The Practice and Purpose of History

Henry Glassie

Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. Bloomington. He is also a past president of
the Vernacular Architecture Forum and the American Folklore Society and a recipient of the Award for Superior
Service from the Turkish Ministry of Culture.
My ownmain writings on history germaneto thisessay are:HenryGlassie, Patterin the Maurilll Folk Clilture
Eester U"ited Statu (Philadelphia. 1968); Henry Glassie, Fo/~ Housing in Middle Virginia: A Struclural
Analysis ofHiuoric Arti/llets (Knoxville, 1976); HenryGlassie, Passmgthe Time in Ballymeno"e: Csltsr Ilnd HislOry of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia, 1982); and Henry Glassie, Tllrkish Traditional Art TOday
(Bloomington, 1993).
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History tangles the past with the present in webs of fact. Its practice is to treat things
that exist here and now as though they concerned the past and to use them in new
compositions designed to equip people for their trip into the future. This process
can be segmented to provide students of history with twO tasks. One studies the
things of the present - documents, broken crockery, elicited memories - in order to
speak about past cultures. Another studies the ways people construct understandings of the past in order to speak about culture in the present.
History was not part of my training. A folklorist of the new school, I went into
the field to observe the dynamics of creation and communication, but the people
I met and the objects I encountered disrupted the synchronic and urged me into
time. With time I have come to practice both kinds of history, analyzing old houses
to learn of the dead, studying historical constructions to learn why and how history
is important to the living,' Speaking here only of the latter, I will sketch a little of
what I have learned about history's purposes from practitioners who are not
historians by profession. My goal is comparative. The historians with whom I have
studied differ greatly from one another. Some call themselves historians, some do
not; they are men and women, poor and prosperous, rural and urban, American
and not. In telling you about them my wish is not to buttress the superiority nor
to denigrate the sincerity of the professional, but to work toward the traits general
to historical practice while discovering concepts that might improve the doing of
history. Purpose centers the quest.
Replace myth with history in the old formulation of functionalist anthropology,
and the grand purpose seems set. Myth, we once said, is the charter of society. A
mechanistic circularity doomed functionalism. If societies endlessly reaffirm the
status quo through stories told about the past, then change would seem impossible
and little room would remain in life for the creative will. But the functionalist's formula can be revitalized if we step back to note the historical context of colonial expansion within which the tribal societies studied by anthropologists were struggling

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:l Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts ofthe 'Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure
in the Archipelagoes ofMelanesian New Guinea (London, 1922). In my argument about myth, I bring function-

alism into conjunction with structuralism. Claude Levi-Strauss developed structuralism in a host of publications,
but the clearest instance of his structural practice, I believe, is Claude Levi-Strauss, The ~y ofthe Masks, trans.
Sylvia Modelski (Seattle. 1982). The historian will find a useful, brief statement in Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and
Meaning (New York, 1978), ch. 4, and a necessary adventure for the intellect in Claude levi-Strauss, The Savage
Mind (Chicago, 1966). My schematic treatment of the shrines of Bangladesh is derived from Malinowski, Argonauts
ofthe 'Western Pacific, tempered by Victor Turner, TheRitualProcess: Structure and Anti-Structure(Chicago, 1969).
For more on the phenomenon, see Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncret~stic Tradition in Bengal(Princeton, 1983), ch. 6.

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to maintain themselves, or if we step up to observe the intricate process in which

the sacred narrative and the society it charters both exist only in a constant state
of reconfiguration. Then we can say history's purpose is to charter societies, consolidating them in the face of variable dangers, while itself lying beyond consolidation in a realm of endless revision where facts fuse with affect. The past about which
history is a tale is so enormous that all narratives are incomplete and, therefore, intended by their creators to gather some people, while excluding others, in accord
with the needs of the moment. History-like myth, powerful, suggestive, and inevitably fragmentary-exists to be altered, to be transformed without end, chartering social orders as yet unimagined.
The great functionalist study is Bronislaw Malinowski's magnificent Argonauts
ofthe "Western Pacific, but let me illustrate out of my own research. The lush, vast
delta of Bangladesh is spattered with small shrines. Occupying the present, mute
features of daily experience, these objects provoke questions. The answersare historical. The men who tend the shrines, as archivists care for documents, keeping them
from decay, tell stories that explain their existence. Separate on the landscape, the
shrines, once explained, join in the mind as episodes in the epic of the arrival of
Islam. The biography of the saint venerated at the shrine invests the building with
meaning, and the circle of significance is entered when the shrine's ritual is enacted.
Manir Uddin, keeper of the shrine, instructs the pilgrim to pray while placing a
burned clay horse beside the tomb of Ghora Pir in remembrance of one of the holy
horsemen who brought the faith of the one God to BengaL In ritual, a social unit
is momentarily constituted, fused in a oneness of observance. Then through repetitious enactment, the ritual, cued by an object, founded upon historical narrative,
consolidates a small community of devotees while, simultaneously, tightening the
bonds that connect them into the international congregation of a great religion. z
Nothing is set, foregone. The shrine could be left to rot, the story forgotten. But
preserved, the little building invites a question. The answer yields an explanation,
producing understanding. Understanding invites participation in a customary activity. Repeated enactment invites committed participation, the formation of an ongoing social order, history's conspicuous purpose. A holy shrine, it could have been
a book, a faded photograph, an old war story; it might have been fireworks on the
Fourth ofJuly, interrupting the night sky to prompt a tale that requests social commitment through new historical understanding.
An old man in Ireland, one in the Owens clan of the townland of Sessiagh, told
me how he was working at the hay as a lad when he was told to take his scythe and

