Professional Documents
Culture Documents
R. Berkhofer
ISBN: 9780230617209
DOI: 10.1057/9780230617209
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ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60868-9
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I Construing the Past as History:
Processes and Presuppositions
1 Historical Methods: From Evidence to Facts 3
2. Historical Synthesis: From Statements to Histories 49
Part II Comparing Histories: Forms, Functions,
Factuality, and the Bigger Picture
3. Texts as Archives and Histories 93
4. Things in and as Exhibits, Museums,
and Historic Sites 133
5. Films as Historical Representations and Resources 175
Afterword: The History Effect and Representations
of the Past 215
Notes 219
Index 259
producing a history no matter what its form. Historians must also orga-
nize or synthesize various and often intellectually contradictory compo-
nents 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 addi-
tion to the usual texts.
In an attempt to offer my readers a chance to consider their own con-
clusions on the topics I discuss, I have adopted two rhetorical conven-
tions. 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 orga-
nization 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 fash-
ioning 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 vari-
ous, dynamic, complicated, and perhaps problematic in the end.
Historical Methods
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 main-
tain 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 histo-
rians 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 profes-
sion does, according to many historians and other scholars.2
shops, and other businesses, all interest some historians today. Such arti-
facts 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 man-
sions; slum tenements and immigrant ghettoes as suburbs. Even bodies,
bones, and hair now interest some historians as much as their anthropo-
logical 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 pub-
lic 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 pam-
phlets, 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, doctri-
nal 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, draw-
ings, 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 previ-
ous two. It stresses the mode of production and distribution, both of
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 com-
puter analyzes massive amounts of data faster and surer than the manual
methods of old. Technology moves so fast these days that it makes obso-
lescent 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 pho-
tographs, 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 per-
cent 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 docu-
mentary sources in his historical methods handbook under the heading
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 fac-
tual particulars she declares? Are a document’s dates and authorship accu-
rate 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 sur-
vival as a useful source, then, presumes a division between the facts estab-
lishing 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 pro-
fession, 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 ceme-
teries, 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 mater-
ial aspects. Coins or monuments contain linguistic inscriptions and pic-
torial matter as well as form and materiality. Murals and paintings are
pictorial but also frequently symbolic or depict a story. Songs and news-
reels are verbal as well as musical or pictorial. Often sources from the
medieval and ancient worlds demand special techniques and skills pro-
vided by what were once called auxiliary or ancillary sciences such as his-
torical 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, authen-
tication, and transcribing of medieval and other archaic handwritten doc-
uments), 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 author-
ship of a document or the producer of an artifact; determining the date
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 sim-
ple 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 gen-
eral 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 cor-
ruptions.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 analy-
sis. Supposedly an edict from Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to
convert to Christianity in 312 CE, the document gave the Pope domin-
ion 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 pro-
duced in Stephen II’s chancery for that purpose. In 1440, Lorenzo Valla’s
analysis of anachronisms of style and reference in the document ques-
tioned its authenticity. Historians of historical scholarship and method
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 unmask-
ing 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 twentieth-
century 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 twenty-
four 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 viru-
lent anti-Semitism of the times. The automobile maker Henry Ford pub-
licized 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
genealogy, and provenance can become its own source of data for the dif-
fusion 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 noth-
ing 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 accu-
rately. 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 print-
ing, 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 “orig-
inal” that ensured the survival of some of them into the present. But even
here the press operator or other intermediary between author and audi-
ence may have edited the text or image from what the author or artist
intended. Of course, the purpose of many original documents and arti-
facts—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 peace-
time about policy. Regardless of kind, only a small part of past documents
and other artifacts survive into the present.
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 sur-
vives 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 cre-
ated and, therefore, whether it can be trusted as a source from which the
historian can infer correct factual particulars about the times (and con-
texts) of its creation. The importance of a good pedigree for a document
even became an issue in recent international diplomacy after the destruc-
tion 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 picto-
rial 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 systemati-
cally for their retrieval and viewing. Unofficially, as many researchers dis-
cover, numerous documents and artifacts are not catalogued, their retrieval
is not as certain as hoped, and many artifacts remain in private hands out-
side 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.)
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 criti-
cism discussed in the next section) because that confirmation occurs
through operations external to the artifact itself, usually through compar-
ison with the same or similar kinds of artifacts. Though the object of analy-
sis 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 attri-
butions, 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 arti-
facts, 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 state-
ments about particulars. Conversely, that a single source can be both pri-
mary 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 sec-
ondary 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
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 pre-
vious 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 consis-
tent 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 con-
demned 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 environ-
ments without the paraphernalia of electric wires, anomalous buildings,
and modern inventions. A 2002 documentary miniseries on Benjamin
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 know-
ing 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 eth-
nicity 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 histo-
rians. 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 docu-
ments 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,
upon how long ago the historical actors lived or how different their cul-
ture 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 his-
torians’ 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 mul-
tiple 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 postmod-
ernists might say prevailing myth—of historians is that their productions
rest on an empirical basis of factuality. That factuality is presumed to con-
stitute the accuracy of history and therefore its truthfulness. That truth-
fulness is both produced and warranted by the techniques of the historical
method. Thus the factuality, accuracy, truthfulness, and methods of his-
torical 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 sec-
tion, I label “re-representation” or “re-presentation” for short, because the
historian repeats, that is presents again, one or more statements (to whole
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 con-
struction, 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-pre-
sentation 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 repre-
sentation constructed by the historian. Both depend equally upon infer-
ence and interpretation by the historian. Both represent the past as
history. Representation, however, is the more inclusive term. All re-pre-
sentations 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 tex-
tual in a general sense. Classic methods manuals developed rules particu-
larly 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 par-
ticulars 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 phys-
ical and behavioral manifestations to abstract, symbolic constructions,
from, say, uncomplicated plain everyday beliefs and activities to compli-
cated imagery and social events to complex statistics and poetry. If exter-
nal 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
mean what it seems at face value? Does the document follow standard
conventions used in letters, laws, reports, or treaties at the time? The sen-
timents 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 testi-
mony 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 con-
fidential 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 con-
sumption. (But what of slanting for an audience of one, especially a pow-
erful 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 pro-
ceedings, for example, were secret until well into the eighteenth century.
