Berkhofer Fashioning Histories

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Fashioning History


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Also by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.

Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862

A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis

The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian fromColumbus to the Present

Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse


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Fashioning History

Current Practices and Principles

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.


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fashioning history

Copyright © Berkhofer, Jr., 2008.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division

of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,

company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies

and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United

Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60868-9

ISBN-10: 0-230-60868-X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berkhofer, Robert F.

Fashioning history : current practices and principles / Robert F.

Berkhofer, Jr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-230-60868-X

1. History--Methodology. I. Title.

D16.B466 2008

901--dc22

2008017163

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: December 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.


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For Sally


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Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Part I Construing the Past as History:Processes and Presuppositions

1 Historical Methods: From Evidence to Facts 3

2. Historical Synthesis: From Statements to Histories 49

Part II Comparing Histories: Forms, Functions,Factuality, and the Bigger Picture

3. Texts as Archives and Histories 93

4. Things in and as Exhibits, Museums,and Historic Sites 133

5. Films as Historical Representations and Resources 175

Afterword: The History Effect and Representationsof the Past 215

Notes 219

Index 259


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Preface

Understanding the past as history changes over time in how we know about the past, what we know about the past, and what we think impor-tant about the past. Historical practice over time as a result has its fash-ions of method, interpretation, and meaning. Do new times bring forthnew answers to old questions? What do historians do today? How do they know what to do? Why do they do it that way?

Fashioning History offers my report on the discipline of history in theearly twenty-first century as the historical profession tries to reconcilelong-standing approaches to evidence and synthesis with the challenges

posed in recent decades by the so-called postmodern critique of history asa way of understanding the past and by the explosion of sources and his-torical interpretations on the Internet and mass media. Each developmentquestions in its own way how historians identify and interpret evidence,create arguments and histories, and give public meaning to the past.

Postmodern theorists questioned the very ability of historians to rep-resent the past accurately or truthfully. As a consequence, such theory seemed to undermine the very authority of the profession, and many his-

torians reacted initially with hostility. Few attempted much explicit accom-modation. With the options and outcome now clearer after a few decadesof dispute, we can examine to what extent postmodernism actually influ-enced the discipline and profession. This is not a book about what histo-rians ought to do as some of my previous books argued but rather my takeon what they do practice today.

The proliferation of historical sources and histories on the Internet hasmade the basic jobs of historians both much easier and more difficultand, in my opinion, more needed. The rapid and ever-increasing digiti-zation of documents and other historical sources on the Internet hasmade the task of those who would infer the past from surviving evidenceamazingly easier than in the days when only visiting archives and otherrepositories all over the world allowed access to the documents. At the


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x • Preface

same time the increased access to such documentation also multipliesthose who interpret such evidence without the training professional his-torians receive in these matters. Such democratization of doing history

frequently challenges the long-standing rules of method and interpreta-tion that were and are the common grounding of professional historians. When the identification and interpretation of evidence and the creationand critique of larger arguments and stories can be asserted by anyoneand everyone, what is the role of professional historians in testing theaccuracy of facts inferred from the evidence surviving from the past or inevolving and evaluating the larger arguments, stories, and meaning giventhe past?

Traditionally during the last century books and articles on what histo-rians did was answered mainly in relation to other books, articles, andlearned editions of documents, which I have included among “texts” inChapter 3. Beyond their schooling, most people today learn about thepast from historical tourism or from television and motion pictures.Chapter 4 discusses how historians curate and design museum exhibitsand manage and interpret historic sites of various kinds, based broadly on

what I have characterized as “things.” Not only do most adults gain theirknowledge today about the past from moving pictures and television buthistorians increasingly appear on screen as well as advise on documentary films and television shows. I discuss all these forms of moving visualimagery under the generic term “films” in Chapter 5. By examining thesevarious types of history in relation to each other, we see better not only what historical practice actually encompasses today but also recognizemore clearly the principles justifying and grounding historical practice in

general. Such comparison provides deeper insight into the general as wellas varied nature of history as a way of construing the past.

Because I treat texts, things, and films as equally valid approaches tointerpreting the past, I have adopted the awkward consumerist word“products” as shorthand for all of these results collectively instead of always listing individually the multiple forms histories take today. Thusall kinds of histories are products, and conversely all products in thisusage are histories of one kind or another. Likewise, a single history is a

product just as such a product is called a history.Historical methods and so-called methods books traditionally described

how historians should derive their facts from their evidential sources, which were long equated mainly with texts. Even expanding methods tocover researching facts inferred from material objects and moving andother visual images covers only a small part of what historians must do in


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producing a history no matter what its form. Historians must also orga-nize or synthesize various and often intellectually contradictory compo-nents into what they call a history. Thus I have devoted a chapter to the

elements common to histories as finished or synthetic products (Chapter2) in addition to methods and the idea and uses of evidence (Chapter 1).To indicate both methods and synthesis at times I have chosen the word“processes” to go along with products to signify that various methods and ways to synthesize exist. Moreover, I want to suggest by that word thatboth historical methods and syntheses apply to things and films in addi-tion to the usual texts.

