On Historiography (II)

 On Historiography (II)

1.

It is often averred that modern historiography begins with Leopold von Ranke.  Ranke (1795 - 1886) was a conservative historian, an immensely prolific writer, who worked for the Prussian State as a professor at the University of Berlin.  His contributions to historiography span the period from the inception of professional history as a vocation – the first professorial chair in history was inaugurated at the Berlin University in 1810 – to the Victorian era, a period often considered the zenith of ambitious and magisterial narrative history.  Ranke plays a central role in developing paradigms for historical method that continue to apply to this day.

As an young man, Ranke was embroiled in an academic dispute between the adherents of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Carl von Savigny.  Hegel interpreted history as the gradual and progressive revelation of the Weltgeist (“the World Spirit”) and thought that stages of historical development were strictly determined.  Savigny, a law professor and student of legal history, was fundamentally casuistic in his analysis of the past.  Savigny said that each historical event was unique and the product of its own particular circumstances and, therefore, non-reproducible.  He derided Hegel’s system as overdetermined, abstract and too general to be usefully applied – it was a “one size fits all” solution to historical problems that, in fact, were precisely limited to their specific context.  Ranke admired Savigny and sided with him in this dispute.  He denied that there was any telos or objective toward history was evolving.  Further, he understood that historical events had to be construed in their own terms without applying other occurrences as precedents or analogs.  

Ranke pioneered the notion of reliance upon original sources.  His assertion was that, when possible, history should be based on the eye-witness accounts of people who were, to use current jargon, “in the room where it happened.”  Although Ranke was scientific and dispassionate in his orientation, he, nonetheless, believed that God’s hand guided at least some events – he was a pious Lutheran.  He admitted to seeking the “holy hieroglyph”, the imprint of God’s intervention in human events.  History, he declared, was an exercise balancing the specificity of facts with a generalized narration derived from those facts.  Ranke believed that, in the eyes of God, every historical era was good and meritorious in its own terms.  He rejected the view that the renaissance was somehow superior in morality and culture to the middle ages – both eras were the creation of God and both were perfect in their own terms.  “History,” he said “is not a criminal court” in which people and past periods are indicted or tried for their crimes.  We must not apply present standards to the conduct of the people of the past.  Similarly, history teaches no lessons because its events are always sui generis – Ranke, a political conservative, argued that the principles of the French Revolution had no legitimate application to Germany or the Prussians for the simple reason that Germans were not French and the products of a different historical and cultural development.

In the preface to a very late publication, The Histories of the Germanic and Latin Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1885), Ranke announced his famous thesis that history should present the past wie es eigentlich war (“as it actually was”.)  As a general statement, this proposition seems trivial – it’s a default axiom that history should be true to the way things once were or how things happened; after all would we want to define history as the account of what didn’t happen or that happened in a way different from the writer’s historical narrative?  Viewed in this light, the proposition wie es eigentlich war seems less prescriptive, then, simply an definition of what can’t be called history – fiction and lies are not history; a work of history is not a poem nor an epic nor a novel.  But, even, a simple thesis such as Ranke’s famous dictum is, perhaps, not as clear as it seems.  The German adjective eigentlich is normally translated as “actually”.  But eigentlich derives from the root word Eigen – this means “one” or “specifically”, that is, a “unity of one” or an “identity”; these concepts in turn may mean something like “essentially.”  Therefore, some writers on historiography have argued that Ranke, Hegel’s foe, in his old age may have turned, at least, slightly, toward German idealism – does wie es eigentlich war mean, in fact, the history should be written “as it was essentially?”

If we consider Ranke as the father of modern historiography, his work stands for these principles: (1) history should be a narrative; (2) figures in past history and their acts should not be judged by the moral and critical habits of thought current when the history is written; rather, the past should be described without judgment on the assumption that all historical eras have an equivalent value and justification and are perfect in the eyes of God; (3) whenever possible, history should be based on eye-witness sources and should not rehash hearsay or opinions based on opinion.  If we remove the archaic reference to God, these precepts could be applied to most history written in the 150 years since Ranke’s death.

2.

When Henry Adams was appointed to a professorship at Harvard in Medieval History, there was only one major problem.  Adams recounted that he knew nothing about medieval history and had, perhaps, considered the subject for about one hour in total before he accepted a job obligating him instruct students in medieval studies.  The deficiency in Adams’ education was due to a simple fact: in America, there were no faculties teaching history until after the Civil War.  (The US had lagged several generations behind the Germans who first instituted a university historical curriculum as noted above in 1810).  In any event, the absence of professors of history in the United States was soon remedied and, by the turn of the 20th century, the teaching of history was a central facet of the American academe. Since that time, with the exception of a few talented outsiders (for instance Bruce Catton, the author of the prize-winning Army of the Potomac trilogy was trained as a journalist), the history industry, as it were, has been centralized in America’s universities.

