lowest level of display and interpretation are those individual three-dimensional objects totally divorced from their original location or context. They exist in museum storage with little more than their acquisition number and information. They appear in a display with little clue to original context or use. They possess no label or only a minimal identification. They may be grouped in a showcase with similar objects, or they may stand alone on a wall or in a room. They may be artistic or utilitarian, large or small, simple or complicated. They may be a coach, wagon, locomotive or whole train; sword, fort, or World War II flying fortress; kitchen utensils, house, barn, and other building; tools, looms, giant engines, or whole factories. Such a minimal institutional setting descends from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cabinets of curiosities. Although collected and displayed, the objects seem to be sources as much

144

•

Fashioning History

as historical products at this minimal level of interpretation. A museum on this long-outmoded model is essentially a warehouse of and for artifacts. The fewer the interpretive aids provided at this level, the more the objects are given context by the audience’s memories, traditions, and other self-interpretation. Some artifacts seem at first self-interpreting: the precious metals and jewels of crowns, the complicatedness of a machine, the beauty of an artifact, the esoteric uniqueness of an object, but such audience interpretation all too often substitutes the views and values of the present day for those of the past in the eyes of historians. Today’s views and values all too often conceal how the object functioned at the time in a social and cultural network, and the further back in time the more the possibility of misunderstanding, hence the increased efforts of modern museums to interpret their holdings for their audiences. Modern museum practice is therefore more organized in presentation of artifacts, large and small. Context as intervention comes from how the artifacts are assembled and associated with each other and from how they are interpreted as such assemblages, whether exhibitions, period rooms, or historic sites. Interpretation as intervention between object and audience comes from textual descriptions, charts, photographs, lectures, computers, and reenactments. The audience learns in such displays about the original locations, functions, persons, and events associated with the artifacts in addition to their dating and identification. The most interpretive displays discuss the economic, social, religious, and/or political context of the objects and point out their “place in history.” Such environmental and interpretive contextualization is the hallmark of modern museum practice just as with any other history.19 Exhibitions are even more organized, interpreted, and contextualized than good displays. Context comes from multiple objects from either a period and place or from a trend, all ordered in display cases, rooms, or the whole museum. In a diachronic exhibit, the audience moves through time following a trend or story by walking through the sequenced series of spaces. What was once hailed as progress is now more frequently depicted as changes in armament, clothing, lighting fixtures, spinning devices, transportation modes, or other objects. Period rooms may be organized to show changes over time in fashions, uses, consumption patterns, and ways of understanding. What objects belong in a period room and even how a period is defined demands much interpretation by the curator.20 In a synchronic exhibit various rooms and perhaps the whole museum are organized to represent, even to re-present, a definite era and place. Historic farms and villages are often keyed to some specific year or

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

145

era. In both cases, increased interpretation is provided by additional text, photographs and other pictorial matter, from docent lectures, audio cassettes, pamphlets, and films among the many forms of interpretation.21 A museum using such interpretive strategies has started the transition from a warehouse of artifacts to an interpretive theater. Increased interpretation began in earnest in history museums in 1970s with the adoption of a social history approach, which changed not only what newer or newly transformed museums held but also what they showed and who they tried to reach as an audience. It was at that time, for example, that the Henry Ford Museum (in a building modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia) moved from displaying a multitude of machines, locomotives, automobiles, and other objects to reducing their numbers and increasing their interpretation.22 What museum professionals term historic sites and open-air or outdoor museums range from individual houses, outbuildings, and their surroundings to entire farms, plantations, factories, battlefields, and villages and their environs. Although some buildings, boats, and other large structures are located inside museums, most are found outdoors. Unlike a museum complex itself (like the Smithsonian Institution with its sixteen or more museums), an open-air museum contains historic buildings and structures. (Of course, the oldest original Smithsonian building, the red brick “Castle,” completed in 1855 can be and is treated as historic in its own right. It was even restored inside to its Victorian semblance in the late 1960s.) While all institutionally managed historic sites may be considered outdoor museums, not all outdoor museums are historic sites. What distinguishes a historic site in museum parlance from a normal aging structure or community is its institutionalized interpretive methods and management. It constitutes itself a historic site through interpreting itself as such. What distinguishes one kind of site from another is its age, extent, the nature of its structures, its purposes, and its methods of interpretation. Sizes may range from a small cabin or mill to large palaces and factories to entire estates and plantations; from farms, mines, and city districts to whole towns and rural countrysides. In a historic site, unlike in many an outdoor museum, the buildings and other structures are not only original themselves but also existed always in their current location in the larger sites and bear the exact same relationship to each other as in the past.23 Many out-of-doors museums therefore are not strictly speaking historic sites. Even if the structures in an outdoor museum are authentically original themselves, they may not be original to the location. Part of the

146

•

Fashioning History

institutionalized management and purpose of such an outdoor museum was to bring together its buildings and artifacts from their various original locations. They have been relocated from other places and juxtaposed in a manner not found in any one place in the past. Even if their buildings and other structures are authentically original themselves, those buildings may be from different periods as opposed to a single era. Arthur Hezelius founded Skansen on an island in Stockholm in 1891 as the first outdoor museum in order to show his fellow Swedes what they were soon going to miss as industrialization changed the countryside. He relocated cottages, farm buildings and equipment, workshops and mills, from around Sweden to preserve traditional crafts and ways of life before they disappeared. Today almost 150 buildings, ranging from manor houses to farmhouses and outbuildings, churches and village tradesmen’s shops and mills exemplify how different social classes lived and worked and amused themselves during mainly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 At Greenfield Village, near his home and factory outside Detroit, Michigan, Henry Ford began in 1929 to rescue buildings from the very fate his automobiles helped seal. He brought the Wright brothers’ cycle shop from Dayton, Ohio; Noah Webster’s house from New Haven, Connecticut; and Robert Frost’s Michigan home, because he admired the inventors of the first successful airplane, the compiler of the first American dictionary, and the poet. (The popular laboratory complex of Thomas Edison in the village is mainly a reconstruction.) Today the ninety-acre Greenfield Village contains more than eighty relocated structures demonstrating over three centuries of history.25 Other museums relocated original buildings of one era to their sites. Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts moved authentic original buildings from all over New England to depict a small town during the years 1790 to 1840. The buildings were originally built from 1704 to 1840. One set of farm buildings displays in microcosm the gathering process from four different places (and dates) in its relocated house built around 1810, a barn and corncrib both from the 1830s to 1860s, and a smokehouse from 1800.26 The Beamish North of England Open Air Museum relocated a pit mine operation and a row of miners’ cottages, an operating tramway and railway with station and signal box, shops, public house, and park and bandstand to re-create a typical industrial town about 1913 on three hundred acres that was originally a farm with a 1780s house as well as a manor whose hall dates to around 1400 with additions around 1810.27 In each of these cases, the presence of these buildings and their relationship to each other is a product of their museum location and not

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

147

the past. No matter how authentic each of the relocated buildings may be, the setting is not authentic. Each presents an environment edited, so to speak, through selection and prettified through interpretation. All current pretty buildings are in a way untrue to their presumed actual past, even though the buildings are authentic descendants of what they once were. Other outdoor museums offer environments composed of structures from different times that may be a combination of preserved, restored, reconstructed, reproduced, and relocated buildings. The Shelburne Museum in Vermont claims to have one of the most eclectic collections of fine and folk art, artifacts, architecture, and Americana in the United States. The site contains relocated and restored original buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two freshly constructed houses supposedly showing life in a typical 1950s American suburb and an art collector’s 2001 home, and new exhibition buildings. Thirty-nine galleries and exhibitions show some of Shelburne’s over 150,000 objects including collections of toys, miniature circuses, quilts and other textiles, folk and decorative arts, and paintings from the nineteenth-century French impressionist Claude Monet to twentieth-century American folk artist Grandma Moses. A popular tourist sight is the restored Ticonderoga built in 1906, the last surviving side paddlewheel steamer with a vertical beam engine in the United States.28 Some museum sites reconstruct a village from the ground up. Some of these villages are built in their original location, but others of necessity must be reconstructed nearby or elsewhere. Viking villages reconstructed at or near their original locale can be found in Newfoundland, Sweden, Denmark, and England. Historic Jamestowne in Virginia is the original site of the first permanent English settlement in what became the United States. It is administered jointly by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the National Park Service primarily as an archaeological site, but encourages visitors.29 Jamestown Settlement, which is located near the original site and contains some reconstructed buildings and ships, is administered by an agency of the State of Virginia as an educational and tourist destination.30 Plimoth Plantation had to be rebuilt three miles south of its original location, now covered by its modern-day successor Plymouth, Massachusetts. The accuracy of such reconstructions depends upon detailed research into maps, diaries, pictures, descriptions, and archaeological digging. They thus resemble any other full-fledged history in their relationship to sources, interpretive imagination, and synthetic construction.

148

•

Fashioning History

Concerns over the immediate environment of historic sites and outdoor museums are always part of their context for interpretation and understanding. How does the researched past setting compare with the actual modern-day setting as a whole for the historic site or outdoor museum itself? How should museum curators and others contextualize the site itself to show how the built or other environment appeared at a specific time? (Changing settings are harder to show over time, except through film or other interpretive devices.) Such anachronisms as electric wires, telephone poles, communication towers, and modern-day tall buildings must be eliminated, if possible, from the immediate environment. But what of the presence today of anachronistic sights, sounds, smells, sanitation, and even the multitude of modern visitors themselves? What compromises must be made with modern-day legal requirements for safety, hygiene, disabled access, and other of today’s considerations? What are the audience members meant to experience as their own interpretation as they enter and go through the historic site or outdoor museum? In some sites and museums the number of buildings and the adjacent areas are extensive enough to re-create the supposed context of those who once lived or worked there. Plantations and estates with surrounding lands on one end of the social scale or factories and surrounding buildings at the other end survive with perhaps some restorative work to suggest the authenticity of the larger settings. In all these cases, curators and other scholars attempt not only to reproduce the individual buildings but also provide the context of the farm or town as well. One quest for overall environment as historical context focuses on the nature of the vistas from the site. Electric and communication towers, tall buildings, and modern highways all remind historic site visitors of their own rather than past times. The clash over vistas is fought frequently over what can be as opposed to what should be seen from historic battlefields. In the United States, preservationists, historians, and Civil War buffs fight real estate developers and corporations, including the Disney corporation, encroaching on the lands or erecting anomalous structures next to or near to the historic battlefields.31 The vista across the Potomac River from George Washington’s Mount Vernon is preserved by a foundation using the area as an outdoor living history museum. The National Colonial Farm Museum presents a 1780 dwelling and the outbuildings and garden typical of an eighteenth-century yeoman class tobacco farm. Its Web site boasts of the beautiful view of Mount Vernon on the opposite bank.32 How mark the boundary between the everyday present of the visitor and the assumed past of the site? How persuade the audience to suspend

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

149

belief in contemporary approaches to life for the past supposedly reproduced in the historic building, fort, farm, village, or battlefield? Whether large or small, all historic sites need zones of transition to persuade the visitor to adopt an open attitude and mind to the past as provided by the museum. Most such site museums hope that the displays and films offered in the orientation center prepare the audience to experience the past as presented on site. Some hope that fences and other barriers help the audience make the leap from the present to a past world. Visitors after passing through an orientation center at Plimoth Plantation encounter a twelve-foot-high reconstructed palisade surrounding the fifteen structures within the town itself. Colonial Williamsburg uses in addition to a large orientation center a three-thousand-acre buffer zone to separate the historic area of the eighteenth-century town from its twenty-first-century successor. At the other end of the interpretive scale in outdoor museums is what happens inside the preserved, restored, reconstructed, or relocated structures. Curators confront the same kinds of choices about the interior environment of the structures as they did in the exterior environment. How many rooms or spaces are needed to show what went on inside the buildings? Do they show all the rooms of a house, factory, shop, barn, or fort as they were once used? Or, do they select some for exhibit and convert the remainder to administrative offices, staff quarters, shops, lounges, and rest rooms? What of legal and other requirements for safety and security: fire alarms and sprinklers, security and communication systems? Should rooms be left empty if original equipment or furnishings are missing? Should, for example, unfinished rooms in historic houses be completed today, as happens at the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina? If the original furnishings have disappeared, should curators produce a period setting using original furniture and objects typical of the place, period, and social position of the owner? Are accurate reproductions allowed? In each case, the interpretive issue revolves about the curator’s ability to re-present a past setting using as much as possible the original design of the room and authentic contents as they have descended from the past versus the need to re-create as accurate a setting as possible from documentary, pictorial, archeological, and other research. Both choices depend upon interpretation of what was original, but re-creation demands greater inference and intervention than re-presentation, as with other historical products.

150

•

Fashioning History

Similar decisions must be made for forts and ships, mills and factories, shops and stores, barns and farm outbuildings if original tools, machines, furnishings, and supplies are missing. Should they remain empty or should other authentic objects or even reproductions be substituted? Should mill sites, for example, restore machinery to working condition or merely display it? To continue this example, must missing machines be assembled from authentic parts produced and used elsewhere originally, or will reproductions serve as well? In each case, should the space look as if its occupants, workers, clerks, or customers just stepped out of it? Each curatorial decision has its interpretive consequences and resulting kind of intervention. At the greatest degree of interpretation and intervention are living history museums, which use reenactment of past persons’ behavior and activities to give a living, breathing sense of history to modern audiences. Such museums use present-day people to portray typical or famous persons in the past. These reenactors utilize past real or reproduced artifacts as they were once used, appear in past structures and environments as they were once occupied, perform in the roles past persons once lived, and talk about things as those persons once spoke. Such reenactments signify the ultimate effort of museum practice to supply the hidden context of the site and therefore embody the most interpretive intervention. They need more and receive more interpretation than any preceding set of interventions, because they attempt to re-create the past as it was once actually lived. Such intervention moves from the use of costumed guides to explain what the audience observes in the way of artifacts and structures to interpreters acting as the persons who once inhabited and used those structures and artifacts. Short of time machines to carry historical tourists back to the past, living history museums are the next best thing we have now. As their name suggests, such outdoor museums present the audience with a threedimensional living reenactment of the past. To that end, artifacts, buildings, vistas, and the activities of costumed interpreters are all assembled to depict the chosen time and place. The ultimate aim of such museums is to create a complete larger environmental context for the visitor that is as accurate to a specific past as research and reenactment can make it—all in the hope of prying the audience from today’s worldviews and activities in order to understand or at least consider those of the past. No matter how well researched in textual and artifactual sources and no matter how realistic it appears to an audience, such interpretive intervention is as constructed and inventive as any full-fledged history, perhaps more so due to

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

151

the comprehensiveness of many large, what one might call, “full-service” museums. Once again Colonial Williamsburg provides a good example of the full-service museum. Colonial Williamsburg now claims to be the largest living historical museum in the United States, employing more than four thousand persons in the early twenty-first century with approximately one thousand individuals “working closely with the collections.” In 1985 attendance peaked at 1.1 million. Paid visitors had declined to 745,000 in 2006, but the off-site audience reaches even more people through educational and other outreach. The “Historic Area” now contains 301 acres of land with more than 500 buildings, containing 225 exhibition rooms, and 90 acres of greens and gardens. Today a three-thousand-acre greenbelt surrounds the Historic Area to control the general vistas and larger environment. Five museums supplement the Historic Area by displaying some of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s collections: 2,600 folk objects of the period; 4 million archeological objects; 500,000 photographs, negatives, drawings and blueprints; and 25,000 rare books and manuscripts. Coexisting with and sustaining the Foundation’s many historical activities are substantial commercial enterprises. In addition to the many gift shops in or near the “Historic Area” as well as online stores, the Foundation also manages five kinds of hotels or other lodging places with over a thousand guest rooms, eleven or more restaurants varying from historical simulation of menu and environment to modern fast food, and three golf courses with no roots in the eighteenth century at all. Colonial Williamsburg advertises for convention business as well as historical tourists. Information about all the matters in these paragraphs and more can be found on the many pages associated with the Foundation’s Web site. Its very title echoes the confidence of the museum in its standing in the United States: http://www.history.org/. This Web site provides among other things the annual reports, virtual tours, hotel and inn accommodations, merchandise for sale, educational opportunities, jobs, and instructions for making donations in addition to providing historical information and educational orientation. Reenactments occur everywhere in the colonial capital. The many “costumed interpreters” ply such crafts as blacksmithing, carpentry, millinery, wig making, shoe making, basket weaving, barrel making, silversmithing, weaving, harness making and other trades at twenty sites. They act as masters and mistresses, journeymen and tavern owners, cooks and servants in the shops, homes and outbuildings (according to gender

152

•

Fashioning History

and race of course). They reenact militia musters and crucial military engagements, dramatic trials in the Courthouse, or the dissolution of the House of Burgesses with the members moving to Raleigh Tavern as prelude to the American Revolution. They perform songs, dances, and dramas in the evening entertainments. They play and march in the Fife and Drum Corps (restricted to the ages of ten to eighteen as then but now including girls as well as boys). Recent new programs include walking “About Town” with “People of the Past” or being met by such eighteenthcentury personages as Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry to explain and debate matters. Colonial Williamsburg also finances and manages extensive educational outreach programs. The Foundation supports and produces the traditional books, videotapes, recordings, and other media to get across the stories, words, and music of eighteenth-century Virginia. It hosts conferences on antiques, gardens, archaeology, architecture, conservation and preservation, and eighteenth-century history. Its experts publish scholarly books and monographs. Its outreach also includes “electronic field trips,” which combine satellite-delivered, interactive television and computer technology to bring eighteenth-century life to over a million students annually throughout the United States. Students can query costumed interpreters and historians and other experts about the times and place, issues and context of family life, African American slavery, commerce and the consumer revolution, religious freedom, or political events and governmental institutions. The Colonial Williamsburg Teachers Institute offers lesson plans and sponsors on-site classes for teachers and students in high school and college, with the Historic Area serving as “a living laboratory.” How challenging such a large living history museum can be to its audience and still attract large numbers of people, educate as well as amuse them, house and feed them in comfort though in “authentic” environment, maintain scholarly standards yet keep up store sales, produce learned monographs and popular but accurate reproductions is its own kind of test of modern museum practice. The challenge from the viewpoint of historians is to keep such museums from becoming part of what they derisively term the “heritage industry” by insisting upon responsible interpretation policed by the profession and not surrendering to entrepreneurial zeal just to increase audience or gain endowment. Whether Colonial Williamsburg manages to maintain this delicate balance concerns its critics and supporters alike. Its many lodging places and restaurants, not to mention its golf courses, make the Foundation’s offerings part of the tourist business, and the neighboring businesses view it as a

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

153

major attraction if not an accomplice in their industry as any search of Williamsburg on the Internet shows. It is clearly a tourist “destination” along with the Busch Gardens Williamsburg theme park and Water Country USA, as is apparent from other Web sites about the town. Its size and multiple sales shops, five kinds of lodging accommodations, eleven eating places, and three golf courses impress the visitor as much as any historic restoration, its amusing divertissements as much as their claim to be authentic re-creations. Last of all, the very large audiences at full-service historic sites add to the inauthenticity and anachronism of the museumgoing experience. Colonial Williamsburg is not only a branch of the tourist industry but also a big business. Some of the taint of business comes from association with the Rockefeller name. Although the proposal for restoring Williamsburg to its historic past was the idea of Rev. Dr. William A. R. Goodwin, the rector who earlier restored the Bruton Parish Church in town, it was the financial largesse of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son of the great American entrepreneur or Robber Baron (depending upon your narrative), that made it possible. His donations to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation began in the 1920s and reached some $79 million before his death in 1960. Revenue from all the stores, lodging, and not least admission fees added up to over $138 million in 2001, the seventy-fifth year of operation. Of that $29.6 million came from admission fees, while $61.8 million derived from hotels and restaurants and $40.7 million from sales of products. Operating expenses that year amounted to $221.5 million, and the endowment exceeded $673 million.33 No wonder some scholars accuse Colonial Williamsburg of being a big tourist business. Moreover, they think that the 931,000 people admitted in 2001 saw a past packaged just like any other thing on sale in modern society. They condemn such museums for commodifying history as just another part of the service sector in a postindustrial, late capitalist world. Such commodification of history depends upon fusing simulation and reality, the past and the present, especially in a living history museum. The extreme degree of interpretive intervention that living history museums present so flagrantly should remind us that all historical exhibitions and sites present some degree of interpretive intervention. Usually the more extensive an exhibition of artifacts, the larger the space covered, or the more varied the number of structures on a site, the more interpretation needed to contextualize it for present-day audiences. The added extent or magnitude of such exhibits and sites introduce interpretive choices at least as complicated if not more so as for any other historical

154

•

Fashioning History

project. For museum exhibitions of all kinds, curators and others must choose what objects to display and how they should contextualize each other; how much explicit interpretation should be given as opposed to presuming traditions and collective memory; and what kinds of interpretation attracts which sectors of audience. Curators and others must choose for outdoor sites what remains and what is razed, what is relocated or what is reconstructed from scratch, what is reinterpreted and what is reenacted. The more the museum tries to re-create the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and general experience of some past people and events, the more the nature and amount of interpretive intervention is the same as for any other form of full-fledged history. So it is time to turn to what kinds of interpretive aids museums use today. Interpretive Aids: From Labels to Web Sites Increased interpretation and greater professionalism went hand in hand in modern museum theory and practice in the last six decades. Growing professionalization was shown not only by museum people getting more advanced degrees in academic history but also in the establishment of programs in museum theory and practice that produced graduates with degrees in the field itself. Museums began to establish separate departments of interpretation or their equivalent for researching and planning exhibitions and training those who explicated them to the public as they grew in size and numbers in the latter half of the twentieth century. What had been hostesses and guides became replaced by “interpreters” in museum terminology. Such books as Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, first published in 1957, and William T. Alderson and Shirley Payne Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites (1976), marked the transition in United States museology from artifactual warehouses to interpretive theaters.34 Even small museums were encouraged to increase interpretation in their exhibits by the new books devoted to the subject and the articles appearing in the professional museum journals. Alderson and Low urged and illustrated what even a small museum or historical site might do by way of interpretive guides and display techniques.35 The emergence of social history in the 1960s with its stress on nonelite peoples and everyday life provided new impetus for museum exhibits and even new kinds of museums with new subject matters, new ways of interpreting their displays, and even new definitions of what professional museum practice should accomplish. Social history, and some would say

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

155

its political agenda, warranted new kinds of exhibits and museums about previously forgotten peoples in slum tenements, slave cabins, tenants’ cottages, factory lofts, and army barracks.36 Such exhibits and museums sought to challenge as well as transmit traditional values and heritage by exemplifying in exhibit and purpose worker exploitation and oppression, social conflict, class structure, gender subordination and domination, racial and ethnic cleavage as part of the national past, hence history. Museums not only sought to portray a broader spectrum of the population and their activities than previously but also to pull in a wider audience than formerly. Educational outreach sought to attract not only schoolchildren from all backgrounds but also adults from more sectors of the population in addition to teachers and the better educated. Museums began studying the nature of their audiences, what attracted them, and how their numbers might be enlarged.37 In line with these trends larger museums and historic sites emerged as full-service educational entities and heritage tourist destinations, like Colonial Williamsburg in the United States or the Ironbridge Gorge Museums along the Severn River in the English West Midlands. This valley claims to be the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Nine museums in a six-square-mile area show restored and reconstructed sites ranging from the blast furnace of Abraham Darby, who invented modern iron smelting with coke in 1709, to a nineteenth-century Victorian town. The cast-iron bridge spanning the gorge since 1779 (and after which the museum group is named) is itself an icon of the industrial revolution, since it was the first one built in the world.38 Smaller museums did what they could along these lines. Ever greater interpretation became basic to what any museum should do and be, what professional practice meant and aimed for, and how larger and more diverse audiences might be attracted. The more the interpretation, however, the more museum exhibitions and historic sites resembled any other full-fledged synthetic historical project, or proper history in short, with its many layers of information, narrative, explanation, perspective, meaning, moral and political implications. The more the objects themselves were organized into a story or contextualized by each other, the more they became diachronic and synchronic histories in their own right. The more they were complemented by textual interpretive aids, the more they literally resembled traditional histories. The more they were supplemented by spoken words, whether by guides or audiotapes, the more they tried to control the audience’s interpretive path as in any other proper history. The more they introduced interpretation into museum

156

•

Fashioning History

displays and historic site presentations, the more they encountered and were aware of the customary problems of voice and viewpoint and therefore who defined meaning for whom and how. Although interpretation pervades all parts of museum presentations as we have seen, it particularly can be found in the textual and pictorial materials that provide the larger context of object or site. Today textual and other interpretive materials accompany all museum presentations from the simplest displays to the most elaborate exhibitions to living historical museums. Such supplementary materials can range from simple identification labels to costumed guides and living reenactments. In many museums today teams of professional designers, curators, educators, and guest experts organize the exhibitions’ and historic sites’ interpretations, design the layout and placement of objects and texts, prepare and train the guides, and produce the pamphlets and audio and virtual tours. Exhibitions and sites are designed to embody various goals and perspectives, point out diverse meanings, and appeal to different groups and multiple audiences, whether schoolchildren, tourists, educated professionals, traditional elites, factory workers, salespeople, or new immigrants. All such interpretive aids assume what these audience sectors want to know, should know, and need to know. Museum designers and planners use increasingly polls and surveys to aid in this process.39 Increased interpretation in museums results in increased intervention between artifacts and their presentation, and the greater the intervention the more such presentations resemble other full-fledged histories. The more such interpretive aids are textual and the more there are of them in any one historical exhibition or site, the more the display or site can be analyzed and judged in the same ways as any other historical synthesis. In what follows, I categorize common interpretive aids by techniques and kind of intervention. Within each general category I arrange the techniques in rough order by kind and amount of interpretation. In other words, I have tried to indicate how the aids in themselves, apart from their associated objects in a presentation, increasingly resemble any fullfledged, proper history.40 The oldest such device is the label.41 The choice of even the simplest label no less than the choice of object indicates how the audience should perceive and conceive the item. The briefest label provides only a title or caption or some simple identification of an object by name or function. Merely to distinguish a crown from a hat, a clock from an ornament, a short sword from a long knife, a pickax from an axe, a butter churn from a washing machine, a stove from a fireplace insert works best when the

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

157

observers can depend upon their memories and traditions within a culture to make these distinctions. The older the object, the less memory and tradition serve to contextualize it. To the extent that the object is foreign to the culture as well as the times of the audience, the more the label performs an act of translation in its very naming of an object. To label something as a crown rather than a headpiece, or a ritual vessel rather than a drinking cup, prompts the observer to immediately set it within certain categories of meaning. Such a simple label, however, does not tell observers of a gold headpiece or ritual vessel heavily encrusted with jewels whether to remark the craftsmanship of the maker, the society’s governmental and religious systems, its modern economic worth, or an elite’s exploitation of the masses. The simpler a label the more it allows (or forces) the audience members to rely upon their memories, traditions, or imagination to contextualize on their own the objects they see. In that sense lack of labeling resembles seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities, which presumed an objects’ interpretation would be based on the ideas and values the observers held about the rare, exotic, or traditional. Some critics of the increased interpretive intervention displayed in modern museums seem wistful about the observers’ freedom in those old cabinets of curiosities even as they condemn the lack of popular access to them at the time. Augmented text and description on a label indicates increased intervention by curator and historian. Whether it lists past or current owner, creator or user, when and where it was created or where and how it was used, it offers some interpretive clue to what classificatory system was applied, by whom then or now, and when in the past or present. The more the label expands upon antiquity, authenticity, authorship, function, value, or significance of what the audience views, the more it offers interpretation as part of the description. Even the briefest label indicates whether the object should be judged by aesthetic, utilitarian, ritual, or patriotic importance. Should tableware and apparel, for example, be described no matter how briefly for their customary function at the time of their creation and use; by their historic importance in commerce and consumer taste, or by their aesthetic beauty to us today? Should, for example, religious regalia and ritual objects from various societies be categorized for their beauty as perceived by us or for the role they played in past worship? This dilemma seems particularly a problem the more the culture of the users seems strange, even exotic, to the culture of a presentday audience. Hence the division perhaps between the same kinds of objects shown for aesthetic qualities in art museums, as exotic cultures in