In an attempt to offer my readers a chance to consider their own con-

clusions on the topics I discuss, I have adopted two rhetorical conven-tions. I often pose a series of questions as a way of looking at a problem. Although the book reveals my own answers to these questions in its orga-nization and phrasing, I hope my rhetorical strategy affords readers anopportunity to consider their own answers to the same basic questions.Second, I try to present sides to an issue on (if not always in) their ownterms for the same reason so that readers have some basis for their own

conclusions. If nothing else, I want to suggest in my own efforts that fash-ioning histories has its own fashions. In this way I hope to illustrate as well as argue that the connections among histories as products, history asan approach to the past, and historians organized as a profession are vari-ous, dynamic, complicated, and perhaps problematic in the end.

Preface • xi


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Acknowledgments

Intellectual and personal debts accrued while working on a book arealways pleasant to acknowledge. I owe intellectual debts to all the authorscited (and often those unnamed as well), especially when venturing intofields new to me. Most pleasant to acknowledge are debts that are per-sonal as well as intellectual to Robert Berkhofer III, Martin Burke, RobertChester, Martin Dolan, Sally Hadden, Martha Hodes, Mary Sies, DavidShorter, and particularly to the late Genevieve Berkhofer.


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PART I

Construing the Past as History

Processes and Presuppositions

Fundamental to all aspects of historical practice is an idea of the past.Crucial to any idea of the past is its very pastness: the fullness of what

once existed previously no longer persists as such in the present. That thepast cannot be observed today as it was once lived and experienced by persons alive then poses the conundrum of understanding the past as his-tory. How and what can we know of that past if so much of it is gone by definition and experience? Thus understanding the past as history demandsassumptions about its nature, ways to study it, and how best to depict itto a modern audience. Without a relatively clear idea of—or at least def-

inite presumptions about—the character of the past, historians and oth-ers would not know what to look for, where to look, or what to do withit when found. Thus a rich set of presuppositions about the past precedesany research into it and exposition or representation of it as history. Suchpresuppositions are the stock in trade of the professional historian.

Chapter 1 examines the research or empirical side of the historicalenterprise. Chapter 2 looks at the literary and artistic side of histories as

representations of the past as history.


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CHAPTER 1

Historical Methods

From Evidence to Facts

A

lthough the past is gone, historians not only presume that the past was once real but that they can comprehend what happened then

from those things postulated as surviving from the past into thepresent. Even though the past no longer exists as such, historians main-tain it can be inferred from such things as manuscripts, monuments, andother material objects that exist in the present but have been accepted assurvivals from previous times. In particular, memories not only seem tooffer clues to past matters themselves but also justify the reality of a pastonce existing as such. But texts and things and even memories do not

replicate the entire context of which they are presumed part. Thus histo-rians must envision or postulate the larger context of the survivals they study even as they explore them for clues to that larger world. Efforts toovercome this hermeneutical paradox became known as the historicalmethod in the profession.1 The variety of techniques that come under thisrubric are considered the empirical or “scientific” side of what the profes-sion does, according to many historians and other scholars.2

The Idea of Sources as Evidence

All such empirical historical research rests upon three fundamental premises.First, the past actually existed: people in the past really did think, act,and experience their own times as a living reality. Second, their thoughtsand activities resulted in a variety of artifacts at the time that have sur-

vived into the present. Third, these artifacts today offer both valuableand valid clues to the actual thoughts, activities, and experiences of thosepast peoples. The connections posited among these three presumptions


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allow historians to consider surviving texts and other artifacts as “sources”or “evidence” for what past peoples did indeed do or think. Likewise, the

linkage presupposed among the three suppositions enables historians toinfer factual particulars, or what they call “facts,” about past persons,activities, and institutions from these sources. Both the conversion of thevariety of surviving artifacts into sources and the creation of facts fromthose sources have been the subject proper of books on what the profes-sion calls the “historical method.”3