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G. M. Trevelyan, History and the Reader (London, 1945), 22.

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mow the Red Meadow. He knew the place but not the name. The name made the
place distinct. History isolates into clarity some pieces out of the whole, differentiating- to generate interest. There are many peach orchards but only one to
capitalize, many meadows along the Arney Riverbut only one called red. Interested,
he asked for the origin of the name and received the tale of a sixteenth-century
battle that left the field red with the blood of the invader. Knowing the name,
learning its history, he was led, he told me, to feel more at home, more densely
and maturely a member of his community. The old men confirmed their authority
through knowledge. Fresh with knowledge, he followed their orders willingly, cutting swath after swath for the common good, while details in the tale, the vision
of dauntless Red Hugh Q'Donnellleading the Irish to victory, deepened in him a
sense of oneness that widened beyond his little green place, rich with history, to
join him with unknown others similarly bent upon resistance. The English historian
G. M. Trevelyan says the historian's job is raising the historical consciousness of all
people, save the Irish, whose historical consciousness (whose will to resist the English) is already too strong." Little wonder when the fields and hills and ruined
churches echo with accusation.
The transformational sequence in historical awarenesssteps from query to explanation, from understanding through validation to commitment. It is history's purpose to preserve things that prompt questions as much as to supply answers that
inspire action. In allowing verbose labels and simplistic narratives to rise into dominance overassemblies of artifacts, curators in museums show that they do not understand. In battling the bulldozers that strip places of their pasts, the ladies and gentlemen of the historic preservation movement show that they do. Their effort is to
conserve a cultural environment within which it might be possible for questions to
rise and personal commitment to root and collective order to flower.
From the present to the past to the present again with social consequences for
the future, history turns through the functionalist's cycle to charter society. Historical practice is political, but it is not necessarily subservient to or subversive of
prevailing power. The historian's story, the tale of the priest or the man who cuts
the hay, expands through enlarging circles of identity from the self through the
gathering of active participants to a wide imagined collective. But that largest ring
of inclusion might as easily be oppositional to, as coterminous with, say, the state.
The southerner and northerner can tell the story of the Civil War, using the same
facts, but shaded to different purpose, one to assert regional identity in opposition
to the state, the other to affirm national identity in opposition to regional fragmentation.
I spent a decade of study in Ireland, and then a decade in Turkey. In both places
I find the historians of the countryside beginning their tales in evident reality, in
the strange sparkling water of a well, the odd shape of a mountain village. The explanation returns to the past, then expands to join the little community with the large.
For the Turkish historian the large community is Turkey, the place of the Turks, peo-

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Impressed by the temporal patterning described in Fernand Braudel, Q" History, trans. Sarah Matthews
(Chicago. 1980). and appreciating the honestprogress he made toward a comprehensive view basedon that patterningin Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Metiite"anea" World i" the Ageo/PhilipII, trans. Sian
Reynolds (2 vols. New York. 1972). esp, 186-87,460. 734. 798-800. 1073, 1242-45 (describing an ageas much
Suleyman's as Philip's), I was disappointed by the absence of references to relevant works on material culture by
archaeologists. geographers. and historians and dismayed bythe ethnocentrism and simplistic evolutionism of Fernand Braudel, The Structures ofEveryday Lift: The Li",itsofthe PoJsible, trans. Silo Reynolds (Berkeley. 1992).
jean-Paul Sartre explicates a process of historical analysis that offers the great promise of integrating synchronic
and diachronic attitudesin the prolegomenon to Jean-Paul Sartre, C,itiq*e ofDialectical Reaso,,: Tbeory ofPrecticili Emembles, trans. AlanSheridan-Smith (London. 1976); Jean-Paul Sartre, Sefilrch for a Method, trans. Hazel
E. Barnes (New York, 1963). His historical project is described in the fifth part of the fine biography: Ronald
Hayman. Sarlre: A Lift (New York, 1987). Any practitioner would benefit from reading jean-Paul Sartre, "A Plea
forIntellectuals;' inJean-Paul Sartre, Between Exjste"titJlitm "nd Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York. 1974).
, For example. see The Teaching ofBuddha (Tokyo: 8ukkyo Dendo Kyokai. 1966). 80-88, 196~200.