158

•

Fashioning History

ethnographic and archaeological museums, and as products of the past in history museums. One can see these divisions in the exhibitions about past Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples around the world. While the history of these peoples is no longer confined to natural history museums as opposed to historical ones, their histories are all too often still segregated from the overall course of a national or regional history in spite of the efforts of many native peoples and historians.42 When a label adds information about whether an object was the first or last, typical or unique of its kind, it is even more interpretive, because it can only assign these attributes according to some classificatory system based on comparison. Objects do not proclaim their uniqueness or typicality. Rather assessment of being first, last, typical, or unique comes from someone’s interpretation of history. Such an attribution can only come from the interpretation of other objects as sources or from texts as sources about the objects. Sometimes it can only come from knowing the future of the past. For example, was the object created by a competent seamstress or a patriot (like the fabled Betsy Ross); a famous potter or an accomplished businessman (like Josiah Wedgewood); a gifted silversmith or famous revolutionary (like Paul Revere); an English thief of spinning machine’s plans or an honored American entrepreneur (like Samuel Slater)? And what about the prolific Anonymous? The more a label gets into the provenance or biography of an object the more chances for interpretation. Sometimes an object’s historical importance follows from its various owners and not from its creator or function. The more the label describes and explains the relationship of the object to an owner, particularly a famous one, the more curators and historians must interpret to establish this connection. But to describe or explain this importance probably requires more than a brief label. Of course, simple labels may be sufficient if an entire room, building, or site contextualizes the object, but then this larger context needs to be explicated. Objects do not divide themselves into periods and places on their own. Most interpretive of all at times are the slogan-like titles given to exhibitions or even museums themselves, such as the “birthplace” or “cradle” of democracy, the Industrial Revolution, or the nation. Labels often provide information about donors or how the museum acquired an object. The more a label provides an object’s recent provenance or a biography of its custody, the more it advances another step along the scale of interpretation. What does such information, for example, show about modern museum patronage, or yesterday’s and today’s

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

159

class and wealth systems, or even ways of looking at and classifying objects?43 Labels usually apply to single objects or at most a few and contain less information than what might best be designated in general as an information “panel.” Panels apply to whole displays as well as showcases of objects. They contain more text since they offer more description and more perspective. As a result of applying to more objects and offering greater amounts of text and picture, they are also more interpretive and exemplify greater curatorial mediation between artifacts and audiences. Panels introduce exhibitions as a whole and contextualize entire displays. They describe functions and roles textually and illustrate them pictorially. They use words, pictures, old photographs, diagrams, maps, and charts of various kinds to trace the genealogy of a person or family, to provide a timeline and temporal location, to explicate and interpret what the audience sees, and to provide the unseen background and larger context of perspective or meaning. Panels help the audience to follow the diachronic story in a sequence of spaces in an exhibition or to grasp the synchronic significance of a period room setting in museum or historic home. Of course the more information a panel offers the more interpretation it includes. Describing and explaining how artifacts functioned in a society is interpretive history at its finest and shows best in such contexts as period room settings, historic houses, mills, factories, forts, and historic sites of all kinds. What holds true for the origins and nature of the classificatory and interpretive systems underlying labels goes doubly, triply, or more for panels. What aspects are selected for attention, according to whose criteria, from then or now? What aspects are neglected or suppressed and for what reasons? What is the underlying system itself of the interpretation? 44 What labels and panels initiate in textual interpretation culminates in pamphlets, monographs, and books. Such traditional texts as pamphlets and books provide greater description, explanation, context, and perspective than even a series of panels (or docent lectures). They may include pictures, statistical tables, diagrams and charts as well as analysis and argument, description and story. Museums sell pamphlets and books that offer more complete written introductions and interpretations of the museums’ exhibitions than can be included in the exhibition itself. Historic sites sell pamphlets and books to describe and explain the site itself and its temporal and other contexts at greater length than can usually be done on a guided tour. In larger museums and historic sites today expert curators or other professional historians usually write these monographs and histories,

160

•

Fashioning History

or the research branch of the institution may produce them. Such books may range from detailed technical monographs on collections of artifacts and their creators to histories of the historic site itself, from who lived or worked there to more general histories of the times and locality.45 Their contents are organized like any other full-fledged history and should be analyzed and judged by the same standards.46 Pictorial matter to supplement the material objects takes many forms in modern museum practice. Panels contain diagrams and drawings, as mentioned earlier. Sometimes paintings, either original or reproduced, illustrate the function of an object, the conditions of workers, the spaces of elite and other persons, the original or earlier appearance of a house or building, the nature of agriculture and shape of the landscape, the implements and forms of warfare, or the modes, uses, and role of transportation. As paintings depict these many matters, they also provide clues to the context of their use. Photographs can play the same interpretive role as paintings for the times after the invention of the camera. Of course, paintings and photographs are doubly interpretive in such uses for they provide their contents as contextual interpretation according to the aesthetic, perceptual, and conceptual biases of their creators (and their patrons). Thus when they appear as themselves in period rooms and historic chambers, they become sources for the tastes, economic worth, and social standing of their possessors as well as the skills of the painter or photographer. When they are used to contextualize objects and settings in museums or historic sites, they become interpretations for the audiences and sources for those who would understand modern museum practice. When they are considered on their own, the interpretive eye of the painter or photographer may conceal as much as it reveals. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it often takes as many to explicate the ways in which its creator manipulates the framing and visual perspective to organize what is shown and not shown. Thus museum visitors are confronted with several layers of interpretation just in trying to construe for themselves what they observe in pictures.47 What I have called pictorial interpretation here culminates in slide shows and films. Both are used frequently to provide an audience with a quick overall introduction to an exhibit or historic site. They also are used as part of exhibits to show the workings, role, or other context of the objects. Their contents may range from still paintings and photographs to filmed reenactments. The pictorial contents themselves may have been created contemporaneously to the objects being contextualized, that is they may use or reproduce old paintings, murals, photographs, and films. Or, the

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

161

pictures may have been created long after what they depict through simulation, reenactment, or scenic extrapolation from present-day landscape and artifacts. Regardless of the sources of such pictorial content, they embody the dilemmas of visual interpretation. If they reproduce still pictures, they pose the interpretive problems of such pictures. If they are filmed reenactments, they pose other problems of living interpretation to be discussed further in the next section. Needless to say, the overall sequence of slide show or film exemplifies the same problems of organization, interpretation, and increasing mediation as with all full-fledged histories. Museums sometimes use scale models to give a third dimension to interpretation. One of the oldest examples of this approach is to use model soldiers, weapons and armaments, and landscape contours to illustrate battles. Museums use models of machines to show how they worked or what their context was. Sometimes a building, village, or landscape is constructed to scale as accurately as documentary, archeological, and other resources allow. The Ironbridge Gorge Museums in northern England display a forty-foot scale model of three miles along the Severn River to show how its industrialization might have appeared when the Prince of Orange visited August 12, 1796. Two Swedish filmmakers constructed a 1:30 scale model of Birka, a medieval Viking village that archeologists had excavated during the 1990s near modern Stockholm. They used the detailed research of the excavation not only to build the model as accurately as possible but also to have actors reenact scenes to appear in the composite film of the model and actors. The model is now housed in the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm.48 Dioramas depict historic scenes through real or reproduced artifacts, modeled figures of humans and animals, and painted backgrounds or replicated landscapes. The manikins may be life size or smaller. Three dioramas in the New York State Museum depict Native American life in a Mohawk Village about 1600 before “European influence greatly changed Iroquois culture.” The dioramas present a scale model of a village, part of a full-sized longhouse with furnishings, and an agricultural field raising the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash. Appropriately sized manikins, animals, plants, and artifacts appear in the various dioramas. The Museum warrants their accuracy based upon extensive research. As the introduction to “The Three Sisters” agricultural field states, “This exhibit strives to be authentic in all respects, from the major setting to the smallest details. The plants and animals displayed are accurate replications of those that inhabited the Iroquois world.”49 Although dioramas are threedimensional, they are static and lifeless in their alleged re-creations of past

162

•

Fashioning History

persons and environment. Nevertheless those representations result from the same interpretation of the sources and resulting intervention as other forms of history. The more the diorama employs virtual reconstruction as opposed to actual artifacts, the more speculative and imaginative the representation. The farther back in the past said to be represented the more speculative and imaginative.50 An important goal of the modern museum is to involve the audiences more through interactive exhibits. Sometimes that means merely that users in some way activate the sounds or sights of a display. Other times interaction has audience members learning by doing. They may handle objects, either authentic or reproduced. Or, they may participate in some activity: bake bread, tar a boat, render lard, load a gun, or even dress a doll, depending upon the interests and the ages of the audience.51 Once again such learning by doing and reenactment of past activities involves interpretation of the sources by the curators if not audiences to produce the semblance of a product, explain its functioning and role in the past, and offer perspective and explanation to understand how the simulated activity fit into the life of the past society. With the increased use and ownership of computers, small and large museums alike developed Web sites. Sometimes a museum’s Web page gives little more than directions to its location, hours open, a concise mention of aims, and a brief description of its collection or site. Larger museums have extensive Web sites offering virtual tours, research publications, online gift shops with reproduced artifacts, documentary sources, and teachers’ materials and lessons. 52 The Monticello Web site (http: //www.monticello.org/), for example, offers among its many pages a virtual tour through Jefferson’s mansion, guides to and pictures of the gardens and grounds, a map and description of the five thousand acre plantation and its working parts, biographies of some of the slaves, streaming speeches by experts on Jefferson and his times, expositions of his political and religious ideas, descriptions of his farming practices, the tasks and duties of slave and free African Americans, the controversy over Jefferson’s relationship to his slave Sally Hemings, and an online catalog for the museum shop gifts, heritage plant seeds, and extensive publications. As part of its educational outreach to schoolchildren, the Web site allows them to ask Jefferson a question and receive a reply in his name and provides pedagogical hints for using the Web site in teaching about him and his times. Although the Web site seems to allow its users greater freedom of maneuver and therefore choice of interpretation than the traditional book or lecture, one soon realizes that it, like any historical representation, organizes

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

163

and limits the options it allows through its hypertext markup links. Like any other interpretive work, the Web site controls how it represents Jefferson as a person, farmer, politician, inventor, slave owner, architect, and intellectual; the plantation community around him; and the larger world in which he lived. Interpretive Aids: From Lectures to Living Reenactments One of the most common methods of interpretation in a museum or a site is through the spoken word. Most familiar is the long, traditional, formal or informal lecture by a docent or guide, often a volunteer, geared to the ages and presumed interests of the various audience members. Popular replacements these days for such tour guides are audiocassette tapes. This mechanical aid allows visitors to wander through the exhibition or site at their own speed, stopping here and there at will, and listening to the interpretations produced by museum professionals. Although this mechanical aid frees the visitors from the tyranny of the live guide’s program, it is no substitute, however, for the interactive give-and-take between a good guide and alert audience. Such interaction and interpretation is enhanced when the guides appear in accurate period costume, talk about what visitors see, and answer their specific questions. The effect is further enhanced when costumed interpreters demonstrate domestic duties like cooking, candle dipping, spinning, and gardening; farm chores like haying, sheep shearing, and butchering; or trades like blacksmithing, barrel making, clerking, and soldiering (according to historic gender roles of course). Since these costumed guides and demonstrators still interact with their audiences by speaking of past persons and activities from today’s point of view and knowledge, museum practice people refer to this method as “third-person interpretation.” That interpretive and interactive trend culminated in the last quarter of the twentieth century in costumed interpreters adopting the roles of famous or typical past persons by expounding their religious, political and other worldviews; demonstrating their everyday activities; portraying their personal attributes, family relationships, and social positions; and always appearing and acting in general in appropriate character. Since reenactors speak and act as if they were their characters, museum practice people call this method “first-person interpretation.” Such first person interpretation embraces a wide range of past characters in United States living history museums today: servants and masters, slaves and owners,

164

•

Fashioning History

housewives and farmers, soldiers and officers, store clerks and artisans, American presidents and judges, tavern owners and dance hall girls, Native Americans and European immigrants, whalers and fur traders, preachers and frontier pioneers, businessmen and workers.53 First-person interpretation demands that reenactors be as accurate in their speech patterns as their manners, their cosmologies as their amusements, their travel modes as their occupational skills, their treatment of inferiors and superiors as their clothing, their interaction with friends and neighbors as their knowledge of local plants and animals, and their understanding of their times and place in the world as their food and drinking customs.54 One of the first and most complete conversions to first-person interpretation as the living part of a history museum was at Plimoth Plantation, founded in 1947 to commemorate the “Pilgrim Fathers” of Thanksgiving legend. Since modern Plymouth covers the original site of the plantation, the supposedly re-constructed fort–meeting house and the first dwellings were built initially on open land near Plymouth Rock. Guides and hostesses, clad in clean, starched copies of supposed period clothes, conducted traditional third-person interpretations of the site. Manikins illustrated activities in the buildings. The museum began construction of a new, more accurate fort–meeting house and the other dwellings at its current site about three miles south of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1957 and started operating as a full-fledged outdoor museum the next year. The Plantation attempted an even more authentically accurate reconstruction at the urging of James Deetz, a young Harvard-trained anthropologist who conducted archeological research in the area and eventually became Assistant Director. Beginning in 1969, the Plantation removed the anachronistic antiques from the houses in favor of barer rooms; returned the oyster shell walkways to plain dirt; tore up the rose bushes, planted flora or left yards unplanted as more original to the times; substituted weathered simple frame houses for the previous charming cottages with Elizabethan glass windows; and constructed the twelve foot high wooden palisade around the village. In the 1970s the manikins disappeared from the buildings, and the guides and hostesses increasingly became first-person “interpreters” by doing tasks rather than just describing them. By 1978 they chopped wood, hauled water, plucked chickens, held musket drills, said prayers, ate with their hands, feasted, danced, and sang in less immaculate but more authentic clothing in design and textile. When the reenacting interpreters talked to visitors, they even spoke in one of the four regional dialects of the original settlers. Later such collective events as a simple wedding, a funeral, court trials, and regular military

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

165

muster were performed. Attracting large audiences were the more elaborated (and extrapolated) festive wedding, grand muster, and three-day harvest feast. Of course, the audience always remains anachronistic no matter how authentically accurate the setting.55 By 1978 Plimoth Plantation had become a complete living history museum committed to first-person interpretation. Such interpretation like the reconstructed village itself depended upon good documentary sources and archaeological research. Because the village was twice visited and described at some length in 1627, the layout and appearance of Plimoth Plantation were keyed to that year. (On the other hand, the reconstructed Mayflower II, docked in modern Plymouth’s busy port, re-created the activities of 1621, to the sometime confusion of those who visited both town and ship.) For the sake of authentic reenactments, the interpreting must be inferred from sources as close to that year and place as possible. In the mid-1980s, the interpreters attended a two-week training session, which included lectures on seventeenth-century worldviews, the social order in Plimoth, the colony’s military organization, and the foods and eating habits of the period. They read two large training manuals produced by the research and interpretation departments that covered these matters and other information pertinent to life in England and the colony in 1627. They listened to audiotapes to learn one of the four dialects spoken in the village. They received historical texts pertinent to the times and their character and were encouraged to supplement their knowledge in the three thousand book library. New interpreters attended additional lectures on “informant method and characterization” and received pointers from their more experienced colleagues. Rehearsals were limited to the dress rehearsal preceding the season opening and some of the major collective reenactments such as court days, the “Festive Wedding,” and the “Harvest Feast.” Rehearsals were usually informal in order to keep the characterization of the reenactors improvisational or extemporaneous. In the end, the ideal first-person interpreters at Plimoth Plantation became so immersed in the outlook, knowledge, behavior, and demeanor of those they portrayed that they could serve as “ethnohistorical informants” for their audiences. In line with their assumed roles they professed to know nothing beyond 1627 and never stepped out of character, even when baited by a determined heckler.56 Scholars debate whether first-person interpretation is more acting and theater than scholarship and history, but all agree that the intended result is to bring the static sets of historic sites to life by creating accurate, animated, and interactive living dioramas in effect. Proponents of this interpretive

166

•

Fashioning History

method stress the extensive research reenactors do to create as authentic a characterization as possible. As with any other historical project, reenactors must extrapolate from the sources to their finished product(ion). They must interpret the role to create the character they portray. The stories they tell and perform, the perspectives and explanations they offer, the demeanor and behavior they enact all supposedly come only from the world of their assumed past characters as inferred from the sources. The degree of commitment to playing a historical role as accurately as possible may be measured by whether the reenactor refuses to understand audience questions posed from a modern point of view or about modern matters. Historians question how authentic such first-person interpretations are and what authorizes them. A curator, educator, or these days a whole department of research or interpretation may script the words or actions. Or, the words may be extemporaneous and the actions improvisational based upon training sessions or guided reading in the sources provided by the curators or departments of interpretation. In either case, their accuracy no less than their perspective depends upon a great deal of interpretation. The question is always how much can be re-presented and how much must be constructed, how much reenacted and how much just acted? Like other histories, first-person interpretations offer representation and construction as if it were re-presentation and reconstruction, because documentation is never complete enough to nail down all the details on one hand or to give all the generalizations on the other hand. First-person interpreters create. For example, they may hypothesize emotions and posture on one side and extrapolate meaning and perspective on the other. Both interpretive sides may be educated guesses but guesses nevertheless.57 The commitment to historical authenticity and accuracy is strained when it comes to reenacting roles and behavior deemed questionable, uncomfortable, or immoral by today’s standards. How should living history museums handle past race relations, ethnic cleavage, inequality of class and gender, harsh working conditions, midwifery and childbirth, and poor health and sanitary conditions? The pained reaction of some in the African American community to the slave auction staged by Colonial Williamsburg in 1994 shows the delicacy of the problem. To what extent should or can reenactments put past toilet habits, alcoholism, domestic quarrels, death, sex, and human and animal cruelty on public view? Wife beating, sexual intercourse, severe illness, maimed bodies, brutal floggings, bear baiting, opium usage, drunkenness, and cursing all so much a part of some past lives are hardly mentioned let alone portrayed in today’s

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

167

museums. What was considered normal and morally acceptable in a past community may draw protest today. The butchering of animals on living history farms can cause protests as well as fainting. The subordination of women may elicit outrage as well as argument. The use of racial and ethnic slurs may anger as well as embarrass. Many living history museums today seek as one of their goals to provoke their audiences to rethink the present as well as to reconsider the past. (Plimoth Plantation interpreters, for example, try to teach the site’s visitors how differently the Pilgrims celebrated the harvest from what Americans associate with Thanksgiving Day now.) At the least, they show different viewpoints in the past in the hopes of challenging modern presumptions and prejudices. At most, they reenact alternatives to today’s ways or depict events that were repudiated or repressed by those creating modern times. Such first-person interpretation as with any other representation of the past relies on emplotment, organizes by perspective, extrapolates meaning, and offers political and moral lessons either explicitly or implicitly. As process and product, then, first-person interpretations, like all museum exhibitions and historic sites, are just like all other full-fledged proper histories. Opponents of first-person interpretation question just how much any performance is legitimate inference from research and how much is improvisational extrapolation or even sheer invention inspired by the interactive moment. This problem of proportion bedevils all historical reenactments in general, including those in computer simulations, board games, and even documentary films. No matter how well researched and seemingly authentic fur traders’ rendezvous, battle reenactments, militia musters, and Indian encampments are, for example, most of the actor-participants must improvise, that is, invent, much or all of their specific behavior, voice quality and dialect, dialogue, habits, posture, and other details in any collective event. That is, the best research into the past only outlines the role but rarely provides the complete characterization for the reenactor, no matter how comprehensive the script. As even James Deetz admitted, “the possibility of any such simulation being true to what it is attempting to re-create is exceedingly slim. There are just too many variables that are beyond control. If Myles Standish were to reappear in modern Plimoth Plantation, it is certain that he would not quite know where he was.”58 The more reenactors and the larger the event, the more interpretation replaces evidence and inference. Which elements are easiest to infer and which hardest seem no different than for any other proper history. Once again the question becomes:

168

•

Fashioning History

what proportion of the reenactment is a re-presentation from documented sources as opposed to how much stems from inference and imagination. Detailed records of religious services and court trials, for example, allow greater re-presentation of those events from the viewpoint and actions of those conducting them than for the onlookers in the church or courtroom. Officers’ and soldiers’ diaries or oral histories allow greater reconstruction of general battle maneuvers or some people’s feelings than of the actual actions of the majority of soldiers or even what they ate at meals. Must the reenactors be of the same physique, gender, and race and ethnicity as those persons being portrayed? At Hobbamock’s Homesite near Plimoth Plantation, the guides are Native Americans, most descended from the Wampanoag who originally lived in the area. Although dressed in traditional tribal clothing and surrounded by two reconstructed native houses and gardens of the 1600s, the interpretive staff do not reenact the past but speak from a modern perspective in order to refute rather than reinforce white and other visitors’ stereotypes of “Indians.”59 Critical Museum Practice and Preserving Heritage Although first-person interpretation and living history seem near the interpretive extreme in museum practice today, they only seek to do what all the interpretive devices from labels to books, from pictures to models, from live lectures to audiotapes aim for in the way of providing context. In that manner, all historical museums and sites as products can be and must be treated the same as any full-fledged synthetic history. That approach is only reinforced as the ideals of museology and curatorship have changed over the years from offering minimal information in addition to the artifacts themselves to providing a fuller and more organized interpretive path to certain conclusions. The increasing role of interpretation in museum practice and educational outreach was at the heart of transforming many museums from warehouses of artifacts to theaters of interpretation in the latter half of the twentieth century. To some scholars museum specimens became so contextualized under this trend that the objects seemed to illustrate their description rather than vice versa.60 The evolution of Colonial Williamsburg from just another old Virginia town (albeit with the second oldest United States college) to the largest outdoor living museum in the United States illustrates the changing relationship between interpretive goals and means as museum practice mutated throughout the second half of the twentieth century.61 In Rockefeller’s own words, the important goal of the initial, massive restoration was to teach the

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

169

“patriotism, high purpose, and unselfish devotion of our forefathers to the common good.”62 Thus, in re-creating the Virginia capital as it supposedly was in the decades before the American Revolution, the architects and other planners began the rebuilding with the politically important buildings: the Governor’s Palace, the Capitol with the House of Burgesses, and the Raleigh Tavern. As part of this interpretive aim, the enterprise stressed the quaint and refined aspects of colonial Virginian life unburdened by racism, internal conflict, rampant social inequality, or future industrialism. In this spirit, the first interpreters were genteel (white and gentile?) local women dressed in eighteenth-century style clothing. They acted as “hostesses” and lectured in third-person mode about the founding fathers and their tough choices in those perilous times. During the Second World War and the subsequent cold war, Rockefeller and his son John III wanted the restored and reconstructed town to exemplify and thereby inculcate classic American liberalism and traditional democratic values. Visits arranged for foreign dignitaries after the Second World War as well as regular tourists were to prove by words and sights what made United States institutions the great antidote to Communism during the cold war. A thirty-four-minute orientation film, Williamsburg— The Story of a Patriot, introduced its audience to “the issues and conditions facing Virginians on the eve of the American Revolution” and has been shown daily in a specially constructed theater since April 1957. (It so deteriorated that it needed its own restoration by 2000). The film stressed the successive choices and actions of white elite male “patriots” in opposing the policies and proceedings of the mother country from 1769 to declaring independence in 1776. In that spirit the film followed the thoughts and actions of John Frye, a fictional member of the Virginia Assembly. His privileged status allowed the film to portray such Virginia heroes as Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee among others. The film emphasized cherished American political principles and national ideals. As the founding generation of Rockefellers and managers turned over control of the enterprise to professionals more committed to social history and the new museum practices, Colonial Williamsburg altered from a white elite experience reinforcing traditional dominant American ideals and institutions to a more challenging view of who was embraced and omitted by those values and institutions in the past. By the mid-1970s the new goals were expressed in the Foundation’s commitment to “represent the eighteenth-century community from top to bottom.” Inclusion of gender, class, and race became the interpretive order of the day, and

170

•

Fashioning History

“reconstructing, restoring, refurnishing, and reinterpreting” a slave quarter (on a plantation outside Williamsburg), a mental hospital, a county courthouse, additional artisan workplaces, and creating domestic settings to highlight women’s and children’s activities all fulfilled this goal.63 Interpretation had expanded from portraying the political ideals and important role of the founding fathers in the formation of the new nation to reenacting the diverse role of the common people in shaping and supporting their community and their contribution to the formation of America as a nation of transplanted peoples. “Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to be Both Free and Equal,” the title of a mid-1990s thematic plan for interpreting the town, encapsulated the newer grand narrative just as The Story of a Patriot had the earlier great story. The central theme of this new interpretive plan was, in the words of one of its authors, “about two transplanted peoples—one African, the other European— who met in a land unfamiliar to both. Over the course of several generations, they developed distinctively different, yet distinctively American, white and black cultures.”64 In keeping with the newer interpretive goals of museum practice, Colonial Williamsburg beginning in the late 1970s gave up some of the manicured grounds and the bright paints for peeling or no paint and ragged or unkempt grounds, added African American interpreters as slaves and free blacks to those whites portraying artisans reenacting such trades and crafts as shoe making, basket weaving, and harness making to better show the community and era as a whole. Colonial Williamsburg faced a “racial” problem common to interpretation of the colonial and antebellum South.65 Half of the town’s two thousand or so eighteenthcentury inhabitants on the eve of the American Revolution were of African descent. Just how was such diversity to be portrayed in occupation, living accommodations, and social and personal relationships? The mock slave auction in 1994 was greeted with controversy among whites as well as blacks, even though it was intended to show the humiliation and cruelty of that phase of the African American experience. How far can or should efforts to re-create and reenact the past go in light of modern sensibilities and moral sympathies? Should the costumed historical interpreters re-creating the eighteenth-century people be shorter than common now to reflect the average height of the time or pock-marked to demonstrate the health of the era?66 Should the animals and plants be bred back to the scrawnier animals and prehybrid plants of that time? Colonial Williamsburg maintains some rare breeds of sheep, horses, and milk cattle; produces heritage plants and seeds; and promotes training

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

171

classes in ancient or obsolete artisan crafts. And what of the quantities of horse manure in eighteenth-century streets and maybe sanitary and health conditions in general? Some horse manure was left in Colonial Williamsburg’s streets by the 1990s. Historians in and out of museums separate historical theme parks, such as Disney’s efforts, from living history museums by the latters’ attention to historically accurate simulations based upon extensive research into documents and artifacts. They distinguish the educational from the entertainment function of the enterprise in the same way they distinguish professional history from historical fiction. Although both kinds of institutions may measure their success by attendance figures and survey research, only the living history museums profess to provide fully documented simulations to their visitors. While actors in both institutions extrapolate their characters’ behaviors and views, only first-person interpreters in living history museums govern their performances and limit their roles by what the sources contain or can be inferred “legitimately” from them. What one scholar calls “staged authenticity.67 The critics of first-person interpretation like those of many historical museums in general see less of a difference between theme parks and living history museums, because both institutions produce spectacles with a view to attracting an ever-larger attendance. They believe that many of the large museums but especially the outdoor ones have blurred the distinction between their educational and entertainment functions so much that the former suffers from the latter. Even Plimoth Plantation stretched historical accuracy in the early 1980s by substituting a more festive English country wedding for the simpler ceremony of the Pilgrims. One of its officials admitted that “historical consistency” had been subordinated to “good public relations” in order to please the three to four thousand spectators the show attracted.68 What sales tell writers about their works and teaching evaluations remind professors about their efforts, attendance figures and survey research inform museum professionals how well they are fulfilling their goals of outreach. As museums extended their coverage of everyday life, they also hoped to widen their audience beyond the better educated and the more prosperous. They varied exhibits or at least geared the messages to different sectors of the populace in order to increase their attendance as well as their educational outreach. At their most innovative, their opponents would say political, museums try to combat racial, sexual, and other social inequalities and injustices by what we might call critical museology. Such critical museum practice seeks to fulfill an expanded social responsibility

