The Historian's Toolbox

A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History

Robert C Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000762518
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Historian's Toolbox introduces students to the theory, craft, and methods of history and equips them with a series of tools to research and understand the past. Written in an engaging and entertaining style, and filled with fascinating examples, this best-selling "how to" book opens up an exciting world behind historical research and writing.

This fourth edition expands the repertory of tools and techniques available to students entering the workshop of history. These include materials on the Kennedy assassination, the litigation of Van Gogh's Night Café, local town histories, contemporary history, Twitter, and the contemplation of the end of history as well as the Sixth Extinction in a new epilogue. The book demonstrates the relevance and expanding possibilities of the study of history in our cacophonous information age of tweetstorms and fake news; it emphasises the increasing value of critical thinking, facts and evidence in the face of political lies and conspiracy theories. Material added to the fourth edition will resonate with a new generation of computer-literate readers in the face of climate change.

The Historian's Toolbox continues to be a seminal text for supporting students throughout their study of history and an accessible teaching tool for instructors.

Part I

The Craft of History

1 The Past

In the beginning was the past. There really was a “then.” The past consisted of events, people, natural surroundings, and the landscape. The past of planet earth goes back 14 billion years. Homo sapiens (Wise Men) appeared a few million years ago. In the distant past, time was measured in seasons and by the cyclic alteration of day and night, light and darkness. In most cultures, time was cyclic and repetitive, rather than linear. There was cosmos but no history, clocks, or calendars. Most humans in the past lived lives of “ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others.”¹ Replication, not invention, was the norm. They imitated celestial archetypes in rituals of eternal recurrence, repeating acts of gods or heroes, abolishing history and time. Events were meaningless except as periodic ceremonies of regeneration or repetition of primal events of creation, such as the great battle between the Babylonian god Marduk and the sea monster Tiamat. There was no real sense of history. The past is not history. The past may be lost without a trace. Or it may be remembered or continually reinvented or imagined as story. The past may be absent or present only through history as a reasonably true account or as useful fiction.

In the case of the Trobriand Islands people of the Pacific, their language had no verb tenses. They simply did not understand the meaning of past, present, and future. While they certainly had a history, their understanding of history differed from that of other cultures.

Our senses—smell, taste, hearing, and sight—and our memories remind us of the past. We remember, and sometimes reinvent, the past that we think we do not forget. We remember things that happened in sequence, before or after, but rarely at any particular time. Material objects in the present remind us of the past: leaking poison gas canisters from the two world wars in France and Germany; the DNA of disinterred bodies; fossils; ancient pollen; old photographs; battlefields; bones. I once encountered dried bloodstains of the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) on top of some of his papers in a Harvard University archive, vivid evidence of the past, if not exactly history. (History reminded me that he was killed in 1940 by an ice axe blow to the head while hunched over his desk editing his papers in Mexico City.) We remember now, but it happened then. The past existed once and is not invalidated by our approximate, incorrect, or disappearing memories of that past now, in the present. Perhaps this is what President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) meant by our “mystic chords of memory.” There really was a past. We even may remember some of it. We may suppress or forget other parts of it. Or we may simply not know part of the past.

Historians and other people often use the past to sanction present structures of authority, religious, or secular. But alternative histories may also justify overthrowing that same authority. Power and rebellion both exploit history. Genealogy legitimates monarchy and nobility or provides a guarantee of future salvation (for the Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Marxist history legitimates class struggle and revolution, not capitalist authority, as the final and inevitable product of history. The past may be used to explain the present and predict the future. No matter how the past is used and altered in the present, it was once there and then.² We seek traces of the past in the evidence we find in the present.

The past is intimately connected with time, a mysterious entity that we measure metaphorically in terms of space (a long or a short time). Early on, people developed calendars to help them keep track of past, present, and future time. Calendars are based on the motions of the natural world (sun, moon, stars, earth) and on a beginning of time (birth of a hero, founding of a religion or a nation, creation of the world, etc.). They contain both cyclic (hours, days, weeks, months, years) and linear (sequential years) elements. Cultures keep track of calendar time in many different systems. But calendars are a culturally defined measure of past time. The Mayans measured time in terms of days, years, and katuns (7,200 days, or about 20 years). Mayan time was both linear and cyclic, so that knowledge of recurrent patterns of events gave power and authority to the priests and wise men and women who understood the past. One historian of calendar time defines time as “interconnected hoops rolling up a great hill of progress.”³ Western time (like Chinese time) is linear. But for many different cultures, time was cyclic, a wheel and not an arrow, eternal recurrence and not linear progress.

We all have remembered pasts. I ask my students to give an accurate account of what they ate for breakfast. I then ask them to suggest various ways in which they might obtain evidence about that breakfast (eyewitness testimony, receipts, fragments found, etc.) that would prove that their account was true. The results can be messy but so is history. For human history involves historians and their human subjects in our common fate, that is, in what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) called the “crooked timber of humanity.” Unlike scientists, historians resemble the objects of their all too human study of the past. We do not need to get bent out of shape by the fact that we are all crooked timber. We understand others in the past precisely because they too, like us, were human beings. We can empathize with their triumphs and tragedies. We can imagine what we might have done in their situation.

The past, then, is not history. The past and its traces provide the raw material of history. History gives an account of the past in the present. We might well have begun with the evidence, those traces of the past that are accessible to us now, in the present. Evidence is the raw material of history, the texts, fossils, images, manuscripts, and artifacts that help us tell a story or make an argument. But without the raw material evidence from the past, there would be no surviving evidence in the present to be examined and questioned, no story to tell, and no history to discover and construct. Thus, we begin with the past and with the root word of history, story.