Historical method, although singular in professional use, embraces in

practice a multitude of techniques for converting survivals into, first,sources and, then, facts. If the ultimate end of historical method is to pro-duce facts, or more accurately statements of fact, then survivals only become sources or evidence through inference or argument directed tohistorians’ ends. To call a survival a source or evidence, even a “trace” ora “remain,” presumes whole sets of assumptions orienting historians tothe past as a grounding for history, to identifying specific survivals as pos-

sible sources according to certain aims and current intellectual outlooks,as well as inferring statements deemed facts from such sources.4 The term“source,” therefore, packs a series of intellectual assumptions into a seem-ingly simple operation that supposedly and seamlessly converts survivalsinto information, then that information is considered as evidence forsomething the researcher wants to know, and finally statements labeledfacts are extrapolated from that evidence. To unpack this series of opera-

tions, the first three sections of this chapter summarize the nature of sur-vivals themselves, their identification as sources, and their customary classification into primary and secondary sources for historians’ purposes.The subsequent two sections examine what kind of connection particularkinds of factual statements have to the evidence supposedly supporting them. Last, I consider memories as reliable historical sources, clues toproviding context, and as history.5

Survivals from the Past

All the things around us are survivals from the past, but not all are of equal interest to students of history. Mere persistence over time does notmake them “historic” or “historical” in the eyes of historians, and it is notmerely a matter of time and ancientness. Their historicalness, or historic-

ity in one sense of that word, depends upon their utility to historians orothers, and their usefulness in turn depends upon how well they fit intosome framework or context employed by the historians and others to

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understand the selected survivals. That framework or context derives in

turn from the desires and needs of the historians and their society and

culture. When the historical profession stressed political, constitutional,diplomatic, and military history as the fundamental focus of any study of

the past, then the records, relics, and monuments produced by politi-

cians, generals, and others important in the stories of nation-states or

empires held greatest interest.6 The development of economic, labor,

intellectual, and social histories in the middle decades of the twentieth

century began a shift to the nonelite and common people, often in gen-

eral as a collectivity. The emphasis on feminist, minority, postcolonialist,cultural, and microhistories in the last decades of that century continued

the trend towards the common people but reflected new interests and

produced new stories. In each instance, historians searched for new

sources or exploited existing ones with new as well as old methods and,

more importantly, questions.

Pictures, public buildings and monuments, coins, arms, and particu-

larly documents suggest the main kinds of records or materials tradition-ally studied, just as censuses, photographs, films, electronic messages, and

everyday artifacts like garbage dumps and latrines suggest the newer or

additional kinds of materials investigated more recently. Letters, diaries,

newspapers, legal documents, government records, statues, coins, and

paintings were (and are) collected and preserved in public and private

libraries, national and local archives, and museums of all kinds. The chief

criterion for what was saved in general was thereby interpreted (and vice

versa) according to national or local pride in the statements and deeds of

great men and great families or stories of the nation state and nationality.

As historians broadened what they covered in their histories, so too did

they expand what was—or should be—saved for new stories of previously

uncovered persons, groups, or sectors of life in the past. (Of course, they

also mined the older, traditional materials with new questions.) Older

museums, archives, and libraries have expanded their collections, or new

museums, libraries, and archives were founded to include photographs,

films, electronic data, and more mundane artifacts. Historical preserva-

tion and reconstruction broadened from great government buildings,

military forts, and large private houses to whole towns like Colonial

Williamsburg in Virginia; factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, and

Ironbridge Gorge in England; suffragists’ houses and slum tenements; orstops for slaves fleeing the Southern United States on the Underground

Railroad.7

Historical Methods • 5


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So multiple is the number of survivals of interest to students of history today that it is difficult to find any easy classification system of their

nature. Traditional classificatory systems mainly listed kinds of writtendocuments, while recognizing the worth of material artifacts to the histo-rian. The American historian of France, Louis Gottschalk, in a primer onhistorical method first published in 1950, covered almost exclusively

written testimony in his chapter on “Where Does Historical InformationCome From?”8 The British historian Arthur Marwick, in the third edi-tion of his The Nature of History (1989), presents a comprehensive listing

of sources “relevant to all types” of historical research. In eight pages heoffers and describes a dozen categories of survivals: half of which are com-posed entirely of written materials and four of which combine words, pic-tures, and objects, for example, films, oral testimony, and inscriptions onbuildings and coins.9 Just two of his categories contain only unwrittenmaterials such as aerial photographs, artifacts, and observable practicespersisting from the past. In a 2001 introduction to historical methods,

early modern and medieval historians Martha Howell and Walter Prevenierdiscuss briefly the “evolution and complementarity” of “source typolo-gies.” They quickly cover the traditional narrative and literary sourcesfrom diaries to newspaper articles; formal legal and juridical documents

whether court proceedings, medieval charters, or mortgage papers; andsuch “social documents” as produced by governments, businesses, andother bureaucracies old and new. Two-thirds of that section discusses

unwritten sources: archaeological, oral, photographic, sound recordings,and electronic.10

The more comprehensive the lists and the more varied the artifactsand media, the more difficult it is to find a classificatory system. Whethertraditional or more recent, these systems rest on dividing records and

writing from other kinds of remains and relics—in other words, betweentexts of all kinds and other things. They also depend upon separating

texts from other kinds of media. Categories of artifactual survivals over-lap in the following scheme, but the three groupings suggest implicationsfor where they may be found and how they might be used in research.