After that time what records of the debates were published were sum-
maries 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
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 let-
ter signed or a speech delivered by the president of the United States, or,
for that matter, any major leader around the world today? These prob-
lems 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 mini-
mum, if not lecturers and booklets, as noted later in Chapter 4. Even
though such texts as poetry, songs, novels, and other creative and sym-
bolic materials can be reproduced by the historian, they only become re-
presented 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 histo-
ries 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, histo-
rians should investigate documentary sources not as wholes but for spe-
cific answers to the classic questions of who, what, when, where, and how
(and maybe why). Although historians may pose the questions when re-
presenting the facts, they expect and, more importantly, accept and repro-
duce 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 understand-
ing the matters under study. At its most inclusive, that means the historian
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 ques-
tions, 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 histori-
cal actors understood social categories and groupings, social and physical
environment, culture and politics describes matters best and most accu-
rately. 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 sin-
gle 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 histo-
rians 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
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 inter-
pretations. The most obvious and elementary rebuttal occurs when one
derived factual statement discredits another. Somewhat more compli-
cated 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’ gen-
eralizations. While a compilation of many facts may not prove a point,
just one well-chosen fact can disprove a generalization. Still more compli-
cated 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 docu-
ments.” 66 The phrase implies that even a complicated synthesis of facts,
argument, viewpoint, and moral outlook can be tested as a whole by sim-
ple 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 founda-
tion 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 under-
stand 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 pro-
vided 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 indissolu-
ble; 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 advan-
tageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of
their Interests.”67 For many years that sentence was interpreted as anoth-
erexample 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
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 para-
phrases may be constructed to a smaller or larger extent. The two kinds of
facts, but especially those constructed, always depend for both their cre-
ation 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 infor-
mation 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 bureau-
cratic 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;
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, his-
torians 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 doc-
umentary 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 pro-
duced 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 analy-
sis 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 pre-
sume 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 statisti-
cal analysis to determine the presence and role of political parties in the
electorate and the government or the issues salient to voters. Such statis-
tical analysis not only generates new facts but also new explanations of
past phenomena different than the people at the time may have con-
ceived. While documents from the time are utilized in such analysis and
some past observers may have given the same generalizations and causes,
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 profes-
sional practice and social custom and are therefore considered knowledge.
These second order facts may be constructed but they are considered fac-
tual 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 re-
presented, because of the greater degree of interpretation needed to estab-
lish the fact. Historians might differ over which documentary evidence is
pertinent, what the evidence really means, and what statements are there-
fore 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 illus-
trates well this point and its associated problems. Historians can agree on
the authenticity of the document as such but disagree over how to inter-
pret 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 treat-
ments 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 inter-
pretive context they use to understand all the relevant documents.
Washburn favors Berkeley over Bacon and excuses all his actions, no mat-
ter 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 por-
trayed Bacon as the “Torchbearer of the Revolution,” as one of his books
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 pro-
ponents of this statement as fact believe that the elevation of the monu-
ment 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 knowl-
edge and even interpretation. Of course, the east face of the capstone con-
tains 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 re-
presented 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
frequently prefer the local and transnational over the national and inter-
national, countermemory to the official version, and even the people’s
experience and memory over long- dominant formal histories in the pro-
fession. 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 gen-
eration of historians condemned that liberalism for the actions of the big
state it justified and the warfare, racism, gender inequality, and continu-
ing 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 mem-
ory 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 repre-
sented 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 back-
ground 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 pro-
fessional 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 pub-
lic 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 Synthesis
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 compila-
tion 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.
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 classi-
ficatory schemes center on technique: biographical; statistical and quan-
titative; 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 (syn-
chronic) 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 progres-
sive 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 his-
tories, but they do not identify the general and common component parts
of histories as such, especially across mediums and schools. Professional his-
torians 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 “chron-
icle” or “annals” at the same time as they repudiate giving some overall pat-
tern 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 sug-
gest one basis for a general categorization of components.2 Older dis-
agreements 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 sci-
ence 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 understand-
ing the modes of exposition chiefly as text and discourse.5 The enduring
conflict over the possibility of objectivity in historical practice and perva-
siveness of bias in historical works indicates the role of evaluation and
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 nar-
ratives 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 interac-
tions over time with various social structures. Public, cultural, or institu-
tional 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 pro-
portions, 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 sub-
textually. 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 perspec-
tive of the last chapter, the big question is whether the narratives, argu-
ments, 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 cre-
ativity of the historian? And from whose point of view are they presented?
topical, and synchronic works offer implicitly always and usually explic-
itly 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 knowl-
edge 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 expla-
nation. 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 nar-
rative 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 expla-
nation 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 under-
stand 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 cau-
sation construct images or models of the actors’ behavior or circum-
stances 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 peo-
ples to the nature of bureaucracies and other complex social organiza-
tions. 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
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 under-
standing 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 psycholo-
gizing 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, tauto-
logical, 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 ques-
tions, 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 theo-
ries 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
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 press-
ing 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 expla-
nation. Philosophers of social science range the basic content of social
explanation between two extremes they have christened “method-
ological 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 expla-
nation is presumed to ground as it flows from a classic nineteenth-cen-
tury liberal view of society.
Holism, or collective or social structural explanation, stresses the coer-
cive 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 compris-
ing 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
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, cor-
porations, 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 explana-
tion? 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 dif-
ferences 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 produc-
tions. What are ideas and belief systems for the individualist become ide-
ologies 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 individu-
alist become conflicting interests as the result of contradictory social loca-
tions for the holist. Interest group demands for the individualist become
evidence of class struggle for the holist; social systems become social
model of human behavior. At the same time the middle way must explain
why groups of individuals choose to create social rules, coercive collectiv-
ities, 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 cul-
ture 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 par-
ticularly 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 concen-
trating on the microcosm of specific individuals or small communities for
clues to the macrocosm of institutions and society. Both favored anthro-
pology over sociology as inspiration, particularly the intense local ethno-
graphic 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 indi-
viduals 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 stud-
ied. Microhistorians produced noted works on rebels, heretics, criminals,
or other individuals whose confrontations with social customs and offi-
cial institutions produced detailed records. Although microhistorians
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 cos-
mos of a northern Italian miller was a microhistory best seller of this
kind.32 Some historians of alltagsgeschichte studied peasants and folk cul-
ture in the early modern era, but most preferred studies of workers, pop-
ular 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 nor-
mative turn by the 1990s in the field. As they conclude, “we always theo-
rize 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 pro-
fessional 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.
and the public. Historians of military affairs, foreign policy, and educa-
tion 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 indi-
cate 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 vol-
ume 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
not convinced of those arguments already. So too are the judgments ren-
dered 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 slave-
holders 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, hege-
monic and oppositional ideologies, and globalism and imperialism?
Should all history be critical history that seeks to challenge, even sub-
vert, 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 run-
ning 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 mean-
ing penetrate to the very core of the historical project. The only unac-
ceptable 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 pro-
paganda and organizational recruitment; religious groups through iden-
tity 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 profes-
sion 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
(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 objec-
tivity 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 perspec-
tive undoubtedly arises from the historian knowing the future of the past:
the outcomes of past aims and actions. At its extreme such retroactive pre-
diction 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 soci-
eties, 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 pre-
sent embody this somewhat teleological approach.53 Others propose his-
tory(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 his-
torians do and must do in lecture, book, exhibition, report, or film.
Part of the perplexity about political and moral judgments and per-
spective 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
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 con-
ceived 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 con-
querors’ place names are used? How did those living then understand spa-
tial 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 commu-
nication and transportation changes, historians need ever greater imagi-
nation 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 cul-
tures once pictured as isolated, self-contained islands outside the stream
of history are now depicted as archipelagos wide open to constant com-
mercial and intercultural exchange very much in the flow of world his-
tory.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.
