Historical Synthesis: Histories As Form and Content
Historical Synthesis: Histories As Form and Content
Historical Synthesis: Histories As Form and Content
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From Statements to Histories
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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 classificatory schemes center on technique: biographical; statistical and quantitative; narrative; and analytical among others. Some stress spacelocal
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 (synchronic) 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 progressive 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 histories, but they do not identify the general and common component parts
of histories as such, especially across mediums and schools. Professional historians 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 chronicle or annals at the same time as they repudiate giving some overall pattern 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 suggest one basis for a general categorization of components.2 Older disagreements 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 science 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 understanding the modes of exposition chiefly as text and discourse.5 The enduring
conflict over the possibility of objectivity in historical practice and pervasiveness of bias in historical works indicates the role of evaluation and
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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 narratives 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 interactions over time with various social structures. Public, cultural, or institutional 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
analysts or historians 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 proportions, 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 subtextually. 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 perspective of the last chapter, the big question is whether the narratives, arguments, 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 creativity of the historian? And from whose point of view are they presented?
Explaining and Interpreting
Historians make connections among their facts in their syntheses by
offering explanations and interpretations, especially in proper histories.
Argumentative and analytical works provide explicit reasons and causes as
explanations and even, at times, use generalizations, models, and theories
of human behavior, institutions, and societies to make their cases. Narrative,
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topical, and synchronic works offer implicitly always and usually explicitly 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 knowledge of asker and answerer as to what is to be explained (explanandum in
philosophers 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 eventsor recountingis basic to one form of narrative explanation. 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 historiesand good narrative 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 explanation 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 understand 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 causation construct images or models of the actors behavior or circumstances 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 peoples to the nature of bureaucracies and other complex social organizations. 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
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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 understanding 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 psychologizing 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, tautological, and, worse from a historians 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 questions, but they produce poor answers. The historians task is to discover
what happened in some actual past situationnot 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 professions goals, historians basic theories 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
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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 pressing 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 explanation. Philosophers of social science range the basic content of social
explanation between two extremes they have christened methodological 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 explanation is presumed to ground as it flows from a classic nineteenth-century liberal view of society.
Holism, or collective or social structural explanation, stresses the coercive 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 comprising 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
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analyses of census data. Opponents of this approach to social science history argued against assuming the aggregative behavior of individuals to be
the explanation of (a) society. As one American social historian pointed
out long ago, numerical analysis is based upon the fiction that the actions
of different individuals or cultural groups are, epistemologically speaking,
the samethat they are identical and discrete entities that can be compared with one another in a scientific manner.25 Opponents of this kind
of statistical history argued that its results like its premises are those of
political liberalism. Each side in this debate, like so many in social and
political understanding, accused the other of assuming what it needed to
prove and proving what it assumed.
The plainest implication of these differences over the nature of social
reality and its explanation is for the historical method. Individualist
acceptance of sources testimony at face value encourages the re-presentation of facts through quotation or paraphrase. Holist suspicion of ideology and false consciousness on the other hand encourages constructing
facts by inferring from the sources content or perhaps re-presenting the
views of those people considered to have the most informed, that is, correct, view from the analysts standpoint. Many historians interested in the
subordinated and the marginalized, for example, see persons in those
social positions as a better guide to the nature of what really went on in
society than those placed in high positions. As historian of science Donna
Haraway phrased this position, Subjugated standpoints are preferred
because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.26 To some poststructuralist theorists the
treatment of peoples on the margins of a society reveals best the central
values of that societyor at least of its elite sector. But Jesse Lemisch, the
first American historian to advocate in print viewing the United States
past from the bottom up, argued before poststructuralist theory was popular in the United States, sympathy for the powerless brings us closer to
objectivity.27 If nothing else, proponents of each position would judge
the reliability of a witness and maybe of a source itself by their views of
what an individual is and can do and the overall organized (structured)
nature of a society in general. In the end, a historians social theory influences how she determines whether, for example, a cluster of ideas in
a source should be denominated an ideology, false consciousness, and an
example of hegemony on one hand or reasons, values, and proof of a belief
system on the other hand. Thus the sorting out of what are actors views
and what historians views in a history often reveal the latters allegiances
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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, corporations, 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 actors so-called logic of
the situation or cultural framework? If the historian suspects such
hermeneutic methods, then does she employ causal analysis and explanation? 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 differences 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 positions 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 productions. What are ideas and belief systems for the individualist become ideologies 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 individualist become conflicting interests as the result of contradictory social locations for the holist. Interest group demands for the individualist become
evidence of class struggle for the holist; social systems become social
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structures or formations; leaders or elites become ruling classes. The individualist describes society as associations of people banding together voluntarily as churches, corporations, governments, and other organizations,
and society itself is essentially conceived as a voluntary association of individuals. Society for the holist is conceived as a complex, organized set of
structures. Racism, for example, is a mainly a matter of psychology and
individuals prejudices under individualist premises and a system of
power and structured inequality under holist assumptions. Racism has a
psychological cause and solution for the former, and a social structural
cause and solution for the latter.29
Individualists in the end portray history as a series of events in which
actors views and actions determine to a large extent the social outcomes.
