The Historical Imagination: Thinking and Doing History

By Craig Wollner, Ph.D. (February 2008)

What is the historical imagination and why is it important?

The historical imagination is the mental equipment with which practitioners of history approach
the craft. Every history major is required to take a course called historiography at some point in
her or his academic career. There the most important tenets of historical thinking, research, and
writingthe elements to which the historical imagination are appliedare taught. This class
usually discusses the work of the great nineteenth century historian Leopold Von Ranke, the
father of modern historical thought. One of Rankes key insights was that every era is
immediate to God, meaning that each time is unique and historical occurrence is therefore not
cyclical.
A corollary to that perspective is that one epoch should not be valued over others. Ranke also
said that rigorous critical examination of sources is essential to sound scholarship. He meant by
this that the scholar should carefully scrutinize her sources, using such tools as philology to test
their veracity. The classic example of this practice is the case of the fifteenth century humanist
Lorenzo Valla. He showed that the document known as the Constitutum Constantini, which
supposedly dated from the fourth century, was a forgery. The document allegedly ratified the
donation by the Roman emperor Constantine I of the Western Roman Empire to the Roman
Catholic Church in gratitude for having been miraculously cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I.
But Valla demonstrated through philological investigation that the documents Latin usage was
obviously from a later time.i
Ranke further asserted that a key attribute of the historical imagination is empathy, the ability to
project oneself into the time and place of the actors under study, to see their world through their
eyes. This does not mean sympathizing or siding with those whose actions we would ordinarily
condemn, but understanding why they believed and behaved as they did. This is perhaps the
most difficult and, at the same time, most important of the attributes those who deal with the
historical record must develop.ii
In any case, following these practices would, Ranke believed, lead to the grail of historical
inquiry, writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen, to show what actually happened, and
with the highest degree of objectivity possible.iii
History is a deceptively simple discipline. It utilizes neither a scientific jargon nor a complex
methodology. It is usually written in the language of the people. Consequently, many believe
that doing history involves merely straightforwardly arranging the facts chronologically. But
the community of practitioners generally agrees that the few standards Ranke proclaimed a
hundred and fifty years ago remain those by which the soundness of the historical imagination at
work on a problem is to be judged.
One of the persistent difficulties instructors have in teaching history and that people who want to
write history have as they begin is the propensity to default in their thinking and writing to a