172

•

Fashioning History

through inclusion of groups usually considered marginal to or invisible in traditional exhibitions and audiences. Such practices ranged from new topics of displays calling attention to past and present social and economic injustices; to involvement of community groups new to planning, even seeing, exhibits; to using museums and historic sites to challenge the values and practices of the larger society and dominant culture. Perhaps these goals are best summarized in the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, founded in December 1999, and dedicated to “assist the public in drawing connections between the history of our sites and its contemporary implications. We view stimulating dialogue on pressing social issues and promoting humanitarian and democratic values as a primary function.” At their most insistent, such museum people become “memory activists” as one phrased it.69 The more critical museology tried to challenge traditional history and traditional audiences’ views of it, but the more museums attempted to appeal to and embrace more sectors of the society, the more the various aims and audiences competed even conflicted. The more inclusive museums or sites tried to be of who had participated and thereby constituted and constructed the past as history, the more their efforts to stress or highlight the multiplicity of past peoples, sexes, classes, races, and ethnicities divided as well as united their present-day audiences, supporters, and communities. Some reacted negatively because they not only thought but preferred that museums reflect and reinforce the existing power structure of a society through how they classified, described, and displayed their contents. No less of a reaction could be expected by those challenging past and present cultural hegemony. Yet to people persuaded of current as well as past injustices, nothing less was worth accomplishing in a museum or on site. The continuing culture wars over museum practice attest to the conflicted interests.70 Audience response or reception theory reminds us that consumers do not always accept the interpretive experience as planned for them by museum professionals and historians. British children shout about Indians, guns, and teepees as they play among the roundhouses in a reconstructed twothousand-year-old Stone Age Celtic village in Wales, or their parents express concerns about lack of proper plumbing and heating.71 Surely what people appreciate and how they understand what they witness depends upon their ages, socioeconomic background, religion, nationality, gender, and other now standard analytical categories. An object, photograph, or exhibit that draws out reminiscence and delight for one generation or one group of persons may draw stares and incomprehension from another

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums, and Historic Sites

•

173

cohort. But another exhibit may elicit exactly the reverse reactions in the same groups of people. At the same time, individuals have their own specific memories and experiences to guide their own interpretations, even counter-interpretations.72 Sometimes the best-intentioned curator efforts at multiculturalism and inclusiveness in exhibits elicit nationalistic and ethnocentric, even racist, reactions from some audience members. Similarly, exhibitions attempting to depict new understanding of gender relationships in the past provoke snickers, even bravado, among some spectators.73

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 5

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

I

ncreasingly how the public understands the past is through its representation in films, videos, and television programs. So ubiquitous are these media that they constitute a significant part of modern memory. In many nations, most citizens cannot remember a time without motion pictures nor can younger generations remember a time without television programs. Filmed representations of the past more and more shape popular historical consciousness, particularly as the memory of what was taught in school, if not the actual teaching of history, declines.1 Movies from the very beginning of the industry frequently used the past as setting and background, as vital to the plot, or even for the story itself. The first epic feature-length motion picture, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), depicted the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, using the most vicious stereotypes of the former slaves as it promoted the superiority of the “Aryan race” by lauding the Ku Klux Klan.2 One of the all-time blockbuster films, Gone with the Wind (1939), also propagated stereotypes of blacks and whites alike in depicting the Civil War and Reconstruction.3 These days the History Channels in various English-speaking countries ostensibly devote their entire programming to representing the past as history, but the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, and other national and private television channels also sponsor and present films as histories.4 Historians, documentary filmmakers, movie and television producers, and others debate both the benefits and disadvantages of the medium for representing history. These debates, like so many about the nature of history, oversimplify the great variety of forms films can take as histories.5

176

•

Fashioning History

What I call “films” in this chapter cover a broad gamut of cinematic and other moving image media just as “texts” and “things” embraced a wide variety of forms in chapters 4 and 5. Historical films can include everything from didactic classroom historical films to grand Hollywood spectacles swathed in a historical setting like Cleopatra (1963) or Titanic (1997). Films also embrace both the distinguished historian Simon Schama’s fifteen-part series on A History of Britain (2000–2001) for the British Broadcasting Corporation and the prizewinning documentary filmmaker Ken Burn’s eleven-hour series on The Civil War (1990) for the Public Broadcasting System in the United States. Popular and full-feature films range from the efforts of Oliver Stone arguing the conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (1991) to adaptations of famous historical novels, like the most recent version of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Films have been made from microhistories, but Le retour de Martin Guerre (1982), supplemented in a book by the chief historical advisor Natalie Zemon Davis, and A Midwife’s Tale (1998), based on a book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, are quite different from each other in their approaches to the medium and how it should represent the past.6 Historic sites frequently offer documentary films as an overall orientation to their enterprise, for example, Williamsburg— The Story of a Patriot (1957). The History Channels in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere show visual depictions of history ranging from a miniseries on Sex Life in Ancient Rome (2005) to the history of sewers from ancient Rome to modern Los Angeles as Modern Marvels of technology (2005) to seemingly endless programs on the Second World War. And who can say how much popular historical consciousness around the world was permanently affected by such film staples as the swashbuckling pirate, the British costume drama, the gangster movie, and the American Western? (Remember those British boys playing cowboys among the Iron Age Welsh roundhouses in the last chapter.) It is this very profusion of products that creates some of the problems about what and how well a film can represent the past from a professional historian’s view. So first we look briefly at some of the arguments raised by historians and filmmakers about each other’s proclivities and products. Second, we observe one customary division of film genres classified by their supposed proportion of factuality and fictionality. Then, we turn to investigating films as evidential sources for the historian through questions akin to the external and internal criticism of texts. Next, we examine films as histories, as representations of the past, in their own right. The last section offers some brief conclusions about films and history.

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

177

Complaints and Issues Given the vast variety of films that present history in some way, no wonder historians and other scholars argue about the ability of films to represent the past as history. In fact, much of the discussion of films by historians concerns how much they must present fiction rather than the facts professional historians accept, purvey simplified heritage more than complex proper history. A major point of comparison seems to take as its standard, full-fledged written histories. Historians and media people argue over whether a film can be as scholarly as written history. The number of pages in a script for a full-length film version of history seems very short in comparison to the number of pages even in a learned article.7 Although films interpret the past, it is difficult for them to discuss explicitly various interpretations or the conflicts over their application in any given instance. In other words, historians lament the lack of annotation parallel to the text that informs the reader of disputes over evidence, counterinterpretations, or controversial application of a thesis in a book or article. Thus films are often accused of oversimplifying circumstances and usually omitting the larger context all together.8 To some critics the very strengths of films are considered weaknesses: their visual and aural complexity and eyewitness quality. Films communicate through the alleged reproduction or simulation the looks and sounds of the past as they also convey the activity and other matters at the center of focus. Films need to show a physical setting visually while books can generalize, merely sketch, or even neglect that aspect. Thus buildings, landscapes, artifacts present the same problems of setting and interpreting the scene that any museum or historic site confronts. The demand that the persons appearing in films use words, develop thoughts, and show activity accurate to those of past peoples presents problems similar to living reenactments. Such common activities as eating and walking or physical details of surroundings may be finessed by a writer of a history but not by a filmmaker. But this problem seems no different conceptually than any other living reenactment. Problematic as their achievement may seem, films appear to convey the very “look” and “feel” of a particular era or place. Old films, whether a short newsreel or full-length feature movie, appear to offer “windows” on the era of their making. They communicate, seemingly directly, how people lived and behaved then. Some complain that the need for a clear narrative line makes matters seem too certain in a film. Even if the lack of footnotes is somewhat compensated by the appearance of historians and other experts as “talking

178

•

Fashioning History

heads” in, say, a documentary, a film shows the “noise of events” better than the structures that shaped them. “Great Men” and “Great Women” photograph better than great trends. Just as history from the top down needs embodiment through some concrete individuals rather than abstract organizational entities, so too does history from the bottom up. Unless complicated situations can be reduced to personal trials and solutions, they are usually omitted or oversimplified. If ambiguities are not neglected entirely, they are not developed very often unless they can be dramatized. To show change over time through film is easy enough, but to show why is far harder. The juxtaposition of various shots and scenes convey the what of change but less so the how and rarely the why. Historians believe that long, annotated texts do a better job at showing the complexity of representing the past. Filmmakers believe that films convey an experience of the immediate and the memorable that no book can communicate. Historians worry that far too many popular films embrace cherished metanarratives rather than accurate narratives, promote heritage more than history. To the extent that films “personalize, emotionalize, or dramatize” specific historical situations, their creditability as history is on the line.9 In that sense the factuality of film as history seems more immediate to the viewer/listener, for films are both aural and visual. Film is a show-and-tell medium. Films use words like texts but can show things better than texts can. They can show things like museums and historic sites but integrate words and sound into the showing. But what and whose criteria should be used to judge the result? All too often, historians would seem to want filmed books, while filmmakers want a product that translates the past into what is appropriate for the medium of film and the nature of its mass audience. Even successful documentary filmmakers measure the audience for their products by the tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, while many of the best proper history books count success in the thousands, except for the breakout best sellers. Films have their own language, so to speak, as a medium that the historian needs to appreciate and understand in order both to evaluate them as evidence for a history of her own and for judging the accuracy of those films claiming to be histories in their own right. Filmmakers and those historians long interested in both the use of films as evidence and in the production of histories through film warn that the technical aspects of lens focal length, camera angles, framing, composition, lighting, editing, and other filmmaking techniques must be understood in order to fully comprehend what goes on in a film. Presentation in a film like on the

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

179

stage depends upon the mise en scène, or the arrangement of actors, costumes, props, and lighting to convey the overall effect. Such editing techniques as the fade, dissolve, wipe, and cut tighten plot; convey temporal, spatial, and causative connections through juxtaposition of shots; and enhance or establish viewpoint, among other things. In many ways the techniques of filming influence not only how something can be presented but as a result what is presented. Historians must recognize the “visual language” employed in a film in order to interpret it as evidence.10 Just as film has methods and approaches unique to it as medium like both texts and things, so too it shares with them the problems of representing the past as history. In the end, films like texts and museum exhibits are complex, multilayered syntheses that combine narrative and arguments, explanation and understanding, perspectives and meaning, and Great Stories. Thus historians must understand how films put these elements together according to cinematic methods in order to infer the facts and generalizations they will incorporate into their own syntheses or to evaluate films as histories in their own right.11 Fact, Fiction, and Film Genres Film critics and theorists categorize films by many genres, but those of most interest to historians classify by proportion of fact to fiction in the medium. By distinguishing among documentaries, docudramas, and dramas, theorists and critics along with filmmakers acknowledge a crude system of classifying films by their faithfulness and accuracy in depicting the present or the past. Some indication of the system occurs in the phrases “a true story,” “based on a true story,” and “inspired by a true story” that appear on screen or through voice-over at the beginning of a film. Even those films claiming to be “a true story” or “based upon a true story” usually contain smaller or larger amounts of fictional invention. Those claiming to be “inspired by a true story,” as the phrase suggests, take still greater artistic license. So let us look at this crude but customary system preliminary to a more detailed examination of films first as sources for their times and then as historical representations in their own right like any other history.12 What are called actuality footage or films supposedly record just what came before the camera lens without any intervention by the filmmaker beyond operating the camera. Thus they presumably offer direct evidence of what the footage shows. They differ from documentaries therefore by their relative lack of intervention by the filmmaker, for documentary

180

•

Fashioning History

filmmakers deliberately emplot the elements in their works to promote a goal or message. Documentary filmmakers at times use actuality footage to re-present past persons and activities as originally recorded. Such representation serves the same function in a filmic historical representation as a quotation does in a textual historical representation. 13 Among the most famous actuality footage is the twenty-six-second home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder of the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.14 Still photographs from it appeared in the national media soon after, but no public showing of the complete footage occurred until March 6, 1975. The Warren Commission, investigating the assassination in 1963–64, issued a twenty-six-volume report that relied heavily on minute analysis of its 486 frames. The House Select Committee on Assassinations examined it frame by frame in 1977–78 to answer lingering questions about how many persons were involved in the shooting. The director Oliver Stone re-presented the silent, black-and-white footage repeatedly in his feature film JFK (1991) along with his own invented black-and-white footage to argue the case for a high-level cabal. A Google search on the Internet of the film or of the Kennedy assassination reveals that the issues of who shot the President and how many were involved directly and indirectly still generates controversy supported by references to the film. Some even argue it was faked or altered in order to support their opinion that the assassination required the work of several persons at a minimum.15 Old-time movie newsreels and modern television interviews and onthe-spot coverage combine actuality footage and interpretive shaping of the narrative. Movie theaters showed weekly newsreels until television news programs superceded their venue and adapted their format. Newsreels and television news coverage frequently insert stock footage of a previous similar event, place, or people to supplement a presentation or provide visual accompaniment to a spoken text. Sometimes an event is created through editing, such as Hitler’s little jig at the surrender of Paris. Other times a seemingly documentary news film is a reenactment. Newsreels of World War II and the Korean War were staged at times for propaganda purposes. Most scenes from battles in earlier wars were reenacted, because the cameras and other equipment were technologically inadequate to record the real fighting. Actual sequences, inserted stock footage, faked or reenacted scenes, and director’s or other interpretations can all be grist for the historian’s mill to produce facts, albeit of a different kind perhaps from those presented as such in the film under study.16

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

181

Film theorists usually separate documentary films from docudramas and biographical pictures (biopics) on the nature of their implicit promise to the audience of actuality and/or a true story, entirely nonfiction as opposed to any invention. Documentaries, as their name implies, seek to document actuality in the present or the past either through direct filming of a slice of life, as it were, or re-presentation from archival or other sources.17 Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is generally acknowledged to be the first important documentary. He supposedly filmed the actual harsh life of the Canadian Inuit (one of those peoples lumped together as Arctic Eskimos), but he staged traditional customs and events no longer practiced by them. Documentaries can vary by length, subject matter, location, veracity, intended audience, and moral and political purpose. Such films range in intended audience from classroom and other instructional settings to art houses and mainstream theaters, from the History Channel or Public Broadcasting System to an exposé on one of the major television channels. They can support or oppose their government, as two controversial films show. Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant Triumph of the Will (1934) employed great artistry in filming the 1934 Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg and thereby supported Hitler in spite of her professions to the contrary after the Second World War. Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) mixed his own filmed interviews with edited clips of George W. Bush, his aides, battle scenes, and casualties to fashion a controversial case against the election of a sitting president, how he responded to the bombing of the Twin Towers, and steered the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Documentaries can focus on individual biographies, groups, social problems, or nature among many subjects. They can be about musical events and even the making of movies themselves. For example Woodstock—3 Days of Peace and Music (1970) documents that iconic festival. Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) takes the audience behind the scenes to witness the difficulties her husband had filming his version of the Vietnam War in the heralded Apocalypse Now (1979).18 Docudramas, cinema verité, and biopics all mix documentary ambitions with dramatic development. They can be about the present or the past. Rather than reproducing film or other documentation, this genre uses actors to portray actual persons and reenact events and its makers construct sets to replicate the original environment. No narrator on screen or in voice-over describes the action; rather it is depicted as if it were really taking place as it happens. The chief characters represent persons who actually lived, and the events shown actually occurred, even

182

•

Fashioning History

though staged. The dialogue, costumes, and sets attempt to avoid anachronisms as does the movie or television show as a whole. Docudramas employ typical dramatic devices to arouse such emotions as happiness, suspense or anguish and evoke such moral reactions as empathy, indignation, and alienation. As the difference between the American word “docudrama” and its English cousin “dramadoc” suggests, theorists dispute the proportion of documented actuality and dramatic invention, even melodramatic license, this genre entails. The dispute shows that the genre contains a spectrum of exemplars ranging in their proportion of factual documentation and narrative invention.19 Biopics are by far the most prevalent films in this category. Biographies are a popular subject in all genres ranging from documentaries to dramas, but they define the very category of biopics. Biographies have been the subject of films since Jeanne d’Arc (1899) till today. A person’s life offers filmmakers both a focus and a story with beginning, middle, and end that an audience can follow and even identify with. Biopics treat in various ways famous persons in the past like Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon, two of the most prevalent; infamous persons like Jesse James or Al Capone, also popular; and nonfamous persons, like a union organizer or a counterfeiter. In the present, they explore the lives of politicians and prostitutes, scientists and singers, elite and common people.20 Docudramas, biopics, and cinema verité all seek to combine a storyline about actual persons and events with typical dramatic film techniques. A curious example of success was the widely acclaimed 1965 film La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) by the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. Some early critics and viewers thought that the director had produced a documentary of a guerilla movement fighting for Algerian independence from France in the mid-1950s. Pontecorvo, however, had conveyed the illusion of actuality by employing many unknown nonprofessional Algerians to act the scripted scenes. (Some of the dialogue had to be dubbed because of the actors’ inexperience before the camera.) The one professional actor portrayed a composite of French military officers. Moreover, the movie was shot in newsreel-like grainy black and white to further the appearance of filmed actuality. Thus what appeared as a documentary to some was in reality a docudrama or a staged drama, although the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) leader, producer, and actor Saadi Yacef (but not Pontecorvo himself ) claimed the film was based upon a true story. Although the two-hour film depicted atrocities on both sides—terrorist tactics by the insurgents and torture by the French military—Pontecorvo sympathized with the FLN in its efforts to overthrow

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

183

the colonial occupation of the Algerian homeland. As a result of the film’s politics, the French government banned its showing in France for some years. The vivid and naturalistic portrayal of what we now call terrorist tactics in asymmetrical warfare became a virtual handbook for radicals around the world.21 Documentaries and docudramas, as is evident, proffer the same basic quandary to historians whether used as historical sources or judged as historical representations. This is not just the problem of distinguishing those documentaries, docudramas, and biopics presenting historical as opposed to present-day subjects. Rather all combine varying degrees and kinds of factuality and interpretive invention. Documentaries, like newsreels, promise their audiences actuality and true stories, but like newsreels they too combine the inventive with the re-presented, even at times reenacting and staging what their or some other camera failed to capture in reality. They usually offer their contents organized by viewpoint and interpretation. If docudramas are guided by past actuality, they also seek to enhance that reality through staging and dramatic techniques. Thus the historian must investigate each of these film forms for what is factual and what is fictive in order to evaluate their use as evidence or to judge them as history. To designate a film as “dramatic” indicates this grouping is more a leftover or residual category than a very precise or descriptive one according to this genre classification. It embraces feature films of many genres in their own right from gangster movies and westerns to adventure films and historical epics. Such films range from avant-garde and so-called independent films to big budget and mainstream movies plus the many in between. They depict times in their present as well as in the past. They range from describing actual persons and events to using “artistic license” to come up with characters, plots, and locale. Dramatic films thus range greatly in their factuality as well as their subject and temporal content from a historian’s viewpoint. Hollywood has long played fast and loose with past persons, events, social practices, and values in the cause of art or commerce. Some historians delight in pointing out misrepresentations of the past in the “Hollywood versus History” tradition. Thus historians authored books with such titles as Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and Reel v. Real: How Hollywood Turns Fact into Fiction.22 The History Channel offered in 2001 a series on History vs. Hollywood in which historians and others discussed the accuracy of various films. Some scholars questioned the criticism of the show’s experts.

184

•

Fashioning History

British director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) is a good example of an action-adventure film that greatly pleased the popular audience but whose historical details and larger perspectives were challenged by the experts. The Australian actor Russell Crowe starred as a Roman general, Maximus, who is sent off to slavery by the jealous Emperor Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is trained as a gladiator in a distant Roman province and eventually wins his way to fight in the Coliseum before Commodus and the crowds. In the climax the two fight a duel in the ring. Inspired by the typical sword-and-sandal movie, Gladiator pursues a plot based upon vengeance, the struggle for imperial succession and power among the elite, and a supposed yearning for the return of the republic— all leavened with plenty of blood and gore. The blood and gore and the disdain for life whether in battle or in the arena may have represented Roman reality of the latter decades of the second century CE, but few if anyone at the time wished a return to the republic.23 The time between the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in March 180 CE to the assassination of Commodus in December 192 CE is compressed into perhaps two years in the movie for dramatic purposes and focus. The deranged Emperor Commodus did fight in the arena to the disapproval of the Roman elite. He was light-haired and left-handed but played by a brunette, right-handed actor. Maximus was invented, possibly inspired by stories of Spartacus and Cincinnatus, and seemed to embrace twentieth-century American democratic values more than second-century Roman politics. In the movie Maximus kills Commodus, but in reality the emperor was assassinated by a man named Narcissus. The twenty-five hundred weapons, the ten thousand costumes, and the battle and arena scenes appeared authentic to the layperson, but critics found fault with small details as well as big themes. The grandeur of imperial Rome was probably inspired by earlier movies and was computer enhanced to match the director’s imagination. No such climatic battle took place between the Roman army and the Germanic tribes that starts the movie (and certainly not in the English forest where it was staged and filmed). Film historian Robert Brent Toplin believes that in recent decades filmmakers have come up with narrative strategies that blur fairly successfully the line once so evident in films between fact and fiction. Thus those concerned with facts have a harder time criticizing a film’s factual content these days, especially in light of its larger moral truths. He coined the term “faction” for this merging of fact and fiction:

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

185

Faction-based movies spin highly fictional tales that are loosely based on actualities. Their stories identify some real people, events, or situations from the past but blend these details into invented fables. Often the leading characters in faction are fictional people who represent a composite of several historical figures or are largely invented to advance the drama. Drawing inspiration from myths and legends as well as traditional practices of cinematic history, the creators of faction employ history in a manner that is less subject to debate over veracity than are the biopics or historical epics of earlier years.

He concludes: “From beginning to end, these movies send only a nebulous message about truth claims. Faction references history, but does not represent it specifically.”24 Supposed greater historical awareness by filmmakers has produced films that more successfully combine fact and fiction into a seamless web for the viewer. As a result, historians must work more systematically to separate professionally accepted facts from fiction in judging a film as a history. If the job is harder, it is more interesting as we shall see. Only extended questioning of the film’s contents distinguishes fact from fiction in our postmodern era. Since feature and dramatic films also depict their own times as well as other eras, they can also serve the historian as sources for historical research about a period. In depicting their own times, they convey, seemingly directly, the “look” and even the “feel” of an era. As with other texts and things, inferences made from film sources need corroboration from other kinds of evidence. Dramatic and fictional films can and do serve as evidence for social and cultural and even political and economic history, but in these cases the facts must be inferred by sophisticated methods. Even in representing other times, films suggest clues to the popular historical consciousness and collective memory of their own era.25 Once again only extended questioning of a film’s contents can produce the facts historians seek about an era as we shall see in the next section. Evaluating Films as Sources All films, like all aural and pictorial media, artifacts in general, and texts come from the past and therefore can be interpreted as historical sources. Film technology has existed for only a short time compared to the span of history covered by texts and things, and so films can only serve as primary sources for persons and events for little more than a century. Even for this relatively short time, different kinds of films can produce different answers,

186

•

Fashioning History

or the same film might prove a primary source for one question and a secondary one for another, as with any other historical survival. Once again, evidence and investigative purpose unite in the interpretive questions put to the source and the answers re-presented or constructed. Like other survivals, films too pose problems of credibility, authenticity, and whether they are to be used for re-presentation or construction of specific facts or more general depiction of an era. As with other sources, a film (or more likely a frame, shot, scene, or sequence in it) can be a primary or secondary source depending upon the question asked and what answers it most accurately. That so many films present history as an explicit narrative in addition to embodying directly the past through their contents complicates their use as sources. (The historian Robert Rosenstone called the first “film on history” while he termed the second “history on film.”)26 Thus the seemingly obvious distinction between films considered as evidential sources in themselves versus historical representations in their own right depends both upon the nature of the film’s contents and the investigator’s interests. Hence the historian must consider both the different kinds of interpretation as well as the degree of invention by the filmmaker in using various kinds of films as sources. Although types of films differ greatly in their factual content, their use as historical sources hinges upon the same quintessential question asked of all texts and things: what (and how much) can a movie, television program, or video tell us about the times of its creation and production? Questions akin to those used in textual external or source criticism establish the credibility and reliability of films. Before an investigator can derive facts from a film as source, she must establish that the film is a reliable source for what she hopes to find out about specific individuals, their values, their behavior, and their institutions during a specific era and in a specific place. As with other sources, therefore, films must first be authenticated as being what and from when and where they claim or purport to be. Thus, of prime importance are questions about its genesis: who, what, when, and where was it produced? Moreover, when was the film made as opposed to when was it shown? Dating is as important in historical research using films as it is for texts and objects. Such dating establishes the exact era to which a film can offer clues. Was it created and produced not only when but where it supposedly takes place? Who produced the film and what was their purpose? In order to gauge the nature of its authorship, so to speak, the investigator must ascertain whether the film was produced by an individual, such as home movie; a small team, such as an independent film; or a very large group, as in modern feature films

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

187

and television shows. The multiple skills needed in putting together a major film leads to vast collaborative effort among directors, actors, costumers, set designers, camera operators, editors, and the host of other persons listed these days at the end of a film or television program. Yet the auteur theory of filmmaking ascribes to the director not only the overall coordination of the film but also the eventual perspective and even “feel” of it as an author/artist.27 Second, is the film the original version, a copy of it, or a copy of a copy? Is the modern or surviving version of a film, for example, the director’s initial or final cut, an edited or abbreviated version? Has the film as made by the director been abridged to fit an allotted time in theater or television? Did the director reedit the film for another audience or add previously cut footage for a DVD version? Has the film been resized from movie screen aspect ratio to that for television screen, for example, so the audience and investigator see different things in the two versions? If an old film, has it been restored from a faded to a fresh, supposedly like-new version, or even colorized from a black-and-white version? As with the cleaning of museum objects, each of a film’s versions offers its audience a somewhat or greatly changed view from what the director intended or was seen earlier. Some older films were filmed at a different number of frames per second than today’s, and, unless shown at the original speed, the viewer gets quite another impression of the film. All versions of a film afford facts to the historical investigator but not necessarily the same facts. If the cinematic counterpart of external criticism establishes the authenticity and credibility of films as sources, then the equivalent of internal criticism inquires what the investigator needs to consider in deriving reliable and accurate facts about specific persons, places, and eras from them as original sources. Does the film not only come from the indicated time, but is it also about that time? To ask this question is to explore to what extent the film can be accepted at face value or prima facie evidence as to what it shows about a time, regardless of whether the historian adduces constructed or re-presented facts. That is why stock footage, faked scenes, and propaganda pieces misrepresent their role in documenting the film’s supposed era. Nevertheless, they all offer their own kind of facts about the creators and their times. Of equal importance is the basic question: whether what is seen and heard in the film is actual or acted? Were the various aspects of the film’s content staged or planned by the scriptwriter, the director, or even the actors, for example? Or, did the filmmaker just film the actual behavior of everyday people being themselves? Individuals and groups, of course, can

188

•

Fashioning History

and do plan their words and actions, especially in certain events deemed newsworthy. Such questions begin to suggest what can be considered primary and secondary about a film’s contents, always depending, of course, on the questions the historian asks. To apply basic internal criticism to a film’s contents as source for the derivation of facts about its time and subject requires attention to the following aspects at a minimum: Persons. Are actual individuals featured in the film? Or are they actors impersonating actual persons or even just playing imaginary characters in a story? If actual persons, has their behavior been altered by the camera’s presence? If the actors are portraying people contemporary to them, even if fictional, then their posture, habits, language, and so on, might be more authentic than if they were reenacting past persons from a time before their own experience and memory. As with a text, the more contemporaneous the times depicted in a film to the actors in it, the more likely the action, dialogue, hairstyling, fashions, and gestures are accurate. Likewise, the closer in time to the actors’ memories of the events, colloquialisms, clothing, bearing, and body language, the better they will recall them, and the more likely the portrayal can be trusted as such. Setting. Are the people and their actions in the actual locale in which they lived or the actions took place? Or, is the film location merely similar or even unlike what is supposedly represented, as in many an old movie? Or, are the environs and buildings on studio sets created by a set designer? In modern movies, were they digitally created? Moreover, are the objects used by the persons in the film the actual ones, or are they stage props supplied from the prop room or bought by the properties buyer? Once again, the setting and the props, if contemporary to the time of the film, would seem more accurate than those created for times before the experience and memory of those providing them. Costume. Is the clothing worn by the film’s subjects their own, or are they designed by the costumier or supplied from wardrobe. Of course, actual people may appear in noneveryday costumes if dressed for a parade or a religious or academic procession, for example. Once again, actors would know better how to wear modern clothing and wardrobe people would know better what to provide if the garments and the fashions come from their own times. Dialogue. Is the film’s dialogue unscripted and unrehearsed; improvised by an actor; or provided by the scriptwriter. Of course, actual ceremonies and similar events are usually planned, and political and other public speeches are written, even rehearsed for such occasions. Colloquialisms,