Change is explained by the actions of individuals. In traditional political,
military, diplomatic, and religious history the spotlight was on kings, generals, ambassadors, bishops, and other leaders. Many argue that the narrative form is particularly congenial to this approach to history. The
dilemma of individualistic explanation is to cope with supraindividual
formations and macroscopic change. Holists depict history in terms of
structures in which their contradictions cause conflict and change for the
individuals in them. Argumentative and analytical histories seem the
form best suited to this approach. The once new social history preferred
explicit theory, social categories, and even statistical analysis of causation
in opposition to the implicit model of human behavior and social theory
of traditional history. To its critics the weakness of too much social history (and all of social science) was explaining change through abstract
entities and external forces as opposed to concrete individuals and their
choices. The American colonial historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich indicted
this approach to social history, which in abandoning the individualistic
and institutional biases of conventional narratives sometimes substitutes
one form of exclusion for another, freezing people into a collective
anonymity that denies either agency or the capacity to change.30
As I pointed out earlier in this section, scholars in practice attempt to
avoid the dilemmas posed by individualism and holism by seeking some
middle way. It is easy to condemn the oversimplifications of individualism and holism but difficult to surmount their problems and premises.
That reconciliation or middle way must try to balance the agency of the
actors with the constraints imposed on them by social institutions and
their position(s) in them. Such a way must resolve the conflict between
the autonomy of individual action based upon free choices in spite of
social constraints versus the denial of any human agency in an oversocialized
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model of human behavior. At the same time the middle way must explain
why groups of individuals choose to create social rules, coercive collectivities, 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 assumedespecially those called a nation,
a society, or a culture. Ideas are not simply ideological reflections, and culture 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 particularly 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 concentrating on the microcosm of specific individuals or small communities for
clues to the macrocosm of institutions and society. Both favored anthropology over sociology as inspiration, particularly the intense local ethnographic 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 individuals 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 studied. Microhistorians produced noted works on rebels, heretics, criminals,
or other individuals whose confrontations with social customs and official institutions produced detailed records. Although microhistorians
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studied both premodern and modern times, their work mostly explored
early modern persons and situations. Carlo Ginzburgs intensive analysis
of sixteenth-century inquisitorial records to reconstruct the heretical cosmos of a northern Italian miller was a microhistory best seller of this
kind.32 Some historians of alltagsgeschichte studied peasants and folk culture in the early modern era, but most preferred studies of workers, popular culture, or support for Nazi ideals and institutions in the modern
period. The alltagsgeschichte exploration of ordinary peoples 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 sections 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 normative turn by the 1990s in the field. As they conclude, we always theorize 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 historians own
social context derives from social traditions, collective memory, and professional 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.
Perspectives and Meaning
History, once promoted as philosophy teaching by example, still has its
instructive side in the right hands. Politicians, generals, and social scientists are more prone than historians to draw lessons from the past, but some
historians do draw explicit lessons from their subject for policymakers
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and the public. Historians of military affairs, foreign policy, and education 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 indicate 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 volume 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 societys 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 nations or the worlds 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 rolesexcept 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
mans 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
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not convinced of those arguments already. So too are the judgments rendered 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 slaveholders and Nazis, for example, what does such a commitment entail?
Ought the historian also use the past to expose the inner workings of
todays society that still perpetuates social and racial inequality, hegemonic and oppositional ideologies, and globalism and imperialism?
Should all history be critical history that seeks to challenge, even subvert, 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 running 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 meaning penetrate to the very core of the historical project. The only unacceptable 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 Gods 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 propaganda and organizational recruitment; religious groups through identity 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 profession 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
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(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 fromas they showthe 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 objectivity 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 perspective undoubtedly arises from the historian knowing the future of the past:
the outcomes of past aims and actions. At its extreme such retroactive prediction 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 Irelands Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome
to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill.52
Some argue history(ies) should show how todays peoples, their societies, material objects, and ideas evolved from those of yesteryears. Such
mottoes as the present grows from past or the past is prologue to the present embody this somewhat teleological approach.53 Others propose history(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 historians do and must do in lecture, book, exhibition, report, or film.
Part of the perplexity about political and moral judgments and perspective 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
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eyes of the actors and how much from beyond them, even an overall
birds-eye or synoptic view by the director? How is the landscape conceived 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 conquerors place names are used? How did those living then understand spatial 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 communication and transportation changes, historians need ever greater imagination 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 todays 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 cultures once pictured as isolated, self-contained islands outside the stream
of history are now depicted as archipelagos wide open to constant commercial and intercultural exchange very much in the flow of world history.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.