The fundamental characteristics of university-based history can be readily stated.  Academic history is founded upon practitioners developing questions about which they posit as a thesis (theses) various explanations.  Productive questions are those that either support or contradict some earlier model for the meaning of historical facts.  Historical orthodoxy, for instance, maintains that the founding fathers lived in a culture in which most people were armed with guns.  This cultural background explains the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights in our Constitution and its centrality in the ways that Americans think about violence and self-defense.  In one notorious case, an ambitious historian set out to disprove the thesis that the 13 colonies were crammed with vigilantes armed to the teeth.  In fact, a book was published purporting to show that very few people possessed firearms at the time of the composition of the Bill of Rights.  This study, in turn, was claimed to have important consequences for Originalist interpretations of the Constitution.  (It turned out that the professor who made these claims had “cooked the data” and simply made up some of his statistics – much to the glee of the National Rifle Association and certain elements of the Republican party and to the chagrin of liberals who had proclaimed the importance of this research.)  The point of this example is to demonstrate that academic history, a product of the university establishments, is continually revisionist.  Revisionism has no intrinsic political valence – revisions to history can be liberal in political implications or conservative depending upon the situation.  Revisions to historical paradigms that contest popular views of the past can be intensely controversial.  The most famous recent example is the scandal accompanying an exhibition presented by the Smithsonian about the World War Two bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the so-called Enola Gay controversy (named after the centerpiece of the show, the B-29 Superfortress bomber flown by Paul Tibbets over Hiroshima).  The 1995 exhibit was accompanied by a “script” (that is, labels and audio visual displays) questioning the necessity and morality of dropping the bomb on Japan.  These questions were thought to be radically provocative, challenging the notion of the “Good War” fought by American soldiers between December 1941 and 1945.  A hue and cry developed, spearheaded by conservative veteran’s organizations, and there were protests from both sides at the exhibit – some protesters smeared ashes and blood on the plane.  Ultimately, the controversy became so bitter that the exhibit was canceled and the Enola Gay returned to mothballs.  (The plane was restored again in 2003 and is on display in Chantilly, Virginia accompanied by a terse, bare bones text that provides a few dates and aircraft specifications.)  This example demonstrates how historical questions can lead to heated controversies not only the ivied halls of the Academe where these disputes arise and are argued but also in the public forum.  

Academic (or University) history has these characteristics.  Academics have to publish or perish.  Therefore, the work product of the history factories on university campuses is an array of books and articles.  These texts are structured as accounts of an existing thesis about history, described in the writing, then, subjected to interrogation through the use of previously unpublished or misunderstood sources (this source material might be statistical analysis of records, forensic scientific studies, or documents of marginalized populations – slaves, women, workers, slumdwellers, immigrants – marshaled to either prove or disprove a thesis.)  The historian develops an argument that the existing thesis was wrong or must be revised and, then, presents documentary and source proof to support that argument.  This model for historical study necessarily involves the search for evidence as to causation.  In 1961, E.H. Carr wrote an influential book called What is History?  In that book, Carr said flatly that “the study of history is the study of causes.”  

Ancient historians viewed the past as being a repository of anecdotes about famous people who lived in a world and social milieu indistinguishable from the world occupied by the consumers of this history.  This compendium of narrative anecdotes was imagined to be didactic – that is, to teach valuable lessons about human character, grace under pressure, and other virtues.  (George Washington, for instance, cut down a cherry tree but was so honest, he “could not tell a lie”; “Honest” Abe Lincoln once walked several miles in bad weather to hand a few pennies back to a customers that he had shortchanged at the general store where he was working.  Of course, these are not figures from ancient history but the historical narratives about these men have virtually the same weight and rhetorical structure that we might expect in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans.)  By contrast, academic history is generally amoral, agnostic about whether its subjects acted virtuously or not.  This kind of history vainly aspires to be scientific, the search for laws that can be written down as thesis-formulae, then, studied, challenged and revised.  (Of course, the analogy to natural sciences does not redound to the benefit of history – history provides us with no reliable laws and does not yield reproducible experimental “results.”)

3.

In 1929, the French historian Marc Bloch initiated the Annales school of history.  Bloch’s innovation was to produce a “total history” taking into account evidence from economics, geography, anthropology, and other allied social and natural sciences.  Bloch’s thesis was that mountain ranges, soil composition, climate, and trade routes over land and sea, together with the distribution of population formed the so-called bedrock to historical processes – that is, what Bloch termed “immobile history”, the unchanging matrix in which history takes place.  Bloch’s second layer above the “immobile history” of seas, rivers, rainfall patterns, and ocean currents was the social and economic activity engendered by the fixed characteristics of the place.  He, then, imagined a third layer imposed on the first two – he called this topmost layer of events, “surface disturbances, crests of foam which the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”  

Bloch’s approach to history emphasized continuity – he disliked the division of time into historical periods that he considered misleading and arbitrary.  Similarly, he argued that history should not be isolated from other sciences: most notably, he worked to integrate anthropology, the study of technology, and archaeology into the fabric of his writing – he was primarily concerned with the medieval period.  Bloch pioneered “comparative history” – that is, he wrote studies comparing the histories of agriculture in England and France; these studies involved analysis of the “enclosures” in both kingdoms, that is, the fencing and appropriation of the commons to the detriment of the peasantry.  His comparative agricultural history also considers, at length, the technology of the water-wheel powered mill and how this influenced patterns of settlement, trade, and commerce.  

History grabbed Bloch by the throat and, ultimately, throttled him.  He fought with distinction in World War One and, even, considered a career in the military, foreclosed to him, he concluded, by the fact that he was a Jew, a disqualification, he thought, dramatized by the Dreyfuss affair.  In 1939, at the age of 53, he enlisted in the military to defend France from the German invasion – he was assigned to manage the logistics of fuel required by the national armed forces.  Things didn’t go well for the French army and Bloch had to be evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk.  He returned to France from London and joined the French Resistance.  Although he was a Leftist, Bloch didn’t support the Communist wing of the Resistance and enlisted in a non-communist cell of fighters.  He was betrayed, captured by the occupying Germans in Lyon, and severely tortured under the supervision of the notorious Klaus Barbie.  Bloch’s wrists were broken and his ribs smashed.  Notwithstanding this duress, he refused to name names and, in the end, produced as his “confession” or “protocol” only a list of French soldiers whom he knew to have been already captured and held in a prison camp in north Africa.  On June 16, 1944, with another 23 men, Bloch was machine-gunned in a meadow near Lyon, his corpse left among the others as prey for the birds of the air.  On his grave, the words Dilexi veritatam are inscribed – that is, “he loved the truth.”