social studies approach to their topics, often leading to a rendering their work as an exercise in
the examination of current events. This is sometimes called presentism, the tendency to frame
past events in the values and occurrences of contemporary life.
The distinction between history rooted in the past and that which is based on matters of concern
in the current moment lies in the fundamental nature of historical inquiry, which is to study the
impact of time on human affairs. As the English novelist L. P. Hartley put it in The Go Between,
The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there. The temptation to view, say,
the Vietnam war of the late twentieth century in the context of the Iraq war of the early twentyfirst century is often overwhelming for some investigators, but in succumbing to it, they forfeit
their ability to visit an America that was different from the one they live in, to glimpse the
mutability of our societys hopes and fears, and to understand social, cultural, and political
values and patterns that are foreign to them, even though the similarities between the two
conflicts seem on the surface strikingly similar. But the United States of the Vietnam eraof
the sixties and seventieswas one in which the immense baby boom cohort came of age and
began to drive the political agenda of the nation. The divisiveness in society over the war had
much to do with the threat of the draft for many of the young men of the day. It had to do with
the questioning of previously unquestioned political, economic, social, and cultural institutions.
It had to do with the Cold War. Although on the surface, some of the same issues that affected
the history of the Vietnam War resonate todaythe apparently contrived reasons for entry into
the conflict, the instances of government deception about the conduct of the war, just to name
twothe researcher who defaults to this kind of analysis short circuits one of the basic elements
of real historical scholarship: the ability to see the past in its own light.
A key to correcting the tendency toward a social studies approach is to remind oneself of the
foundational steps of any historical enterprise, by addressing how historians frame questions
and seek answers. History is first and foremost a questioning methodology. It begins by
framing the topic under discussion as a question that homes in on a particular aspect of a broad
issue. For instance, if the topic is World War II, the question asked should be narrow enough to
be answerable with the time and resources available to the questioner. Even someone like Ken
Burns, the documentary film maker who recently did in fact deal with World War II, could only
focus on a small part of the sprawling picture of the war, although he could presumably bring the
considerable resources of PBS to bear on the subject. Once narrowing and focus is
accomplished, the other guidelines to the successful completion of the historians task fall
quickly into place. These elements include the following:
Respect the subject. The philosopher George Santayana perhaps stated the kernel of this
injunction succinctly when he observed, We must respect the past, remembering that it was
once all that was humanly possible.iv This means that the historian does not patronize those
who populate his work. As Mary Lynn Rampolla points out, to write that a figure was ahead of
his or her time, is to suggest that he or she thought and acted as we would.v Those who came
before us were not less (or, for that matter, more) moral than we are. True, we may have more or
better information than they on certain matters, but that does not make us their superiors. By the
same token, to judge that figures from an alien culture are better, worse, wrong, or right,
compared to us because they act by the standards of that culture, no matter how attractive or
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repugnant these standards may be to us, is to condescend to the culture and to misconstrue the
nature of the historical developments under discussion. Edward Said made this point forcefully
in his landmark book Orientalism, in which he asserted that historians (and other scholars) had
practiced a kind of subjugation of eastern cultures and societies by writing about them from a
perspective that unselfconsciously assumed their characteristics were traits of inferiority
compared to the West.vi
Perhaps a more useful illustration for this audience is from a book now more or less regarded as
pass. In Francis Jennings the Invasion of America, the author nevertheless highlights a
misleading history of white-native relations by pointing out that historians for generations wrote
about the native peoples of America from anagain, unselfconsciousattitude of superiority
that distorted the actual history of the relations between native peoples and European
interlopers.vii The title of the book alone suggests how the failure to respect the subject degrades,
or at least fails to capture, historical reality. The dominant narrative was that America was
discovered by white Europeans, when in reality, native peoples had lived there for several
thousands of years. So, Jennings says, a fairer, more accurate metaphor of white settlement
would be one of invasion. Under the meta-narrative (the generally accepted version of history
under which white have historians labored and which they have reinforced with their successive
contributions), the first white settlers were said to have come upon a virgin land awaiting
them. In light of the swift decimation and conquest of the indigenous populations, accomplished
as much by the transmission of European diseases to which natives had no resistance as force of
arms, Jennings substitutes the phrase widowed land, as a more apt characterization of the
process by which whites became dominant in the early contact era. Moreover, previous scholars
further denigrated the level of civilization of the native peoples by insisting, often against clear
evidence to the contrary, that native populations were small, which suggested that they were
primitive, nomadic hunter-gatherers, whereas more accurate statistics indicate a settled farming
population (suggesting a higher level of civilization than had previously been assumed) that was
much greater in numbers than historians had routinely estimated.viii
Guard against anachronism. The past cannot be judged except by its own standards and the
state of its own knowledge, but this obvious truth has not from time to time prevented even the
most sophisticated historians from using contemporary values and information to understand and
characterize it. It is easy, for example, to condemn the slaveholders of the antebellum South for
keeping human chattels because we today find slavery abhorrent, but we learn nothing of the
reasons for their resistance to giving it up if we dismiss their worldview by applying ours to
them. Callous and improbable as it seems, the comfort with this practice of plantation owners as
well as other non-slaveholding citizens of the South, made it not only acceptable, but in their
eyes, a superior way of life to that of the North. Moreover, if our moral values interdict that
understanding, they also impede our grasp of the causes of the Civil War. By the same token,
judging Franklin Roosevelt an incompetent because he failed to anticipate Pearl Harborand
this has been asserted by professional historiansis to convict him of not being us, with all our
information about the origins of World War II. Historians must always avoid falling into the
traps of passing moral judgment or projecting current knowledge and values on actors of a
previous time who could not possibly have known or embraced them. Falling into these habits
composes what the theoretician of history Quentin Skinner called the tendency toward
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anachronism or what philosophers describe as the proleptic fallacy.ix The simplest and most
memorable illustration of the trap of the proleptic fallacy is the story of the elderly French doctor
called out on a dark, cold, and stormy night to deliver a baby. When he returns to his cottage
exhausted and bedraggled, his wife scolds him for going out on such a night at his advanced age.
The doctor replies, It was worth it. Do you know who was born tonight? Victor Hugo!
Be aware of your own biases (strive for objectivity). As noted previously, objectivity is the
highest value of historical thinking. Historians know that it is impossible to eliminate all bias
from the thought processes of even the most sophisticated and experienced practitionersthe
quest for objectivity represents what the great early twentieth century historian Charles Beard
called that noble dreambecause we are all captives to some extent of our culture, our
personal experiences, and our personal identity.x It is easy to assume that the researcher located
in a different place and time from his subject, cannot truly understand the subjects motives,
views, and activities, let alone analyze them without actively or passively leveling moral
judgment. But it needs to be emphasized that while true understanding will always be
constrained by the researchers cultural bias, lapsing into a fatalistic relativism abdicates the
responsibility to analyze. The best history is written by those who employ all possible
techniques they can to eliminate bias from their work, on the one hand, while exercising humility
about the limitations of understanding in approaching the topic and being willing to examine
even that which might be personally distasteful to them.