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The debate over the social construction of nature versus its independent 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 construction 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 historians theory 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 societys 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 historians 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 symbolically and territorially. In line with these dual trends, the nation became
not only the preferred unit of analysis but was presumed the most appropriateeven most naturalone 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 seeing nation formation as a multiple concatenation of events and persons
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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, persistence, stability, or transformation in the past?76
Diverse perspectives and meanings as with other kinds of interpretations 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 circle 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
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the object itself solely determine the understanding of its nature by all
observersas 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 historical practice, truth results from the correspondence between the presumed 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 ones perspective on these issues.79
Although the ideal of rigorous objectivity has long justified professional practices and products, most historians honor such strictness only
in spirit today. Professional ethics, social theory, and contending interpretive community affiliations all point elsewhere. If (absolute) objectivity 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 theory 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 justifies 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 perception,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
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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 perspectives, which in turn assures the individual scholars 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 Jrn Rsen 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 historians 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 different 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 community and, second, negotiation between interpretive communities to expand
the original circle of agreement. Historical truths result from such objectivity, 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
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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 history excluded women and large sectors of society; social and cultural history 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 ones 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 constructions. Sometimes the perspectives are widely shared by other historians 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 viewpoint and purposes.
Multiculturalist and feminist theory underscored the presence of viewpoint 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 manifest to those who propound them but not necessarily to others. The
meaning of (a?) history will be clearest to those of the same interpretive
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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 history.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: conomies, Socities,
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 mentalits, or even slower climatic or
demographic cycles. As mentioned earlier, successive schools of United
States historiography are commonly designated the progressive or economic 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 neoprogressive interpretation from the 1970s onward. Those histories of historywriting 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 wellknown master or grand narratives are the rise and spread of Western capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism across continents and centuries.93
When the framework or larger context is implicit in a number of histories, 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
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a history, and they validate that history as they organize it. Where once
history revealed the working of Gods will, classic historical metanarratives 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 liberal 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 perspective). 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 capitalism with its many discontents; the empowerment of subordinated
peoples and the rise of postcolonial hybrid cultures; the seemingly apocalyptic ecological constraints on modern economies; and finally even the
arguments over the existence and effects of late industrialism and postmodernism. 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 general history, a school of history, or especially in what is referred to as history 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 coherence to the ostensibly disparate facts, explanations, and generalizations
presented. Metanarratives underlie both individual and collective memories and supply the links between them. Such metanarratives, by providing 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 peoples history, the nation is still the normal
stage for presentation of many histories, although called the state, a society, or a culture. The academic history profession is still divided mainly
according to national histories. Nationalism may need to be explained in
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history but history departments remain mainly organized by national histories. Many major journals, such as the American Historical Review, arrange
most of their reviews by geographical area as well as time. American,
English, French, and German exceptionalism still thrives in metahistorical practice if not always in theory.96
Ethnicity is not only a major component of collective memory but
also the basis of many a national history yet today. Whiteness studies trace
the evolution of certain nationalities becoming American and predominant in United States history. White constituted the main ethnic affiliation of those Americans that figured prominently in the history of the
United States from its English colonial beginnings, which concealed any
Native American or Spanish genesis. Anglo-Americans long assumed
themselves the majority and without ethnicity. Only immigrants or
minority persons possessed race or ethnicity in this story. And historians seconded this opinion explicitly and tacitly until recently whenever
they spoke or wrote of the American people.97 In a similar manner, the
preferred metanarrative of the English people traces their roots to the
invading Angles and Saxons rather than the indigenous Britons and
ancient Celts.98 Such competing metanarratives of national racial and
ethnic origins are common to many peoples.99
That ethnic metanarratives even ground the origins of Western civilization is shown by the heated controversy over the claims of political scientist Martin Bernal that ancient Greek civilization originated with Semitic
Phoenician and Egyptian peoples rather than later Indo-European northerners. In his provocatively titled, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization, he argues that this history, acknowledged by the
ancient Greeks themselves, was ignored or distorted beginning in the late
eighteenth century in order to give a white European ancestry to those
later Greek achievements considered the foundations of Western civilization.100 By the early twentieth century this racist-motivated Aryan myth
had triumphed over ancient knowledge, according to him. Bernals assertions elicited a vast outpouring of books and Web sites denying or supporting his scholarship and reasoning.101
The whole idea of otherness depends as much on a metanarrative as
does sameness.102 Sameness and otherness receive visual, often vivid, portrayal in museum displays. Do the peoples depicted in the exhibit look
and act like us to encourage identity, or are they presented in ways to
show difference and relativism? The answers to this question are particularly evident in museum exhibits about early humans: are they represented as more ape-like or more human? Questions about similarity and
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histories use both. Historical syntheses unite explanation and interpretation through style and rhetoric. Historical syntheses combine meaning
and perspective through voice and viewpoint. Contextualization ranges
from the simple juxtaposition of factual statements to Great Stories themselves. Great Stories vary from explicit petit rcits to overt master narratives, from complexes of implicit presuppositions to entire metanarratives.
While all histories have common characteristics, they vary by degrees of
intervention and interpretation by historians acting as supposed intermediaries between the survivals from the past and the type of historical products they create in the present. The next three chapters examine the
relationships among the empirical and the literary and artistic elements
within various genres of history.