Bloch is legendary among French historians and, sometimes, claimed to be the greatest and most influential French historian of all time.  Michel Foucault, for instance, said that his entire project was to apply Bloch’s methods of historical analysis to the study of social institutions – in Foucault’s case, prisons and judicial punishment as well as epistemology and the history of madness and sexuality.  Bloch could be eerily detached: he said that his involvement in World War One combat was “a gigantic social experience of incredible richness,” a peculiar way of describing the Battle of the Marne, for instance, in which he fought.  He later observed that his memories of the First World War comprised a “discontinuous series of images, vivid, but badly arranged” as if arbitrarily “compiled on a reel of motion picture film” with gaps and “some scenes running in reverse.”  While he was being tortured in the Gestapo cellars in Lyon, Bloch was said to have spent his time between inquisitions teaching French history to his comrades in prison, the group of men who died with him in June of 1944.

Bloch’s most famous student, the leader of the second generation of the Annales school of historians, was Ferdinand Braudel.  Braudel’s huge book on the civilizations trading with one another across the Mediterranean, The Mediterranean, was initially composed when he was a prisoner of war in Mainz first (where he directed the camp university as Chancellor) and, then, in Luebeck.  Braudel asserted that he wrote history from the omniscient point of view of “God himself” – a reaction to being powerless, hungry, and confined in the POW camp.  (The entire series of books on the Mediterranean were not published until 1967.)  Braudel, curiously, thought history was highly imperfect as a discipline and maintained that “economics was the most perfect” of human sciences.  In his writing, Braudel perceives men and woman as without agency, not exercising free will but rather obedient to social and economic pressures applicable to them.  

A legacy of Bloch and Braudel’s approach to history is the efflorescence of studies involving trade routes and economic factors, for instance, histories of the Silk Road and the transatlantic slave trade.  So-called World Systems Theory, an argument that political borders are arbitrary and that world history must be written in terms of interactions between trading partners and networks of commerce arises in the context of Braudel’s influential studies. 

4.

Of course, lawyers are not taught anything in law school about jurisprudence or the history of law.  Therefore, what I know about these subjects is the product of my independent reading.  “Legal realism” developed in opposition to earlier theories of jurisprudence.  In the 19th century, courts and lawyers imagined that deciding cases led to the “discovery” of legal principles.  These legal principles were immanent, slumbering as it were in the structures of justice, and not awakened until a specific case or controversy brought them to light.  In the context of Federal common law, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that earlier jurists had thought that law “was a brooding omnipresence in the sky”, a form of divine revelation that Courts discovered in the course of deciding disputes.  (The problem with Federal common law, as opposed the State and local law, is that there was no foundation in the precedents of judge-made law arising from English practice or secreted by the courts in the individual states – Federal common law had to be “made up” as it were from the whole cloth without antecedent decisions serving as precedent.)  Holmes stated the principle of the “brooding omnipresence of reason” as the source of law with a great deal of skepticism.  In contrast to the theory of legal principles discovered by the application of pure reason (lex est dictamen ratio – law, as the Romans said, is the dictate of Reason), Holmes said that he thought Judges made law in response to “the felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions, avowed or unconscious, and even the prejudices which Judges share with their fellow men.”  In other words, Holmes maintained that Judges didn’t discover the law but made it.  

In 1938, questions as to the source and authority of Federal common law were decided by the Supreme Court in Erie Railroad v. Tompkins.  The High Court adopted a jurisprudence that came to be identified as “legal realism”.  The “legal realists” asserted that all law was judge-made and that the notion that logic and reason, brooding or otherwise, was the source of legal decision-making was a fiction.  

These developments correlate to a turn in historiography.  After World War Two, historians increasingly adopted the idea that history wasn’t discovered through an objective study of archival materials.  Rather, historians came to agree, at least in many respects, that history was produced by historians – like law, history was not merely discovered but made according to the “prevalent moral and political theories,” the intuitions and prejudices of historians.  This idea led to the question as to whether historians, described perjoratively as “pale males” (that is, dead white men) should hold a monopoly on history.  If historians themselves made history, then, the narratives produced by women, people of color, sexual and ethnic minorities would look very different from the stuff excreted by “pale males.”  This concept has opened the floodgates to an immense industry engaged in revising historical accounts by imposing perspectives on the facts different from those customarily employed by bourgeois Caucasian (male) professors.  

5.

I am surveying trends in mid-twentieth century (and later) historiography.  In general, it can be argued persuasively that historical practice in the academy has veered decisively away from diachronic narratives of events construed in terms of cause and effect.  (Traditional narratives of these kinds remain popular in best-selling histories about war, civil rights, and politics; similarly people like Ken Burns continue to produce large-scale studies of historical subjects – jazz, the Civil War, baseball – founded on common-sense notions of causation and chronology.  But this is no longer de riguer in the Academy, university institutions in which most historians are employed.)