The debate over the social construction of nature versus its indepen-
dent 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 con-
struction 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 the-
ory 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 histori-
ans 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 symboli-
cally and territorially. In line with these dual trends, the nation became
not only the preferred unit of analysis but was presumed the most appro-
priate—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 see-
ing nation formation as a multiple concatenation of events and persons
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, persis-
tence, stability, or transformation in the past?76
Diverse perspectives and meanings as with other kinds of interpreta-
tions 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 cir-
cle 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
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 his-
torical practice, truth results from the correspondence between the pre-
sumed 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 profes-
sional practices and products, most historians honor such strictness only
in spirit today. Professional ethics, social theory, and contending inter-
pretive community affiliations all point elsewhere. If (absolute) objectiv-
ity 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 the-
ory 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 justi-
fies 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 percep-
tion,”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
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 perspec-
tives, 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 histo-
rian’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 differ-
ent 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 commu-
nity and, second, negotiation between interpretive communities to expand
the original circle of agreement. Historical truths result from such objec-
tivity, 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
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 his-
tory excluded women and large sectors of society; social and cultural his-
tory 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 con-
structions. Sometimes the perspectives are widely shared by other histori-
ans 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 view-
point and purposes.
Multiculturalist and feminist theory underscored the presence of view-
point 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 man-
ifest to those who propound them but not necessarily to others. The
meaning of (a?) history will be clearest to those of the same interpretive
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 his-
tory.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 eco-
nomic 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 neoprogres-
sive interpretation from the 1970s onward. Those histories of history-
writing 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 well-
known master or grand narratives are the rise and spread of Western cap-
italism, nationalism, and imperialism across continents and centuries.93
When the framework or larger context is implicit in a number of his-
tories, 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
a history, and they validate that history as they organize it. Where once
history revealed the working of God’s will, classic historical metanarra-
tives 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 lib-
eral 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 per-
spective). 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 capi-
talism with its many discontents; the empowerment of subordinated
peoples and the rise of postcolonial hybrid cultures; the seemingly apoca-
lyptic ecological constraints on modern economies; and finally even the
arguments over the existence and effects of late industrialism and post-
modernism. 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 gen-
eral history, a school of history, or especially in what is referred to as his-
tory 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 coher-
ence to the ostensibly disparate facts, explanations, and generalizations
presented. Metanarratives underlie both individual and collective memo-
ries and supply the links between them. Such metanarratives, by provid-
ing 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 soci-
ety, or a culture. The academic history profession is still divided mainly
according to national histories. Nationalism may need to be explained in
Comparing 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 prod-
ucts preferred by the new profession. Even history in general was understood
chiefly as a text writ large. That heritage still influences the profession today.
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 cor-
porate 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 govern-
ments. Technically speaking, archives contain the noncurrent or discontin-
ued records of such a group. The term “archives” today refers at one and
the same time to the records themselves, the institutional agency han-
dling 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 fundamen-
tal, 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 main-
tained 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 descrip-
tion replicate the bureaucratic system of the creating organization and
probably its functions and structure. Thus the records themselves are evi-
dence 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, sub-
divided by series.
and making inferences. They must use knowledge from outside the col-
lection 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 gen-
eral 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 inter-
nal 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 trans-
formation of survivals into sources according to the historical method is
the end product of the archivists’ identification, authentication, classifi-
cation, 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 hold-
ings for public use, whether by historians, genealogists, students, lawyers,
local historians, filmmakers, or others.
At the risk of oversimplifying the differences among and within insti-
tutional types, I want to summarize briefly some of these common tasks
as prelude to considering their implications for the first degrees of inter-
pretation 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
and unusual if not unique. For the public, singularity or scarcity trans-
lates into the prices the paintings by renowned artists, the letters of
famous persons, or rare books fetch on the auction block. For the histo-
rian, 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 muse-
ums make about their holdings is that they are actual survivals from a cer-
tain 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 unin-
terpreted, 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 cri-
teria of usefulness must be based upon some interpretive goal. If the his-
torian 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 his-
torian 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 histo-
rian’s use of it through what and how they identify, preserve, store, orga-
nize, 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
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, muse-
ums, 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 institu-
tional origins and culling.14
Interpretive intervention commences with the recognition and identi-
fication 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 abun-
dance 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 deci-
sions made long ago. The survival of survivals depends upon the serendip-
ity 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, reli-
gious, and diplomatic records predominated until recent times, con-
cerned 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 classifica-
tion depend upon historians of the first resort contextualizing those hold-
ings 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 inter-
pret survivals is highlighted particularly in the preservation and presenta-
tion of historic sites, which will be covered in the next chapter. The older
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 recontex-
tualization. Archives, museums, libraries, and other repositories provide a
new context for their holdings through their arrangement and classifica-
tion 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 seem-
ingly unchanged from the past exist in a changed physical, social, and cul-
tural context, as any city, college campus, or countryside demonstrates.
Last, interpretation and intervention occurs in description and exhibi-
tion. 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 per-
son, 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 exhibi-
tions particularly reveal the depth and nature of interpretation in arrange-
ment, 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.
full-fledged histories at the other. For the sake of organizing the discus-
sion, I have grouped the various kinds of interpretive intervention into
three general categories: reproduction and re-presentation (in this sec-
tion) appears to use less intervention and seemingly interpretation
between sources and finished product, while construction of a full-
fledged history (in next section) demands more of both. Greater interpre-
tations 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 arti-
facts, 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 pub-
lic records; from variorum editions of classic authors to classroom “source-
books.” What historians seek in and through these forms are reproductions
of the originals that are as accurate, complete, and authoritative as possi-
ble. What is possible depends upon the nature of the original source, the
medium of duplication, the degree of editorial intervention and interpre-
tation, 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 hand-
written 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
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 vari-
ations 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 pub-
lish 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 dif-
ferent versions? Such a combined text, of course, resembles no one origi-
nal 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 repos-
itories, 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 pol-
icy 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 con-
text 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 con-
straints? What in other words may be safely omitted as well as what must
be included in the name of comprehensiveness? The standards for selec-
tion vary by how scarce or abundant the documents are. Scarcity in one
sense simplifies the editors’ job, for every scrap must probably be repro-
duced. Sheer abundance forces choices because of constraints of space,
time, and money. Should every relevant document in a collection be
reproduced even if there are multiple copies of the same or similar docu-
ments? Or should just a sampling be taken of such multiple but formu-
laic 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 doc-
uments 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 simi-
larly 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 compil-
ing 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 biographi-
cal 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 with-
out warning the reader.21
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 con-
sumption in the name of insight into the past through partial reproduc-
tion. 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 oper-
ation 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 selec-
tion 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 pro-
ducer of it stated emphatically or matter-of-factly, sarcastically or halt-
ingly, 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
of their appeals to king and courts for relief from capital punishment for
the various murders the petitioners committed or attempted. These “par-
don tales” appear to be repeated or re-presented in the letters of remis-
sion issued by the king. While the petitioners’ words may not be
verbatim, Davis believes they are close to the actual stories of events, cir-
cumstances, 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 argu-
ments 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 tran-
scribed 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 transcrip-
tions retain the original sixteenth-century orthography and use of “et
cetera” of the chancellery copies but modernize capitalization and nor-
malize 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 argu-
ment as she discusses the many different kinds of events considered ger-
mane in the tales; the characterization of petitioners versus the adultery,
drunkenness, and bad behavior of their victims; the language and emplot-
ments used to gain sympathy for commuting the customary death sen-
tence; 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 generaliza-
tions, 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
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 republican-
ism came to coexist in American history according to Morgan with ram-
ifications 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 con-
venience 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
On the other hand, the remainder of the book will supposedly justify his
speculative extrapolations, even though he does not return to these spe-
cific 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 “peo-
ple” 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 re-
presenting a brief portion of an original source: Samuel Davies’ tract,
Virginia’s Danger and Remedy, published in Williamsburg in 1756, in sen-
tences 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 full-
fledged histories.