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

189

speech mannerisms, accents, and dialects contemporary to the actor’s and movie’s time would appear to make for their more accurate delivery in dialogue. Sound and music. Are the ambient sounds actual and customary to the action and the location? Or, are they scripted by the writing team and produced by the sound technician? What of the music accompanying the film? Was it part of a parade or other actual ceremony, or was it composed to enhance the action and plot of the film? Was the style of music selected to further delineate the culture and outlook of the actors? Would the persons appearing in the film have listened to or at least heard of such music? Action. Is it authentic? Is that what really happened? Or, is it rehearsed and/or reenacted? Once again, the more contemporary the action is to the time of its portrayal, the more probable its representation is accurate. That is why stock footage from another time or place in a film betrays the trust of the viewer. Interpretation. Who supplies the viewpoint(s) presented in the film? Does the film show only the viewpoint of the director or also the supposed ones of past persons as well? Are the viewpoints therefore multiple? Do they conflict? To what extent is viewpoint explicit in dialogue, say, as opposed to shown through camera angles and framing? Whence derive the story and plot: from actual everyday persons and their activities or from the team of writer and director? Does the film portray the perspective and meaning held by the actual subjects in it, or does it embody those of the writer and director? Many a film contains a Great Story, either as central message or theme, through symbol and metaphor, as popular ideology or implicit metanarrative. Cowboy movies long embodied the American myth of individualism. Movies, like textual histories, presumed race and gender even when they did not focus on these matters as such. Even dramatic fictional films could show racial and gender etiquette common to a time. The Time. Does the film depict the times when it occurred, that is, in its own era or not? If the film portrays actual events, then presumably the time is coincident with the time of its occurrence (unless it is stock footage inserted for the sake of “authenticity”), and the historian can treat it as first hand evidence of what it shows. That a dramatic feature film portrays action and attitudes contemporary to the time of its filming means it too can serve in its own way as firsthand evidence of those times. Thus whether a dramatic film constitutes firsthand or secondhand evidence of what it shows depends to some extent on whether the writer, director, actors, cinematographer, wardrobe and prop room managers,

190

•

Fashioning History

and others associated with the film experienced or at least remembered first hand what they film. In the end, of course, what is first hand and second hand evidence for the historian studying films as sources always depends upon the question asked. Thus almost all types of films offer some form of primary evidence for certain questions, just as all films can be considered secondary evidence for other queries. What kinds of facts can the various categories of films tell us that we want to know? Does a specific film tell us the facts we want to know directly or indirectly, simply or interpretively, plainly or symbolically? Factual statements can derive from and be about shots, scenes, sequences of scenes, or whole films. Facts can be re-presented or constructed. Constructed facts are common in discussing films as with other visual materials. Constructed facts can be developed from shots, scenes, sequences, and perhaps whole films. They thus become the historian’s representations based upon the film’s representations, especially when discussing values, memory, culture, and traditions. What does the historian need to know about the production of a film that would influence answers to questions about social institutions and cultural values? How did producers, directors, and actors take into account current events and contemporary problems in making a film? On the other hand, what was the impact of current events and contemporary issues in general on a film as seen in its contents? How much does the historical investigator need to understand technical and other aspects of filmmaking in order to derive such facts? Last, to what extent does the investigator develop facts that presume the reception of a film by one or more audiences? A film’s contents do not convey its actual reception, nor does the reaction by a viewer today to a film from years ago indicate how an audience responded when it was first screened.28 Re-presentation of facts from films can range from still photographs of single frames and shots to a moving visual re-presentation of facts by reproducing scenes even sequences from films as part of another documentary or other film. Such facts can be simple or summative but are always interpretive and more often than not demand some text to elucidate their relevance. Still pictures, for example, usually are captioned beneath to give the proper guidance to the viewer.29 Words from interviews and other dialogue can be quoted in a written text or reproduced in a recording or another film. Scenes can be described or summarized in a text. Visual re-presentation of facts can show people, costumes and fashions, the use of artifacts and environment, and the physical world in which the action takes place and the people live, fight, or otherwise occupy.

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

191

As the reader has concluded by now, types of films and kinds of facts do not correlate in any single, simple way. Actuality films and perhaps newsreels and on-the-spot news seem to offer their factual contents sufficiently directly that the historian can re-present them through photograph, transcribed dialogue, or, perhaps, another film in her own interpretive representation. Since amateur and journalist movies, for example, seem to offer everyday or extraordinary events with minimum interpretation, they provide greater opportunity for re-presented facts through reproduction. To the extent, however, that home movies and newscasts are programmed and interpreted by their creators, the historian needs to exercise great inferential care. Feature films about their present, on the other hand, would seem to require even more inference and interpretation by the historian to derive facts from them. Hence facts from them would be constructed more often than re-presented, but the proof of a generalization about the habits and values of some group in an era might come from reproduction of a still frame, transcribed dialogue, or a filmed scene or sequence (for a documentary historical film). A documentary film or a docudrama about its own times presents the historian with an in-between case for developing facts. To the degree that these film types depict actuality they can result in re-presented facts, but not as text of course, unless quoting dialogue. Depending upon how the films present their interpretations, historians can derive their own re-presented and constructed facts according to the interpretive questions they ask. Even grand historical epics, however, can be explored for what they show about popular historical consciousness in the era in which they are created.30 The most direct use of all kinds of films as sources would seem to be for histories of filmmaking and films themselves. Filmmaking, of course, has its own history. Films, like documents and other artifacts, reveal neither their own reception nor their own larger context of production. Such reception and context is a key concern of those historians of film who investigate documentary and other trails to discover the organizational nature, the economics, the creative inputs, and impact of the film industry in various countries. Since movies are by definition central to the notion of mass media, that field particularly argues about how to measure and discuss audience reception. The history of films and filmmaking provide valuable background and context for understanding films as primary and secondary historical sources. Such contextual use ranges from authentication of a film’s contents to the external analysis in general of a film as a source of facts about it.31

192

•

Fashioning History

Essential to such research these days are modern film archives. Many early motion pictures have disintegrated because of the fragility and flammability of the film stock.32 Perhaps 50 percent of films made before 1950 have disappeared. Early television programs exist only in obsolete and deteriorating formats. Institutional collection, preservation, and organization began rather late. The Library of Congress, for example, only began collecting movie films in 1942 but added television films by 1949.33 Second only to the Library of Congress in the United States in size of its holdings is the University of California at Los Angeles Film and Television Archive Collections. It claims to be the world’s largest university-held collection of motion pictures and broadcast programming.34 Its holdings include 220,000 films and 27 million feet of broadcast programming. The International Federation of Film Archives was founded in 1938 with four members and today has more than 127 groups affiliated.35 The expansion and proliferation of such archives make easier primary research in the actual films and broadcasts. Likewise, as various archives and manuscript libraries collect the personal and business papers of directors, producers, actors, distributors, and others as well as company records, researchers can investigate the production and reception side of filmmaking and television programming. To fulfill this role, film archives, like other archives and manuscript libraries, have instituted procedures for acquisition, preservation, arrangement, cataloguing, and granting access. As a result, the staffs of these archives have increasingly become historians of first resort for moving visual images.36 Last, films can be used in other films to re-present the past. The most common use is in documentaries, but biopics, docudramas, and perhaps period films might employ such excerpts. Producers of a historical film can use such films as settings for their own reconstructions and guides to their own narratives. The director Oliver Stone reproduced the Zapruder actuality footage to good effect in JFK. Historical documentarians can make such films objects of their own analysis. Judging Films as Histories A film whose chief purpose is to represent the past as a history like any text or museum exhibition must cope with the problems common to all historical syntheses: factual re-presentation and construction, narrative interpretation and invention. It too faces the problems of form and content, story and argument, perspective and meaning, structure and sequence, grand and metanarratives—all using the various techniques

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

193

open to filmmakers. Films as representations of the past can range from re-presenting evidential material to constructing an overall interpretive synthesis itself to speculative, highly inventive, even fictionalized versions of the past; from a filmed lecture with good illustrations to carefully researched reenactment to creative acting; or from purporting to be true and accurate to the past to speculative interpretation to merely using “history” as backdrop, setting, or supposed story. Distinctions among film genres recognize these differences somewhat by distinguishing historical documentaries from the class of films called cinema verité, biopics, and docudramas about past subjects and those in turn from period dramas, action adventures, romantic melodramas, westerns, and gangster movies that use a historical setting. These genres range filmed histories along a continuum from nonfiction to the fictional, from attempted re-presentation and reconstruction to the purely inventive. On one side of the continuum are those films, or more likely some of their parts, which are unstaged and essentially show what came before the camera. On the opposite side are staged, scripted historical films that resemble historical fiction in their high degree of invention. In between are biopics, docudramas, and cinema verité, all of which combine documentary and melodramatic elements. As with other historical representations, the various kinds of films combine the factual and the inventive, the represented and the constructed in varying proportions.37 It is just this proportion among the reproduced, the reconstructed, the simulated, the speculative, and the entirely fictional that so concerns historians when reviewing a film purporting to represent the past. When considering films as historical representations of the past, one can raise the same basic questions and issues in relation to the general and specific contents of films as applied to texts and things as histories.38 Without pretending to either an extended analysis or application, let me sketch some of the possibilities for exploring this mix of re-presentation, invention, and interpretation in relation to the historical evidence. In each of the following general categories, filmmakers have a range of choices or options open to them for representing the past as history. In each of the following categories, historians can assess the nature and amount of interpretation producing a given kind of filmed history, just as was done for texts and things in chapters 4 and 5. Re-presentation of sources. Films can reproduce visual sources such as paintings, photographs, and maps as well as parts of other films from the past. They can use images of actual textual documents such as handbills, newspapers, letters, and court documents from the past. Films can show

194

•

Fashioning History

up close or in background such authentic material artifacts as tools, cooking utensils, rooms, houses, and landscapes. Last, they can reproduce the sounds and music of an era. In each instance, the viewer must ask how authentic are the images and sounds relative to the times and places shown. Are the pictures and moving visual images on the screen, for example, of whom or what is talked about by the narrator or others? Or, are they some generic pictures of persons or scenes at or near the time, or even pictures made later. Ken Burns seemed to animate actual still pictures from the Civil War era through the use of a rostrum camera that moved slowly across the image in line with narration and music to give a sense of action and animation. But he also used a film of a 1920s march of the Ku Klux Klan to illustrate his documentary about the period immediately after the Civil War, when motion pictures did not exist.39 In the end, then historians ask whether the visual images are reproduced from past sources or created in the present for any given film. Are the material artifacts authentic or reproductions or simulations? Is the dialogue based upon actual diaries, letters, and other authentic documents, or is it scripted by a modern writer? Is the music from the period or composed in the present to affect mood or enhance story?40 Dialogue. Whence derive the words used in a filmed history? Do they come only from authenticated documents, from people remembering the persons and events in their past, from historians and other experts (socalled talking heads), or from written scripts? If they come from scripts, then how much is constructed like any other proper history? Who delivers the words? Options range from a hidden or on-camera narrator delivering the constructed script to various disembodied actors reading the words of a real letter or edict to the actors on the screen delivering the purely scripted lines. (Ken Burns used over nine hundred quotations from documents in his Civil War series and more than three dozen “remarkable voices” to deliver them.)41 If the viewer sees the narrator on screen, is she a historian, a well-known actor, or a character in the story? Should the narrator appear in the buildings and landscape of the time as they have survived or been reconstructed or just in some present-day environment? Should the narrator dress like and act along with the characters in the film?42 What voice quality should historic leaders, everyday people, and others possess? How depict various persons through their voices? Should the voices be plainly male and female, young or old, accented or in dialect? Is the language that of the characters and place depicted; an accurate or plausible translation of what was or might have been said; or is the dialog in modern-day language and idiom? Do the

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

195

ancient Romans speak Latin or modern English in a film? Do actors portraying modern French and Germans in an English-language film speak standard English or with a supposed foreign accent? For example, the German-speaking reenactors in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) suddenly switched from German to English during the fictionalized trial of four Nazi judges tried for complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity after World War II. Do the scripts mainly repeat the documented words of the actual individuals being impersonated on the screen? In one case, the actors portraying revolutionary-era persons in the PBS series Liberty! The American Revolution (1997) only delivered lines from letters, newspaper articles, military accounts, and other authentic documents from the time.43 Or, are the scripts like any reenactment: created from extensive research so as to seem plausible and realistic? Or, perhaps the scripts result from imaginative forays into a supposed past by the writer, director, actors, and others. Sounds and music. What of the other sounds in a film, particularly the ambient ones? Are the sounds from the scene at the time, or are they added by the filmmaker to enhance her interpretation of the event? Can one use the sound in general of a horse’s gallop or blacksmith’s hammer to represent those sounds centuries or millennia earlier? Perhaps all horses sound alike no matter when on grass or cobblestone streets, but surely wagons and carriages do not. Should the sound of a carriage come from an actual one of the period shown? Beyond making sure that specific guns and cannons sound as they once did, can the filmmaker simulate a gun firing rather than using a real one and still maintain authenticity?44 Is the music throughout the film authentic to period, or was it newly composed to enhance plot and message? When listening to the sound track, the investigator must always ask from where comes the sound: from the characters, from within the scene, from outside the scene, and from whom. Many of the tunes in Ken Burn’s The Civil War were from the period but one of the most memorable songs was composed for the series and served as its principle musical theme.45 Does the sound extend from one scene to the next to suggest continuity regardless of what is being shown? Characters. Should a filmed history restrict the characters appearing on the screen to only those historically identified in documented research, or can the filmmaker employ characters invented to make a point or fill out a scene? How does the filmmaker portray those many unnamed persons in the past who appear as servants, workers, shopkeepers, and the public in a filmed history? To what extent must such people be invented and “fictional” to be as “realistic” to the best of documented knowledge? What

196

•

Fashioning History

justifies their physical appearance? Some few persons exist in statues, murals, and paintings and more in photographs that allow filmmakers to suggest realistic or at least plausible dress, hairstyles, posture, and maybe attitude for the featured actors. More often, as in many a reenactment, the actors adopt gaits, gestures, dialects, demeanor, and behavior presumed authentic or plausible from extensive research into the times and place. In some ways, details will always need invention, but such details are easier at times than the interpretation needed to depict the subtler aspects on film of gender, racial, and other roles. Once again, these seem the same problems as any good reenactment, and once again the viewer can ask what is reenacted from documented sources; what is acted with educated guesswork; and what is derived from the actor’s instincts about the role? Even serious documentaries invent fictional characters to focus and carry a story. For example, as mentioned in the last chapter, the hero in the Colonial Williamsburg orientation film, The Story of a Patriot, is a fictional member of the Virginia Assembly. Filmmakers sometimes combine several real persons into one character to simplify and carry the story. Historians protest such composite characters, but filmmakers justify their use to aid the viewer in following the narrative thread. Particularly notorious was The Patriot (2000), which featured Mel Gibson playing a hero very loosely based on two or three men at the time of the American Revolution (as was his antagonist). In the opinion of many historians who study that era, not only were their original prototypes misrepresented but so were their actions and times. Setting and environment. What is the source of the material objects, built environments, and landscapes appearing in a filmed history? The options range from reproducing old film of the earlier era, to using authentically old museum objects, historic sites, and landscapes, to constructing buildings and landscapes as sets on a studio lot. At times, for example, the United States military loans ships, rockets, and other war paraphernalia to favored films and their makers. When the narrator discusses locale or an actor reads a diary or letter about a place, is it legitimate for the filmmaker to show a modern version of that river bend or bank, of a mountain or plains or desert? How does the filmmaker find a built urban environment to represent earlier eras without electric wires, tall buildings, and other modern anomalies? Remember the producers of Benjamin Franklin (2002) who resorted to Lithuania to represent eighteenth-century London and Paris. Even in filming a battlefield or other landscape today, the camera must avoid communication towers on the horizon, modern roads, and even car sounds in the neighborhood. At

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

197

other times, computer-driven graphics can restore, so to speak, a ruined environment. Such computer-driven graphics particularly can summarize and dramatize how people in the past constructed an ancient Egyptian pyramid, a Roman coliseum, a medieval cathedral, the Brooklyn Bridge, or a modern skyscraper. Viewpoint. Technically speaking, point of view in a film results from both camera position and editing, but a filmed history incorporates the same kinds of viewpoints as any other history: perceptual, conceptual, evaluative, and emotional. Does the viewer perceive the action and scene from the viewpoint of a character, of several characters, or with a bird’seye or godlike and seemingly omniscient view? Does the editing indicate from whose view matters are to be conceived and understood by the viewer? Whose viewpoint shapes the overall film and how many viewpoints are represented throughout the film? Is the film mostly presented from the viewpoint of the past actors of from that of the modern filmmaker? Does, in other words, the viewpoint come from inside or outside the actors’ world? If it comes from inside that world, how does the writer, director, and others know that? If it comes from outside that world, is it particularly present-minded? Or, are multiple viewpoints, past and present, displayed? To what extent should conflicting viewpoints be presented in a film and how should they be shown? The director John Sayles, for example, believes that an audience finds it difficult to follow more than three points of view in a film: omniscient, protagonist, and antagonist.46 Conflict of ideas and actions can be dramatic, but most filmmakers believe that too much interpretive conflict can be confusing in a film. Is such interpretive conflict depicted by the actors, discussed by talking heads, or declared by a narrator? Last, what feelings or emotional view should the viewer carry away from the film? Should the viewer sympathize with or condemn the characters in the film? (Hence the delicate task of the director of the German film Downfall (2002), which portrays the last days of Adolph Hitler, his chief henchmen, and others in his underground bunker.) To what extent is nostalgia for the past reinforced by the look of a film or the beauty of its setting? To what degree is the viewer repelled by the past through deliberately colorless or gray and dark scenes? British director Ridley Scott in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicted the cultural backwardness of twelfth-century Europe by gray or dark scenes and the advanced civilization of the Muslims at the time by bright, sundrenched scenes. Film techniques and interpretive choices mutually interact in viewpoint, but even more so in plot and perspective. Questions about viewpoint, especially emotional and evaluative, shift the analysis

198

•

Fashioning History

from the mainly factual side of historical representation to the overall nature of the synthetic side. Story and Plot. Unlike paintings and photographs but like music and books, films are a sequential medium. Whereas the viewer of a painting for example sees it in a sense as a whole all at once, the viewer of a film like the reader of a book must “consume” it over time. The fact that movies depict time and yet take their own time necessitates both the nature and need for emplotment plus techniques for showing the passage of time. Emplotment in films as in texts transforms events into episodes and chronicles into stories. Plot turns an aggregation of materials into a significant narrative structure showing continuity, coherence, causality, contingency, or other type of connection. Agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, and ambient environments are organized into coherent temporal structures through plot and subplots in films (as in books). Agents, aims, actions, settings, and outcomes are plotted as narrative in films as in other histories to reveal a story. Filmmakers use such narrative devices as turning points, crises, and resolutions to advance their stories. Moreover, a film’s depiction of events in time rarely coincides in the order or duration of their supposed chronological occurrence. The sequence in which the story’s events are told is usually different from how and when those events supposedly took place in calendar time. This is particularly evident in when a film begins and ends compared to the actual beginning and ending events in chronological time, as the frequent use of flashback at the commencement of a film demonstrates. Needless to say, the actual length and duration of events in a film is usually less than the referred-to duration in actual hours and time. Cutting between scenes and events throughout the film shows the manipulation of time through the distinction between the chronological sequence of events and their narrative sequence and the duration of actual time as opposed to its depiction on the screen. The big picture. That all genres of films can use these same narrative means raises the question about how films claiming to represent the past as history differ from other films. Thus the difference between historical documentaries and docudramas on one hand and semifictional or completely fictional representations of the past on the other results not from film techniques as such but from the purposes to which they are put. The particular plot and subplots in a filmed history purporting to be true to the past, like the emplotment of the film in general, are guided by what the professionally accepted, documented historical record shows. To evaluate the overall emplotment of a film or television series against such a

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

199

record demands the reviewer compare her overall interpretation of the persons and events against that of the filmmaker. In other words, one synthesis is compared to another synthesis, for evaluating the nature of an overall synthesis as such is more than a matter of the particular facts. The truthfulness of any synthesis is more than the truth of its component facts. Even though a wrong fact can disprove a synthesis, all of the facts combined do not necessarily prove a synthesis. On the other hand, a multitude of questionable, let alone wrong, facts can justify distinguishing between a good and bad docudrama as history and whether a feature film should be considered mostly historical or mainly fictional. It is the many-layered nature of a synthesis as opposed to the evaluation of its facts per se that makes for both the interpretive diversity among films as histories and the arguments over the proper criteria for judging them better and poorer history. Thus the director John Sayles, in discussing his film Matewan (1987) about a bitter 1920s coal mine strike that eventuated in a “massacre,” looked beyond minor factual errors or omissions to being “true to the larger picture, so I crammed a certain amount of related but not strictly factual stuff into that particular story.” In line with this approach to overall synthesis, he admits employing historians the way most directors do: for advice on specific details but not for “the big picture.” 47 Arguments between historians and filmmakers over the big picture in the end turn on the issues of perspective and meaning and the nature of the Great Story. Great Stories. Whether explicit or implicit, whether as grand narrative or metanarrative, Great Stories provide the larger context for organization of a history. Films, like other histories, long depended upon such standard Great Stories as progress and decline, the superiority of one nationality or race over another, the rise of the West or the inevitability of liberal democracy. Even the criticism of such explicit or implicit, standard, old Great Stories substitutes new ones for old. A Great Story as the ultimate context in a film is frequently discussed in terms of the film’s main theme(s). Thus the noted American historian Eric Foner points out that Sayles in Matewan does more than “chronicle a particularly dramatic episode in American labor history”; Sayles offers “a meditation” on “the possibility of interracial cooperation, the merits of violence and nonviolence in combating injustice, and the threat posed by concentrated economic power to American notions of political democracy and social justice.”48 But Foner also notes that Sayles omits the larger historical and political context in which these themes operated by leaving out the coal mine owners and their control of the West Virginian government; the

200

•

Fashioning History

general restrictions imposed by the court system and the state and national authorities at the time; the long history of efforts to unionize the mines; and most of all for giving the miners “no sense of their own history, forcing them to rely on an outsider for lessons in union organization and racial tolerance.” In spite of high praise for Matewan, the historian Foner faults the filmmaker Sayles in the end for evoking nostalgia for a time when the “brawny industrial worker” did the “real” work and women were only their “loyal helpmates.” Thus ultimately what Sayles pictured as the real history of that era, Foner sees as still promoting a male-dominated heritage downplaying actual women’s roles in the labor movement then and subsequently.49 Foner’s assessment demonstrates the salience of context to the historian’s arsenal of criticism and sense of professional authority. It also illustrates the importance of perspective and meaning in films as in other representations of the past as histories. Perspective and meaning. All films, but especially narrative ones, use emplotment and various film techniques to make their larger point. In the terms of this book, that larger point is perspective and meaning. As Foner’s critique of Matewan suggests, viewpoint, emplotment, and Great Story all convey and result from perspective and meaning in films as in other histories. In current jargon perspective and meaning constitute the “agenda.” In older terminology, they comprise the “message.” In any case, they express explicit and/or implicit purpose. Sometimes a film’s perspective and meaning flow from a writer’s, director’s, or sponsor’s avowed reason for making a movie: to reveal a particular injustice, to expose human suffering, to sympathize with the downtrodden, or to depict the horrors of war, for example. Other times historians and other critics point out the covert message or the hidden agenda that undermines or contradicts the filmmaker’s avowed aims. When historians juxtapose a film’s interpretive synthesis against their own, they often contrast their perspective on the past and the meaning it should have with that of the filmmaker. When Foner criticized Sayle’s manly worker and passive female helpmate, he was measuring the perspective Matewan suggested against his own conception of the actual as well as potential role of women. When Foner accused Sayles of neglecting the agency of workers, one witnessed his own perspective on the efficacy of agency from below. In the end, Foner appears to believe that Matewan, like all history, derives its meaning from the continuing struggle of workers and others for economic justice and interracial harmony.