One important influence in modern historiography is the import of paradigms derived from cultural anthropology into the study of the past.  The name most frequently mentioned in this context is that of Clifford Geertz (1926 - 1980).  Geertz was a cultural anthropologist associated first with the University of Chicago and, then, working at the Princeton’s School for Advanced Studies.  Geetz’s contribution to historiography is the development of the notion of “thick description” as a tool for interpretation.  “Thick description”, a phrase first used by Gilbert Ryle, is one of those catchwords that is often invoked, but not clearly defined.  (In fact, only “thick description” of the anthropological sort will establish the meaning of “thick description” – this seems apt.)  The idea of “thick description” is that human conduct is entangled in what Geertz called “webs of significance”.  The means that an act can have several meanings – in fact, probably an unlimited series of meanings within the context of the society in which the act occurs.  The objective of “thick description” is to identify as many strands of cultural meaning as can be practically deciphered from the evidence.  In articulating significance, Geertz applied the semiotics (the study of “signs” or symbols) following the lead of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; he also adopted Wittgenstein’s analysis of “family resemblances” to assess concepts or actions that have a relationship to one another but are not, strictly speaking, identical or exactly congruent.  Geertz most well-known example of “thick description” arises in his seminal work: “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” published in1973 but deriving from Geertz’s field work in Indonesia in 1958.  Geertz considered Balinese cockfighting in terms of its symbolism (the roosters represented prominent men in the community), as an act subversive to the local polity (cockfighting was banned), as an occasion for gambling and other mercantile exchanges and in relation to gender roles in the village.  The objective was “not to establish” laws but to develop “interpretations” based on the webs of significance enfolding cockfighting and its associated activities.  Key to this analysis was to determine what the event meant to its participants and how this significance was received by the anthropologist who must be continuously aware of his or her own cultural preconceptions.  (All of this seems self-evident today but may not have been apparent in 1973; “thick description” sounds good, particularly in contrast to “thin description” which is also not clearly defined.  It seems that the essence of this practice is to realize that human acts have multiple levels of meaning and that the more we know about those differing symbolic (and other) meanings, the more we know about the society that produces these meanings.)

In the field of history, Geertz’s notion of “thick description” was famously articulated in Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre”.   Darnton, a historian of pre-revolutionary France, described an incident in which printer’s apprentices in Paris went on a rampage torturing and slaughtering cats.  Darnton’s analysis focuses on what the “cat massacre” meant to its perpetrators, how it exemplified in a subterranean manner, currents in French society that would lead to the Revolution.  Geertz’s ideas have also been enormously influential on archaeology.  “Thick description” has been integral to the so-called “Post-processualist” school of archaeology, the leading ideology in the field since the 1980's – Ian Hodder (born 1948) coined the term in 1985 to describe already existing practices.  Processualist archaeology was “positivistic”, based on the idea that archaeology was a science and that, if objectively practiced according to scientific principles, would lead to the truth.  Adopting Continental philosophical principles derived from structuralism and post-structuralism, Hodder and his followers argued that archaeology was “subjective”, that is, could not reach the truth (which is famously elusive), but that it could only provide contingent interpretations necessarily configured according to the archaeologist’s gender, class, and cultural background.  Hodder adopted Geertz’s idea of “thick description” in the form of the concept of “entanglement”.  All archaeological artifacts, whether the village of Catalhoyuk (where Hodder worked for 30 years) or an arrowhead chipped from Grand Meadow chert are “entangled” in the “webs of significance” comprising the culture that produced them.  For instance, a flake of Grand Meadow flint (chert) may have a mercantile meaning, may be an expression of the pride and craftsmanship of the maker, may be an heirloom or a presentation piece with symbolic meanings as to friendship and kin relations, represents gender roles and may be a weapon or a hunting tool (in which case the chert point is embedded in a web of cultural meanings relating to warfare and the natural world) – in short, the chert flake or arrowhead or lance-point has meanings that are technological, spiritual, cultural, and historical (flint-knapping technology changes over the ages).  The archaeologist may privilege one or more of these constellations of meaning, but he or she must be aware that his or her system of interpretation doesn’t exclude other significances, including unknowable self-understandings of makers and users lost to time.  Hodder’s work at the neolithic village site in Anatolia, Catalhoyuk, led to many publications which became increasingly diffuse as the author succumbed to doubt as to the enterprise – perhaps, the meanings of things found at Catalhoyuk were ultimately inaccessible to a British, university-educated archaeologist.  Hodder came to think that his own prejudices and cultural background impeded his ability to understand what had become his life-work.  So in 2012, to everyone’s surprise and much dismay, Hodder fired almost all his workers and associates at the ongoing Catalhoyuk dig and turned the site over to Turkish authorities.  (This seems deeply quixotic to me: is a 21st century Turk somehow more qualified than an Oxford archaeologist to interpret a 9000 year old neolithic site occupied by people entirely distinct from the Turkish-speaking tribal people who came to occupy Anatolia only a thousand years ago?  Hodder seems to have thought that his work at Catalhoyuk was a residue of British colonialism and, to some degree, renounced his findings on that basis.)