Viewpoint and voice. Even though Morgan repeats the derogatory
terms “papists” and “savages” from Davies’ bigoted polemic without quo-
tation marks in sentence 7, I take that omission not to be his true view-
point 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 colo-
nial 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, func-
tional 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
and liberty, and his quantitative analysis of slaveholding in the most pop-
ulous 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 min-
ister 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
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 predis-
position 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, cer-
tainly 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 con-
servatives 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 cen-
tury. Obviously, he feels the Civil War and its aftermath brought needed
change. He wrote the book during a time when many called for the radi-
cal 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
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 inden-
tured 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, quan-
titative snapshot of Virginia society around the time of Bacon’s Rebellion,
has narrative elements, and the four seemingly topical chapters conclud-
ing 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 succes-
sively 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 begin-
ning the contradiction between American freedom and American slavery.
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 inhabi-
tants 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 ren-
dered 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 plenti-
ful land (taken from its Native American occupants of course) is under-
mined 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 con-
trolled 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
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 assem-
blages of description, generalization, rhetoric, narrative, argument, chronol-
ogy, 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 sub-
plots 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, gen-
eralization, inference, perspective, lesson, and rhetorical style is so seam-
less, 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, some-
times 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 com-
plete 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 over-
all 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 his-
torian’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
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 regis-
ters,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 docu-
mentation,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 sympa-
thetic 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 interpreta-
tion to their readers. They use such words and phrases as “perhaps,” “prob-
ably,” “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
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’ per-
spectives (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, perspec-
tive 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 his-
tory 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 analy-
sis, story and meaning, voice and viewpoint, explanation and interpreta-
tion, 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 eco-
nomically, 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 inter-
pretation in turn.53
Greater Interpretation:
From Histories to History
General histories, interpretive schools, historiographies, and metanarra-
tives 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 syn-
theses as texts and products. Just as there are the survivals themselves at a
more minimal end of interpretive intervention, so there are historical syn-
theses almost totally dependent upon other histories at the other end. The
beau ideal of the full-fledged, constructed history in the profession pre-
sumes 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 knowl-
edge, 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 depen-
dent 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 lev-
els 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 comprehen-
sive 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 cap-
italist system. Topically, they may cover a history of warfare, disease,
trade, religion, or numerous other subjects. They may take the form of
popular best sellers, classroom survey textbooks, or even sociological trea-
tises.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 his-
tory 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 his-
tory.) 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 empiri-
cal base of survivals as sources. Nevertheless, authors of general histories
confront the same elements of story, argument, explanation, interpreta-
tion, voice, viewpoint, and meaning as in any other historical synthesis.
In those categories, a general history may be no more—and no less—con-
structed 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 ele-
ments. The role of Great Stories in synthesizing history in general partic-
ularly 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 eth-
nocentrism 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 postmoder-
nity 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 post-
modern 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
T
he three dimensions and material concreteness of objects, build-
ings, 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, fac-
tories, 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 dis-
played 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 origi-
nally, 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, light-
houses, 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
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 interpreta-
tion and intervention between the past and present of artifacts. Rather
than describing the general operations again, I want to focus in this sec-
tion on the amount of interpretive intervention involved in preserving,
restoring, reconstructing, and reproducing objects. Preservation and
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 inter-
preters 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 sta-
bilize 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 bat-
tlefield, 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
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 cur-
rent safety and other laws? Should worn or dilapidated but original furni-
ture 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 recon-
structions 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-thousand-
year-old Celtic Village in the Museum of Welsh Life in Cardiff. Such
reconstructions are just like any other full-fledged history; although con-
structed 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
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 chap-
ter). 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 three-
masted frigate was completely repaired and rebuilt many times through-
out 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 phys-
ical object itself so much (for the old one is destroyed every twenty years)
but the accompanying ritual process and continuity of tradition in con-
structing the shrine.17
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 cur-
rent 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 gal-
leries 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 archae-
ological 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 edu-
cational 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 syn-
thetic construction.
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 his-
tory museums, which use reenactment of past persons’ behavior and activ-
ities 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 interven-
tions, 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, liv-
ing history museums are the next best thing we have now. As their name
suggests, such outdoor museums present the audience with a three-
dimensional living reenactment of the past. To that end, artifacts, build-
ings, 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 real-
istic it appears to an audience, such interpretive intervention is as con-
structed and inventive as any full-fledged history, perhaps more so due to
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 pre-
lude to the American Revolution. They perform songs, dances, and dra-
mas 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 eighteenth-
century personages as Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick
Henry to explain and debate matters.