On the attempt to eliminate bias, in addition to simply recognizing and acknowledging their own
biases and the obstacle they might pose to a clear understanding of the past, there are simple
measures historians commonly take to guard against unconscious displays of bias. One is to try
to eliminate prejudicial language from their writing so as not to telegraph to their reader how
they should think about an issue. This means that they avoid words that convey value
judgments. A historian writing about General Custers leadership at Little Bighorn might be
tempted to describe him as stupid or vain, but even though there is truth in such a description, it
would be misleading, insofar as it cuts off consideration of other factors that played a role in the
defeat. These could include the anomalous decision of the Sioux and their allies to mass in one
battle group, rather than their usual pattern of small bands. Or, take for example, Jeffersons
ambivalent relationship to slavery: it could, from the vantage of the twenty-first century, be
characterized as hypocritical for the author of the words, All men are created equal, to own
other human beings, but such a label does little to explain the complex realities of his mind, his
times, or their relationship to each other. It isnt necessary to condone Jeffersons racism (a
historian might, in fact, ask: could Jeffersons views properly be called racism in the context of
eighteenth century America?) in order to understand it nor to convey your understanding to a
reading audience.xi
At the same time, historians try not to use biased language revealing unthinking prejudices.
Orientals, to take one example, is a word no longer in employed to describe Asians.xii Its use
suggests ignorance or bias. It should be noted that such caveats are not about obeisance to
political correctness, but respecting the values of the culture in which a historical work is
embedded and speaking to it in its own language.
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On the second point, I like to tell the story of one of the great Latin Americanists of the last half
of the twentieth century who was criticized by some in his field because, in pursuit of the truth of
Chiles political development, he interviewed not only the violent and reactionary officers of the
Army (who were so far to the right that they laughingly called themselves los momios, the
mummies), but their reviled leader General Augusto Pinochet. Although his own ideals were
decidedly liberal, he often said he would interview Hitler, if doing so would reveal the truth of
the Third Reich. The point is that historians arent responsible for their subjects views or
actions. They are responsible to characterize their views and actions as close to the reality of the
times and place as possible and not pass moral judgments on them. That is as close to true
objectivity as fallible human beings can come.
Finally, understanding continuity, change, and focus are key elements of the historical
enterprise. It is often assumed that history is simply a chain of events, with one leading
inevitably to the next in a continuum that eventually culminates in an inevitable resolution of
some sort. Although the great tradition of historical writing in the West has tended to reinforce
the view that historical occurrence is linear, there have been many alternative theories about the
mechanics of history which have had greater or lesser currency from time to time. These include
Marxs view of the dialectic in history and the cyclical theories of such figures as Arnold
Toynbee, with his theory of challenge and response, and Oswald Spenglers, whose hypothesis
was captured in his title, the Decline of the West.
While such theories are now generally regarded as pass, a significant alternative view of the
structure of occurrence was offered by the late historian-philosopher, Michel Foucault, who
believed that history was full of discontinuities and that historical developments were not
necessarily connected in an orderly procession. Rather, he believed that periods of intellectual
coherence that engendered discoursesconstellations of power and knowledgecould occur
concurrently as products of various power-knowledge systems that brought about their own
unique history.xiii Similarly, the late historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, in a seminal book called
Theory of Scientific Revolutions adumbrated a theory of occurrence in science that relied on
paradigms, or constellations of ideas, based on which normal science is practiced.xiv When the
paradigm begins to break down because researchers discover anomalies that fail to be
explainable under the assumptions of the paradigm, paradigm breakdown occurs and the process
of formation of a new paradigm takes place. A primary example Kuhn used to illustrate his
concept was the collapse of the Ptolemaic universe and the ascension of the Copernican theory.
When Ptolemaic principles failed to explain previously unknown natural occurrences, such as the
solar parallax, the paradigm went into crisis and then breakdown. Eventually a new paradigm,
the Copernican model, replaced it with answers to such novel questions. Normal science
resumed.
Alternative theories of the focus of historical inquiry have also taken on great significance over
the last half of the twentieth century and into the present one, to the extent of modifying the
Rankean canon. Ranke and his followers put all their emphasis on state historynational and
international politics, constitutions, and military conflictsafter World War II. But, influenced
by the Annales School of historiography founded by the French scholars Marc Bloch and Lucien
Fevre, a newer generation of historians turned their attention to other matters. (As a late
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colleague of mine used to say, the French, having failed at war and diplomacy, decided that they
really didnt matter much anymore.) These younger scholars focused on social history,
concentrating on patterns of life in the lower orders of society, especially key themes of everyday
existence such as race, class, and gender. By concentrating on such themes, they believed they
could give a truer portrait of life as lived by the vast majority of people in any society, who may
never have been touched by the machinations of political or social elites.
The sensitivity to new topics in historical research gained intensity in the wake of the social and
political upheavals of the middle and later years of the twentieth century, which seemed to call
into question the foundational values of the society concerning freedom, liberty, and equality set
against the motif of American exceptionalism. The catalysts were the civil rights movement, the
womens movement, and the protest against the Vietnam War, to name a few. The claims for the
older focus grew, in the minds of the younger generation, less and less tenable as the increasing
ferment called attention to the inequities and hypocrisies buried in the traditional metanarrative of the American experience that emphasized the inexorable march of inclusive
political, social, and economic progress. Rejecting the privileged discourse, or history as
written by the dominant group, which contributed to what they characterized as a mythical
national story, the historians of the last half of the century attempted to write excluded groups in
and debunk the dominant saga of ever growing goodness.xv
One of the great ironies of the discipline is that even as they revise the flawed perspectives of
past schools of historical thought, historians often fail to understand their own. But in fact
historians move through time like schools of fish, bunched together on the basis of affinities
generated by time and circumstance (much, in my mind, as Foucault and Kuhn suggest
practitioners of other discourses do). Thus, in the wake of World War I, American historians,
following the path breaking work of James Harvey Robinson, attempted to construct a new
history that would generate a usable past.xvi In the Depression era, Charles and Mary Beard
and others wrote Progressive history, a version of American history strongly influenced by the
sense that the national experience was an ongoing pageant of class conflict and the Progressive
movements attempt to reform the political, social, and economic system that generated the
tensions. By exposing the schemes of the plutocrats, the Progressive historians like Charles
Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington could assist in the badly needed reforms that would put the
country back on track. Thus, Charles Beard wrote in An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution that the signers of the seminal document had not promulgated a basis for the
freedom of all, but a compact protecting their own middle class property rights. It cannot be
denied, he wrote, that the interests seeking protection were extensive and diversified. This is
conclusively shown by the rapidity with which the new government under the Constitution
responded to their demands.xvii And in perhaps the most famous extended conceit in American
historical writing, Parrington indicted the capitalists of the Gilded Age for their rapacious
gluttony and for duping the common people, especially the farmers. He wrote of a Great
Barbecue following the Civil War, in which, When the bill was sent to the American people
the farmers discovered that they had been put off with the giblets while the capitalists were
consuming the turkey.xviii