Things (and historical evidence) don’t have a single meaning.  They are polysemous and speak to us in a variety of languages.  Consider I-90 as it passes to the south and west of the Minnesota capitol building and mall.  The freeway is a thing.  It has a history that is profoundly entangled with racism in Minnesota.  I-90 was built through a thriving African-American neighborhood called “the Rondo.”  The freeway, therefore, represents a web of significance: Interstates, built under Eisenhower’s administration, represented post-War optimism, American power and economic might, as well as the authority of the Federal government (forged in the Second World War and by the New Deal) that would spearhead desegregation of schools.  Interstates were constructed on the basis of a web of economic institutions – contractors, government supervisors, architects, lenders, labor unions, the men who delivered the concrete and poured it.  But this interstate had to be built somewhere and property had to be acquired by purchase or coercive eminent domain – topics, themselves, implicating legal history.  A neighborhood had to be sacrificed to the progressive, modernist principles of the Interstate.  And, so, Rondo was considered by the powers-that-be, the White male establishment as disposable and was razed to make way for the future.  Histories can trace the entanglements in artifacts (a freeway) and places (a neighborhood) – “thick description” affords access to multiple meanings arising from such things.  

Geertz wrote: “The purpose for cultural anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions but to make available to us answers that others , guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given and, thus, to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.”

6. 

“Thick description” underlies a genre called “microhistory.”  “Microhistory” is a term used to mean studies of obscure men or women from which one can derive historical significance.  Microhistory lies at the antipodes of the history of great men and the battles or struggles in which they fought.  James J. Hill, the railroad baron and “empire builder” is a great man – he pushed rails west from St. Paul through the Dakotas and to the Pacific coast.  If you tour Hill’s castle on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul, one option for your visit is a guided lecture about the servants who worked for Hill’s household, their background as mostly Irish and Scandinavian immigrants, the wages that they were paid, and how they amused themselves when not working – you can learn about their marriages, love affairs, and children.  This is an example of microhistory.

Microhistory was pioneered by Carlo Ginzburg in his 1976 book The Cheese and the Maggots: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller.   Ginzburg’s book, first published in Italian, narrates the story of a miller accused of heresy and the village in which he lived.  In this book, Ginzburg uses trial transcripts from proceedings accusing the miller, a man named Menocchio, of heresy – Menocchio, who was literate and self-taught, came to believe that the world was a kind of porous cheese and that the angels were maggots living in that substance.  Through the prism of Menocchio’s trials, Ginzburg resurrects folk beliefs existing three-hundred years earlier.  (Ginzburg also wrote on peasant visionaries and witchcraft.)  I recommend an excerpt from Ginzburg’s essay, “Latitude, Slaves and the Bible: an experiment in Microhistory” available in abbreviated form on the internet at http://www.hup.fi/collegium/events/Purry.pdf  Ginzburg’s work with regard to the Microhistory of the counter-reformation inquisition ultimately led to the Vatican opening its closed files as to those proceedings to “qualified scholars.”  Ginzburg, a highly influential figure in Italian historiography, was instrumental in marshaling support to defeat a legislative measure making holocaust denial a crime – Ginzburg, who was Jewish and whose father was tortured to death by the Nazis, argued successfully that existing Italian law against “hate speech” was sufficient to combat holocaust denial and that further laws on the subject would chill historical discourse.   Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin” is another example of microhistory as is the well-known study The Return of Martin Guerre (Natalie Zemon Davis, 1983) a book based on a celebrated movie (starring Gerard Depardieu) – Natalie Zemon Davis, a Princeton professor, had served as the consultant on the film and, then, expanded her research into her historical treatise.  

Microhistory is said to have three defining traits: first, it concerns a non-famous person; second, this type of history documents the person’s involvement in some kind of crisis (for instance, Menocchio’s trials for heresy); and, finally, the author uses the story to explore broader points about some historical question.  Microhistory posits the past as different, often radically so, from the present.  Historians working in this genre attack the past at the point where it seems most alien to us – for instance, a semi-literate miller thinks the world is cheese full of angelic worms: why would he think this?  And why would anyone care enough to prosecute him for these antinomian views?  Microhistory analyzes what seems inexplicable to us, for instance, a cat massacre, from which we can access different habits of mind and sensibility.  Of course, practitioners of conventional history have criticized microhistory.  Edward Mist asked: “How can historians concerned with trifles avoid producing a trivial history?”

7.

The subject of structuralism and post-structuralist approaches to history is complicated and fraught with controversy.  I can only provide a bare outline for these developments arising in concert with cultural anthropological and microhistory approaches to the past.  To use Hodder’s terminology, these schools of thought, including post-modernism, are all profoundly “entangled.”  

In practical application, structuralism amounts to a parlor trick.  Any text asserting a specific position can be construed to articulate the exact opposite of what it purports to mean.  The way this sleight-of-hand is accomplished is by studying the text to identify what it omits.  The nuances of the omissions in the argument will turn out to mirror, although in a negative way, what is said in the writing.  This results from a trivial proposition: if I endorse A, I am not endorsing B.  Therefore, my endorsement of A can be read as implicating anxiety about B and, even, in many cases, a grudging admiration for B.  You can’t write without leaving things out.  Accordingly, if we read as to those things excluded from an argument, we will be able to deconstruct the argument and, even, make it assert the possibility and importance of things that it did not explicitly express.

Students of literature figured this out, first in France, in the mid-sixties.  Of course, the concept was reasonably well-known to lawyers since the time of Cicero as the concept of expressio unius est exclusio alterius – that is, the canon of statutory interpretation that “what is not expressed is excluded.”  Applying this principle to legal enactments, one quickly finds that progressive statutes intended for reform are, in fact, conservative in effect and, even, possibly reactionary. Let’s say that the legislature determines that landlords should be required to control rats and mice in apartments that they rent to tenants.  A law is written to this effect.  A tenant complains to the Court that his or her premises are infested with cockroaches and bed-bugs.  Under the principle of expressio unius est exclusio alterius, the Judge decides that landlords are authorized to collect rents with respect to apartments infested with cockroaches and bed-bugs.  The law turns out to have an unanticipated consequence that is, in effect, the opposite of what it endorses.  (Of course, notwithstanding Dickens’ Mr. Bumble, the “law is not an ass” – for every canon of construction, there is an equal and opposite rule, in this case, ejusdem generis, which means that items of a similar class are included within the statutory regulation since, after all, not every form of vermin can be identified.  Under ejusdem generis, cockroaches and bedbugs belong, arguably, to the category of vermin and, therefore, landlords must control these creatures as well.)  