Colonial Williamsburg also finances and manages extensive educa-
tional 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 con-
ferences 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 tech-
nology 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 con-
sumer revolution, religious freedom, or political events and governmen-
tal 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” envi-
ronment, 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 view-
point 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 entre-
preneurial zeal just to increase audience or gain endowment. Whether
Colonial Williamsburg manages to maintain this delicate balance con-
cerns its critics and supporters alike. Its many lodging places and restau-
rants, not to mention its golf courses, make the Foundation’s offerings
part of the tourist business, and the neighboring businesses view it as a
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 interpre-
tation 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 depart-
ments 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 interpreta-
tion 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 inter-
preting their displays, and even new definitions of what professional
museum practice should accomplish. Social history, and some would say
its political agenda, warranted new kinds of exhibits and museums about
previously forgotten peoples in slum tenements, slave cabins, tenants’ cot-
tages, 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 popula-
tion and their activities than previously but also to pull in a wider audi-
ence 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 val-
ley 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 inter-
pretation, however, the more museum exhibitions and historic sites resem-
bled any other full-fledged synthetic historical project, or proper history
in short, with its many layers of information, narrative, explanation, per-
spective, 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
displays and historic site presentations, the more they encountered and
were aware of the customary problems of voice and viewpoint and there-
fore 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 mate-
rials 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 identifi-
cation labels to costumed guides and living reenactments. In many muse-
ums 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 tech-
niques 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 full-
fledged, 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
observers can depend upon their memories and traditions within a cul-
ture 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 per-
forms an act of translation in its very naming of an object. To label some-
thing 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 mem-
bers to rely upon their memories, traditions, or imagination to contextu-
alize 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 inter-
vention 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, func-
tion, 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 cat-
egorized 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 present-
day audience. Hence the division perhaps between the same kinds of
objects shown for aesthetic qualities in art museums, as exotic cultures in
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 imple-
ments and forms of warfare, or the modes, uses, and role of transporta-
tion. 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 aes-
thetic, perceptual, and conceptual biases of their creators (and their
patrons). Thus when they appear as themselves in period rooms and his-
toric 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 sev-
eral 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
pictures may have been created long after what they depict through sim-
ulation, 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 pic-
tures, 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 illus-
trate 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 con-
structed a 1:30 scale model of Birka, a medieval Viking village that arche-
ologists 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 dio-
ramas 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 introduc-
tion 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 three-
dimensional, they are static and lifeless in their alleged re-creations of past
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 intel-
lectual; 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 exhibi-
tion or site at their own speed, stopping here and there at will, and listen-
ing 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 interpre-
tation 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 his-
toric gender roles of course). Since these costumed guides and demon-
strators 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,
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 interpre-
tation 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 inter-
pretation 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 host-
esses, 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 recon-
struction at the urging of James Deetz, a young Harvard-trained anthro-
pologist 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; substi-
tuted 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 collec-
tive events as a simple wedding, a funeral, court trials, and regular military
muster were performed. Attracting large audiences were the more elabo-
rated (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 ses-
sion, 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 pro-
duced 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 spo-
ken 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 point-
ers from their more experienced colleagues. Rehearsals were limited to the
dress rehearsal preceding the season opening and some of the major col-
lective reenactments such as court days, the “Festive Wedding,” and the
“Harvest Feast.” Rehearsals were usually informal in order to keep the char-
acterization 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
cohort. But another exhibit may elicit exactly the reverse reactions in the
same groups of people. At the same time, individuals have their own spe-
cific 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 relation-
ships in the past provoke snickers, even bravado, among some spectators.73
I
ncreasingly how the public understands the past is through its repre-
sentation 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 pop-
ular 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 var-
ious English-speaking countries ostensibly devote their entire program-
ming 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 his-
tory, oversimplify the great variety of forms films can take as histories.5
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 every-
thing from didactic classroom historical films to grand Hollywood spec-
tacles 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 histori-
cal 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 his-
tory 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 con-
sciousness around the world was permanently affected by such film sta-
ples 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 ques-
tions akin to the external and internal criticism of texts. Next, we exam-
ine films as histories, as representations of the past, in their own right.
The last section offers some brief conclusions about films and 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 solu-
tions, 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 com-
plexity of representing the past. Filmmakers believe that films convey an
experience of the immediate and the memorable that no book can com-
municate. Historians worry that far too many popular films embrace cher-
ished metanarratives rather than accurate narratives, promote heritage
more than history.
To the extent that films “personalize, emotionalize, or dramatize” spe-
cific 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 his-
torian 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
stage depends upon the mise en scène, or the arrangement of actors, cos-
tumes, props, and lighting to convey the overall effect. Such editing tech-
niques 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 repre-
senting 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
though staged. The dialogue, costumes, and sets attempt to avoid anachro-
nisms 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 propor-
tion 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 documenta-
tion 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 story-
line about actual persons and events with typical dramatic film tech-
niques. 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 nonpro-
fessional 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 doc-
umentary 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 mili-
tary—Pontecorvo sympathized with the FLN in its efforts to overthrow
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 lead-
ing 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 prac-
tices of cinematic history, the creators of faction employ history in a man-
ner that is less subject to debate over veracity than are the biopics or
historical epics of earlier years.
or the same film might prove a primary source for one question and a sec-
ondary 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, authentic-
ity, 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 pri-
mary 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 consid-
ered 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 pro-
gram, or video tell us about the times of its creation and production?
Questions akin to those used in textual external or source criticism estab-
lish 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 val-
ues, their behavior, and their institutions during a specific era and in a
specific place. As with other sources, therefore, films must first be authen-
ticated 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
and do plan their words and actions, especially in certain events deemed
newsworthy. Such questions begin to suggest what can be considered pri-
mary 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 fol-
lowing 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 contempora-
neous 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 simi-
lar 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; impro-
vised by an actor; or provided by the scriptwriter. Of course, actual cere-
monies and similar events are usually planned, and political and other public
speeches are written, even rehearsed for such occasions. Colloquialisms,
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 suffi-
ciently directly that the historian can re-present them through photo-
graph, 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 reproduc-
tion. To the extent, however, that home movies and newscasts are pro-
grammed 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 generaliza-
tion 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 actu-
ality they can result in re-presented facts, but not as text of course, unless
quoting dialogue. Depending upon how the films present their interpre-
tations, 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 histor-
ical 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 nei-
ther 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 indus-
try 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 pro-
vide valuable background and context for understanding films as primary
and secondary historical sources. Such contextual use ranges from authenti-
cation of a film’s contents to the external analysis in general of a film as a
source of facts about it.31
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 orga-
nization 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 col-
lection 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 man-
uscript libraries collect the personal and business papers of directors, pro-
ducers, actors, distributors, and others as well as company records,
researchers can investigate the production and reception side of filmmak-
ing 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.
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 his-
tory, 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-domi-
nated 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 perspec-
tive and meaning flow from a writer’s, director’s, or sponsor’s avowed rea-
son 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 per-
spective on the efficacy of agency from below. In the end, Foner appears
to believe that Matewan, like all history, derives its meaning from the con-
tinuing struggle of workers and others for economic justice and interra-
cial harmony.
exemplifies the racial repression and white terrorism of the early twenti-
eth century.
Second, the ten categories outlined in the preceding section on “judg-
ing films as histories” and their countless associated options certainly sug-
gest 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 perti-
nent 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 his-
torical films lumped together. The wide range of film genres means that
examples can be found for each kind of criticism. As with histories in gen-
eral, no one generalization fits all kinds of films.53
Third, every film like every text and thing can serve as primary evi-
dence 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 migra-
tion to California of a fictional poor rural family forced from their Dust
Bowl lands in the period, while the Plow interpreted the social and eco-
nomic 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 con-
demned 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 evi-
dence for certain questions about depression-era America, especially
larger social and cultural trends.) As these brief remarks suggest, what is
primary and secondary evidence in or about any film depends upon the
questions posed. The answers range from particular facts to generaliza-
tions 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 interpre-
tation and reconstruction, invention and re-presentation. I have chosen
three examples to show diverse but equally valid approaches to represent-
ing 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 nar-
ratives 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 under-
the 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 ante-
bellum 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 pop-
ulation. The photographs of ex-slave interviewees in the collection are
also mainly twentieth century, as are the pictures of the actual typed nar-
rative 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
and place where the events occurred. The actors (and their horses), how-
ever, 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 histori-
ans 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 interpreta-
tions 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 his-
torians. In this sense, the film is more like a textbook with living illustra-
tions 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 evi-
dence. After all, almost all the people portrayed, their actions, their cloth-
ing, and their environment (including the kinds and colors of their
horses) are educated guesses at best. Like so many histories, this film con-
ceals 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.
