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History and Critical Thinking
Americans have always had an ambiguous attitude toward history.
-Eric Foner, Who Owns History? (2002) (1)
To soft-pedal history is doing a disservice to people.
-Ken Burns, interview (2002) (2)
Apologia Pro Mea Summa
Strange how so very rarely anyone ever attempts to truly define what it is we are attempting to study. The following is adapted from a paper I wrote while studying for my Masters in Education at the University of Maryland, College Park during the academic year 2003-2004.
Introduction
Eric Foner’s question is appropriate: Who owns history?
This examination of content knowledge, and in effect the ownership of history will begin with an attempt to define history, which will then lead to an exploration of the objectivity of history and the pedagogy of history in secondary schools. I begin with the views of several scholars on the subject then transition into a self -examination and examination of the views of the Maryland State Department of Education.
History
What is history?
There will be irony in the answer, for so often students will regale teachers with the argument that they despise the studying of history for history is often a recounting of the story of dead white males. But, it must be to certain dead, white males to whom one must first turn for a working definition of history, and in this, attempt begin to understand what it is “to study History.”
The word “history” is very old. An examination of Webster’s New World Dictionary (4th edition, 1999) yields a lineage from the Greek eidenai, “to know”, through the Latin historia, whose base word histor means “knowing or learned” leading to “...a learning by inquiry, a narrative.” Its Anglo-Saxon roots parallel those of the word “wise” (3). Thus at its very roots “history” has some relationship to learning, knowing, knowledge, and wisdom, based upon the understanding of some type of story.
To historian Marc Bloch, history is an “inquiry.”
The word places no a priori prohibitions in the path of inquiry, which may turn at will toward either the individual or the social, toward momentary convulsions or the most lasting developments. It commits us, according to its original meaning, to nothing other than “inquiry.” (4).
History is at least a kind of research or inquiry. During the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries many historians would further define it as a “science,”
“...forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them...Science...does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it....science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance...our ignorance of some definite thing-the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun...Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is science.” (5).
R. G. Collingwood would further state in his The Idea of History, that history is the science of res gestae (the examination of things done). History is a kind of research or inquiry that finds out the actions of human beings that have been done in the past. It proceeds through the interpretation of evidence. Usually in the past, historians relied primarily upon the examination of written documents, but today, historians examine information from all media. The end or goal of historical inquiry is human self-knowledge. As Collingwood would conclude: “The value of history, then is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.” (6).
There is “history” and there is “History.”
`That history is a form of science is at best poorly put and maybe at worst ridiculously confusing to Henri Bloch. “How,” he wrote just after the fall of France in 1940, “without preliminary distillation, can one make of the phenomina, having no other common character than that of being not contemporary with us, the matter of rational knowledge?”(7).
He continues:
It is true that language...freely retains the name of history for any study of a change taking place in time...there is a history of the solar system, because the stars which compose it have not always been as we now see them. It belongs to the province of astronomy. There is a history of volcanic eruptions which is, I am sure, of most lively interest as regards the composition of the earth. It does not concern the history of historians (8).
He agrees, however that “History” is the study of men (9). Nevertheless, he states; “...It is necessary to add: ‘...of men in time.’” (Of course today “men” would include “women.” but still would be limited to time.)
Thus, the he historian studies mankind- that is humankind- with respect to time. Bloch further states:
This solidarity of the ages is so effective that the lines of connection work both ways. Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present (10).
In a way the past informs us of the present, yet our present also informs us of our past.
“History” not only studies what happened, but how succeeding generations interpreted the “happening.”
Edward Hallet Carr in his What Is History? (1961) elaborates on this point, “When we attempt to answer the question, What is history?, our answer, consciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and forms part of our answer to the broader question, what view we take of the society in which we live.” (11).
The interpretation of past events changes with the process of current events. For example, the role of non-white, non-male, non-western peoples has changed with the progress of time. One just does not see these people in older textbooks, yet “they” made history and today history textbooks reflect “diversity”-to a certain extent. President Harry Truman once thought of as a poor President is now considered to be a great President. Our present President, George Walker Bush often cites that his policies toward Iraq will be vindicated by future historians; much as Truman’s policies were so vindicated.
The discussion of the definition of history has quite a long history itself. The preceding was not meant to be an exhaustive analysis, but a preliminary perusal, in anticipation of the next discussion: an exploration of the objectivity of history.
Thus, when we study history we are not so much concerned with the eruptions of volcanoes but with the story of humankind. And yes, if I had written this 30 years ago, I would have written “mankind.”
But can we determine truth?
Can History Be Objective?
What is truth? Can the study of history lead one to the truth?
Henri Bloch indicated that the term “history” covered a wide genre of literature, a literature whose adherence to truth until “recent” times could be characterized as “loose.” As an eleventh century country squire of Lorraine announced, “With ink, anyone can write anything.” (12). Even in past time; as Bloch concluded, “...doubt was frequently a natural defensive reflex” (13). The study and writing of history itself has a long history; but this modern approach to its study could be said to have begun with the French, in particular Voltaire, who used the term the “philosophy of history” to distinguish critical thinking about the past as opposed to the repetition or compilation of stories as found in old books (14).