Structuralism was developed under the aegis of linguistics.  About a hundred years ago, a linguist named Ferdinand Sassure argued that language works not on the basis of words defined in isolation but by virtue of relations – these relations establish the context for linguistic meaning.  Again, this is a common-place idea – we know good from our experience of bad, we know sweet because it is not sour, we can define pain because it is not pleasure and so on. Saussure’s insight, argued in his 1916 Course in General Linguistics was that words are entirely arbitrary signs when viewed in themselves; a word only assumes meaning in context of other equally arbitrary signs that defined as its opposite – hot is just a meaningless sound that we make with our mouths without the opposing concept of cold. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied Saussure’s theory of “general linguistics” as he called it to cultural institutions.  Cultural anthropology, Levi-Strauss asserted, involved the construction of meaning from opposites – the raw opposed the cooked, wild stood in opposition to tame, male and female are construed as opposing, matched terms and so on.  Historians were quick to jump on this bandwagon and Levi-Strauss system of opposing terms was applied to the construction of the past – of course, close readers were also able to find evidence of structuralist principles in previous historical writings.  

Structuralism’s neat trick of turning propositions upside down has been highly influential in recent historiography.  For instance, the American constitution may be construed not as a document founding freedoms but, rather, as a writing that ossifies certain forms of tyranny – while declaring all men equal, American founding documents, also excluded many classes from such equality (women and slaves who were only counted as 3/5th human) and, therefore, each declaration of freedom implies the opposite of freedom, that is, slavery and oppression.  Walter Benjamin said “that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.” Academia flourishes on intricacy.  Soon enough, it was obvious that Structuralism’s relatively simple system of antinomies was too rigid and, perhaps, banal.  This insight led to Post-Structuralism.

Post-Structuralism complicates the structuralist argument that words are arbitrary signs unless construed in the relation to their opposite terms.  Post-structuralists assert that every word implies an infinite number of shades of meaning that are not uttered or intended.  In post-structuralist analysis, the so-called “stable antinomies” posited by Levi-Strauss (light v. dark, male v. female, family v. stranger and so on) are rejected as too simplistic.  Levi-Strauss might say the term “cat” stands in binary opposition to “dog”; post-structuralists would argue that “cat” implies a myriad of “not-cats”, such as rats, centipedes, humans, stars, cars, and rainbows.  Each term means by rejecting an unlimited number of other words.  Meaning is “endlessly deferred” because linguistic terms are always “pushing away an infinity of potential opposites.”  Structuralism provided readers with a set of interpretive tools that let them construe texts as meaning the opposite of what they purported to say.  Post-structuralism construes texts as having no stable or determinate meaning at all.  Reality is, therefore, interpreted as a series of texts in accord with Jacques Derrida’s declaration that “there is nothing outside of the text.”  But these texts don’t have fixed or stable meanings; meaning is deferred or vanishes in a cloud of things not said or rejected by the text.  If a text doesn’t have a determinate meaning, then, how do we determine what a writing means?  Clearly, people think that words and writings have meanings.  But on what is this illusion based?  Here post-structuralism becomes political – Marx and Nietzsche hop into bed with Jacques Derrida.  Since meaning is never inherent in any linguistic utterance; since texts have no “natural” or “organic” meaning, they are subject to Nietzsche’s Will to Power.  Words and texts mean what ruling authorities construe them to mean.  Meaning is, therefore, a handmaiden to political and socio-economic power.  We live in a system dominated by predatory capitalism – therefore, texts (for instance laws and the Constitution) are given meanings that endorse and support the political powers governing the regime.  Words are tinted by capitalism and the political system that it has engendered.  Meaning, which doesn’t exist in any intrinsic way, is constructed on the basis of the ruling political authority.  Everything is text and all texts can be construed only in terms of the ruling ideology.  

It should come as no surprise that this interpretative system leads to a dead end.  People began to recognize this by the mid-nineties and, for all intents and purposes, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist approaches to literature and history were in decline.  Students of historiography, for instance, Sara Maza, observe that, in application, to historical studies, many writers gave lip-service to post-modern theory but, in fact, there are no books or essays that actually adopt that standpoint.  After bowing to the notion that history is constructed and that all historical texts are infected with the oppressive power of the elites that wrote those materials, writers, then, got down to the business of formulating chronologies, assigning causes and effects, and answering questions, more or less, mirroring those previously proposed in academic discourse. 