screen and sound track. Nevertheless, the viewer is always aware of the
different perspectives on the past as lived, researched, and reenacted, espe-
cially since almost all the words come from the diary via the actress play-
ing 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 neces-
sity 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 for-
mal 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 drama-
tization 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 dis-
cussed 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 interi-
ors and exteriors were both actual in their new location and faked. The
filmmakers always knew, however, what the weather outside was, because
Martha recorded season after season whether the day was clear or rainy,
warm or cold. Ambient sounds are constant and frequent, but the char-
acters 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 obstet-
ric events; rape by a prominent judge; illegitimate childbirth and mar-
riage; funeral preparations and autopsy; conflict between Martha and son
and daughter-in-law; and murder among others. These events and hap-
penings 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 survey-
ing 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 domes-
tic economy of her household. On the other hand, her husbands’ sawing
and mill management, land surveying, and tax-collecting duties were
“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 mid-
wifery; ministers, unless through their wives; public officials, unless jailed
like her husband; or even farmers who comprised the bulk of male popu-
lation. 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 point-
ing 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 his-
torical 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 other-
wise. 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 docu-
mentaries 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 syn-
thetic 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
interpretation. They too raise questions about judging the factual accu-
racy of a product’s parts as opposed to the larger truthfulness of it as syn-
thesis. 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 collec-
tively 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.
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 empir-
ical 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 his-
torians 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 repre-
sentation 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 histo-
rian, 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 exper-
imental 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 pos-
sible. This is as true of newer social and cultural history as older political
and economic history; of transnational as national; of global as microhis-
tory; 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
Chapter 1
1. Hermeneutics studies how to bridge understanding between today and what
past persons meant in their documents. The standard reference is Hans-
Georg 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 some-
what 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.
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
Press, 2003). See also Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral
History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006).
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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 his-
tory 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.
20. “Library of Congress to Treat Acidity in Books,” New York Times, January 1,
2002, National edition, A18.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. Stille, The Future of the Past, 303.
25. Dana Canedy, “Florida Ponders Fate of Historic 2000 Ballots,” New York
Times, February 16, 2003, National edition, A18.
26. The estimate of Luciano Canfora, quoted in Stille, The Future of the Past,
260.
27. The estimate of Michael Clanchy, mentioned in Bull, Thinking Medieval,
71.
28. Gottschalk, Understanding History, 45.
29. 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.
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).
71. The larger point of Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
72. The larger issue is discussed by Michael Pickering, “History as Horizon:
Gadamer, Tradition, and Critique,” Rethinking History 3, no. 2 (1999),
177–95.
73. Cf. Dibble, “Four Types of Inference from Documents to Events,” 210–13.
74. 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.
75. See, for example, how much Laurel Thatcher Ulrich contextualizes the arti-
facts 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.
76. 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).
77. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., Post-Colonial Studies:
The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), provides an introduction to
terminology and concepts.
78. 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.
79. 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.
80. 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.
81. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago,
1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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
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).
32. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century 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 micro-
history. 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 exam-
ples as well as a brief overall introduction.
33. 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.
34. 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).
35. 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).
36. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1991).
37. 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
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).
38. Ernest R. May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History
for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986).
39. Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learning from the Past: What History
Teaches Us about School Reform (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995).
40. 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.
41. 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).
42. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
43. 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).
44. 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).
45. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
46. 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 intercul-
tural solution to such problems.
47. 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.
48. 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-illus-
trated 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.
49. 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:
in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920),
ch. 1.
68. 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.
69. 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).
70. Anna Green, Cultural History (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), suggests a brief history of the field as she outlines its various
approaches.
71. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms.
72. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1975),
trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978).
73. 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.
74. 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 contradic-
tion 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.
75. John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), discusses anthropological and philosophical
approaches to moral relativism.
76. 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 cur-
riculum 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 pro-
moted pessimism and guilt. See, for example, Edward T. Linenthal and Tom
Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American
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.
77. 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 dis-
course, 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.”
78. Novick, That Noble Dream, is now standard on its subject.
79. That a range of opinion can exist on these issues because of varying onto-
logical 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.”
80. 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.
81. Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, 83.
82. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 582–83.
83. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality, 150, but see 150–56.
84. Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values, in Leerssen
and Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values, 63.
85. 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.
86. See especially Rüsen, “Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values.”
87. 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.
88. Smith, The Gender of History.
89. 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;
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 postmod-
ernist perspective on the work of archivists.
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 Hooper-
Greenfield, 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 muse-
ology 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
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 appen-
dices. 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 “prob-
lems 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.,
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 Role-
Playing 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 inter-
preter 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 per-
spective 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 visi-
tors.” 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, theo-
retically 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.
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 cul-
tural memory and the plantation museum.
66. The question of average height and longevity in the colonial period is dis-
cussed 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 tele-
vision. 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.
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 arti-
cles. 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/.
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).
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.
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 mak-
ing 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 ques-
tioned 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.
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.
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 imagina-
tive speculation about a murder at Harvard in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted
Speculations) (New York: Knopf, 1991). He compounded this historio-
graphical 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 condemna-
tion of the latter by American historian Louis Mazur, “History or Fiction,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2003, B15, for one example of pro-
fessional reaction.