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

201

Foner’s critique of basic perspective is even clearer in his judgment on how (and why) Ken Burns and his colleagues mishandled the end of the Civil War and the era that followed. Issues central to the Civil War and of obvious contemporary relevance— self-determination, political democracy, race relations, the balance of force and consent in maintaining political authority—are never addressed. The abolition of slavery is never mentioned explicitly as part of the war’s meaning, while the unfulfilled promise of emancipation is all but ignored as central to its aftermath. Nor is it ever suggested that the abandonment of the nation’s post-war commitment to equal rights for the former slaves was the basis on which former (white) antagonists could unite in the romance of reunion. In choosing to stress the preservation of the American nation state as the war’s most enduring consequence, Burns privileges a merely national concern over the great human drama of emancipation. The result is a strangely parochial vision of the Civil War and its aftermath, and a missed opportunity to stimulate thinking about political and moral questions still central to our society.50

At issue here is more than a scholar specializing in the history of Reconstruction asking for another kind of film than Burns produced. The difference from Foner’s viewpoint revolves about the proper perspective on American history and its meaning for today. Foner is concerned that a “romantic” stress on reunification reinforces Jefferson’s worry that slavery was bad for white society, and so he prefers to emphasize that slavery was bad for African Americans then and subsequently. In short, he believes that the series attributes too much agency to the whites and too little to the African Americans both in what happened during the war and in its outcome. Burns denies these criticisms. He thinks his narrator and “talking heads” handle this problem. (His chief writer argues that Foner asks for an entirely different film series than Burn’s The Civil War.)51 Regardless of how the reader resolves this dispute, it underscores how perspective and meaning result from and in viewpoint and emplotment, shape a Great Story, and presume a Big Picture. At this level of disagreement, facts as such are not the issue but rather whose grand narrative and Big Picture should prevail and therefore which facts should be included along with all that goes into a history.52

202

•

Fashioning History

A Matter of Interpretive Mix The preceding outline of categories—re-presentation of sources, dialogue, sounds and music, characters, setting, viewpoint, story and plot, big picture, great stories, perspective and meaning with the many possible options within them—may be too few, too brief, and too schematic, but even so it points to seven general conclusions about films as historical representations of the past. First, the categories and their many options suggest the limitation of the three-fold division of filmed historical representations as documentaries, docudramas, and dramas. True, this three-fold division suggests the factual basis of the scheme, but it oversimplifies any approach to the synthetic side of historical representation in a film. Even the most resolute documentarian includes inventive and speculative elements in a film, as we shall see below. Even outright works of historical fiction can include factually accurate elements such as costumes, settings, and even characters. Once again, as with other forms of historical representation, the distinction rests on the relationship between evidential sources and their interpretation on the factual side and the overall nature of the interpretive synthesis on the other. Documentaries strive to stick closer to the evidence than docudramas and biopics. If they cannot re-present the survivals visually or aurally, they try to interpret the past within the bounds of disciplined professional reconstruction, especially through historians as advisors or on-camera experts. Thus documentarians hope not only to be as accurate as possible to past words and sounds, characters and actions, and props and setting, but also be true to past viewpoints and events. Historical documentaries do not make up stories or plots, even though the film’s sequence of events may not be in strict chronological order of their happening for narrative reasons. In the end, documentary films hope to offer perspective and meaning, Great Stories, and even a big picture that is compatible with current historical scholarship. The difference among the three general genres comes down to what guides the emplotment and their Great Stories in relation to what (most?) historians accept as the big picture. Documentaries use current historical scholarship as their guide; historical dramas use artistic license and intuition to reach a higher truth—or at least a larger audience. But even the extreme racism manifested in The Birth of a Nation (1915), so evident to us today, embodies the prevailing (white) professional historians’ interpretation of black freedmen and Reconstruction at the time of its filming just as it

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

203

exemplifies the racial repression and white terrorism of the early twentieth century. Second, the ten categories outlined in the preceding section on “judging films as histories” and their countless associated options certainly suggest and perhaps explain why such a range of film genres can purport to represent the past as history. Certainly quite different films result from different choices among the many options within the ten categories. Surely this profusion of filmed representations of the past as history accounts also for the variety of opinions existing on the ability of (a) film to convey history. As a result of these numerous differences, it seems less useful for historians to complain about films in general or even particular genres than to examine individual examples. Thus it seems more pertinent to ask of a particular film whether it presents too little history and too much heritage, stresses story and character over long-term causes and complex context, or caters too much to the audiences’ emotions rather than their intellect as opposed to asking these questions of all kinds of historical films lumped together. The wide range of film genres means that examples can be found for each kind of criticism. As with histories in general, no one generalization fits all kinds of films.53 Third, every film like every text and thing can serve as primary evidence if the right questions are asked of it. Both the New Deal sponsored documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the movie made from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940) treat the impact of the severe drought that affected farmers in the American heartland during the 1930s Great Depression.54 The latter dramatized the migration to California of a fictional poor rural family forced from their Dust Bowl lands in the period, while the Plow interpreted the social and economic background that led to the ecological disaster and then showed what happened to 1930s farm families’ lives as a result. The well-studied documentary and the Academy Award–nominated movie were condemned as socialist propaganda at the time and as politically conservative in more recent times. Both serve as evidence for particular facts about the 1930s, but not always in the same ways. Even though the movie followed a fictional family and chronicled fictional events, some classify the film as a docudrama because it deals with the era’s real social problems. Both have been studied for what they tell us today about the social practices, cultural values, and the politics of their era. (Even lavish 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals and Disney animated films can provide primary evidence for certain questions about depression-era America, especially larger social and cultural trends.) As these brief remarks suggest, what is

204

•

Fashioning History

primary and secondary evidence in or about any film depends upon the questions posed. The answers range from particular facts to generalizations about large-scale social and cultural phenomena to Great Stories and metanarratives.55 Fourth, even documentary films praised for their historical accuracy can make different choices of options about how they represent history. Various documentary films show different attempts to reconcile interpretation and reconstruction, invention and re-presentation. I have chosen three examples to show diverse but equally valid approaches to representing the past as history. The seventy-four-minute Home Box Office documentary production of Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2002) relies, as the title suggests, on the seventeen volumes of transcripts of slave narratives in the Library of Congress. The film gives voice to a few of the more than 2,300 first-person ex-slave accounts gathered between 1936 and 1938 by mainly white and some black interviewers working underthe auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal. Eighteen prominent African American actors give expressive readings of selected excerpts from as many ex-slaves. The well-known African American actress Whoopi Goldberg provides contextual commentary throughout the film on the nature of slavery as an institution and its place not only in the South but also the entire American economy and society during the antebellum period. The film has no plot as such but covers systematically a multitude of topics from childhood to work to punishment to marriage to running away and emancipation.56 Most of the film is in black and white because it combines still and moving images spanning from the decade before the Civil War to the time of the interviews themselves. A few of the images reproduce antebellum handbills and broadsides about runaway slaves and slave auctions. Most, however, derive from the twentieth century, especially the movies of cotton picking and the living conditions of a poor Southern black population. The photographs of ex-slave interviewees in the collection are also mainly twentieth century, as are the pictures of the actual typed narrative transcripts that are scattered throughout the movie. Even the African American actors appear in modern black clothing before a black background, so as not to attract attention away from the words they deliver. The few instances of color in the film indicate modern times: a few reenactments and the singing and dancing of the McIntosh County Shouters. The few reenactments show scenes without people, such as a

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

205

moving horse-drawn coach, an empty plantation dining room, and bloody footprints in the snow. The McIntosh County Shouters sing reconstructed slave songs throughout the film and are shown at times singing and performing some dance steps. In all these visual ways, the film illustrates as it concentrates on the words of the narratives themselves. The actors deliver their monologues with the emotions and voice quality they think appropriate to what they see on the page and in the photograph of an interviewee. So some readings are humorous or sad, others cynical or angry. Since the interviewers were instructed to try to transcribe the actual language of the ex-slaves, the actors pronounce the words and grammar or speak in dialect as rendered on the page. (The name of a dialect coach appears in the credits at the end of the film). So although the film depends upon re-presentation of its primary source, both that source and its reading are reconstructions in fact. (In one case, for example, a relatively young actress depicts a 103year-old woman, and the sounds of a supposed slave auction accompany the handbill advertising such a business transaction.) Because Unchained Memories concentrates so single-mindedly on the transcripts themselves, even to showing photographs of some pages, any praise or complaint must begin with them as an example of oral history. The project has proved immensely valuable to historians, and one of the best authorities on the history of slavery served as senior historical advisor to the film. His own approaches to slavery showed up in the voice-over commentary of Whoopi Goldberg about slave life. Both the methods used to obtain the interviews in the first place and their subsequent transcriptions have raised questions. Just as the film fails to mention the grounds for the few interviews chosen for monologues, so the Federal Writer’s Project seemed equally random in who was interviewed among the estimated one hundred thousand ex-slaves still living in the 1930s. By that time all of the ex-slaves were old, at least over seventy and some claimed to be over one hundred years old. Thus they were usually quite old people remembering experiences three-quarters of a century earlier with all the problems associated with such oral history. The interviewers were given a list of questions but allowed to follow their own best instincts. Did the race and gender of the interviewer make a difference in how present and past were described by the ex-slave men and women? How were the interviews recorded? In at least one case, a woman recalls being ten years old when she took down in short hand the interviews done by her father, who was an Arkansas African American educator and minister.57 How accurate are the transcriptions, since the interviewers

206

•

Fashioning History

employed their own methods of rendering their interviewees’ vocabulary and pronunciation into written versions? How much were the transcripts edited? The interviewers were encouraged by the project’s Washington, DC, administration to take down their interviewees’ statements “word for word.” We know some editing of ideas and sentiments as well as language did occur. Presumably, the historical experts advising on the film considered if not solved all the problems the transcriptions presented as sources.58 My second choice is more conventional in its approach to the documentary as a genre and to historical representation itself. Northern Light Productions’ Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters, which premiered May 25, 2005, on the History Channel, consists mainly of reenactments by actors and interviews with five historians as experts. As the title suggests, the one-hundred-minute film emphasizes the agency of the African American slaves as much as that of their white owners and oppressors. Unlike the previous documentary, this one downplays re-presentation of archival documents in favor of thirty-two actors playing slaves and their white owners, slave patrollers, and the paid catchers who plied their nefarious trade in the North as well as the South. The chronological story, if not the film itself, begins around the turn of the eighteenth century in South Carolina with the formation of patrols to control the lives of slaves, particularly when off plantation. It ends with the founding after the Civil War of the Ku Klux Klan to continue illegally the psychological and physical intimidation of the now-freed population. In between the film stresses the multiple and creative ways African American slaves used in escaping slavery as well as the brutality and physical punishment the whites employed to maintain the system. The film covers at some length the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion as well as the mass escape of slaves to the English during the Revolution and to the Union side during the Civil War. These conflicts make for good drama as well as prove the case for the slaves’ continuing desire for freedom.59 Although the filmmakers re-present some images of old paintings and prints, authentic broadsides and newspaper advertisements, old maps and pamphlets, and old photographs, they mainly rely on reenactment to convey the action amidst generic scenery. The documentary images come from both the period being discussed and later (especially once again the movie of the Ku Klux Klan). The actors are both African American and white to portray the respective races in the slave system, and mainly male to depict who did most of the running away and the enforcement of slave codes. Past slaves, slave owners, and catchers are named as well as the time

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

207

and place where the events occurred. The actors (and their horses), however, appear recycled through the centuries depicted. The locales and buildings are not readily identifiable by the viewer. Much of the action takes place in nonspecific fields, swamps, and woods, and, since the slave patrols operated from sundown to sunup, often in dark or poorly lit scenes. The only locations listed specifically at the end of the film are all in Massachusetts, the home of Northern Light Productions. There is no dialogue from the actors, only a few readings of diaries and other documents. The professional narrator mostly tells the story from the omniscient viewpoint so common in written history. The five historians are all experts on slavery in general or on patrols in particular. They offer up-to-date interpretations of the nature of slavery, the role of a white “racial police,” and the natural and normal resistance of African Americans to their enslavement. They all stress the immorality of that part of American history and how deeply the slave system was entwined in the American legal and political system, the national economy, and Northern as well as Southern society. Some of the experts venture controversial interpretations of numbers of runaways, and all speculate on the psychological dynamics of the master–slave relationship, the motives of runaway slaves and slave catchers, and particularly ten generations of white brutality and African American resistance. Last, the music in this film does not try to replicate old tunes but only sounds synthesized as background for the events being narrated. All in all, this film treats history like most history books except for the concrete visualization of the action. Even with the visualization most of the interpretation is spoken by the omniscient narrator or by the five historians. In this sense, the film is more like a textbook with living illustrations and boxed interpretive quotations than an innovative documentary film in its own right. Nevertheless, the interpretation is professional and current in the discipline. On the whole, the mise en scènes represent the past accurately enough. (But did one see a modern zipper on an actor’s pants?) As with other historical representations, Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters combines re-presentation with invention, speculation with evidence. After all, almost all the people portrayed, their actions, their clothing, and their environment (including the kinds and colors of their horses) are educated guesses at best. Like so many histories, this film conceals the proportion of speculation to re-presentation behind the façade of continuous narration. The hard work of investigating and synthesizing history is hidden by the seemingly simple nature of the overall presentation.

208

•

Fashioning History

The third documentary film was inspired by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. This prizewinning microhistory about a Hallowell, Maine, woman inspired the filmmaker to bring it to screen. The film, using only the short main title, was first shown in 1997 on the American Experience series on the Public Broadcasting System. It very deliberately explores the role of the historian in fashioning representations of the past. Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, writer and producer, decided that the film should interweave scenes of Ulrich piecing together the story of Ballard’s life from the usually very short, sometimes cryptic, references in the voluminous diary with reenactment by actors of the midwife’s various daily activities. As part of this process of showing the self-conscious construal of persons and events in the film, Kahn-Leavitt writes at some length on all her own activities in constructing the historical documentary on the extensive Web site covering the diary.60 In accord with this dual focus on past actors and present historians, two sequences of scenes open the eighty-eight-minute documentary. The film starts with a woman rowing a canoe across the vaporous waters of the Kennebec River in 1785 and then delivering a baby. The words in voiceover are spoken by the actress playing the midwife and come from the diary. The second sequence shows Ulrich studying the diary and other documents as she describes the problems of piecing together the stories behind the often cryptic diary entries and in general the importance of documentary evidence to the historian. She admits that in spite of the nearly one thousand diary entries, she still does not know what Martha Ballard looked like, where the children slept in the crowded house, or much of the family dynamics as well as many other minor and major matters. On the other hand, the film like the book reveals that Ulrich feels confident in reconstructing the female domestic economy of the era, even suggesting some of the larger political, social, and religious conflict and change occurring during the twenty-seven years the diary records. These two opening sequences begin two narrative trajectories. One trajectory follows Martha doing her various tasks as housewife, mother, healer, midwife, and domestic economy manager, with the words coming from the diary and voiced by Kaiulani Lee, the actress playing her. Another trajectory follows Ulrich as she researches the diary entries, construes their context, and infers the stories and subplots they imply. The process is described in her words, sometimes on camera, sometimes as voice-over. As the film proceeds, Ulrich’s appearance on camera declines and Martha’s increases until her life and times are the only subjects on the

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

209

screen and sound track. Nevertheless, the viewer is always aware of the different perspectives on the past as lived, researched, and reenacted, especially since almost all the words come from the diary via the actress playing Martha or from Ulrich herself. These perspectives are only enhanced by the long discussion by Kahn-Leavitt on all aspects of preproduction, production, and postproduction of the film on the Web site. The film seems a close collaboration between Kahn-Leavitt as producer and writer and Ulrich as historian and expert. In the film, and more so on the Web site, the viewer learns the limits of historical reconstruction and the necessity for imaginative invention—in spite of Ulrich’s explicit denial of the latter on camera. Both speculative reconstruction and disciplined invention are done with care by the producer, Ulrich, seven other historians, and many formal and informal advisors. Thirty-nine actors play husband Ephraim Ballard, sons and daughters, neighbors, town worthies, mothers in labor, servants, “white Indians,” persons in a parade, and ordinary and/or female roles mentioned in the selections dramatized from the diary. How these persons appeared, dressed, walked, and otherwise thought and behaved had to be done by inference. Even how Martha herself looked is unknown, but the actress playing Martha was in her forties and so had to be made up to appear to be fifty years old when the diary and its dramatization begins and seventy-seven when it ends and she dies. Even the newborn babies in the film were nearly so, being borrowed from recently delivered mothers, often through the cooperation of their own midwives. Yet for all this care, neither Ulrich nor the other experts knew how close or far apart various persons from different classes stood, or whether she touched a person of elite status when she examined him, or even the dynamics within the Ballard family. Social standing and class are not discussed explicitly in the film but exemplified through terms of address, clothing, and house furnishings, among other indicators. Since present-day Hallowell, Maine, and its sister city across the river, Augusta, were too modern, the location scout had to hunt up a site that still looked more like one from the revolutionary era. He found such a site in a Loyalist-founded town in New Brunswick, Canada, which had a river, some old postrevolutionary-era houses, and even a mill that might have looked like what Ephraim Ballard owned. Thus, all the exterior scenes like the interior ones are educated guesses. The mise en scènes used both authentic period pieces and simulated artifacts, and building interiors and exteriors were both actual in their new location and faked. The filmmakers always knew, however, what the weather outside was, because

210

•

Fashioning History

Martha recorded season after season whether the day was clear or rainy, warm or cold. Ambient sounds are constant and frequent, but the characters engage in little dialogue—perhaps because such language departed from the diary in being scripted by the writer or delivered impromptu by the actors. Even the words by Martha are mainly voice-over from the diary as the scene plays. Pronunciation was an issue of course. Many of the ambient sounds came from the Foley room and were created to fit the scene. The composer for the film used some old songs but created new music in the supposed spirit of the project. The film employed the same basic approach to story and emplotment as Ulrich did in her book. Thus the film presents some selected diary entries and then reenacts the supposed story each set contains: midwifery and healing, household activities, gardening, and spinning; land disputes and surveying; conflict with male doctors over who would control obstetric events; rape by a prominent judge; illegitimate childbirth and marriage; funeral preparations and autopsy; conflict between Martha and son and daughter-in-law; and murder among others. These events and happenings appear to follow chronology so plot and subplot look as if they follow Martha’s life. The film like Ulrich’s book relies on a Great Story about social and political change and resulting conflict in the decades after the revolution. That Great Story is not featured so much as relied upon to provide the larger context for such events as uppity servants, squatters on the lands of rich merchants, the assault of Ephraim by “white Indians” while surveying those lands, and the jailing of husband Ephraim and son Jonathan for debt. Martha and Ephraim disliked the new, more democratic social order coming in, but her husband and son engaged in the speculative new commercial economy emerging. Martha preferred the older order when it kept servants in their place but lamented it when a town notable escaped rape charges because of social rank. Since this Great Story of these changes is so male-centered, they receive little explicit, let alone extended, mention in Martha’s diary. The film, like Ulrich’s book, makes a virtue of the limited viewpoint of the diary in order to highlight the role of women in the economy and society of the period. Midwifery was the best paid occupation of women at the time. Martha also exploited her growing daughters’ labor to spin and weave cloth for the market. The film emphasizes the multiplicity of activities and managerial capacity Martha needed to organize the domestic economy of her household. On the other hand, her husbands’ sawing and mill management, land surveying, and tax-collecting duties were

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

211

“foreign” in a sense because they were male. Thus Martha says little in her diary about the roles of doctors, except for their interference in her midwifery; ministers, unless through their wives; public officials, unless jailed like her husband; or even farmers who comprised the bulk of male population. She omits politics and religion to a surprising extent, even though she attended church regularly (except for four years when irked that Reverend Foster was hounded from the pulpit). The relationship between male and female roles is seen in the film in the 1800 parade honoring George Washington after his death the preceding year. Sixteen maidens from better families marched in front to symbolize the states in the union at the time, but the body of the procession was male and arranged by social rank. In fact, the account of the procession is in a male diary and not Martha’s. Ulrich emphasizes the legal inferiority of women by pointing out that Martha could not own house or land in her own name under the law of the time while her husband lived. The film offers explicit and implicit perspective on the nature of historical research and synthesis. Ulrich’s description of her research and insights in the film emphasizes that history is more puzzle solving and storytelling than construction and analysis. Disciplined imagination and invention is played down in favor of “piecing together” the many bits of evidence and clues, even though Ulrich’s own book, the film itself, and Kahn-Leavitt’s own description of the film’s making suggest quite otherwise. If the film plumbs the limits of reconstruction and re-presentation, it also exemplifies well what disciplined and educated guesswork can achieve in historical synthesis. To sum up the implication of this fourth conclusion: historical documentaries like history texts and museum exhibitions can pursue a variety of factual and inventive options and still be considered legitimate, proper history. That documentaries as a genre can contain quite different synthetic combinations of fact and invention suggests the question to ask of all films, and by extension all histories, is not whether one of them includes fictive invention but rather of what kind and how much before it crosses over the line dividing fiction from history as a genre. Fifth, to return to general conclusions, films have techniques and methods customary or unique to them as a genre to achieve factual and interpretive goals. Construction of facts just like perspective and meaning can be through music, lighting, and editorial juxtaposition among other techniques. Surely the exterior shot of a cottage or house versus that of a mansion or castle and scenes from their respective interiors imply as they depict the social status of the inhabitants, even if that fact is never mentioned

212

•

Fashioning History

in dialogue or text. That fact is further elaborated through dress, language, mannerism, and attitude as shown in a film. The physical appearance of a person or of her surroundings can indicate emotional states. Various editing techniques can imply through juxtaposition of scenes connections, even causation, as well as temporal sequence. As pointed out previously, lighting can affect whether the viewer accepts the scene shown as desirable or the opposite with the corresponding perspective and meaning for that condition of affairs. The mise en scène reinforces the facts asserted in a reenactment. Steven Lipkin points out in his captions for some frames from the motion picture Shine (1996) how they reveal the mental breakdown and psychological state of the classical pianist David Helfgott through the use of water.61 Filmmakers use music to establish the time a film represents as well as enhance a mood. Classical music often accompanies eighteenth-century scenes just as jazz signifies the 1920s or hip hop the 1990s. Sixth, what films may lack in complex and abstract argument, they more than make up for in complex visual and aural detail. Both types of complexity pose problems for historians and filmmakers alike in both analyzing and producing films. The complex aural and visual details give the eyewitness, “you-are-there” feeling to films, but that very complexity renders historical accuracy so much harder to achieve for filmmaker than book author. The infinitude of detail enables greater possibility of accurate historical elements at the same time as it almost guarantees the inability to be correct about everything no matter how hard the filmmaker tries. The greater possibilities open the door to invention as the multitude of details necessitates some solution in the filming. Theå book’s author can finesse through silence or brief mention what the filmmaker must provide concretely and specifically to fill, so to speak, the mise en scène. Complex, abstract argument and analysis of sources so common to books and so uncommon in films provides further grist for the mill of historical criticism without solving the filmmaker’s problem of trying to achieve its equivalent. But in the end, which medium renders better the larger truths about the big picture of the past for its audience? Seven, even though films may have methods and approaches unique to them, they also share general problems of historical representation with texts and things. Filmed histories exhibit the same hybrid qualities as other kinds of historical representations. Although the show-and-tell qualities of the medium may be different than those of texts and museums and historic sites, films too in the end struggle to reconcile science and art, fact and fiction, objectivity and propaganda, explanation and

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

•

213

interpretation. They too raise questions about judging the factual accuracy of a product’s parts as opposed to the larger truthfulness of it as synthesis. In that sense, films like other historical representations combine factuality and invention, re-presentation and construction, heritage and history, narrative and explanation, perspective and meaning. As with texts and things, it is all a matter of interpretation and mediation. The big question, as pointed out earlier, is just what kind of invention and how much before the representation crosses over the line separating history and fiction. In line with these conclusions, this chapter on films parallels those on texts and things in order to indicate comparable problems and their respective solutions in each genre or medium. The three chapters show how each medium has methods and approaches unique to it, but collectively they also point out how texts, things, and films share the dilemmas of representing the past as history. Each of the chapters offered examples of different kinds of solutions to the common problems within its medium. In each kind of solution and in each genre in general, it was, to repeat, a matter of kind and mix, whether of re-presentation and construction, interpretation or invention.

This page intentionally left blank

AFTERWORD

The History Effect and Representations of the Past

F

rom my review of various processes and diverse products, it is quite clear what effect historians want to achieve in their representations of the past. They seek in their various forms of representations to communicate what they and their readers, viewers, and other consumers consider a truthful, presumably accurate, impression of some part of past reality. That means in practice they hope to make their generalizations, interpretations, and inventive constructions seem to possess the same authoritative grounding as their assertion of historical facts and empirical knowledge. As the philosopher Louis Mink concluded, “a historical narrative claims truth not only for each of its individual statements taken distributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself.”1 Thus historians in their writings, exhibitions, and films declare that their overall representations refer to the actual past. Their rhetoric asserts definite, preferably definitive, statements about the past whether simple fact or speculative generalization. We can call this effort to make all of a representation of a past appear as well grounded as its most empirical portion “the history effect.”2 The techniques used to achieve the history effect may vary by historian, topic, type of history, or product, but the goal is the same. Whether offering argument or narrative, whether fashioned as research monograph or documentary film, whether employing traditional exposition or experimental effort, all make the entirety of their representations appear to be as referential, that is refer, to past reality as much and as accurately as possible. This is as true of newer social and cultural history as older political and economic history; of transnational as national; of global as microhistory; or of gender and queer history as well as traditional military and diplomatic history. Viewpoint may be singular or multiple; the voice may be first person, even autobiographical, or third person and distanced; the

216

•

Fashioning History

synthesis may be unified or fragmented; the narrative sequence may be chronological or otherwise, but all purport to be nonfiction as opposed to fictional no matter what their position on postmodernism.3 All rely on facts, although how to derive or develop them may be questioned in the very process of presenting them. No one claims to make up the facts, 4 although they may question what and how they can know what they do. All purport to rely on evidence or accepted knowledge as their ultimate raw material. All move beyond their evidence in seeking the greater meaning of their topic. All seek to convey meaning through larger as well as smaller truths. The postmodern challenge may question how and whether these goals can be achieved, but even postmodernists accept their own historical generalizations as true and offer facts in the defense of their case. They may challenge traditional categories, but in the very process they hope to expand the potential of history, not destroy factuality and truthfulness as such (especially their own). That historical products vary so much by the kinds and amounts of interpretation they embody complicates any characterization, some might say theorization, of history as a discipline. The history effect depends upon the combination of seemingly incompatible intellectual tendencies and rhetorical strategies. Intellectual efforts to cope with this mixed quality of historical practice led in the past to discussing history in terms of a long series of paired oppositions: science versus art, empirical research versus narrative synthesis, knowledge versus opinion or even error, factuality versus generalization and speculation, truthfulness versus fictive invention, objectivity versus partiality and bias, and reality versus representation, among other antitheses. Our survey shows that such simple dichotomies are not so much wrong as inadequate. They are deficient when applied singly, because each history embraces both sides of the supposedly mutually exclusive oppositions. Even when all of the binary oppositions are conceived as a series of continuums or scales and applied together, however, they are still insufficient to indicate how various kinds of histories rank differently from continuum to continuum. Thus, an edited series of documents, a restored building, or a documentary film place differently on the various scales than does a full-fledged history, a reconstructed building, or a melodramatic historical film epic. The dichotomies therefore make good slogans but poor theory, because they all fail to describe the collective, intellectually mixed nature of histories as synthetic products. Not only does each history have its own rank or point, so to speak, on each of the continuums, but each form or

The History Effect and Representations of the Past

•

217

genre of history possesses a different profile when measured by all the scales. Clearly, an edition of letters or a documentary film ranks nearer the empirical, re-presentational, and factual ends of the scales than say an interpretive essay or a docudrama, which in turn are less near the interpretive, inventive, speculative, and imaginative ends on those same scales than a metanarrative, a historical novel, or an epic historical film. No one kind of history need share its exact combination of intellectually mixed characteristics with another kind, yet all histories share such mixture as a quality in common. Thus, not only is each history as product a combination in its own way of art and science, and so forth, but history as a discipline is also an intellectual hybrid itself. That no kind of history lies entirely at the extreme end of any one or all of the dichotomous scales means all histories combine empirical elements and interpretation and invention to a lesser or greater degree. The degree of interpretation and invention differs, of course, in whether the historian is identifying and investigating sources, fashioning a synthesis, or presuming a Great Story. Nevertheless interpretation and invention is involved to a smaller or larger extent in each process and in each resulting product. And it is this greater and lesser degree that poses the great challenge to characterizing or theorizing the nature of history as knowledge and discipline, as science and art, but constitutes the wonder of historical practice and the appeal of its products.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Hermeneutics studies how to bridge understanding between today and what past persons meant in their documents. The standard reference is HansGeorg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), but see David C. Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), for a useful, brief introduction to the field. 2. For example, Stephen Davies, Empiricism and History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 3. See Harry Ritter’s attempt to clarify historians’ use of the terms “method” and “methodology” in his Dictionary of Concepts in History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 268–72. The first modern handbooks on method appeared at the end of the nineteenth century: Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historische Methode (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot (sic), 1889); and Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historique (Paris: Hachette, 1898). Rolf Torstendahl, “Fact, Truth, and Text: The Quest for a Firm Basis for Historical Knowledge around 1900,” History and Theory 42, no. 3 (2003), 305–31, discusses these early guides. 4. Since “documents,” “records,” and “relics” imply from their names how they are to be used as sources and even “remains,” “traces,” and “artifacts” seem to connote too much their specific nature as sources, I have adopted the somewhat unusual use of “survival” as the most comprehensive and neutral term. Of course, the term still presupposes the object comes from the past. 5. David Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), as his title suggests, advances a strong case for the place of argument in understanding survivals as evidence. He offers many examples from ancient times as well as non-Western societies in support of his contention.

220

•

Notes

6. What Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1–2, calls the “old history,” which he sees as “event-oriented” and narrative in form. 7. Alexander Stille, The Future of the Past (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), provides a broadly interpretive introduction to the nature of survivals. 8. Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1969), ch. 5. First published in 1950. 9. Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, 3rd ed. (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989), 208–16. Quotation is from p. 208. First published in 1970. 10. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 20–27. 11. See ibid., 17, for example. 12. In addition to Gottschalk, Marwick, and Howell and Prevenier cited above, see John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 3rd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2000), ch. 3; and Neville Morley, Writing Ancient History (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999) 53–96. The division between texts and things is the basis for Chapters 3 and 4 here. 13. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990), shows what can be developed from even very brief entries in a diary. 14. See, among many, Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); John O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1990); Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); and Michael Baxandall, Pattern of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 15. On the fragility of such materials, see the Web site of the Save Our Sounds project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress,http:// www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/index.html. On sounds in general, see Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 16. Paul R. Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), is a good introduction to historical practice in general as well as the practice of oral history. Another recent guide is Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University

Notes

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

•

221

Press, 2003). See also Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). James M. O’Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), ch. 1, provides a brief history of records from the viewpoint of technology of production. Howell and Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, 19. To designate anything as “evidence” of course assumes that it already communicates to the historian according to some research agenda. Cf. Morley; Nick Merriman, ed., Making Early Histories in Museums (London: Leicester University Press, 1999); and Bill McMillon, The Archaeology Handbook: A Field Manual and Resource Guide (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991), chs. 10–11. Cf. evidence for medieval European history in Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2005), ch. 3. See also Stille, The Future of the Past. William M. Kelso, Jamestown: The Buried Truth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), offers an example of what survives from a specific site. “Library of Congress to Treat Acidity in Books,” New York Times, January 1, 2002, National edition, A18. Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 233–34. Cf. for different examples, see William J. Turkel, “Every Place is an Archive: Environmental History and the Interpretation of Physical Evidence,” Rethinking History 10, no. 2 (2006), 259–76. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), offer larger context. Stille, The Future of the Past, 299–309, discusses these problems. Cf. Michael Moss, “Archives, the Historian, and the Future,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), ch. 39. Stille, The Future of the Past, 303. Dana Canedy, “Florida Ponders Fate of Historic 2000 Ballots,” New York Times, February 16, 2003, National edition, A18. The estimate of Luciano Canfora, quoted in Stille, The Future of the Past, 260. The estimate of Michael Clanchy, mentioned in Bull, Thinking Medieval, 71. Gottschalk, Understanding History, 45. The point of Lorraine Daston’s arguments in “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 243–74, 282–89.