By the same token, following World War II, historians came to realize that even though fascism
was defeated and the US had emerged as the globes strongest power, the world remained a
dangerous place for America, with a totalitarian threat inimical to democracy in the form of the
Soviet Union at large. As a result, historians writing in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
discovered a consensus about basic tenets of American life that they suddenly asserted had
always existed. The Consensus historians minimized the social, cultural, and economic
conflicts as well as the deep ideological differences that had driven the countrys history during a
period when internal solidarity seemed to be the key to national self-preservation. Even a liberal
cynic like the brilliant Richard Hofstadter could write in his classic work, the American Political
Tradition, of a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity, while at the same
time asserting that there was general agreement about values in our political culture.xix In 1946
he wrote, A political society cannot hang together at all unless there is some kind of consensus
running through it, and yet no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant
conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history.xx
Even allowing for the total breakdown in harmony represented by the Civil War, Hofstadter and
the Consensus school believed Beard and Parrington had gone too far in using conflict to explain
the nations past.
Why pursue such a detailed discussion of the vagaries of historical thought when, as Ive noted,
professional historians themselves (Hofstadter notwithstanding) are often not conscious of the
values underlying their own perspective? The answer is that anyone who thinks about history
needs to be sensitive to the varieties of historical thought and to their mechanics in order
successfully to pursue her or his own research. Too often an adequate enough appreciation of
the methods of analysis and habits of mind that inform sound and productive historical inquiry
are missing from otherwise intelligent discourse that purports to be about history. Those who
think or write this way frequently cannot grasp the difference between useful sources and
defective ones, between one point of view and another. Even when they recognize a reliable
source, they cannot adequately interrogate it to obtain the maximum information it could yield.
Finally, they are unable to frame research questions in ways that can lead them through enriching
thought processes to satisfying results.
One of the greatest historians who ever wrote was Thucydides, who lived in the fourth century B.
C. He wrote one book, The Peloponnesian War. He was the first to exercise the historical
imagination in all of the facets that Ive describedalthough imperfectly (he often reproduced
speeches he had heard from memory or reconstructed them based on what he thought would
have been said). In the preface to his book, he articulated the reasons to think and write about
history. His view makes as apt a coda to an introduction to the historical imagination as I can
think of.
To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables,
shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of
things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be
done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him
think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession,
than to be rehearsed for a prize.