Disney corporation, 140, 171, 203 ethnicity, 22, 29, 35, 42, 43, 46, 47,
docudramas, 181–83, 202, 217 60, 65, 66, 69, 72, 75, 83, 84,
documents, ix, 5–10, 12–14, 16–18, 134, 155, 166, 168, 172
43, 45–47, 119, 124–25, See African Americans; Mexican
137–39, 141, 149, 161–62, 165, Americans; Native Americans;
168, 171, 182, 191, 194–96, whiteness
198, 216 evaluation process, 95–98, 99, 102–3,
See also archives; constructed facts; 134
editing; A Midwife’s Tale; re- evidence, ix–x, 4, 216
presentation; sources; and films, 179–80, 187–92, 203–4,
Unchained Memories 211–12
documentary films, 19, 21, 41, 66, memory as, 41, 42, 45, 51, 52, 53,
89, 90, 93, 112, 115, 167, 175, 63, 69, 70, 75, 76
176, 178, 179, 180–81 See sources
190, 191, 217, 202, 204–11, 216, exhibits, 22–23, 66, 115, 143–44
217 versus display, 244n2
See also Burns, Ken experimental histories, 215
Donation of Constantine, 13–14 explaining, 54–63
Downfall (2002), 197 explanation, 29, 50, 118–19
dramadoc, 181–83 extrapolation, defined, 90
dramatic films, 216, 217 external criticism, 18–19, 25–26
Durkheim, Émile, 58 of films as history, 186–92
See sources
economic history, 5, 35, 49, 57, 75,
185, 215 factories, 5, 6, 133, 135, 136, 138,
editing, 104–11 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150,
editions, 107–8, 109–10, 216, 217 155, 159
Elton, Geoffrey, 35 facts
empirical side of history, 3, 30, defined, 3–4, 25, 28
89–90, 216–17 constructed, 32–41, 211–12
See also methods re-presented, 24–32
emplotment, 87, 113, 122, 124, 167, summative, 37, 60, 117, 190
198, 200, 201, 202, 210 See methods
defined, 91 factuality, 131, 216–17, 265
environment, natural, 71 in films, 177–85, 187–88, 191,
environmental history, 9, 64, 71 192–201, 203, 211–12
environmental setting, 18, 21, 103, versus fiction, 52, 78, 171, 216–17,
138, 143, 145, 148–49, 150–51, 257n4
177, 181, 188, 190, 194, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), 181
196–97 Federal Writers’ Project, 204–6
epigraphy, 12 feminist theory, 40, 79, 80, 85
ethical turn, 76–77 Fiction in the Archives, 112–13, 115
See also perspective; viewpoint; fiction versus non-fiction, 52, 78, 171,
voice 216–17, 257n4
fiction versus non-fiction (continued) gender, 22, 35, 42, 46, 47, 60, 69, 72,
in films, 176, 177–85, 187–88, 75, 80, 85, 152, 155, 163, 166,
191, 192–201, 203, 211–12 169, 172, 173, 189, 196, 205
film archives, 192 gender history, 50, 80, 215
films general histories, 67, 128–29
and collective memory, 41, 185 generalization, 30, 36, 39, 51, 54, 55,
in museums and historic sites, 145, 56, 62, 68, 81, 82, 83, 113, 116,
148, 149, 160, 161, 169 124, 127, 128, 129, 166, 179,
filmmaking 191, 204, 215, 216, 226n87
technical, 178–79 generations, 42, 45–47, 170, 172,
viewpoint and voice, 69–70 175
film genres and historical representa- genres
tion, 176, 179–85 film, 179–85, 202
finding aids, 97–98, 99 See histories, kinds of
first-person interpretation geography, 33, 72–73
criticized, 165–66, 167–68 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 139
Gibson, Mel, 196
defined, 163
Ginzburg, Carlo, 29, 63, 75, 115
role-playing, 164–65
Gladiator (2000), 184
Flaherty, Robert, 181
Goldberg, Whoopi, 204, 205
Florida, 2000 election ballots, 10
Gone with the Wind (1939), 175
fonds, defined, 96
Goodwin, Dr. William A. R., 153
Foner, Eric, 199–200, 201
Gottschalk, Louis, 6, 10–11, 28
forgeries, 13–16
Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 203
Ford, Henry, 14
grand narratives, 39, 45, 53, 54, 68,
museum, 145 79, 82, 120, 170, 192, 199, 201,
Ford’s Theater, 137 202
Franklin, Benjamin, 21–22, 30, 196 See also Great Stories
French and Indian War, 117–18 Great Stories, 86–87, 120, 124,
French Revolution, 37, 38 129–30, 170, 217
Freud, Sigmund, 40 in films, 189, 199–200, 210–11
frontier interpretation of U.S. history, Greenfield Village (MI), 142, 146
74 Griffith, D. W., 175
full-fledged histories, 90, 104, Guide to Documentary Editing, A, 111
111,115–28, 130, 131, 138, 141,
147, 150, 154, 155, 156, 160, Half Moon, 139
161, 167–68, 177, 194, 211, 216 Haraway, Donna, 59, 78–79
See also proper histories Harvey, P. D. A., 107
Haskell, Thomas, 53, 79
gardening, 163, 210 Hearts of Darkness (1991), 181
gardens, 20, 148, 151, 152, 162, 168 Hemings, Sally, 10, 162
Geertz, Clifford, 62 Henry Ford Museum, 142, 145, 146
heritage, 18, 32, 42, 43, 45, 65, 155, House of Commons, UK, debates, 27
162, 170 House of Representatives, U.S.,
condemned, 64, 140, 170 debates, 27–28
in films, 177, 178, 200, 203, 213 How the Irish Saved Civilization, 67
heritage industry, 140, 152–53, 155 Howard, Michael, 64, 79
hermeneutics, 3, 23–24, 31, 60, Howell, Martha, 6, 8, 22
219n1
Hidden from History, 64 identity, personal, 83, 84
historians, 45–47, 66, 69 Independence Hall, 21
historic sites, 7, 41, 49, 66, 70, 71, Indians
133–73, 176, 196 See Native Americans
historical consciousness, popular, 185 industrial revolution, 8, 155, 158
historical method, 4 industrialism, 36, 83, 133, 143, 146,
See also methods 156, 161, 169, 191
historical museums See also factories
See museums inference, 8, 9, 11–12, 24, 25, 32, 33,
historical schools 54, 98, 117, 119, 124, 125, 149,
See schools of historical interpreta- 167, 168, 185, 191, 208, 209
tion defined, 90
historicism, 76, 236n74 intellectual history, 5, 31, 49, 74, 75
histories, kinds of, 5, 49–50, 72, See also cultural history
80–81, 115, 72, 215–17 internal criticism, 18–19, 25–26,
See also full-fledged; general; 187–92
metahistories; proper International Coalition of Historic
histories, fields of Site Museums of Conscience,
See cultural; demographic; diplo- 172
matic; economic; environmen- interpretation
tal; experimental; gender; in archives and libraries, 101–3
general; intellectual; military; in editing, 110–11
political; psychohistory; quan- in films, 189, 197–201, 209–11
titative; social; women’s; world in the idea of history, 130–33
History Channels (TV), 175, 176, in museum practice, 134–35,
181, 183 142–68
history, idea of, 2, 81–88, 93, as practice, 22, 54–59, 81, 90–91
128–31, 175, 198–201, 215–17 as product, 50, 74, 81–86
See also big picture; critical history; in proper history, 115–16, 124–25
critical museum practice; her- See first-person interpretation;
itage; memory; purpose; the- third-person interpretation
ory of history Interpreting our Heritage, 154
History of Britain, A (2000–2001), Interpretation of Historic Sites, 154
176 interpretive community, 68, 78, 79
“history effect,” 215–16 intertextuality, 19, 23
Hitler, Adolph, 14, 15, 180, 197 intervention, 104–5, 111, 115, 122
National Colonial Farm Museum, as history, ix, 1, 46, 47, 49, 82, 86,