Notes

1 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 5.

2 J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).

3 Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 332.

For Further Reading

On the idea of the past, see especially Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). The historian J.H. Plumb explores the difference between past and history in The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). On time, see Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1989). See also, from an art history perspective, George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), as well as G.J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

An interesting recent study of memory in relating past and history is Patrick H. Hutton, History and the Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993). For contemporary history, try Ian Kershaw, The Global Age. Europe 1950–2017 (London: Penguin Books, 2019).

2 Story

The fascinating thing about telling stories is that they start with the end.

—Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 1994

In any war story, but especially a true one, it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen … The angles and vision are skewed.

—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990

Once upon a time, as we say, human beings maintained their family and community, in part, by telling stories about the past. They still do. Stories were generally oral, not written. Stories often contained as much fiction as fact. The storyteller might also be a healer or a magician. Today, literary critics talk of narratives more than stories. But story and narrative form the same linked chains of tales about the past. Stories tell of the past in ways that give meaning and coherence to the present.

Story in any culture forms the basis of myth, where gods and humans interact in a way that explains the natural world. The Greek poet Homer (c. eighth century b.c.e) in the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 b.c.e) in his Aeneid, provide memorable examples of the impulse to write down stories from a world of oral folk tales as epic poems. (We are not even certain that Homer was a real person, rather than a compilation of oral accounts.) There are many stories and gods in the polytheist universe of ancient Greece and Rome. Myths keep the collective unconscious alive by telling stories of gods and humans interacting in love and war. Native American Wabenaki stories abound of their legendary creator, Gluskap. Many Chinese myths and stories claim to predict the future. We often live by such stories, which are told and retold with variations over and over. Stories give meaning to our lives.

One particular Greek story links history with women. Clio was one of nine daughters of Zeus, god of the heavens, and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. In time, Clio took on the role of the “proclaimer” of the past, or the muse of history. She ultimately became the patron of all historians. In the West, the story of history as a discipline begins with the Greek goddess Clio.

A story generally exhibits a plot that develops from a beginning through a middle section to an end. Think of this triad as past, present, and future. Good stories may or may not end happily ever after, but they surely do end. The Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament are examples of oral traditions that have become written stories in which God is the main stage director and narrator of human events, keeping the Hebrews to their covenant and promising salvation to Christians at the end of time, and in eternity beyond death. God speaks and makes promises. God hears and accepts sacrifices. God reveals the truth at the end of time.

Stories exist to entertain, to moralize, and to teach us about life. The Iliad glorifies war and exemplifies the Hellenic code of the hero. The Aeneid tells of the genealogy of empire and the transfer of empire from Troy to Rome. The Florentine poet Dante and his Renaissance townsman, Boccaccio, were great storytellers who drew on the rich traditions of both pagans and Christians to portray the divine and human comedies. The Arthurian legends of late-medieval France and England told stories of knights and ladies, magic, and the quest for the Holy Grail. The Renaissance writer Christine de Pizan told stories about her imagined and liberated City of Ladies, unhindered by patriarchs. The Grimm brothers collected and reinvented German fairy tales. The British writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) and the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860–1914) helped make the short story a modern art form. So did Stephen King and Toni Morrison. Stories persist as part of our culture. They articulate cultural norms of right and wrong, good and evil. Stories reflect our morality—and immorality.

“I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories,” said American writer Washington Irving (1783–1859) in his Tales of a Traveler (1824).

Stories normally contain more elements of fiction than are allowed historians.

History was originally an attempt to tell a true story, then to get the facts straight, in order to explain and give meaning to the past. But in recent years the line between story and explanation, literature and history, has blurred. Some postmodern literary critics consider all the past a text and historians merely tellers of a relatively meaningful (or meaningless) story that they construct from textual fragments found. Texts are not necessarily fictions, of course. But our most important stories, especially stories about ourselves, may also be true or at least grounded in truth. Historians remain doggedly concerned with approximating the truth about the past on the basis of available evidence. Yet historians recognize, as they always have, their own present situation and inclinations. Recognizing their limitations, historians still want to tell true stories, not make up a fictional past. They want to figure out what probably happened, not what we might imagine happened. They abhor fake history.

Stories are like instructions or blueprints or manuals for the craft of history. They narrate the step-by-step process of construction in sequence. But stories do not give us the raw materials unless they are true, nor do they provide the tools for construction. They are a useful beginning, and we should know them before we settle down to work. Fake news and conspiracy theories are the enemies of history as a reasonably true story of the past.

We are, to paraphrase Aristotle, storytelling animals. But, as the contemporary writer of Vietnam War stories, Tim O’Brien, reminds us, stories blur the line between truth and fiction. Stories are normally fictional. They do not necessarily intend to tell the truth about the past. Truth and fiction may at times seem indistinguishable. Story is the root word for history. But stories about the past are not yet history, because they are not necessarily true. Stories imagine what might have been. History seeks to explain and understand a past that actually was. What, then, do we really mean by the word history?

For Further Reading

Story and history are closely related. My favorite analysis of the relationship is Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Maclean tells his story of trying to discover and reconstruct the history of smoke jumpers killed in a fire that blew up in Montana in August 1949. The writer Tim O’Brien explores the similarities and differences between story and history regarding the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1990). John H. Arnold, in his book History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), provides some enthusiastic examples of history as “true stories” about the past. See also John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

3 History

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History

—Thomas Hobbes, 1651

History is philosophy teaching by example

—Bolingbroke, 1735

Historical research is a process of discovery and construction. The historian investigates ...