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pled out of CentralAsia, shaped upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire byKemal
Atarurk, the father of the Turks, and unified bythe Turkish language and a. Turkish
heritage ofsacred teaching. Butfor the Catholic farmer in Ulster, the larger community isthe Irish nation, thwarted byEnglish intrusion, projected byperpetual rebels
in quiet tales and violent verse spoken in the tongue of the invader.
Constructing similar histories to different ends, Turkish and Irish historians are
alike in that theydo not force the past into a single paradigm. Instead, theyconnect
some facts in one way, some in another. The academic historian, bycontrast, might
accept the generic constraints of periodic narrative and struggle courageously to subsumeit allinto a masterscheme. It was Fernand Brandel's failure: stretching to speak
globally of everyday life, he fell back upon the crudest variety of evolutionistic delusion. It was Jean-Paul Sartre's dream: since there was one past, there must be one
story, one retrogressive, progressive melding of psychology and history;' But from
any single account, most is missing. Women are missing, and poor men, dark
people, common labor, painful routines, little joys: the baby's smile, the lover's
touch, raindrops on the turned furrow. What ismissing is that which doesnot move
in time with the developmental conventions of narration. That is what the great
E. P. Thompson told me;folklorists' offer the ultimate challenge to historical orderto the profession and to the political and economic institutions it supports- bytheir
willingness to entertain phenomenathat do not exhibitthe patternsof change that
can be assimilated into the big story, broken by period, linked by chains of cause
and,effect. The historical world I have entered isthe transitory one described bythe
Buddha, so complicated in its fluid intermixtures of cause, so multiplex in its overlappings of temporal rhythms, that origins dissolve into oblivion, connections ramify toward infinity, and only the predicament of the moment as understood by a
flawed mortal can determine which pieces of the past are pertinent.'
Country historians in Ireland and Turkey understand. History is too complex to
contain in one structure. They use the common experiences of sequence and sameness to create at once two distinct histories. One is arranged in time, the other in
space. A similar distinction is found in myth. Some mythologies are constructed
genealogically, linking the people of the first time through lines of descent to the
peopleof our time. Othersareconstructed spatially, linkingthe first peopleto those

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of today through the landscape both inhabit. There is a parallel in social orders.
Some are constructed (especially by nomadic people) to create unity through
familial or ethnic identity. Others are constructed (especially by settled people) to
create unity through civic or regional identity. It follows that as mobility increasesin contemporary America for instance - identity by lineage would rise to challenge
identity by place, and history, if not the very land, would become a battleground
for factions, some confusing the nation with the state, others confusing the nation
with a particular people. In Ireland and Turkey, where a sense of belonging is derived
from both ancestry and communal interaction, rural historians do not strive for a
single story. They use the logicsof sequence and sameness, time and space, to govern
different realms of historical fact.
Certain facts from socioeconomic experience are linked in sequential structures.
Farmers know their work, they worked with talkative elders, and they describe
progressive sequences in agricultural technology, in housing, transportation, and
communication. Then they extrapolate from what they know, purifying the far past
and the near future in order to clarify the current direction by hyperbole. They will
say everyone has a tractor now or a television, knowing full well that they do not,
much as the bourgeois American will, say everyone uses computers now, despite the
world's millions who live without electricity. The farmer-historians do not attempt
to attach all history to the structures of progress that are apparent in the merely
technological sphere. Most of their history comes into existence in independent and
circumscribed narratives focused upon the human condition, told to raise enduring
moral issues. These stories do not float free. They are attached to the land, which
becomes a massivemnemonic device. Then knowledge of the land, necessaryto getting around, provides people with a collective warehouse of historical information,
shelved by location, from which facts can be lifted and shaped into distinct narratives that are performed in relation to each other to meet the instructional needs
of the instant.
People gather around their own historian, the one best able to frame vague,
general knowledge into the specific factual narratives that contain the messages
people must consider in their effort to live properly. These tales are not alienated
from modern existence by chronological distance. They deal with people who occupied the place that modern people do and who, in their lives, faced the problems
modern people face. We hear of widowswho were brave, tradesmen who were gifted,
farmers who were witty and wise, tricky saints who blessed this earth.
Despite the space that divides them, despite the extreme differences of their nations, one the inheritor of an empire, the other an old colony, the rural historians
of Turkeyand Ireland maintain comparable double histories. So, it seems, do many
Native Americans. Their concept cannot be reduced to Braudel's important distinction between histories of the long and short duration, but it is shadowed in professional writing. While there are histories patently designed to charter society, to explain and reinforce the status quo through master narratives of places and peoples,
there are other histories, close accounts of political events, military histories, art his-