“...wie es eigentlich gewesen...”
Perhaps only Karl Marx’s invocation of a “specter haunting Europe” gripped the intellectual imagination more than these words of Leopold von Ranke. Perhaps no one phrase of German was and still is subject to so much interpretation in translation by historians; particularly American historians. Roger Wines translates von Ranke:
History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices the present work does not presume; it seeks only to show what actually happened [wie es eigentlich gewesen] (15).
Is History objective? Can History be objective? Does the study of History lead to the truth?
Von Ranke’s 1824 work History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494-1535, changed the way historians would look at the past. In an appendix to the work, von Ranke systematically examined the sources used by previous historians, such as Machiavelli; finding an “...enormous number of plagiarisms, error and distortions, proving finally the impossibility of erecting a sound historical work on such memoirs and contemporary authors without a recourse to primary sources.” (16). In an essay History, Politics and Philosophy (circa 1830), a mid-aged von Ranke wrote that a true historian had two qualities: an appreciation of the particular and thus second, an ability to use the particular to the development of the universal; as opposed to an a priori view driving one to find the particulars to fit the universal (17).
Boldly then! Let things happen as they may; only, for our part, let us try to unveil this holy hieroglyph. And so shall we serve God; so are we also priests, also teachers (18).
Thus to von Ranke, the historian collects the information, determines fact-truth-and presents the objective record for present and future.
Holy Hieroglyphs!
“...to show what actually happened...”
How much like William Butler Yeats’ epitaph, “Cast a cold eye on life and death...”! Absolute, perfectly objective, the historian would stand as the diviner and arbiter of truth, the knowledge of which lead one straight to God. Perhaps unstated was that it was at least a Christian God. The very words of von Ranke came to symbolize the very system itself. In the late 19th century, American historians constructed their system of professional norms fully aware of, if not in awe of German historical scholarship (19). Recalling earlier references to history as science, historical method as attempted in practice during the 19th and early 20th centuries was part of scientific method, the hallmark of what was modern and authoritative (20). It is important to realize the effect of “scienticity” on thinking during this time, as Carr quotes Lord Acton:
Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information has become capable of solution (21).
In 1934, the President of the American Historical Society, Theodore Clarke Smith echoed Acton in spirit and von Ranke in fact, in describing “the ideal of the effort for objective truth” as essential to the very core of historical epistemology, less history degenerate into mere entertainment (22).
It all could be solved. It would all be solved.
Unfortunately, according to Peter Novick in his That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988) the objective foundations of American historical scholarship were laid on sand, starting with poorly understood nuances in the language of 19th century German historical scholarship. Words such as wissenschaft, were more meant by the Germans themselves to mean “scholarship” or “learning,” as opposed to “science” as many Americans were taking it to mean in translation. Thus wissenschaftlich could mistranslate into the presumption of the adoption of scientific methodology leading to the attainment of “objective truth” rather than a rigorous albeit subjective scholarship. As for von Ranke, he had retired years before any significant number of Americans began to study in Germany. No American historian ever had first-hand knowledge imparted from the master and many of the American initiates misunderstood, misquoted, or quoted von Ranke out of context. Indeed many American historians studying in Germany confused von Ranke’s ideas with those of the less idealistic, more nationalistic “Prussian” school of historical scholarship (24). E. H. Carr regales the reader with images of three generations of German, British , “...and even French” historians marching into intellectual, and eventual military battle intoning von Ranke’s dictum as incantation “...to save them from the tiresome obligation to think for themselves.” (25)
Thus older attempts to teach History fixated at certain unchanging interpretations.
Not all objectivity was thought-free, some was more thought-controlled, even in the realm of American historical scholarship. As W. E. B. Du Bois (1935) stated in his Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1890:
Three-fourths of the testimony against the Negro in Reconstruction is on the unsupported evidence of men who hated and despised Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism to country, and filial tribute to the fathers to lie, steal or kill in order to discredit these black folk.” (26)
Such testimony also formed the basis of histories that dominated American History texts well into the 1960’s and beyond. “Revisionism” with regard to Reconstruction (normally taken as 1866 through 1877) in America, save for the lone voice of Du Bois, began in the mid-1960’s with the scholarship of Kenneth M. Stampp. Two world wars, a cold war, immigration, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War all have had a role in what Novick describes as a “crisis of historicism.”
It ceased to be axiomatic that the scholar’s or scientist’s task was to represent accurately what was “out there.” Most crucially, and across the board, the notion of a determinate and unitary truth about the physical or social world, approachable if not ultimately reachable, came to be seen by a growing number of scholars as a chimera. And with skepticism about the telos, the meaning of “progress” in science and scholarship became problematic (27).