146 102, 177, 198, 203, 204,
National Constitution Center, 21 215–17
National Museum of the American Past Imperfect, 183
Indian, 65 Patriot, The (2000), 196
Native Americans, 14–15, 30–31, 34, period rooms, 137, 143, 144, 149,
35, 64, 65, 128, 161, 168 159, 160, 209
nature, 71 periods, 13, 31, 32, 63, 120, 133,
Nazis, 14, 63, 66, 181, 194, 195, 197 144, 146, 151, 163, 164, 165,
Neustadt, Richard, 64 185, 192, 194, 195, 203, 204,
New York State Museum, 161 206, 210
newsreels, 177, 180, 183, 191 See also times as era
nonfiction periodization, 31, 129, 158, 230n12
See factuality; fiction; truthfulness perspective, 39, 51, 53, 63–66, 67,
Nora, Pierre, 43, 44 68, 82, 83, 88
Northern Light Productions, 206, in documents, 8, 22, 69, 73
207 in films, 179, 184, 189, 192, 197,
Northwest Ordinance, 33–34 199, 200–201, 202, 209, 211,
numismatics, 12 212, 213
in Morgan, American Slavery, 116,
objectivity, 50, 59, 67, 68, 69, 76,
120–21, 126–27
77–80, 212, 216–17
in museum practice, 155, 156, 159,
See also bias; morals; perspective;
162, 166, 167, 250n57
viewpoint
and objectivity, 77–81
Old Ironsides, 20, 142
photographs, 14–15, 112, 220n14
Old Sturbridge Village (MA), 137,
physical environment
146
See environment, natural; environ-
open-air museums, 133, 142, 145–45
oral history, 7, 11, 28, 41, 45, 46, 69, mental setting
62, 205–6 pictorial matter, interpreting, 7,
Orientalism, 73 14–15, 160–61, 220n14
otherness of people, 84 Plimoth Plantation (MA), 138, 147,
otherness of past, 23, 67, 84–85 149, 164–65, 167–68, 171
out-doors museums Plow That Broke the Plains, The
See open-air museums (1936), 203
political history, 5, 29, 36, 49, 57, 61,
Pacific Rim, 73 75, 80, 185, 215
paleography, 12 politics and historians, 31, 44, 46, 51,
panels, museum, 159 53, 57, 59, 62, 63–68, 69, 77,
paraphrase as re-presentation, 25, 26, 79, 80, 81, 87, 90, 112, 121–22,
28, 32, 36, 58, 59, 69, 71, 77, 154–55, 167, 169–70, 171, 181,
113–15, 124 199–202
Parent, Anthony S., Jr., 127 postcolonial, 5, 35, 83
past, idea of, 1,3 postmodern, as period, 83, 185
postmodernism, ix, 8, 24, 45, 53, 78, race, 29, 84, 166, 169, 172, 189, 199,
216 201, 206
and Great Stories, 129–30, 131, racism, 46, 61, 117, 120, 124, 126,
216 169, 202
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 182–83 “Rape of Nanking,” 46
Ravitch, Diane, 64
preservation, 94–95, 100, 134–36
realism, 1, 3, 41, 44, 75, 78, 80,
See also conservation
215–17
Prevenier, Walter, 6, 8, 22
reconstructed buildings, 5,20, 21, 49,
primary sources, 18–24, 26, 35, 41, 134–35, 136, 137, 138–39, 140,
128 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 155,
films as, 179–80, 186–92, 203–4, 162, 164, 165, 170, 194, 202,
208–11 204, 216
in archives, 93–103 reconstruction as historical practice,
museums, 134–42 44–45, 60, 63, 75, 114–15, 168,
re-presented, 103–15 193, 205, 208, 209, 211
See also evidence reconstruction of archive files, 96–97
processing Reconstruction Era, 122, 175, 201,
by archives, 93–99, 100, 101 202–3
records, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 19, 27, 28,
in museums, 134–39
31, 32, 62–63, 75, 105, 106,
proper histories, 50, 51, 54, 67, 68,
107, 111, 115, 125, 168, 192
114, 115, 122, 124, 125, 127, in archives, 93–103
141, 155, 156, 167, 177, 194, Reel v. Real, 183
211 reenactments, 49, 134, 144, 150,
See also full-fledged histories 151–52, 156, 160, 161, 165–68
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 14 at Plimoth Plantation, 164–66, 168
provenance, 16–17, 96, 103, 106, in films, 177, 180, 193, 195, 196,
111, 158 204–11
defined, 222n43 referentiality, 215
provenience replicas, 20, 107, 138–39, 140, 142,
See provenance 161
re-presentation, 3, 36, 37, 39, 51, 58,
psychohistory, 82
59, 63, 69, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80,
Public Broadcasting System, 175, 181
217
Public Records Office (UK), 95 as facts, 24–32
purpose of history, 63–64, 66–68, in texts, 103–115
167, 168–73, 215–17 in museums, 138, 149, 166, 168
in films, 180, 181, 183, 186, 190,
quotation, 25, 29, 59, 69, 71, 75, 77, 191, 193–94, 202, 204–6,
94, 111–14, 118, 180, 194 209–10
compare paraphrase representation, historical, 11, 25, 45,
quantitative history, 35–36, 50, 59 48, 81, 90, 91, 111
storage of artifacts, 10, 17, 94, 95, 98, Tilden, Freeman, 154
100 time, concept of, ix, 4, 24, 44, 50, 51,
story 52, 54, 56, 57, 67, 68, 71, 74,
See emplotment; narrative 76, 81, 86, 87, 97–98, 102, 110,
structure vs. agency, 61–62, 72 114
subalterns, 29, 35, 46, 70 in films, 183, 186, 187, 189
subjectivity, 77, 78 in museum practice, 135, 136, 144,
See also bias; partiality; viewpoint; 147, 148, 164
voice times, as era, 3, 8,9,11, 12, 13, 14,
survivals, 3–4, 5–18, 20, 22, 23, 39, 15,16, 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 28,
41, 47, 48, 88, 93–104, 129, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45, 52,
130, 131, 186, 219n4 54, 63, 69, 72, 73, 76, 101, 109
synchronic, 50, 52, 55, 143, 144, See also period; periodization
155, 159 Titanic (1997), 175
synthesis, 30, 89–90, 98, 129–31, Toplin, Robert Brent, 184–85
140, 143, 156, 193, 198–200, traditions, 24, 31, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44,
202, 211, 217 45, 46, 47, 63, 64, 65, 85, 138,
as practice and product, 49–88 144, 154, 155, 157, 169, 190
invented, 47–48, 63–64
in Morgan, American Slavery,
compare heritage, memory
116–27
translation, 31, 112
traditional definition, 129
Triumph of the Will (1934), 181
television, 14, 15, 41, 43, 49, 175, truthfulness, 24, 37, 38, 52, 53, 56,
176, 180, 181, 182, 186–87, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 124, 129,
131, 184, 185, 199, 202, 212,
192, 198
213, 215–16
testimony, 6, 8, 25–27, 41, 59
See also big picture; factuality, fic-
texts, 89–131
tion; invention; objectivity
See also methods; synthesis
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 74
Thanksgiving (U.S.), 47, 164, 167
theory, use in historical practice, 35, Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 61, 176,
37, 38, 54, 56–57, 59, 61, 62, 208–11
63, 73, 179, 181 Unchained Memories (2002), 204–6
See also methodological holism Underground Railroad, 5
methodological individualism University of California at Los
theory of history, ix, 8, 19, 24, 36, 50, Angeles Film and Television
78,79, 80, 81, 87, 129, 154, Archive Collections, 192
172, 216–17 understanding as interpretation,
Thinking in Time, 64 54–59
third-person interpretation, 163–64, uniqueness of holdings, 100–101
169
Thompson, Paul, 18 Valla, Lorenzo, 13–14
thorn, 104 Vanderbilt, George, 138, 149
Ticonderoga (steamboat), 147 Victory, HMS, 20