I recall attending a post-graduate seminar on William Blake in which a doctoral student (her name was Patricia Fedkiw) presented a paper.  Ms. Fedkiw, who was from Winnipeg and the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants if I recall correctly, applied post-structuralist methods to deconstruct one of Blake’s lyric poems.  Using a complicated system of puns ascribed as operative in the text – “tiger” meant “tie her” for instance – she excavated a series of sexual meanings, mostly perverse and sado-masochistic, from the writing.  It was all complete nonsense, although Ms. Fedkiw was clearly excited by her discoveries and, after the seminar, when some wine and cookies were distributed, a number of French academics, most of them aging surrealists, gathered in a tight circle around the speaker that threatened, as far as I could see, to develop into some kind of Sadean orgy.  (A whiff of the sexually perverse will get you a long way in ivied halls of the Academe.)  A couple of middle-aged Blake scholars were in attendance and, of course, they were appalled.  But when they raised objections that Blake really wasn’t promoting anal sex as a force subversive to the powers of the British empire, the professor responsible for the seminar derided them as politically reactionary and, more or less, shut down their objections.  It was, in fact, a pure demonstration of the operation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power.  The professor who had sponsored the seminar, and who served as doctoral advisor to Ms. Fedkiw, was the authority in power in this classroom and, therefore, he controlled the tone and shape of the discourse.  In his response to the objections of the hapless Blake scholars, who were made to look like pro-Nixon Republicans, the central tenet of post-modernism was exemplified – those with the power make the rules. (I should be careful here; Patricia Fedkiw is still alive and I’m sure she would dispute my account). 

Post-modernism was all fine and good as long as confined to seminars on campus.  But what happens when you have a post-modern President, a leader who declares that truth is entirely in the eye of the beholder and that no one can claim to know the difference between what really happened and outright lies?  Recently, a candidate for vice-president claimed on national TV that he had the right, even duty, to invent lies to dramatize a political point – although no Haitians were, in fact, stealing and eating pets, the candidate said that he had the right to cast alleged deficiencies in American immigration policy in those terms, purely fictional as they might be.  None of this is new – Orwell perceived that those in power have the capability of inventing a “Newspeak” in which war is peace and freedom slavery.  Academic post-modernism has leaked into the real world.  All that matters is who has the power to enforce the lies devised by the political candidates.   

7. 

Historiography is said to have taken a “linguistic turn” in the last fifty years.  This expression means that post-modern theory licenses historians to construe sources and historical narratives as literary texts.  Historical writing should be interpreted in terms of rhetorical structures and narrative devices like a novel or, in the case of writers like Alexander Nemerov, as a poem or “poetic” production – in this context, “poetry” means “something made” by the writer.  The raw material of history is, often, a simple diachronic chronicle, exemplified by a time-line.  The project of the historian is to convert this chronicle into a narrative.

The leading theorist of the “linguistic turn” was the California historian Hayden White.  White’s essay “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1978) exemplifies his approach.  White’s 1993 book Metahistory: the Historical Imagination of the XIX Century is a further founding document in the literary approach to history.  In these writings, White argued that the historical “text tells us how to think about events and charges our thinking with emotional valences.”  The guidance supplied by the historian is similar to the construction of a novel.  Invoking the Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye, White argues that written history is “emplotted”, that is, presented in the form of narrative structures.  Following Frye, White says that the principal plot structures take the form of myths or a mythos.  Historians chose among available myths to devise stories – they don’t discover facts, but rather use facts to plot narratives.  

The principle plot structures used to write history are identified by White in the following terms: Romantic myth embodies the notion of a quest or pilgrimage to an ultimate goal – this may be salvation or the City of God or Marx’s “classless society.”  Comic myth depicts historical events as having a happy ending achieved after complications in the form of evolution or revolution.  Tragic myths depict history as a chronicle of decline and fall – this is the form of history written by Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence).  History as Ironic myth shows historical patterns as cyclical; human destiny is absurd and random casualty rules the world. Historical events are absurd jokes played on us by God or Fate.  The ironic mode of history writing is a form of the grotesque.  For White, historical writing has a fictional aspect (the story imposed by the historian) which serves as a thematic structure controlling the presentation of facts.  White observes that these structures are imposed by the historian but not intrinsic in events: “Historical events are not inherently comic, tragic, or romantic.”  In this context, White invokes the idea of the model – a historian marshals evidence to construct a model of the past.  A man building a model plane can always check the full-size original to assess the accuracy of his work.  But the historian builds a model without an original with which to compare the picture that he or she makes.  

On a more granular level, White interrogates the rhetorical structures that historians use as their tools for analysis.  History can be conceived as “metaphoric”, that is based on likeness or analogy.  Or history can be built on the basis of metonymy in which a part stands for the whole – White says this strategy is “reductionist.”  Historians may employ synecdoche.  No one has convincingly explained the difference between synecdoche and metonymy and I won’t enter into that debate here.  Synecdoche is a subcategory of metonymy in which a part is taken for a whole (the Pentagon is a synecdoche for American military command) or the whole describes, or represents, a part – for instance, the political trope that “the American people” won’t tolerate this or that.  (I have always averred that when a politician or pundit uses the phrase the “American people” this means that he or she is engaged in an outright lie.)  Finally, historians can use “irony” – this is speech that means the opposite of what is said.  In historical discourse, White thinks irony creates a “negational aporia”, in effect, a denial of meaning – the Holocaust or Shoah, in some contexts, is regarded as a negation of all meaning, an event characterized by the inadequacy of any characterization applied to it.  

According to White historians “emplot” their narratives on the basis of three possible paradigms which can be combined in a variety of ways: history involves constants in human behavior and affairs that are always the same (this is an anti-historicist approach); history is radically other – it’s a foreign land that we can’t really visit or understand (this is a historicist perspective); history is analogical – that is, history is founded on a relationship between today and the past.

8.