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Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy ofthe Civil war: Meditations on the Centennial (New York, 1961). 107-9.

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tories, literary biographies, that are read less for their contribution to the big story
than for - as Robert Penn Warren said of the Civil War- their ability to teach their
readers about moral problems and human potential. 6
Its doubleness - now explaining the development of states of affairs, now artfully
moving people to awareness of their options-simultaneously undermines history's
social functions and establishes for it a subtler, higher purpose. Trapped between
the endless changes that history describes and the unchanging existential realities
history also describes, people are driven by knowledge into humanity. Through
genealogical and geographic description, one history pushes people into connection
and toward union, preventing identity from collapsing in upon the self and history
from dispersing into a billion biographies. Through well-told tales of human beings
in action, the other history prevents witless assent to political order, calling people
into understanding of themselves so that they will act knowledgeably, deciding
whether to acquiesce, rebel, or withdraw into isolation for imaginative discourse
with the shades of their choice.
It is among history's virtues that it is, at last, impossible. No tale, of course, can
capture much of the past, so every narrative, blatant in its incompleteness, must
come upon the mind as an artifice, a willed confection, always questionable, with
luck entertaining, and entertainment is not the least of history's purposes. Not only
is every tale partial and artful, but there is no obvious order in the past, no single
construct that can satisfactorily encompass the change and sameness that any account requires for accuracy. Disorderly, fragmentary, malleable, history leaves room
for diverse participation. The professionals cannot do it perfectly, so all can take a
turn. They must. Everyone is obliged by history's cultural importance and its clear
use in planning, to try at times to pull a little account of the past into order, to
act like a historian.
Being important and impossible, history remains worth doing and learning. The
fortunate failure of all the king's men and women to get it together again, the manifest nobility of their effort, and the profound social consequences of their success
in replacing myth with history for our age have made me an ardent consumer of
historical literature and determined what I admire in certain authors and works:
Herodotus for his antique comfort with mythic structures and his futuristic interdiseiplinarity; Geoffrey Keating for the generosity with which he handled the fantastical in the sober chronicle of his wounded nation; Edward Gibbon for his stylish
sentences and the moral fervor that enabled him to keep his sprawling story in
order; Douglas Southall Freeman for his scrupulous effort to place his actors on the
stage of their own days in Leej- Lieutenants; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for her patient
teasing of significance out of the unpromising text of Martha Ballard's diary; E.
Estyn Evans and W. G. Hoskins for teaching how the land can be opened and read
like a book; Richard EHmann for his deft integration of biographical detail and creative expression in JamesJoyce; E. P. Thompson for his willingness to give time to
movements that ran into dead ends and his courage in rising from the desk to go