222

•

Notes

30. See again O’Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, ch. 1. 31. Cf., for example, what Howell and Prevenier, Reliable Sources, 44–56, call technical tools with what R. J. Shafer, A Guide to Historical Method (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969), 111–20, calls “auxiliary disciplines.” 32. For example, Black, Maps and History; Burke, Eyewitnessing. 33. Quoted in Janet Owen, “Making Histories from Archaeology” in Making History in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 207. 34. See, for example, the estimates of Giles Constable, “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages,” Archiv für Diplomatik 29 (1983), 11. Cf. Bull, Thinking Medieval, 65–66, but see all of ch. 3 on evidence. 35. For an introduction to the topic, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Mark Jones et al, eds., Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), provides both an introduction and pictures of paintings, objects, and texts from ancient to modern times from an exhibit in the British Museum; Kenneth W. Rendell, Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters and Documents (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), offers an introduction to its subject by an expert who played a role in uncovering several modern forgeries. 36. Kirsten A. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 37. The authority is Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). 38. Burke, Eyewitnessing, 23, 24. 39. George H. Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 8. 40. William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), ch. 20, discuss Curtis’ artistic manipulation to romanticize the disappearing “red man.” Cf. Robert Flaherty’s similar manipulation in his documentary film of Inuit natives in ch. 5 below. 41. O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact, 11. See in general, Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000). 42. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, and History (London: Verso, 2005), explores the future as well as the past of media manipulation. 43. Provenance is usually used in the arts while provenience is preferred for archaeological items. Although “provenance” usually refers to origins, it can also refer to the chain of custody that allows the investigator to establish the authenticity of the object by tracing it back to its origins. Cf. Lewis J. Bellardo and Lynn Lady Bellaro, A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 1992), 27.

Notes

•

223

44. See examples given in Morley, Writing Ancient History, 65. 45. Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 4. He argues oral history can compensate for this bias. 46. According to Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), even surviving plantation buildings are usually interpreted from the perspective of antebellum white elite values, thereby “trivializing” the experiences of “enslaved” and “enslaver” alike. 47. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing, 14–15, observes that visual imagery criticism has the same problems of context, function, rhetoric, recollection, and the like, as source criticism. Cf. Johnson, Voice of the Past, ch. 4; O’Connor, Image as Artifact, chs. 2–3. 48. Gottschalk, Understanding History, 54, offers five possible meanings of “original source” and the two he prefers historians use. 49. Chapter 3, section 2 examines the kinds and degrees of intervention in such hybrid primary sources. 50. See their Web sites: http://www.hms-victory.com/index.php and http:// www.ussconstitution.navy.mil/. On the rebuilding of the HMS Victory, see Peter Fowler, The Past in Contemporary Society: Then, Now (London: Routledge, 1992), 11. On reconstructing the USS Constitution, see ch. 4 here. See the interesting speculation of Stille, The Future of the Past, ch. 2, on the differences between an Asian and a Western sense of preservation of the original versus its reproduction. 51. The views of the restoration’s director can be found in Pinin Brambilla Barcillon and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: The Last Supper, trans. Harlowe Tighe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 52. Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 213–26. If conveying the context of such relatively recent times proves challenging, imagine the context of, say, the ancient Egyptian pyramids, which were built it is believed today by a household village society. See Stille, Future of the Past, 38. 53. Benjamin Franklin, PBS on November 19–20, 2002, now on DVD, PBS Home Video BENF601. 54. Cf. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 214–17. 55. Howell and Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, 19. Cf. the use of the terms historical and historiographic contexts in the American Historical Association pamphlet on Careers for Students of History under “Skills of the Professional Historian” http://www.historians.org/pubs/careers/Introduction.htm#skills. 56. Burke, Eyewitnessing, 13. 57. Peter Burke, “Context in Context,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002), 152–77, provides a brief history of the term and today’s uses and problems

224

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

•

Notes

of application. Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), offers a new name for a traditional approach to establishing context with many examples from theater history. For example, Davies, Empiricism and History. See Vernon K. Dibble, “Four Types of Inference from Documents to Events,” History and Theory 3, no. 2 (1963), 219–21, for a brief overview of older methods manuals on testimony. Cf. David Cockburn, Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 246–50, 260–63, 266–70, on testimony. See Fact Sheet G17 from House of Commons Information Office, http:// www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/g17.pdf. Mildred L. Amer, The Congressional Record; Content, History and Issues” (Washington, DC: Congressional Reference Service, 1993), http://www .llscc.org/attachments/wysiwyg/544/crs-93–60.pdf. Donald H. Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential, and Private (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), explores the relationship between the intentions of authors and the nature of their presumed audiences for understanding and interpreting sources. See the cautionary words of Marwick, Nature of History, 228–31. Gottchalk, Understanding History, 56, 139. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978). The phrase is used by Robert Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988), 571, but see whole dispute, 553–603. Leonard Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 118–19. See the forum on the larger issue in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 53, no. 3 (1996), 587–635. David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1985); James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (London: Routledge, 2004), 18–36, outlines a comprehensive list of problems on these issues from his point of view. Cf. the two quite different approaches of George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Roger T. Bell, Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice (London: Longman,

Notes

71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

•

225

1991). See the special issue of The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (1999), 1280–1460, which is devoted to “Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation,” for a practical demonstration of translation (and retranslation). The larger point of Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The larger issue is discussed by Michael Pickering, “History as Horizon: Gadamer, Tradition, and Critique,” Rethinking History 3, no. 2 (1999), 177–95. Cf. Dibble, “Four Types of Inference from Documents to Events,” 210–13. J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277–312, suggests possibilities. See, for example, how much Laurel Thatcher Ulrich contextualizes the artifacts she makes the focus of her chapters in The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), especially when she lacks evidence of provenance as in ch. 1. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Jefferson, the Ordinance of 1784, and the Origins of the American Territorial System,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 29, no. 2 (1972), 231–62; and “The Northwest Ordinance and the Principle of Territorial Evolution” in The American Territorial System, ed. John Porter Bloom (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), provides an introduction to terminology and concepts. Fairburn, Social History, tackles these and other problems relevant to this and the next two paragraphs. Cf. C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London: Routledge, 1998), passim. Pat Hudson, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (London: Arnold, 2000), outlines briefly the history of quantitative analysis in historical practice as she explicates approaches. For one introduction, see Martyn Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993), 248–72. Janet Staiger covers reception theory in general and its application, chiefly to movies and television, in a series of books: Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Media Reception Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2005). In addition to historians of film, audience reaction is also a major concern of museum people. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

226

•

Notes

82. Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), and Michael Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), ch. 2, wrestle with the nature of “macroevents,” as Roberts terms them. Cf. McCullagh, Truth of History. 83. Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 98–99. Cf. 107–9. 84. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and its Leader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940); Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 1984). 85. Cf. the statements on George Washington in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 53–56. 86. See for some guidance to the documents, George J. Olezewski, A History of the Washington Monument, 1844–1968 (Washington, DC: Office of History and Historic Architecture, Eastern Service Center, National Park Service, 1971), http://www.nps.gov/archive/wamo/history/. 87. The seemingly clear-cut distinction others make between what is theory or generalization versus fact in this paragraph and the next three depends upon who is making the distinction according to what framework. What is theory or generalization to one person according to her framework is fact to another and her system of beliefs (and vice versa at times) and this is the point of the exercise. 88. See Frances R. Keller, Fictions of U. S. History: A Theory and Four Illustrations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), ch. 2, for one woman historian’s general statement on the myth and “pathology” of patriarchy. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), is classic. 89. Cf. Constantino Brumidi’s 1865 fresco The Apotheosis of George Washington in the dome of the Capitol’s rotunda: Barbara A. Wolanin, Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1998), ch. 9. 90. Cockburn, Other Times, 54–58. 91. See the important role living memories can play in museum collections and exhibitions of recent material objects as opposed to those in ancient times by comparing most of the essays in Kavanagh, ed., Making History in Museums, with those in Merriman, ed., Making Early Histories in Museums. See also Gaynor Kavanagh, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), chs. 7–11. 92. Cf. Anna Green, Cultural History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chs. 5–6, on remembering and memory, with Paul Ricoeur, Memory,

Notes

93.

94.

95.

96.

•

227

History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Of the multitude of books and articles on memory, I found valuable for overall perspective: Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002), 179–97; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001), 906–22; Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, no. 69 (2000), 127–50; Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997), 1386–1403; Paul Hutton, History As an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 193–210. See also Jacob J. Climo and Maria Cattell, Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, chs. 8–9; Kavanagh, Dream Spaces, passim. See, for one example of different groups in a society having varying collective memories, the various articles in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). From the translation that appeared in Representations and reprinted in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al (New York: New Press, 1995), 642–643. See Tai, Remembered Realms, for an extended review and critique of this position and project. For the British, see Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994); and the uncompleted second volume, published as Island Stories: Unraveling Britain, ed. Alison Light et al (London: Verso, 1998). For the United States, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991); and John Bodnar, ed., Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, offers a general introduction to media and memory. See on television, Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, eds., Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). As his title states, Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), chs. 6–8, examines the important role television played in creating modern Germans’ memory of their earlier twentieth-century past.

228

•

Notes

97. These questions are inspired by Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory.” Cf. Bodnar, ed., Remaking America, 13–30, 245–53. 98. Revel and Hunt, eds., Histories, 633. 99. Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, 121–2. Cf. his The Past is a Foreign Country, 212–14, for the same position. 100. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 180. 101. David Farber, ed., The Sixties: from Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Cf. Steve Gillon, Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever and How It Changed America (New York: Free Press, 2004). Pierre Nora, “Generation,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), ch. 13, offers a good introduction to the concept in general as well as its use in a French context. 102. Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing the American Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which searches for the historical forebears of interpretations favored today, can be read as an exercise in changing the official memory of one nation’s profession of itself through historiography. 103. See, for one example of national identity and collective memory fashioning professional historical works, Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 104. Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review 68, no. 2 (1963), 315–31. 105. See, for example, Brundage, Where These Memories Grow. 106. Such as in the classic that created the term, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 107. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 195.

Chapter 2 1. In order of schools, see Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Bernard Sternsher, Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975); and Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1973). What Wise called “New Left” history,” I christened “neoprogressive” to indicate its larger implications in “Two New Histories: Competing Paradigms for Interpreting the American Past, Organization of American Historians Newsletter 11, no. 2 (1983), 9–12. Cf. Dorothy Ross, “Grand

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

•

229

Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (1995), 651–77; and Peter C. Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), chs. 1–3. See the case presented by H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1964). The modern argument about empiricism versus textualism and postmodernism can be read as another version of the long debate over art versus science. See, for example, Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). See Patrick Gardiner, ed., Theories of History (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 344–75, for the earlier argument in philosophy over the so-called “covering law” versus narrativist models of explanation in history. Peter D. McClelland, Causal Explanation and Model Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially ch. 4. For example, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). This chapter’s basic categories are inspired by my Beyond the Great Story. Cf. Hayden White’s theory of the historical work in his Metahistory: The Historical Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1–38. I have omitted from this chapter a section on the important role of style and rhetoric, but see Beyond the Great Story, ch. 4. See for two quite different examples of stylistic and rhetorical analyses of histories: Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). Cf. Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality (London: Routledge, 1990). I follow Beyond the Great Story, passim., but especially 77–90, 117–20. Alun Munslow, Narrative and History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), offers a recent, general introduction. Too much, so argues Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Geoffrey Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative Reader (London: Routledge, 2001) excerpts important articles in the debate over narrative in history in the latter half of the twentieth century. I develop these matters at greater length in Beyond the Great Story, 36–40, 77–90, 109–129, 133–36, 142–45.

230

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

•

Notes

William Guynn, Writing History in Film (London: Routledge, 2006), provides a sophisticated analysis of historical representation versus fiction in films. See also the forum on the fiction/history boundary in Rethinking History 9, no. 3 (2005), 141–335; and Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction? Especially in the so-called new economic, political, and social histories of the 1960s. A major cliometrician, outlined the goals and methods of social science history in Robert W. Fogel and G.R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 5–70. Cf. McClelland, Causal Explanation and Model Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History. Jacob Burckhardt in his classic synchronic history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York: Random House, 1954), “froze” in his middle chapters the two centuries from 1350 to 1550 to make his point about the wholeness of the period but used the first and last chapters to show the rise and decline of the characteristics he ascribed to the Renaissance. Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 11, but cf. 14–15 on causation in the narrative. Nancy Isenberg, “Second Thoughts on Gender and Women’s History,” American Studies 36, no. 1 (1995), 98. Most notably David A. Carr in Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Some of the participants in this argument are anthologized by Roberts, ed., History and Narrative Reader, pt. 3. Margaret R. Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16, no. 4 (1992), 603–6. See her application of her scheme to clarifying competing approaches to English working-class history. Cf. on how historians explain matters, Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies, and Methods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); McCullagh, Truth of History; Roberts, Logic of Historical Explanation; Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie McMahon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). In Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997), chs. 1, 9. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17, but see 16–20 on “Understanding Large Events.” See Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). Cf. his What is Cultural History? (London: Polity, 2004); Donald M. MacRaild and Avram Taylor, Social Theory and Social History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave

Notes

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

•

231

Macmillan, 2004); Cabrera, Postsocial History; and Simon Gunn, History and Cultural Theory (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006). See Fogel in Which Road to the Past? 5–70, for a brief overall statement of the approach. McClelland, Causal Explanation and Model Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History, offers an example. Terrence McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) marks the heyday of the movement. Cf. Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), with Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History, and The Structures of History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), on these two approaches. Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, 170, suggests that methodological holism is more congenial to the French intellectual tradition and methodological individualism to the English tradition. Matt Perry, Marxism and History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), provides an introduction to a very large literature. James Henretta, “The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias,” Labor History 18, no. 2 (1977), 167. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988), 582–583 Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968). Cf. Edward P. Thompson’s phrase “history from below,” in his 1966 essay of the same title now reprinted in Dorothy Thompson, ed., The Essential E. P. Thompson (New York: Free Press, 2001), 481–9. Most vividly shown in the glossary of Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 444–51. See the four overlapping categories of Thomas Holt, “Explaining Racism in American History,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 107–19. Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), provide a multitude of excerpts. Cf. Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and the Present (London: Routledge, 1997). Laurel T. Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 20. See Barry Barnes, “The Macro/Micro Problem and the Problem of Structure and Agency,” in The Handbook of Social Theory, eds., George Ritzer and Barry Smart (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 339–52, for a general orientation. Two terms and names are most associated with such theorizing these

232

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

•

Notes

days: the “structuration” of the English sociologist Anthony Giddens and the “habitus” of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. On Giddens, see Ira J. Cohen, “Structuration Theory and Social Praxis,” in Social Theory Today, ed. Anthony Giddens and Jonathan H. Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 272–308. For an introduction to Bourdieu, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also the theme issue “Agency after Postmodernism” of History and Theory 40, no. 4 (2001). Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 97–119; and David A. Bell, “Total History and Microhistory: The French and Italian Paradigms,” in Kramer and Maza, eds., Companion to Western Historical Thought, ch. 13, provide brief introductions to microhistory. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe: Selections from Quaderni Storici, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), offer some examples as well as a brief overall introduction. Alf Leudtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), offers a general introduction. See Brad S. Gregory, “Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999), 100–110, for a critical comparison of the two schools. Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002); Gabrielle Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (London: Routledge, 2005); Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005); Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., The New Social Theory: Contemporary Debates Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), 2. Cf. the new entry “Ethical Turn” in Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 95–98; Howard Marchitello, ed., What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (London: Routledge, 2000). Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Cf. the

Notes

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

•

233

title of Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Ernest R. May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986). Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See the preface of Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), ix–xii, on this tendency. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995). On textbooks, see Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979); Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History; or, How the Past is Taught to Children, new ed. with a new preface, trans. Norman Stone and Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 2003). Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For example, Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History from the 17th Century to the Present (London: Plato Press, 1973); and Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncy, Jr., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989). Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Johanna Alberti, Gender and the Historian (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2002). Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). See Jörn Rüsen, “How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the Twenty-First Century,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 118–29, for an analysis and proposed intercultural solution to such problems. All quotations are from the Museum’s Web site of on-going exhibitions, http://www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=exhibitions&second =dc&third=current. Duane Blue Spruce, ed., Spirit of a Native Place: Building the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC: National Geographic and Smithsonian, 2004), presents the “official” pro views in a well-illustrated book. Amanda J. Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2005), 485–506, discusses the critics in writing a favorable review of the museum. Cf. Kreps, Liberating Culture, ch. 4. Cf. my summary of earlier critical history principles in Beyond the Great Story, 214–19, with the symposium on “What is Left History?” Left History:

234

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

•

Notes

An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate 11, no. 1 (2006), 12–68. The immensely popular, oft-reprinted Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1st ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), is a good example of the genre. For museum practice, see last section of ch. 4 here. Jeremy Black, Using History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), surveys public uses of history by governments and other organizations over time and across continents. Recent systematic introductions to purposes are Stephen Vaughn, ed., The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985); Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why?: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). See also Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000); “The Good of History” issue of Rethinking History 2 no. 3 (1998), 309–404; and “Historians and Ethics” theme issue History and Theory 43, no. 43 (2004). Carlo Ginzburg, “Distance and Perspective: Reflections on Two Metaphors,” in Leerssen and Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values, 19–32. For example, Greenwood Press publishes a series entitled “Events That Changed the World,” edited by Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Finding, with some books covering events as early as the sixteenth century. Shakespeare’s words “What is Past is Prologue” is carved on a statue outside the National Archives Building in Washington DC. Leo Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Michel de Certeau speaks of the otherness of the past in The Writing of History (1975), trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), passim. See also Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). James Cracroft, “Implicit Morality,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 31–42. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth points out the ethical and other assumptions underlying the historians’ use of time as a seemingly neutral and natural container most recently in “Ethics and Method,” ibid., 61–83. See my Beyond the Great Story, chs. 6–7, for more on voice and viewpoint. Cf. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), ch. 3, for voice and viewpoint in films. A particular theme of Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cf. Natalie Zemon Davis’ statement in her interview in Visions of History, ed. Henry Abelove et al (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 112–15. See also Antoon de Baets, “A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 130–64. For a general introduction, see Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen Till, eds., Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Alan R. H. Barker, Geography

Notes

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

•

235

and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chs. 3–4. Many disciplines contribute to historical landscapes and perceptual geography. See for a sampling, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995); Peter J. Ucko and Robert Layton, eds., The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscapes: Shaping Your Landscape (London: Routledge, 1999); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); and Sheena Mackellan Goultry, Heritage Gardens: Care, Conservation, and Management (London: Routledge, 1993). See the speculations of James O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). The archipelago metaphor became common in anthropology during the 1980s. Cf., for example, the essays in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995); Michael Soulé and Gary Lease, ed., Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995); “Environment and History” theme issue, History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003); and William J. Turkel, “Every Place is an Archive: Environmental History and the Interpretation of Physical Evidence,” Rethinking History 10, no. 2 (2006), 259–76. Andrew Isenberg, “Historicizing Natural Environments: The Deep Roots of Environmental History,” in Kramer and Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ch. 19, presents a brief overview of the field’s history. See in general on England, France, Germany, and Italy, Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds., Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999). For convenient introductions to the issues as seen today, see introduction and articles in Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Cf. David Boswell and Jessica Evans, eds., Representing the Nation: A Reader; Histories, Heritages, and Museums (London: Routledge, 1999). Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See 207n2 for their distinction between metageography and Hayden White’s metahistory. As Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), points out. Cf. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978). Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” American Historical Association, Annual Report for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 199–227, reprinted

236

68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

•

Notes

in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), ch. 1. The turning point in the history of the Turnerian School might be marked by the publication of Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), which transmuted supposed historical reality according to Turner into ideology and social construction. The essays in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank Van Vree (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), provide a brief introduction to German, English, and Dutch approaches to the field. See also James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Samuel Todd Presner et al (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Anna Green, Cultural History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), suggests a brief history of the field as she outlines its various approaches. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1975), trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978). See Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, and What is Cultural History? for introductory surveys of the field. See also Gunn, History and Cultural Theory; and Cabrera, Postsocial History. Historicism is a controversial term. See, Henry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 183–88; Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 140–42. Its continuing importance as well as its internal contradiction is argued by Frank Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), ch. 4. Preston King points out the moral relativism of historicism at the same time as he connects historicism and context in the conclusion to his “Historical Contextualism: The New Historicism?” History of European Ideas 21, no. 2 (1995), 223–32. John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), discusses anthropological and philosophical approaches to moral relativism. This was a major complaint in the so-called history wars of the mid-1990s. Opponents of the National Historical Standards for revising the school curriculum and the proposed Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay (the B-29 Flying Fortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) argued these projects painted too gloomy a picture of the American past, one that promoted pessimism and guilt. See, for example, Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American

Notes

77.

78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89.

•

237

Past (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud . . . , ch. 4, foregrounds political stances in these debates as does Michael Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996), 269–318. Cf. the notions of interpretive community of Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), with a modern definition of “problematic” as defined by Ellen Rooney in Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 50, the “historically determinate structure of presuppositions that constitute a discourse, its enabling conditions . . . a conceptual matrix that defines objects within a field, fixes lines of inquiry, sets problems, and thereby determines the ‘solutions’ that can be generated within its limits.” Novick, That Noble Dream, is now standard on its subject. That a range of opinion can exist on these issues because of varying ontological and epistemological assumptions is always the point of Alun Munslow, but see his view on these matters at their most succinct in his entry on “Objectivity” in his Companion to Historical Studies, 191–94. Novick, That Noble Dream, offers a case study of conflict within American professional practice over the “objectivity question.” Compare Allan Megill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), on various kinds of objectivity, and also see his Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch. 5. Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, 83. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 582–83. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality, 150, but see 150–56. Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values, in Leerssen and Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values, 63. Quoted in Frank R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 100. Of course, the converse holds true also: as Kenneth Burke noted, “every insight contains its own special kind of blindness.” Quoted in Michael Pickering, “History as Horizon: Gadamer, Tradition and Critique,” Rethinking History 3, no. 2 (1999), 177. See especially Rüsen, “Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values.” Cf. Alberti, Gender and the Historian; Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004); and Helene Bowen Raddeker, Sceptical History: Feminist and Postmodern Approaches in Practice (London: Routledge, 2007), on the evolution and implications of women’s history. Smith, The Gender of History. In addition to Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History, 243–50, for earlier references, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), ch. 2;

238

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

98.

•

Notes

Murray G. Murphey, Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 101–34; C. Roberts, Logic of Historical Explanation, ch. 11; and McCullagh, Truth of History, ch. 4. Steven Mailloux, “Interpretation,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentriccia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121–34, introduces the topic for another discipline. Some authors in Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, eds., Philosophy of Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), discuss history specifically as well as interpretation in general. Interpretation is fundamental to museum practice; see ch. 5 here. For example, Thompson, The Voice of the Past; Pat Hudson, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (London: Arnold, 2000); Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychoanalytical Approach, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996). One example is Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). In general see Perry, Marxism and History. Among the many introductions to the School in English: George Huppert, “The Annales Experiment,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), ch. 35; Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Carrard, Poetics of the New History. The terminology in this and the next paragraph is revised from my Beyond the Great Story, 39, 300 n52. Cf. for somewhat different definitions, Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, ch. 9, “‘Grand Narrative’ and the Discipline of History.” “Grand récit” and “metanarrative” are the terms of Jean-Fran3ßois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See my extended argument in Beyond the Great Story, passim, but especially 38–44, 122–28. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism” in Molho and Wood, eds., Imagined Histories, ch. 2; Cf. Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002), 154–73; “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination” symposium in International Labor and WorkingClass History, no. 60 (2001), 1–92, 203–21. Cf. the versions given by Geoffrey R. Elton, The English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 1; and Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066-c.1220 (Oxford:

Notes

•

239

Oxford University Press, 2003), especially chs. 2, 15; with that of Christopher A. Snyder, The Britons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 99. See, for example, the volumes in “The Peoples of Europe” series edited by James Campbell and Barry Cunliffe, published by Blackwell, and devoted to histories of origins. See also Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 100. This was the first of four projected volumes: (London: Free Association Press, 1987). 101. For example, the essays collected in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy McLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Bernal’s replies to his many critics are collected in David C. Moore, ed., Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2001). Cf. the debate over Afrocentrism with its claim that human civilization began in Africa, for example, Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996). See David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), chs. 8–9, on priority and innateness as the basis of histories. 102. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Cf. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 103. Gaby Porter, “Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 105–26, offers general observations from a postmodernist perspective. 104. Simon James, “Imag(in)ing the Past: The Politics and Practicalities of Reconstructions in the Museum Gallery,” in Making Early Histories in Museums, ed. Nick Merriman (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 117–35; Marie Louise Stig Sørenson, “Archaeology, Gender and the Museum” in ibid., 136–50; Joan M. Gero, “Genderlithics: Women in Stone Tool Production,” in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, eds. Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 163–93, but see also the whole book. 105. See, for example, the attempted historiographic revisionism of Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing the American Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 106. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, especially 38–40. Cf. Leonard Krieger, Time’s Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New (Chicago: University of

240

•

Notes

Chicago Press, 1989), on the long-term quest for coherence in historical writing. 107. See among many, for example, Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ed., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey, eds., Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, eds., Writing World History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 108. Notably Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth in Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crises of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and also see her personal reflections in “Beyond History,” Rethinking History 5, no. 2 (2001), 195–215.

Chapter 3 1. Statement is conceived broadly here. Cf., for example, John O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1990), 302, who likens a movie shot to a sentence and a scene to a paragraph as a way of introducing text-oriented historians to the “language” of moving visual imagery. 2. For the broader definition, see Lewis J. Bellardo and Lynn Lady Bellardo, A Glossary for Archivists. Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1992), 27. Cf. Michael J. Fox and Peter L. Wilkerson, Introduction to Archival Organization and Administration, ed. Suzanne R. Warren (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Information Institute, 1998); and Frederic Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), for a narrower definition. The contested nature of archival theory and terminology is illustrated by Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public (Lanham, MD: The Society of American Archivists and the Scarecrow Press, 1996). These books plus James O’Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), provide good overall introductions to the work of archivists. See also Bruce W. Dearstyne, The Archival Enterprise: Modern Archival Principles, Practices, and Management Techniques (Chicago: American Library Association, 1993); and Randall Jimerson, American Archival Studies: Readings in Theory and Practice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2000). Bernadine Dodge, “Re-imag(in)ing the Past,” Rethinking History, 10, no. 3 (2006), 345–67, provides a valuable postmodernist perspective on the work of archivists.