The “linguistic turn” is exemplified in Annette Atkins' Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out (2007, revised 2016, Minnesota Historical Society).  In her “Epilogue” at the end of the book, Atkins invokes the notion of synecdoche to describe and justify her project – in fact, her last chapter is called “Epilogue: Synecdoche.”    After some jocular remarks about the difficulty of spelling the word, she writes: “Film buffs use synecdoche to describe the technique of using a detail to conjure up the whole – a cracked headlight, instead of the crashed car, or the silky bathrobe slipping to the floor, the screen fading to black.  Each tells the essential story; both leave much to the imagination... This history of Minnesota employs the device of synecdoche in the same way.”  Atkins says that “no one person’s life does or could stand for all the others”, but it is useful to consider individual human lives in the search for “something more elusive (than judging historical impact) – “gauging impact is not my ultimate goal.  I seek instead something more elusive: understanding, indeed, historical understanding.”  

On the final pages of her narrative, Atkins demonstrates the “linguistic turn” in her historical imagination by citing two poets, Billy Collins and May Oliver.  Collins’ poem “Litany” is an example of how metaphors take us to “larger truths about the complex and funny ways of relationships.”  Atkins notes that Collins “leaves it up to us to make the connections.”  This citation suggests that historical narrative uses events as metaphors to which we must apply our imagination “to make the connections.”  Atkins cites May Oliver for the proposition that “all narrative is metaphor.”  History for Atkins is an exercise of poeisis or “story-making power.”  In making this assertion, she reverts to her trope that she is writing history “from the inside out.”  By this, she means to study people “from the inside, where people are articulate and powerful and in control” – here she is citing folklorist Henry Glassie.  For Atkins, the inside from which people derive their power is their own personal story or narrative.  Atkins believes that people should be studied in terms of their own excellence.  Part of people’s excellence is their ability to construct, in their own voice, a story or narrative about their lives.  From within the cocoon of this narrative, people are articulate and powerful.  This power is imagined as radiating from inner strength out to the periphery of a person’s narrative.  Outside that periphery, competing narratives may clash or exert friction on one another and, indeed, the farther away from the core, the less powerful a narrative may be.  But Atkins believes everyone owns (or has power over) a narrative, that these narratives give strength and center the person out to the limits of their story, a frontier where the contrasting or even opposing narratives of others take over.

Atkins suggests that history is a kind of sustenance.  Using the rhetorical device of synecdoche, an individual historical figure becomes “the means by which we crack open the coconut of the past and are fed by its insides.”  (This approach involves the techniques of “Microhistory.”) No one historical figure can provide all of the answers.  Rather, history “gives us the feel, the texture, the context; and it challenges us to make connections to construct the answer that imagination allows and that the evidence supports.”

Consider the metaphors deployed by Atkins:   the car crash, the sex scene with a robe slipping to the floor to reveal “the naked truth”, the coconut cracked open to feed us with its insides.  Figure out where your story fits into this system of tales.  Make your own story from what “imagination allows” and “the evidence supports.”

9.

From 1927 to 1940 (when he died by suicide), the German critic Walter Benjamin worked on his Passagenwerk (“The Arcades”) Ostensibly about “the covered passages” in Paris, that is, mercantile emporiums that are the precursors to the modern shopping mall, Benjamin assembled thousands of fragments consisting of aphorisms, historical reflections, and citations from newspapers, diaries, economic studies, advertisements, and narrative histories.  The book is cabalistic in form.  Benjamin wrote to his friend, the Jewish cabala scholar, Gerschom Scholem, that the huge text was intended to be a collage.  Composed in so-called “convolutes”, that is, separate lettered sections, Benjamin uses various sizes of type-font to signify his interpretations of the material that he presents.  There are sections on Baudelaire, mannequins, panoramas, circuses, fashion, lithography, the stock exchange, mirrors and spectacles, the bloodbath of the Paris Commune and a seeming infinity of other subjects.  Benjamin thought Paris was the “capitol of the 19th century” and that, as a synecdoche, could stand for the entirety of that epoch in human history.  The citations and subjects that Benjamin collects are enigmatic ciphers, tiny parts that stand for a whole, that is, Paris, which, in turn, represents the 19th century.

Of course, the text is unfinished.  How could such a history ever be completed?

In the book’s ruins, discovered after World War Two in a closed archive where the manuscript had been hidden by Georges Bataille (the librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale), we see the embodiment of Benjamin’s angelic theory of history – a great heap of detritus arising from one calamity after another is piled before us as a monstrous midden heap.  We would like to sort through the debris, but winds of progress blowing out of Paradise are battering the sails of our wings and we are borne ceaselessly away from these ruins into our future.  

10.

On the morning that I finished this essay, I heard on the morning news that a historical commission had been constituted to research the facts of the Tulsa race riots of May 31 and June 1, 1921.  Of course, there are today only two surviving witnesses to the massacre, both of them over one-hundred years old.  No one was brought to justice over the massacre, a murderous bloodbath that involved White mobs rampaging through the Greenwood district of Tulsa, a prosperous African-American neighborhood called “the Black Wall Street”.  Greenwood was burned to the ground and some unknown number of its residents murdered – possibly several hundred although the casualty figures have never been conclusively established.  

What’s the point of this exercise?  Perhaps, reparations may be paid, although the event is now remote and has receded into obscurity.  Michael Ignatieff wrote an essay about Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, Belfast, and Rwanda.  His essay is called “The Nightmare from which we are trying to awake” (1998).  He says: “The past is an argument and the function of truth commissions, like the function of honest historians, is simply to purify the argument, to narrow the range of permissive lies.”