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7 Manuel Komroff, ed., The HistoryofHerodotus, trans. George Rawlinson (New York, 1928). The most complete version of Geoffrey Keating's manuscript of the earlier seventeenth century is Geoffrey Keating, History of
Ireland, ed. David Comyn and Patrick S. Dineen (4 vols., London, 1902-1914). Keating's inclusion of the mythic
and epic, which brought him censure from early historians, should bring him praise from the modern. His own
position is clear, rational, and reiterated. See, for example, the most usual version: Geoffrey Keating, Keating's
GeneralHistory ofIreland, ed, Dermod O'Connor (Dublin, 1861), 63, 178, 190-92, 280-81, 342, 364. Edward
Gibbon, The History ofthe Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire (1776-1788; 12 vols., London, 1807). Given
my argument, it is interesting that Gibbon, after considering many historical projects, was inspired to his task by
visiting Rome and seeing the place, the palpable ruins. See ibid., XII, 432; and Dero A. Saunders, ed., TheAutobiography ofEdwardGibbon (New York, 1961), 154. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee'sLieutenants: A Study in Command(3 vols., New York, 1943-1944). While the ground beneath the battle and the education of the officersmake
the common examples, Freeman's comments on religion illustrate dearly his urge to enter the times he describes.
See ibid., III, xvii-xxiii, I, xxviii. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tizle: The Life ofMartha Ballard, Basedon
Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990); E. Estyn Evans, France: A Geographical Introduction (London, 1937);
E. Estyn Evans, IrishFolk Wlys (N~ York, 1957); E. Estyn Evans, Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland.' A Guide
(London, 1966); E. Estyn Evans, Mourne Country: Landscape and Life in South Down (Dundalk, 1967); E. Estyn
Evans, The Personality ofIreland (Cambridge, Eng., 1973); W. G. Hoskins, The Makingofthe English Landscape
(London, 1955); W. G. Hoskins, The MidlandPeasant: TheEconomic and Social History ofa Leicestersbire Village
(London, 1965); W. G. Hoskins, ProvincialEngland: Essays in Socialand Economic History (London, 1965); W. G.
Hoskins, Fieldwork in LocalHistory (London, 1967); W. G. Hoskins, English Landscapes: How to Read the ManMade Scenery ofEngland (London, 1973); W. G. Hoskins, One Man's England (London, 1978). In the United
States, the contemporary and peer of Evans and Hoskins is Fred Kniffen. A few of his key papers are conveniently
gathered in H. Jesse Walker and Randall A. Detro, eds., CulturalDiffusion and Landscapes: Seiections by Fred
B. Kniffen (Baton Rouge, 1990). Richard Ellmann,jamesjoyce (New York, 1982); E. P. Thompson, The Making
ofthe English Working Class (New York, 1963); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin ofthe Black
Act (New York, 1975); E. P. Thompson, Customsin Common: Studiesin Traditional Popular Culture (New York,
1991).For an excellent introduction to William Morris, whose writings of a century ago continue to inspire students
of historical material culture, see E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romanticto Revolutionary (New York, 1977).
And see especially William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art (London, 1882); William Morris, Signs of Change
(London, 1888); and William Morris, Architecture, Industry, and Wealth: CollectedPapers (London, 1902). His
great historical imagination is on display in William Morris, A Dreamofjohn Balland a King'sLesson (Hammersmith, 1892).

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into the streets like the hero we shared, William Morris, in whom historical imagination pulsed with revolutionary potential. 7
Because it is always incomplete, because it always merges artifice with sincerity,
because its social functions are manifold, history is as rewarding a topic for the ethnographer as it is for the writer and reader. During fieldwork, in the midst of cultural inquiry, I have been led into colloquy with many historians and into admiration, and love, for one above all. Hugh Nolan called himself a historian. His
neighbors called him that, and they called him odd. An old man, a bent and broken
farmer, he was also a saint, and God called him home in 1981.
History exists, Hugh Nolan taught, because there are people with the will to work
as he did, gathering up the facts, rehearsing them into order, then telling the whole
tale truthfully. Falsehood, Mr. Nolan said, puts the tongue and soul into contention, causing people to be inarticulate, to worry and age. Speaking the truth is a
joy. It spread his body with pleasure. His words flowed with effortless grace, his eye
was bright as a child's.
When the patriots gathered in his tiny home, its interior smoked to every shade
of black, Mr. Nolan would pluck one story off a hilltop to speak of the heroes of
their place. Old warriors would come alive in their minds to fight again for Irish
freedom. Then he would reach out, collect another, and tell it to show how people

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at war risk damnation for breaking Our Lord's commandment to love. And they
would stop to think. And that is history's purpose.
Hugh Nolan wasthe strongest man of his generation, the oldest man of his place.
When I asked him to describe the changes he had witnessed, he dutifully arranged
things in progressive sequence, recounting the shifts from the cart to the automobile
to the helicopter, from rumor to newspapers to radio to television. There has been
a great improvement in people's lives, he said. "But," he went on, lethe greatest
change in my lifetime has been that people has lost all respect for authority, civil
or divine. Today there is neither law nor order. And that is the greatest change."
A life lived with an open, agile mind, filled with conflicting historical facts,
meant that no simple concept could satisfy Hugh Nolan. He was not drawn by
nostalgia for the past, nor was he duped by the myth of progress that lures people
into acceptance of the sequential fashions that power capitalism and corrupt scholarship. The best of the practitioners I have met, whether in books or on the earth,
he had come to a great historian's understanding. His clear eye remained upon me
as he concluded: ''Aye, the two things happen at the one time. Things get better.
And they get worse."

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Hugh Nolan. Rossdoney, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, 1976.

Drawing by Henry Glassie.