See Carlo Ginsburg, History Rhetoric and Proof: the Menachem Stern Jerusalem Lectures
(Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 54-66 and passim for a recent
discussion of Vallas contribution to historiography.
ii

See The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 16 October 2007, <http://etext.virginia.edu/cgilocal/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-09> for a useful discussion of this concept.
iii

From Von Ranke, Latin and Germanic Nations, in Stern, Varieties of History, 57. See also
Trygve R. Tholfsen, Historical Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 157-186, for a
succinct discussion of Rankes philosophy of history and his influence.
iv

George Santayana, the Philosophy of George Santaya (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1940), 560.
v

Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2007),
45. Another excellent guide to the writing of history for students is Richard Marius, A Short
Guide to Writing about History (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1989). Both
Marius and Rampolla are good on mechanics, but Marius treats issues of the historical thinking
process more fully than Rampolla. A more exhaustive work is the classic Jacque Barzun and
Henry Graff, the Modern Researcher, 5th edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992),
but this work is for a general audience of researchers, not only historians.
vi

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). The introduction and first
chapter provide the sum and substance of Saids argument.
vii

Francis Jennings, the Invasion of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).

viii

See Jennings, Invasion of America, chs. 1 and 2 for discussion of what the author calls the
civilization/savagery dichotomy by which historians assumed the native-white encounter
unfolded and for his indictment of foremost historians and anthropologists who accepted it.
ix

See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and
Theory, v.8 (1969), 3-53. Although this is a highly specialized essay aimed at political
philosophers and historians of ideas, it can be read profitably by those seeking to understand the
mechanics of historical thinking generally.
x

Charles Beard, That Noble Dream, reprinted in Stern, Varieties of History, 314-328. See also
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) for an exhaustive discussion of the
quest for objectivity in American historical writing.
xi

See Rampolla, Writing in History, 63, for a discussion of the use of value-laden language.

xii

Rampolla, Writing in History, 62-63.

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xiii

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 197.

xiv

Thomas Kuhn, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962), chs. 2 and 3.
xv

See Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to
the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1997, 2005). See Part
III for a consideration of the post-modern movement in historical thinking.
xvi

See James Harvey Robinson, The New History, excerpted in Stern, Varieties of History,
258-266. A short but excellent consideration of Robinsons influence on American historical
thought is found in John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1983), 110-116.
xvii

Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States New
York: Free Press, 1913), 48-49.
xviii

Vernon Louis Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America: 1860-1920 (New
York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1930), 24.
19

Richard Hofstadter, the American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York:
Random House, 1973), xxxvii.
xx

Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, xxviii. See also Jack Pole, "Richard Hofstadter," in
Robert Allen Rutland, ed., Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 68-83; 73-74, for a discussion of Hofstadters
intellectual development.
OTHER HELPFUL WORKS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY
Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, the Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985).
A classic on research methods by a great historian (Barzun) and, in subsequent editions, a
younger colleague (Graff), but meant for a general audience.
Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953).
As noted in the text, Bloch was one of the prime movers in the trend toward social history. This
brief book represents a working historians ideas concerning practice, with emphasis on social
history research. Bloch, a member of the French Resistance, was captured and executed by the
Nazis. The work was edited for publication by his distinguished colleague, Lucien Fevre.
Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
An exhaustive history of the development of historical theory and method.
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Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Another discussion by a practitioner of the main questions every historian ponders when engaged
in the work of writing history.
James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: the Art of Historical Detection
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
An excellent aid for understanding the dynamics of historical thinking and writing which uses
various perspectives to illustrate the inductive, deductive, and wholly interpretive nature of the
construction of historical narrative. As such, it is an entertaining guide to the use and abuse of
evidence.
Mark T. Gilderhuis, History and Historians: a Historiographical Introduction, 6th edition
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007).
As brief as Breisach is lengthy.
Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper &
Row, 1968).
A compendium of essays and excerpts focusing on the techniques of evaluating historical
evidence.

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