Notes

•

241

3. For example, in February 2008, the American Historical Association only allowed access to its archives from 1979 and before according to its Web site, http://www.historians.org/info/history.cfm, and the Organization of American Historians from ten or more years ago depending upon the nature of the material, http://www.oah.org/about/archives.html. 4. Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, 21. 5. Many of the articles in Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society, ed. Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace (Westport, CT: Quorum, 2002), provide these and other examples of the informational and ethical implications for what is saved and what destroyed and why in archives. See also Jimerson, ed., American Archival Studies, chs. 9–13. 6. Jimerson, ed., American Archival Studies, ch. 22; cf. ch. 23 for audio. 7. For one example, the “American Memory” project of the Library of Congress, http://www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html. 8. All three archives maintain Web sites: the Archives Nationales, http:// www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/; the National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov; and the National Archives of the United Kingdom, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. 9. Bellardo and Bellardo, Glossary, 3. 10. See Jimerson, ed., American Archival Studies, ch. 14, on the principle of provenance. 11. David Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Dennis A. Trinkle and Scott A. Merriman, eds., The History Highway: A 21st-Century Guide to Internet Resources (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), provide introductory guides. 12. The prevalence of glossaries and standards in the archival and library professions illustrates both past diversity and newer trends of uniformity. The contested nature of archival theory and terminology is illustrated by Livelton, Archival Theory. For one such glossary, Bellardo and Bellardo, Glossary. 13. James O’Toole, “On the Idea of Uniqueness,” reprinted in Jimerson, ed., American Archival Studies, 245–77. 14. See Dodge, “Re-imag(in)ing the Past,” for perspective on archival creation of the past and history. 15. Two standard, contrasting introductions to historical editing are P. D. A. Harvey, Editing Historical Records (London: British Library, 2001); and Mary-Jo Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Cf. Michael C. W. Hunter, Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Practices and Principles (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), for more recent developments. Michael E. Stevens and Steven B. Burg, Editing Historical Documents: A Handbook of Practice (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1997), offers a systematic guide to the choices editors face with a multitude of transcribed examples of them.

242

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

•

Notes

Lou Burnal, Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, and John Unsworth, eds., Electronic Textual Editing (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006), is one learned association’s effort to inform scholars of a rapidly changing and growing approach. Cf. Stevens and Berg, Editing Historical Documents, ch. 5; and Hunter, Editing Early Modern Texts, 109–33, for a brief sampling of various editing results. Stevens and Burg, Editing Historical Documents, 80–82, illustrate five forms of documentary editing using the first sentence from Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. Harvey, Editing Historical Records, 43. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257–64; and Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 64–75, discuss briefly transcription. What Stevens and Berg, Editing Historical Documents, 120, call a “conflated document.” Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing, 219–20. Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing, 136. And never more so than when the original is oral and undergoes transcription. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). Ibid., 19. Ibid., 117–39. Ibid., 12, 30–41, 77–79. Ibid., 54, 56. Cf. the distinctions of Allan Megill on “Narrative and the Four Tasks of History-Writing,” in Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch. 4. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 149. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller (1976), trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978). Criticisms of the use of sources by these authors suggest the degrees of interpretive intervention: Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Renato Resaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 77–97; and Leonard E. Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology,” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. James E. Battis (Toronto: Pontifical

Notes

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

•

243

Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981), 119–40. Ginzburg replies to some of these criticisms in “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues, Myths, and Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 3. Ibid. 4–6. Ibid., 387. Ibid. Ibid., 376. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 370–71. Ibid., 261–262. Ibid., 307–8. Ibid., 356, 371, 373, respectively. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 227, 230. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 309, 47n. Ibid., 376. Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For example, Philip D. Morgan, review of Foul Means in Journal of American History 91, no. 3 (2004), 990. Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), states his goal in the subtitle and the forces he says explains those fates in the title. Even the histories of such efforts illustrate as they combine the Great Stories of Western European history as the grand narrative of the past with the Great Story of historiography as the master narrative of the discipline’s understanding of that past. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), offer two recent histories of the field. Older but still valuable is Dietrich Gerhard, “Periodization in History,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 476–81. See also the brief surveys

244

•

Notes

in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), chs. 4–11. 56. See in general Jörn Rüsen, ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (New York: Berghahn, 2002). Efforts to periodize world history reveal the problems of the traditional Western approach. See, for example, Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, eds., Writing World History, 18002000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 57. A good starting place is Breisach, On the Future of History, but see also my conclusions in Beyond the Great Story, 224–26. 58. Best observed perhaps in the long traditional division between prehistory and history based upon the invention of writing. As the English historian John Vincent, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History (London: Duckworth, 1995), 4, encapsulates this view, prehistory is “history minus the alphabet.”

Chapter 4 1. Books I found especially helpful in making the distinctions I do throughout this chapter: Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989); Peter van Mensch, “Towards a Methodology of Museology” (PhD diss., University of Zagreb, 1992); and Kenneth Hudson, Museums of Influence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Eilean HooperGreenfield, Museums in the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Eilean Hooper-Greenfield, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (London: Leicester University Press, 1992); and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 6. Cf. Bernard M. Feilden on “degrees of intervention” in his Conservation of Historic Buildings, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2003), 8–12. Randolph Starn, “A Historian’s Guide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005), 68–98, provides bibliographical guidance. 2. In traditional museum parlance a display is permanent while an exhibition is temporary. But since both are interpretive sites, I follow Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 163n1, in using the terms interchangeably except when specified otherwise. 3. Most useful on conflicting definitions of terms and on the theory of museology is van Mensch, “Towards a Methodology of Museology,” but George Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 3rd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1997), especially 13–17, offers definitions of terms common in museum practice, as does Stacy Roth, Past Into Present: Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 183–85. Cf. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing

Notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

•

245

World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pts. 1–2. Christina F. Kreps, Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation (London: Routledge, 2003), attempts a broader view as her title states. Cf. the “Definitions of Conservation Terminology,” provided by the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, for example, on their Web site, http://aic.stanford.edu/geninfo/defin.html, with the definitions given by the references in the preceding note. The elaborate efforts of a multiyear project to preserve the Star Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the words in 1814 that became the United States national anthem, are described at the Smithsonian Web site,http: //americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29&newskey=346 Cf. van Mensch, “Towards a Methodology of Museology,” chs. 18, 20. These and other museums mentioned in this section are discussed in the next section. Gerald Gutek and Patricia Gutek, Experiencing America’s Past: A Travel Guide to Museum Villages, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), and Jay Anderson, The Living History Sourcebook (Nashville, TN: American Association of State and Local History, 1985), offer a historical tourist’s guide to such places in the United States. Cf. English sites, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/. The various authors in Jessica Foy Donnelly, ed., Interpreting Historic House Museums (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), apply general museum practices to their subject. See also Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Sheena Mackellan Goultry, Heritage Gardens: Care, Conservation, and Management (London: Routledge, 1993), offers a brief history of garden design in Europe and America, the problems of conservation and maintenance, and eleven case studies. Rudy J. Favretti and Joy Putnam Favretti, Landscapes and Gardens for Historic Buildings: A Handbook for Reproducing and Creating Authentic Landscape Settings, 2nd rev. ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1997), covers the American scene by centuries from this standpoint. See, for example, the contrasting photographs of the exterior of the Museum of History of the City of Warsaw in 1945 after German destruction and in 1980 after rebuilding in Hudson, Museums of Influence, 134, 135, but this could be repeated for any number of post–World War II European cities. Peter G. Stone and Phillippe G. Planel, eds, The Constructed Past: Experimental Archaeology, Education and the Public (London: Routledge, 1999), discusses specific reconstructions around the world. Hudson, Museums of Influence, 140–3.

246

•

Notes

13. See for the Half Moon, http://www.maritime.org/conf/confreynoldshalf .htm, and for the Mayflower II, http://www.plimoth.org/features/ mayflower2/. 14. Karel Ann Marling, ed., Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), is basic. Michael Wallace, “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World,” in History Museums in the United States, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 159–80, is the oft-cited, sharp indictment of its title topic. A spirited critique of the British heritage industry by one of the early users of the term is Peter J. Fowler, The Past in Contemporary Society: Then, Now (London: Routledge, 1992), but see also Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World (London: Routledge, 1992), on the British scene. David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, Free Press, 1996), provides a wide-ranging essay on the relationship between heritage and history. See also Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 205–312. 15. In addition to its extensive Web site, http://www.history.org/, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), and Anders Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 16. Online chronologies indicate the many times of restoration and reconstruction, http://www.ussconstitution.navy.mil/historyupdate.htm. The most recent reconstruction is described by Patrick Otton, “USS Constitution Rehabilitation and Restoration,” http://www.maritime.org/conf/confotton -const.htm. 17. Kenzo Tange and Noboru Kawazoe, Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). Whether the modern replicas exactly duplicate the original temple is disputed. 18. Definitions of just what is a museum are many and contested. See Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 18–21; Leon and Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States, xiii-xvi; Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), ch. 1; Kenneth Hudson, “Attempts to Define ‘Museum,’” in Representing the Nation, ed. Boswell and Evans, ch. 16; and various essays in Macdonald and Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums. 19. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, especially chs. 6–9, covers how museums give their objects meaning. 20. See van Mensch, “Towards a Methodology of Museology,” ch. 22, for more on period rooms. 21. Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in Leon and Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United

Notes

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

•

247

States, ch. 1, examines four examples of changing exhibition practices over two centuries. Many books treat exhibitions as such, for example, Amy Henderson and Adrienne Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). The reviews of museum exhibitions in historical and other journals frequently address the larger issues of their particular shows. Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), protests this transition from an object-oriented stress on “real things” to the new people-centered, idea-oriented, story-centered, heavily contextualized production of experience in modern museum practice. Jay Anderson, The Living History Sourcebook, 5, distinguishes between historic site and outdoor museum in this way. Hudson, Museums of Influence, divides chs. 6 and 7 on the same basis. See Hudson, Museums of Influence, 120–25, for a brief history and the Web site, http://www.skansen.se/, for a current description of its buildings and events. See the Greenfield Village section of http://www.thehenryford.org/. The buildings, their original location and dates, and the time of their relocation are given on the Web site, http://www.osv.org/. William Alderson and Shirley Payne Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites, 2nd ed. (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1985), 12–14, discuss its founders and founding. Hudson, Museums of Influence, 126–31; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 111–4. See also, http://www.beamish.org.uk/ and http://www.beamishcollections.com/ collections/default.asp. The eclecticism of the Shelburne Museum can be found in the descriptions of its “Collections and Buildings” on its Web site, http://www.shelburn emuseum.org/. See The “Historic Jamestowne” Web site, http://www.historicjamestowne .org, which describes its approach. sponsorship, goals and activities. The different purpose of the “Jamestown Settlement” is indicated in the URL of its Web site, http://www.historyisfun.org/JamestownSettlement .htm. On the so-called Second Battle of Gettysburg, see John S. Patterson, “From Battle Ground to Pleasure Ground: Gettysburg as a Historic Site,” in Leon and Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States, ch. 6. See the “National Colonial Farm” and “Piscataway Park” on the Accokeek Foundation Web site, http:// www.accokeek.org/. These figures come from the annual report for 2001, http://www .history.org/Foundation/Annualrpt01/financial.cfm.

248

•

Notes

34. Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), but new editions in 1967 and 1977, and William T. Alderson and Shirley Payne Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1976), new edition in 1985. 35. Alderson and Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites, especially in the appendices. Books and booklets from the American Association of State and Local History fostered this trend in the United States. 36. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pt. 2, includes essays on “The New History and the New Museum.” See also, for example, Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman, eds., Restoring Women’s History Through Historic Preservation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 37. Gail Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), sees this transition to a wider audience as the “paradigm shift” of her title. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Their Visitors (London: Routledge, 1994); John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, Learning From Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000); David Uzzell, ed., Heritage Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York: Bellhaven Press, 1989), all exemplify as they examine the trend to research audience responses. 38. See The Ironbridge Gorge Museums’ Web site, http://www.ironbridge .org.uk/our_attractions/ for descriptions of the various museums and sites. 39. For a summary of an important British audience survey, see Nick Merriman, “Museum Visiting as Cultural Phenomenon,” in Vergo, The New Museology, 149–71. See again the books mentioned in note 37 in this chapter. 40. My efforts at distinguishing the degree and kinds of intervention is based chiefly on information found in van Mensch, “Towards a methodology of Museology”; Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work; and Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. 41. Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), discusses labeling in relation to the intended audience. 42. On the history of this division in the United States, see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 43. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, ch. 11, surveys briefly the “problems of power.” See also Richard Sandell, ed., Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge, 2002); George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds., Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (London: Routledge, 1994); and Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Miller, and Steven D. Lavine, eds.,

Notes

44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

•

249

Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). See Hooper-Greenfield, Museums in the Shaping of Knowledge, and Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, chs. 5–6, for an introduction to these issues. A notable example is the well-illustrated 111-page booklet authored by Thomas Dublin, Lowell: The Story of an Industrial City: A Guide to Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Heritage State Park, Lowell, Massachusetts (Washington, DC: Division of Publications of the National Park Service, 1992). See for example the exhibition reviews in the Journal of American History, which added them to its regular book reviewing section with an introduction by the section’s own editor, Thomas Schlereth, starting in 76, no. 1 (1989), 192–95. Cf. his report after five years in 81, no. 1 (1994), 183–87. See, among many, Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London; Reaktion Press, 2001); Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs; Images as History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Michael Baxandall, Pattern of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). The story of this model and its uses can be found at “Explore a Viking Village,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vikings/village.html. The Web site, “A Mohawk Village: An Exhibit at the New York State Museum,” found at “http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/IroquoisVillage/ provides a good introduction to the dioramas with pictures of them. Do these dioramas still present the Native American as prehistoric? See Nick Merriman, ed., Making Early Histories in Museums (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), especially Moser, ch. 5 and James, ch. 6 on dioramas. See the various Web sites of living history museums for the many kinds of interactive activities offered audiences. Even museum associations have their own Web sites. See, for example, that of the Association of Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums at http://www.alhfam.org/, which in turn lists the Web sites of over eighty such museums in the United States and elsewhere. Other kinds of Web sites were first reviewed regularly in the Journal of American History beginning with volume 88, no. 1 (2001), 317–23.

250

•

Notes

53. Drawn from descriptions of these museums in Roth, Past Into Present; Anderson, Living History Sourcebook; and my sampling of such museums’ Web sites. 54. See Roth, Past Into Present, especially “The Ultimate Character Development List,” 186–93. 55. Stephen Eddy Snow, Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical RolePlaying at Plimoth Plantation (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993). See also James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977). 56. Snow, Performing the Pilgrims, 124–30, describes his experience as an interpreter in the mid-1980s. 57. How perspective shapes a script is evident in the “model interpretation” given by Alderson and Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites, 165–83. That perspective is even more evident in the tour guidelines and “facts” presented in appendix 1. At the end of the script, the authors warn interpreters not to memorize the script but to select what appeals to them and might interest an audience. They even suggest that the interpreters add other “authenticated” material if they choose—all “to bring the people and the period alive for visitors.” Compare manual for Half Moon, http://www.hrmm/halfmoon/ prt-manual.htm. 58. Quoted in Warren Leon and Margaret Piatt, “Living-History Museums,” in Leon and Rosenzewig, eds., History Museums in the United States, 89. 59. See the “Wampanoag Homesite” at http://www.plimoth.org/features/home site.php. See also Laura Peers, “Playing Ourselves: First Nations and Native American Interpreters at Living History Sites,” Public Historian 21, no. 4 (1999), 39–59. 60. I do not intend to present a history of museums in the past six decades. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, especially pt. 1, suggests what a critical, theoretically informed history would include. Cf. the many suggestive essays in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). 61. Once again, see Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum; Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg; and its extensive Web site at http://www.history.org/. 62. Quoted in Cary Carson, “Lost in the Fun House: A Commentary on Anthropologists’ First Contact with History Museums,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994), 145. 63. The quotations are from one of these new museum planners, Carson, “Lost in the Fun House,” 146. 64. Carson, “Lost in the Fun House,” 147. The plan was published as Cary Carson, ed., Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to be Both Free and Equal: A Plan of Thematic Interpretation (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1998). Note that Native Americans were slighted in this bicultural emphasis.

Notes

•

251

65. Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), provide context as they discuss the problem of cultural memory and the plantation museum. 66. The question of average height and longevity in the colonial period is discussed in the “Myth and Reality,” http://www.plimoth.org/discover/myth/, along with Thanksgiving 67. Dean MacCannell quoted in Snow, Performing the Pilgrims, 208. Both Snow, Performing the Pilgrims, and Roth, Past Into Present, offer favorable views of living history re-enactments. 68. See Snow, Performing the Pilgrims, 102, for quoted words from rationale. Warren Leon and Margaret Piatt, “Living-History Museums,” in History Museums in the United States, 86–91, critique roleplaying. 69. Quotations from Ruth J. Abram, “Harnessing the Power of History,” in Sandell, ed., Museums, Society, Inequality, 125, 126. 70. Most of the essays in Wallace, Mickey Mouse History, exemplify this critical spirit, but see especially 115–29. In addition to Sandell, Museums, Society, Inequality, see on the issues, George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds., Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (London: Routledge, 1994); Karp, Miller, and Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities. 71. Angela Piccini, “Wargames and Wendy Houses: Open-Air Reconstructions of Prehistoric Life,” in Merriman, Making Early Histories in Museums, 160, 165–66. 72. Gaynor Kavanagh, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), discusses individual and collective memories as interpretive bases for museum exhibitions. 73. Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice, and the Reframing of Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), examines problems and solutions.

Chapter 5 1. The essays reprinted in Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), introduce the problems of representing history in motion pictures and television. See also the observations of Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Cf. the approaches of historian Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge, 2007); and film theorist William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. Leon F. Litwack, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes et al. (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 136–41. 3. Catherine Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” in Past Imperfect, 132–35.

252

•

Notes

4. The History Channel Web sites in the United States and United Kingdom are http://www.history.com/ and http://www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/site/ home/, respectively. 5. For a sample of such debates, see the essays in David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 6. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). 7. Eric Stange, “Splitters versus Lumpers or How I Learned to Love the History Police,” OAH Newsletter 33, no. 1 (2005), 8, points out that the entire script for a 4-hour PBS documentary on the Seven Years War in America was only 75-pages long, while the standard history on the subject these days was 746 pages. 8. Complaints and issues in this section compiled from Cannadine, ed., History and the Media; Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and the forum “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988), 1173–1227. Cf. Guynn, Writing History in Film, 1–19; and Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, 18–24, 9. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 59. 10. John O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1990), ch. 5, offers “An Introduction to Visual Language for Historians and History Teachers.” See also Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, ch. 3. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), is a standard introduction to the many aspects of its subject. Cf. Toby Miller and Robert Stam, A Companion to Film Theory (London: Blackwell, 1999). Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), offers a historical approach to a century of changing theories. 11. See, for example, Nina Gilden Seavey, “Film and Media Producers: Taking History Off the Page and Putting It On the Screen,” in Public History: Essays from the Field, ed. James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1999), 117–28. 12. Cf. the rough classification system Robert Rosenstone, History on Film, Film on History (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006), uses in republishing his newer articles. See also Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, chs. 2, 6–7. 13. O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact, 169–216, provides a good starting place. Most of the films included in the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress are actuality footage, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/.

Notes

•

253

14. Stella Bruzzi, “The Event: Archive and Imagination,” in New Challenges for the Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 419–31. 15. Michael L. Kurtz, “Oliver Stone, JFK, and History” in Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 166–77. 16. Several authors in O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact, 169–216, passim, warn about these problematic practices. See Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: 1911–1967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972). 17. The difficulties in defining the documentary and whether it constitutes a genre are explored in Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001); and Michael Renov, ed., Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993). Cf. Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), analyzes as he describes the various kinds of films and television programs comprising the genre. 18. Sam B. Girgus, America on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), discusses the nature of documentaries in light of changing interpretations of what is American over time. A standard reference is Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), but see also Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLean, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005); and the articles reprinted in the second edition of Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, eds., New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005). 19. On the genre, consult Steven N. Lipkin, Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); and Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama in Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Cf. Beattie, Documentary Screens, ch. 8. Alan Rosenthal, ed., Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), anthologizes articles on the genre. Janet Staiger provides a brief but excellent introduction in her article “Docudrama,” in Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television, ed. Horace Newcomb, 1st ed. (1997), also available at http://www.museum.tv/ archives/etv/D/htmlD/docudrama/docudrama.htm. 20. George F. Custen, Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

254

•

Notes

21. The newly independent Algerian government put up 45 percent of the film’s financing. The best sources on the film are the two extra DVDs that are part of the 2005 Criterion Collection reissue of the 1999 Italian restoration of the film that had been distributed in England, the United States, and France the preceding two years by Rialto Pictures. These discs contain among other matters interviews with Pontecorvo and others involved in making the film as well as historians and others discussing the war and its representation in the film. 22. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect; Frank Sanello, Reel v. Real: How Hollywood Turns Fact Into Fiction (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2003). 23. See the essays in Martin M. Winkler, ed., Gladiator: Film and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), particularly ch. 3. 24. Toplin, Reel History, 92, but see 91–97. Among the examples he discusses are Gladiator and Patriot, but perhaps Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is a better example. A second disc accompanying that film on DVD discusses at length the efforts of all concerned with the film to make it look historical. Scholars nevertheless disagreed with details as well as the larger points made in the film. 25. Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), argues for analyzing this category of films for these purposes. 26. Both phrases are found in the title of his book, History on Film, Film on History. 27. James Naremore, “Authorship” in Miller and Stam, eds., A Companion to Film Theory, 9–24. 28. As O’ Connor, Artifact as Image, warns repeatedly, but especially 19–23. O’Connor argues throughout this volume that production and reception are as important as contents if one is to understand what appears in a film. Cf. the questions editor Peter C. Rollins posed to the contributors to The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xiv–xvii. See Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), for both theories of reception and its application to American films. Her Media Reception Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2005), covers reception theories in general, but particularly in relation to television and film. 29. Cf., for example, the highly interpretive captions in Kenneth Cameron, America on Film: Hollywood and American History (New York: Continuum, 1997), with the much less interpretive ones in Lipkin, Reel Emotional Logic, most of which merely mention their filmic source.

Notes

•

255

30. Grindon, Shadows on the Past, for example, analyzes the interaction of a time’s political dynamics and the shaping of historical fiction films of the era. 31. See, for example, the essays reprinted from the English journal Screen in Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, eds., Screen Histories: A Screen Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), grouped under the categories: reception, social, institutional, and textual histories. 32. As the title states of Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Co., 1992). 33. Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division, Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, http://www.loc .gov/rr/mopic/. 34. UCLA Film and Television Archive, http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/. 35. The International Federation of Film Archives, http://www.fiafnet.org/uk/. 36. Sklar, “Paradigms for Historical interpretation,” 128–30, notes briefly the transformation of the “field of inquiry” due to increased documentation. 37. Lipkin, Real Emotional Logic, discusses the hybrid qualities of the genre. Cf. pp. 53–54 on his “kinds of proximities” in shaping actuality in a film with my scheme below of degrees of interpretation between source and product. 38. As can be seen in the film reviews in the American Historical Review and Journal of American History among others. 39. Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Ken Burn’s The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106. 40. The producer/writer Laurie Kahn-Leavitt discusses throughout the “Process of Making a Historical Film” the “thousands” of choices of music and sound; location and built environment; costumes, hair, and makeup; and the research and expert advice necessary in trying to be true to the past in making her documentary of A Midwife’s Tale (1998), http://www.dohistory .org/film/index.html. 41. Toplin, Ken Burn’s The Civil War, xxii, 165. 42. As the male narrator did in the History Channel series on Sex in Ancient Rome (2005), even smiling as he entered what he said was a brothel at the end of one narrative commentary. 43. The making of the series is given at www.pbs.org/ktca/liberty. The writer admits modernizing the language occasionally for clarity, but Joanne Freeman in a review in Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999), 1416, noted some inaccurate quotations, some language out of context, and questioned the trustworthiness of some sources among other criticisms. 44. For example, Pro Sound Effects claims on its Web site to have over a quarter of a million royalty-free sounds from thirty organizations ranging from the Library of Congress and British Broadcasting Corporation to major film companies, http://www.prosoundeffects.com/. 45. Toplin, Ken Burn’s The Civil War, xxii.

256

•

Notes

46. “A Conversation Between Eric Foner and John Sayles,” in Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect, 13. 47. Carnes, Past Imperfect, 13, 16. Cf. his comment on p. 16 on getting the facts straight versus being “true to the spirit of the story.” 48. In Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect, 204. 49. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect, 206–7. 50. Eric Foner, “Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion,” in Toplin, ed., Ken Burn’s The Civil War, 105–6. 51. Burns’ and the writer’s rebuttals are in Toplin, ed., Ken Burn’s The Civil War, chs. 8, 9. 52. Foner’s own film, Reconstruction: The Second Civil War appeared in 2004 in the American Experience series on Public Broadcasting, and it featured the themes that he argued Burns neglected. 53. Hence the basic argument in Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, that historical films should not be distinguished from other forms of history. 54. O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact, ch. 4, provides a case study of Plow. Cf. the quite different treatments of The Grapes of Wrath by Alan Brinkley in Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect, 224–27, and Vivian C. Sobchack in Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian, ch. 5. 55. Such books, for example, as Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975); Sorlin, The Film in History; Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian; Cameron, America on Film; Rollins, ed., The Columbia Companion to American History on Film; Tony Barta, ed., Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); and Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), all study in their own ways the larger themes and Great Stories in films as well as other matters. 56. Unchained Memories has been issued by HBO Cinemax Documentary Films as a DVD item no. 1888686. The Library of Congress includes the “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves” in its American Memory Collection, http://memory .loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html. 57. Interview with Yvonne Beatty under “Special Features” on Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2002), HBO Documentary DVD, no. 1888686. 58. Norman R. Yetman discusses these and other problems in his extended introduction to the “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves,”http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/snhtml/snhome.html. 59. Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters (2005), History Channel Digital Library, no. AAE-73369.

Notes

•

257

60. A Midwife’s Tale is available from PBS Home Video no. AMER603. The Web site devoted in general to the diary is http://dohistory.org/home.html. Kahn-Levitt discusses “The Process of Making a Historical Film” beginning at http://dohistory.org/home/film/process_preprod.html. 61. Lipkin, Real Emotional Logic, fig. 19, 20. See pp. 103–4 for elaboration.

Afterword 1. Louis Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 144. 2. My notion of “history effect” was inspired of course by Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” (1968) in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzevetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11–17, and “Historical Discourse,” trans. and reprinted in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 154. Cf. Frank Ankersmit, “The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Tropology,” History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 5. 3. See some experimental efforts to test limits in Alun Munslow and Robert Rosenstone, eds., Experiments in Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 2004). 4. Simon Schama stepped over the line between fact and fiction in the opinion of many historians in his fictional invention of a diary and highly imaginative speculation about a murder at Harvard in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Knopf, 1991). He compounded this historiographical sin in a 2003 television program devoted to retelling The Murder at Harvard through dramatic reenactment on the PBS American Experience series, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/murder/. Cf. the strong condemnation of the latter by American historian Louis Mazur, “History or Fiction,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2003, B15, for one example of professional reaction.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

access, 95, 99,100 accession process, 93–94, 100, 102, 134 acquisition process, 93–94, 100, 134 actuality films, 179–80, 187–88, 191, 192 African Americans, 36, 116–27, 152, 162, 166, 170, 201, 204–7 See also slavery agency of individuals, 53, 61–62, 72, 83, 85, 118, 198, 200–201, 206 Alderson William T., 154 Algiers, Battle of, 182–83 alltagsgeschichte, 62–63 American Revolution, 37, 39, 116, 120, 124, 141, 152, 169, 195, 196 arrangement process, 95–98, 99, 102–3 American Slavery, American Freedom, 116–27 Annales School, 50, 62, 82 annals, 50, 86, 87 Apocalypse Now (1979), 181 appraisal process, 94, 100, 134 archaeology, 9, 12, 18, 85, 152 archives, 17, 18, 90, 93–100, 101, 103 film, 192 archivists, 93–99 arguments, 51, 52–54, 55 See also synthesis Armenian massacre, 46 arrangement, 95–98, 99, 102, 134 artistic side of history, 49–50, 88, 130, 216–17 See also literary side of history

Articles of Confederation, 33–34, 38 artifacts in films, 177, 185, 190, 191, 194, 209 in museums, 133–42, 149, 150–56, 159–62, 168, 171 as sources, 3–20, 22, 23, 41, 45–48 as texts, 85, 100–101, 104, 112 audience response, 172–73, 155 auteur theory of film, 187 auxiliary sciences, 12 Bacon’s Rebellion, 38–39, 123, 123, 125, 126 Ballard, Martha, 208–11 Battle of Algiers, The (1965), 182–83 Beamish North of England Open Air Museum, 146 begriffsgeschichte, 74 Benjamin Franklin (2002), 196 Berkhofer, Robert. F., Jr., 33–34, 86 Bernal, Martin, 84 Beth Hatefutoth Museum, 139 bias, 18, 26, 29, 34, 35, 50, 61, 63–68, 73, 77, 79, 80, 85, 160, 216–17 See also partiality; perspective; viewpoint; voice big picture, 87, 130, 198–200, 201, 202, 212, 213 Biltmore (Ashville, NC), 149 biopics, 80, 181, 182, 202 biographies, 69 Birka, Sweden, 161

260

•

Index

Birth of the Nation, The (1915), 175, 202–3 Black Athena, 84 British Broadcasting Corporation, 176 Burns, Ken, 176, 194–95, 201 Burke, Peter, 22 Bush, George W., 10, 17, 181 Cahill, Thomas, 67 Celts, 47, 138, 142, 172 Cheese and Worms, The, 29, 115 chronicles, 50, 86, 87 Civil War, U.S., 120, 121, 124, 148, 206 Civil War, The (1990), 176, 194, 195, 201 class, social, 18, 22, 35, 36, 42, 46, 56, 58, 60–61, 63, 65, 69, 86, 113, 116, 117, 119, 124, 146, 155, 159, 166, 169, 172, 209 Clendinnen, Inga, 56 Cleopatra (1963), 176 Cohen, Lizabeth, 36 Colonial Williamsburg, 5, 22, 141, 151–53, 166, 168–70 collective memory. See memory, kinds of comparative history, 50, 127, 128 computer, 10, 15, 19, 95, 99, 105, 106, 107, 111, 144, 152, 162, 167, 184, 197 See also digitization Congressional Record, U.S., 27–28 Connor Prairie (IN), 137 Constitution, U.S., 21, 34, 38, 40 Constitution, USS, 20, 142 conservation, 94–95, 100, 135–36 See also preservation constructed facts, 24–25, 32–41, 69, 190, 211–12 contexts, 3–5, 22–24, 29, 31–32, 39–40

in archives, 103 in films, 177, 199, 201–2, 203, 204, 208, 210 in museums, 134, 142–54 in proper histories, 124–26 contextualization, 81–83, 86–88, 112, 142–53 Coppola, Eleanor, 181 Coppola, Francis Ford, 181 critical history, 66, 171–72 critical museum practice, 168–73 criticism See external criticism; internal criticism cultural history, 5, 29, 49, 63, 73, 74–76, 80, 185, 215 curators, 93 See museums Curtis, Edward, 14–15 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 135 Darby, Abraham, 155 David (Michelangelo), 135, 139 Davies, Rev. Samuel, 177, 118, 119 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 112–13, 115 Deetz, James, 164, 167 demographic history, 35–36 description process, 95–98, 99, 102–3, 114, 134 Dewey decimal system, 99 diaries, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 27, 99, 103,104, 106–7, 110, 147, 168, 194, 196, 207 See also A Midwife’s Tale digitization of documents, ix, 14, 20, 95, 102, 104, 111 dioramas, 161–62 diplomatic history, 5, 29, 36, 49, 61, 215 diplomatics, 12 discourse, 50, 61, 74, 79, 86, 124 See also rhetoric discourse time, 52, 122

Index Disney corporation, 140, 171, 203 docudramas, 181–83, 202, 217 documents, ix, 5–10, 12–14, 16–18, 43, 45–47, 119, 124–25, 137–39, 141, 149, 161–62, 165, 168, 171, 182, 191, 194–96, 198, 216 See also archives; constructed facts; editing; A Midwife’s Tale; representation; sources; Unchained Memories documentary films, 19, 21, 41, 66, 89, 90, 93, 112, 115, 167, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180–81 190, 191, 217, 202, 204–11, 216, 217 See also Burns, Ken Donation of Constantine, 13–14 Downfall (2002), 197 dramadoc, 181–83 dramatic films, 216, 217 Durkheim, Émile, 58 economic history, 5, 35, 49, 57, 75, 185, 215 editing, 104–11 editions, 107–8, 109–10, 216, 217 Elton, Geoffrey, 35 empirical side of history, 3, 30, 89–90, 216–17 See also methods emplotment, 87, 113, 122, 124, 167, 198, 200, 201, 202, 210 defined, 91 environment, natural, 71 environmental history, 9, 64, 71 environmental setting, 18, 21, 103, 138, 143, 145, 148–49, 150–51, 177, 181, 188, 190, 194, 196–97 epigraphy, 12 ethical turn, 76–77 See also perspective; viewpoint; voice

•

261

ethnicity, 22, 29, 35, 42, 43, 46, 47, 60, 65, 66, 69, 72, 75, 83, 84, 134, 155, 166, 168, 172 See African Americans; Mexican Americans; Native Americans; whiteness evaluation process, 95–98, 99, 102–3, 134 evidence, ix–x, 4, 216 and films, 179–80, 187–92, 203–4, 211–12 memory as, 41, 42, 45, 51, 52, 53, 63, 69, 70, 75, 76 See sources exhibits, 22–23, 66, 115, 143–44 versus display, 244n2 experimental histories, 215 explaining, 54–63 explanation, 29, 50, 118–19 extrapolation, defined, 90 external criticism, 18–19, 25–26 of films as history, 186–92 See sources factories, 5, 6, 133, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 155, 159 facts defined, 3–4, 25, 28 constructed, 32–41, 211–12 re-presented, 24–32 summative, 37, 60, 117, 190 See methods factuality, 131, 216–17, 265 in films, 177–85, 187–88, 191, 192–201, 203, 211–12 versus fiction, 52, 78, 171, 216–17, 257n4 Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), 181 Federal Writers’ Project, 204–6 feminist theory, 40, 79, 80, 85 Fiction in the Archives, 112–13, 115 fiction versus non-fiction, 52, 78, 171, 216–17, 257n4

262

•

Index

fiction versus non-fiction (continued) in films, 176, 177–85, 187–88, 191, 192–201, 203, 211–12 film archives, 192 films and collective memory, 41, 185 in museums and historic sites, 145, 148, 149, 160, 161, 169 filmmaking technical, 178–79 viewpoint and voice, 69–70 film genres and historical representation, 176, 179–85 finding aids, 97–98, 99 first-person interpretation criticized, 165–66, 167–68 defined, 163 role-playing, 164–65 Flaherty, Robert, 181 Florida, 2000 election ballots, 10 fonds, defined, 96 Foner, Eric, 199–200, 201 forgeries, 13–16 Ford, Henry, 14 museum, 145 Ford’s Theater, 137 Franklin, Benjamin, 21–22, 30, 196 French and Indian War, 117–18 French Revolution, 37, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 40 frontier interpretation of U.S. history, 74 full-fledged histories, 90, 104, 111,115–28, 130, 131, 138, 141, 147, 150, 154, 155, 156, 160, 161, 167–68, 177, 194, 211, 216 See also proper histories gardening, 163, 210 gardens, 20, 148, 151, 152, 162, 168 Geertz, Clifford, 62

gender, 22, 35, 42, 46, 47, 60, 69, 72, 75, 80, 85, 152, 155, 163, 166, 169, 172, 173, 189, 196, 205 gender history, 50, 80, 215 general histories, 67, 128–29 generalization, 30, 36, 39, 51, 54, 55, 56, 62, 68, 81, 82, 83, 113, 116, 124, 127, 128, 129, 166, 179, 191, 204, 215, 216, 226n87 generations, 42, 45–47, 170, 172, 175 genres film, 179–85, 202 See histories, kinds of geography, 33, 72–73 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 139 Gibson, Mel, 196 Ginzburg, Carlo, 29, 63, 75, 115 Gladiator (2000), 184 Goldberg, Whoopi, 204, 205 Gone with the Wind (1939), 175 Goodwin, Dr. William A. R., 153 Gottschalk, Louis, 6, 10–11, 28 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 203 grand narratives, 39, 45, 53, 54, 68, 79, 82, 120, 170, 192, 199, 201, 202 See also Great Stories Great Stories, 86–87, 120, 124, 129–30, 170, 217 in films, 189, 199–200, 210–11 Greenfield Village (MI), 142, 146 Griffith, D. W., 175 Guide to Documentary Editing, A, 111 Half Moon, 139 Haraway, Donna, 59, 78–79 Harvey, P. D. A., 107 Haskell, Thomas, 53, 79 Hearts of Darkness (1991), 181 Hemings, Sally, 10, 162 Henry Ford Museum, 142, 145, 146

Index heritage, 18, 32, 42, 43, 45, 65, 155, 162, 170 condemned, 64, 140, 170 in films, 177, 178, 200, 203, 213 heritage industry, 140, 152–53, 155 hermeneutics, 3, 23–24, 31, 60, 219n1 Hidden from History, 64 historians, 45–47, 66, 69 historic sites, 7, 41, 49, 66, 70, 71, 133–73, 176, 196 historical consciousness, popular, 185 historical method, 4 See also methods historical museums See museums historical schools See schools of historical interpretation historicism, 76, 236n74 histories, kinds of, 5, 49–50, 72, 80–81, 115, 72, 215–17 See also full-fledged; general; metahistories; proper histories, fields of See cultural; demographic; diplomatic; economic; environmental; experimental; gender; general; intellectual; military; political; psychohistory; quantitative; social; women’s; world History Channels (TV), 175, 176, 181, 183 history, idea of, 2, 81–88, 93, 128–31, 175, 198–201, 215–17 See also big picture; critical history; critical museum practice; heritage; memory; purpose; theory of history History of Britain, A (2000–2001), 176 “history effect,” 215–16 Hitler, Adolph, 14, 15, 180, 197

•

263

House of Commons, UK, debates, 27 House of Representatives, U.S., debates, 27–28 How the Irish Saved Civilization, 67 Howard, Michael, 64, 79 Howell, Martha, 6, 8, 22 identity, personal, 83, 84 Independence Hall, 21 Indians See Native Americans industrial revolution, 8, 155, 158 industrialism, 36, 83, 133, 143, 146, 156, 161, 169, 191 See also factories inference, 8, 9, 11–12, 24, 25, 32, 33, 54, 98, 117, 119, 124, 125, 149, 167, 168, 185, 191, 208, 209 defined, 90 intellectual history, 5, 31, 49, 74, 75 See also cultural history internal criticism, 18–19, 25–26, 187–92 International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, 172 interpretation in archives and libraries, 101–3 in editing, 110–11 in films, 189, 197–201, 209–11 in the idea of history, 130–33 in museum practice, 134–35, 142–68 as practice, 22, 54–59, 81, 90–91 as product, 50, 74, 81–86 in proper history, 115–16, 124–25 See first-person interpretation; third-person interpretation Interpreting our Heritage, 154 Interpretation of Historic Sites, 154 interpretive community, 68, 78, 79 intertextuality, 19, 23 intervention, 104–5, 111, 115, 122

264

•

Index

defined, 90 invention in historical practice, 216, 217 defined, 90 in films, 179, 181, 182, 183, 186, 192, 217, 204, 207, 209, 211, 213 invention in historical documentary films, 209, 211–12 Invention of Tradition, The, 47, 48, 63, 64 Iron Bridge Gorge Museums (UK), 5, 155, 161 Iroquois, 30–31, 161 Ise Shinto shrine (Japan), 142 JFK (1991), 176, 180 Jamestown (VA), 123, 147 Jeanne d’Arc (1899), 182 Jefferson, Thomas, 10, 33–34, 119, 121–22, 126, 137, 152, 162–63, 169, 201 Joan of Arc Day, 47 Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), 195 Kahn-Leavitt, Laurie, 208–11 Kansteiner, Wulf, 45, 48 Kennedy, John F., 176, 180, 192 Kingdom of Heaven (2005), 197 Klein, Mary-Jo, 111 Korean War, 180 Koselleck, Reinhold, 74 Ku Klux Klan, 194, 206 labels in museums, 13, 28, 32, 143, 156–59 Laden, Osama bin, 17 Last of the Mohicans, The (1992), 176 Last Supper, The, 21, 135 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 29, 75, 115 Learning from the Past, 64 Lee, Kaiulani, 208 Lemisch, Jesse, 59

Lessons of History, The, 64 Lessons of the Past, 64 Liberty! The American Revolution (1997), 195 Liberty Bell Pavilion, 21 Library Hall, 139 libraries, 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 114 Library of Congress, 9, 20, 99, 192, 204 Lies My Teacher Told Me, 64 lieux de mémoire, 43, 44 Lincoln, Abraham, 14, 137, 182 Lipkin, Steven, 212 literary side of history, 49–88, 90–91, 130–31 See also artistic side of history living history museums, 148, 150–52, 153, 163, 166, 167, 168, 171 Locke, John, 31, 74 Lovejoy, Arthur, 74 Low, Shirley Payne, 154 Lowell (MA), 5, 249n45 Loewen, James W., 64 Lowenthal, David, 45 Making a New Deal, 36 manuscript repositories See archives; libraries manuscripts, 1, 9, 13, 16, 17, 20, 100, 102, 109, 136, 151 See also editing maps, 7, 10, 17, 32, 33, 34, 72–73, 95, 99, 105, 147, 159, 162, 193, 206 See Vinland map Marxist, 23, 50, 58, 82, 83 Marwick, Arthur, 6 master narrative, 53, 82, 85, 88 material culture, 133 material objects, x, 67, 75, 90, 99, 100, 101, 103, 112 in films, 194, 195

Index and museums, 133–73 as sources, 3, 6–7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 28, 32, 41 Matewan (1957), 199–200 May, Ernest, 64 Mayflower II, 139, 165 meaning of history, x, 50, 51, 63–68, 77, 79, 80, 81–88, 119–20, 126–27, 128–31, 143, 155, 156, 159, 166, 167, 179, 192, 198–201, 202, 216 See also ethical turn; Great Stories; metanarratives; morals; perspective; purpose McIntosh Country Shouters, 204, 205 Megill, Allan, 78 memory, 3, 172, 178 kinds, 41–48 vs. history, 44–45 memory “activists,” 172 mentalités, 74, 75, 82, 115 metageography, 73 metahistory, 86–87 See also metanarratives Metahistory, 87 methods, historical, 1–48, 49, 59–61, 89–90, 93, 98, 103, 119, 128, 142 and schools, 82 methodological holism, 57, 58, 59–62 methodological individualism, 57–62 Mexican Americans, 36, 46 metanarratives, 24, 45, 53, 54, 68, 79, 81, 82–86, 88, 91, 129–30, 178, 189, 192, 199, 204, 216, 217 See also Great Stories Michelangelo, 21, 135, 139 microhistory, 29, 50, 62–63, 72, 115, 176 Midwife’s Tale, A, book, 176, 208 Midwife’s Tale, A (1998), film, 208–11 military history, 5, 29, 36, 49, 61, 80, 215

•

265

Mink, Louis, 215 minorities, 5, 18, 29, 35, 41, 49, 65, 66, 84 models in museums, 139, 161 Montaillou, 29, 75, 115 Monticello, 137, 162–63 Moore, Michael, 181 morals and history, 63–64, 66–68, 76–77, 85–86, 172 Morgan, Edmund, 116–27 motion pictures, x, 8, 9, 15, 17, 41, 175–213 Mount Vernon, 137, 148 movies See motion pictures multiculturalism, 29, 78, 80, 173 Museum of Welsh Life, 138, 142 museums, 5, 17, 18, 90,93, 101, 103, 133–73 defined, 142 Web sites, 162 See also exhibits; labels; living history museums; open-air museums; out-door museums Nanook of the North (1922), 181 narrative, 50, 51–54, 55, 61, 76, 79, 81, 87, 119–20, 112–13, 122, 140, 155 and films, 177, 180, 184–85, 186, 192, 196, 198, 200, 208, 215, 216–17 See also emplotment; grand and master narratives; Great Stories; metanarratives nation/nationalism, 71–72, 84 and memory, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 54 historical practice, 5, 18, 45–46, 50, 54, 64, 71–74, 82, 83–84, 95–96, 102, 128, 158, 201 See also heritage National Archives, U.S., 10, 95, 96 National Archives of the United Kingdom, 95–96

266

•

Index

National Colonial Farm Museum, 146 National Constitution Center, 21 National Museum of the American Indian, 65 Native Americans, 14–15, 30–31, 34, 35, 64, 65, 128, 161, 168 nature, 71 Nazis, 14, 63, 66, 181, 194, 195, 197 Neustadt, Richard, 64 New York State Museum, 161 newsreels, 177, 180, 183, 191 nonfiction See factuality; fiction; truthfulness Nora, Pierre, 43, 44 Northern Light Productions, 206, 207 Northwest Ordinance, 33–34 numismatics, 12 objectivity, 50, 59, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77–80, 212, 216–17 See also bias; morals; perspective; viewpoint Old Ironsides, 20, 142 Old Sturbridge Village (MA), 137, 146 open-air museums, 133, 142, 145–45 oral history, 7, 11, 28, 41, 45, 46, 69, 62, 205–6 Orientalism, 73 otherness of people, 84 otherness of past, 23, 67, 84–85 out-doors museums See open-air museums Pacific Rim, 73 paleography, 12 panels, museum, 159 paraphrase as re-presentation, 25, 26, 28, 32, 36, 58, 59, 69, 71, 77, 113–15, 124 Parent, Anthony S., Jr., 127 past, idea of, 1,3

as history, ix, 1, 46, 47, 49, 82, 86, 102, 177, 198, 203, 204, 215–17 Past Imperfect, 183 Patriot, The (2000), 196 period rooms, 137, 143, 144, 149, 159, 160, 209 periods, 13, 31, 32, 63, 120, 133, 144, 146, 151, 163, 164, 165, 185, 192, 194, 195, 203, 204, 206, 210 See also times as era periodization, 31, 129, 158, 230n12 perspective, 39, 51, 53, 63–66, 67, 68, 82, 83, 88 in documents, 8, 22, 69, 73 in films, 179, 184, 189, 192, 197, 199, 200–201, 202, 209, 211, 212, 213 in Morgan, American Slavery, 116, 120–21, 126–27 in museum practice, 155, 156, 159, 162, 166, 167, 250n57 and objectivity, 77–81 photographs, 14–15, 112, 220n14 physical environment See environment, natural; environmental setting pictorial matter, interpreting, 7, 14–15, 160–61, 220n14 Plimoth Plantation (MA), 138, 147, 149, 164–65, 167–68, 171 Plow That Broke the Plains, The (1936), 203 political history, 5, 29, 36, 49, 57, 61, 75, 80, 185, 215 politics and historians, 31, 44, 46, 51, 53, 57, 59, 62, 63–68, 69, 77, 79, 80, 81, 87, 90, 112, 121–22, 154–55, 167, 169–70, 171, 181, 199–202 postcolonial, 5, 35, 83 postmodern, as period, 83, 185

Index postmodernism, ix, 8, 24, 45, 53, 78, 216 and Great Stories, 129–30, 131, 216 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 182–83 preservation, 94–95, 100, 134–36 See also conservation Prevenier, Walter, 6, 8, 22 primary sources, 18–24, 26, 35, 41, 128 films as, 179–80, 186–92, 203–4, 208–11 in archives, 93–103 museums, 134–42 re-presented, 103–15 See also evidence processing by archives, 93–99, 100, 101 in museums, 134–39 proper histories, 50, 51, 54, 67, 68, 114, 115, 122, 124, 125, 127, 141, 155, 156, 167, 177, 194, 211 See also full-fledged histories Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 14 provenance, 16–17, 96, 103, 106, 111, 158 defined, 222n43 provenience See provenance psychohistory, 82 Public Broadcasting System, 175, 181 Public Records Office (UK), 95 purpose of history, 63–64, 66–68, 167, 168–73, 215–17 quotation, 25, 29, 59, 69, 71, 75, 77, 94, 111–14, 118, 180, 194 compare paraphrase quantitative history, 35–36, 50, 59

•

267

race, 29, 84, 166, 169, 172, 189, 199, 201, 206 racism, 46, 61, 117, 120, 124, 126, 169, 202 “Rape of Nanking,” 46 Ravitch, Diane, 64 realism, 1, 3, 41, 44, 75, 78, 80, 215–17 reconstructed buildings, 5,20, 21, 49, 134–35, 136, 137, 138–39, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 155, 162, 164, 165, 170, 194, 202, 204, 216 reconstruction as historical practice, 44–45, 60, 63, 75, 114–15, 168, 193, 205, 208, 209, 211 reconstruction of archive files, 96–97 Reconstruction Era, 122, 175, 201, 202–3 records, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 19, 27, 28, 31, 32, 62–63, 75, 105, 106, 107, 111, 115, 125, 168, 192 in archives, 93–103 Reel v. Real, 183 reenactments, 49, 134, 144, 150, 151–52, 156, 160, 161, 165–68 at Plimoth Plantation, 164–66, 168 in films, 177, 180, 193, 195, 196, 204–11 referentiality, 215 replicas, 20, 107, 138–39, 140, 142, 161 re-presentation, 3, 36, 37, 39, 51, 58, 59, 63, 69, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80, 217 as facts, 24–32 in texts, 103–115 in museums, 138, 149, 166, 168 in films, 180, 181, 183, 186, 190, 191, 193–94, 202, 204–6, 209–10 representation, historical, 11, 25, 45, 48, 81, 90, 91, 111

268

•

Index

in museum practice, 162, 166, 167 through films, 177–79, 183, 186, 10, 192–201, 202–3, 204–11 reproductions, 20, 103–14, 133, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 152, 160, 161, 162, 194 See also re-presentation restoration of buildings, 20, 134, 135–41, 216 of texts, 99, 100 Retour de Martin Guerre, Le (1982), 176 rhetoric, 50, 87, 88, 124, 215 in Morgan, American Slavery, 120, 121–22 Riefenstahl, Leni, 181 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 141, 153, 168–69 Rosenstone, Robert, 186 Rüsen, Jörn, 79 Rutledge, Ann, 14 Said, Edward, 73 satire, 26, 30, 87, 121 Sayles, John, 197, 199–200 Schama, Simon, 176, 257n4 scientific side of historical practice, 3, 12,71, 50, 71, 216–17 See also empirical side schools of historical interpretation, 34, 38, 50, 62, 80–82, 83, 86, 87, 110, 128 schools of U.S. history, 34, 50, 74, 228n1 Scott, Ridley, 184, 197 Scottish Highland tradition, 47, 64 Sex Life in Ancient Rome (2005), 176 Shintoism, 47, 142 Shine (1996), 212 Shelburne Museum (VT), 147 simulations, 25, 106, 137, 139, 140, 151, 153, 167, 171, 177, 194 by computer, 15, 167

Sistine Chapel, 21 Skansen (Sweden), 142, 146 Skinner, Quentin, 31, 74 Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters (2005), 206–7 slavery, 5, 7, 10, 18, 29, 34, 43, 66, 155, 162, 175 in Colonial Williamsburg, 152, 166, 170 in films, 201, 204–7 See also American Slavery, American Freedom slum tenements, 5, 7, 133, 155 Smithsonian Institution, 65, 145 social history, 35, 49–50, 72, 154–55 social science history, 50, 56–57 See also quantitative history Somers, Margaret, 54 sound recordings, 6, 9, 17, 95, 99, 101, 102, 105, 152 sounds, 19–20, 21, 102, 148, 154 in films, 177, 178, 188, 189, 194, 195, 204–5, 207, 209, 210, 212 sources, 58–59, 89–90, 129 films as, 185–92 idea of, 3–4, 8–9, 24–25 identification of, 11–18, 19 in archives and libraries, 93–103 kinds of, 5–11, 12, 13 primary and secondary, 18–24, 26 See also editing; external criticism; internal criticism; processing; representation; reproduction statements, 4, 9, 11, 19, 24, 25, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 68, 69, 83, 88, 90, 115, 126, 129, 131, 190, 215, 240n1 Standish, Myles, 167 statistical history See quantitative history Steinbeck, John, 203 Stone, Oliver, 176, 180, 192

Index storage of artifacts, 10, 17, 94, 95, 98, 100 story See emplotment; narrative structure vs. agency, 61–62, 72 subalterns, 29, 35, 46, 70 subjectivity, 77, 78 See also bias; partiality; viewpoint; voice survivals, 3–4, 5–18, 20, 22, 23, 39, 41, 47, 48, 88, 93–104, 129, 130, 131, 186, 219n4 synchronic, 50, 52, 55, 143, 144, 155, 159 synthesis, 30, 89–90, 98, 129–31, 140, 143, 156, 193, 198–200, 202, 211, 217 as practice and product, 49–88 in Morgan, American Slavery, 116–27 traditional definition, 129 television, 14, 15, 41, 43, 49, 175, 176, 180, 181, 182, 186–87, 192, 198 testimony, 6, 8, 25–27, 41, 59 texts, 89–131 See also methods; synthesis Thanksgiving (U.S.), 47, 164, 167 theory, use in historical practice, 35, 37, 38, 54, 56–57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 73, 179, 181 See also methodological holism methodological individualism theory of history, ix, 8, 19, 24, 36, 50, 78,79, 80, 81, 87, 129, 154, 172, 216–17 Thinking in Time, 64 third-person interpretation, 163–64, 169 Thompson, Paul, 18 thorn, 104 Ticonderoga (steamboat), 147

•

269

Tilden, Freeman, 154 time, concept of, ix, 4, 24, 44, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 67, 68, 71, 74, 76, 81, 86, 87, 97–98, 102, 110, 114 in films, 183, 186, 187, 189 in museum practice, 135, 136, 144, 147, 148, 164 times, as era, 3, 8,9,11, 12, 13, 14, 15,16, 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45, 52, 54, 63, 69, 72, 73, 76, 101, 109 See also period; periodization Titanic (1997), 175 Toplin, Robert Brent, 184–85 traditions, 24, 31, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 63, 64, 65, 85, 138, 144, 154, 155, 157, 169, 190 invented, 47–48, 63–64 compare heritage, memory translation, 31, 112 Triumph of the Will (1934), 181 truthfulness, 24, 37, 38, 52, 53, 56, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 124, 129, 131, 184, 185, 199, 202, 212, 213, 215–16 See also big picture; factuality, fiction; invention; objectivity Turner, Frederick Jackson, 74 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 61, 176, 208–11 Unchained Memories (2002), 204–6 Underground Railroad, 5 University of California at Los Angeles Film and Television Archive Collections, 192 understanding as interpretation, 54–59 uniqueness of holdings, 100–101 Valla, Lorenzo, 13–14 Vanderbilt, George, 138, 149 Victory, HMS, 20

270

•

Index

Vietnam War, 181 viewpoint, 31, 36, 68, 69–81, 90, 113, 114, 115, 215–16 in Morgan, American Slavery, 118, 127 in museum practice, 65, 136, 156, 167, 168 in films, 179, 183, 189, 197–98, 200, 201, 202, 211 Viking villages, 138, 147, 161 Vinland map, 14, 16 Vinovskis, Maris, 64 Virginia See Bacon’s Rebellion; Colonial Williamsburg; Jamestown; Morgan (Edmund) vistas of historic sites, 148, 150, 151 See also environmental setting visual imagery, interpreting See films; motion pictures, photographs, pictorial matter, television voice, 68–69, 81, 189, 215–16 See also viewpoint Washburn Wilcomb, 38–39 Washington, George, 39, 40, 120, 169, 211 Washington, Martha, 40, 152 Washington Monument (DC), 39–40 Webb, Stephen Saunders, 38–39

Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, 38–39 White, Hayden, 87 whiteness studies, 84 Williamsburg (VA) See Colonial Williamsburg Williamsburg—The Story of a Patriot (1957), 169, 170, 176, 196 witches, 34, 75 Wolf, Eric, 85 women, 18, 40, 41, 46, 64, 75, 128, 167, 169, 170, 178, 200, 205 women’s history, 5, 29, 49, 64, 80, 85, 102 compare feminist theory, gender See A Midwife’s Tale Woodstock—3 Days of Peace and Music (1970), 181 world history, 50, 72, 115, 240n107 Worldviews, 34, 55, 74, 75, 119, 150, 163, 165 See also perspective World Trade Center Towers (NYC), 17, 43 World War I, 14, 22, 94 World War II, 14, 74, 82,138, 143, 169, 176, 180, 181, 195 Xerographic copies, 104, 105, 106 Yacef, Saadi, 182 Zapruder, Abraham, 180, 192