Physical/material objects versus textual . Historians have long referred tophysical survivals as “relics” or “remains,” while they referred to the textsas “documents” or “testimony.”11 All survivals are physical objects or arti-facts, but scholars of material culture separate the documentary from the

other physical artifacts. Buildings old and new, whether palaces or mod-est cottages; capitols or other governmental buildings nationally orlocally; churches and schools and even museums themselves; factories,



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shops, and other businesses, all interest some historians today. Such arti-facts of past everyday living as clothing, bottles, cooking utensils, tools,

and machines can interest today’s historians as much as weapons, coins,monuments, and religious relics did yesteryear’s historians. Village andcity houses and streets as well as farm fields and fences gather as muchattention as battlefields and roads; railroads and canals as churches andtemples; jails as well as courtrooms; servant and slave quarters as man-sions; slum tenements and immigrant ghettoes as suburbs. Even bodies,bones, and hair now interest some historians as much as their anthropo-

logical and medical colleagues. Physical artifacts of all sorts are found inmuseums of all kinds and historic sites, while textual artifacts are usually located in libraries and archives.12

Written versus other media . The bibliographies of current histories likethose of older ones reveal that documentary remains still constitute thelargest category of artifactual survivals of interest to most historians.These range from personal documents like diaries and letters to such pub-

lic documents as local and national legislative and court records, fromscribbled memoranda to local and national censuses, from signed essaysand editorials to anonymously mass-produced newspapers and pam-phlets, from memoirs to treaties and maps, from inscriptions on ancientmonuments to codices. School records vary from pupils’ essays, university syllabi, report cards, internal communications, and board minutes. Religiousdocuments include church membership lists, religious pamphlets, doctri-

nal statements, sacred books, sermons, hymnals, and official proceedings.Business documents embrace bills, receipts, accounts, and contracts as well as meeting minutes, stock certificates, and letters. Historians are alwaysdelighted to find individual diaries, whether by housewife or midwife,minister or parishioner, businessman or worker, professor or student,government official or lawyer, general or soldier in any place and in alleras.13

Among unwritten media are visual and auditory materials that stillcommunicate directly. Pictorial artifacts have always been important tohistorians, but the category has expanded from statues, paintings, draw-ings, and maps to include photographs, films, and videotapes.14 Sound,long lost to the historian, now includes audiotapes and other soundmedia starting in the late 1800s, but these sources prove to be as fragile asany manuscript.15 Oral history also in a sense conveys the sounds of the

past though recorded after the fact or in the present.16

Personal versus institutional . This categorization cuts across the previ-ous two. It stresses the mode of production and distribution, both of



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which are relevant to their evidential use as sources. Personal artifactsstress the uniqueness of their production, whether letter, diary, or artisan-

crafted object, and their probable lack of wide distribution. Institutionalartifacts betray their bureaucratic origins through their place in a filing system or archive, or their frequently widespread, even mass, distribution,

whether coins, newspapers, or movies. Although past bureaucracies pro-duced unique documents and other artifacts, such as a chancery letter orchurch edict for example, the institutional is usually associated in moderntimes with multiple copies of text or object, best symbolized by the mass

media and mass production. Mass media began with the printing press,and mass production is a hallmark of the industrial revolution.17 Whethera textual source is institutional or personal makes a difference not only inhow it is interpreted but also in how it is classified and organized inarchive, library, or manuscript repository. Similarly, whether a materialobject is institutional or personal makes a difference in interpretation andin what kind of museum or historic site.

This basic partitioning of all artifactual survivals into material objectsand documents, into unwritten and written materials, reflects a long-heldassumption in traditional historical method that texts contain their owninterpretations in a sense (and thus can be repeated with little or no inter-pretation by the historian?), while material objects, such as tools, cloth-ing, and landscapes, only yield their meaning through the historian’sactive interpretation. The latter require the historian to infer meaning;

the former offer their own through report, record, or testimony, and soon. On one level of understanding, this is a truism. Communication isdirect in textual materials, indirect in other things. In a sense, documentsare already represented versions of the past, already interpreted by thoseof the time in light of their categories and perspectives. Thus they appearto present their information directly. Other artifacts only offer informa-tion indirectly through inference and interpretation by the historian, even

in those cases when the existence of the object is taken to correlate withthe artistic or technological level of a population or indicate its socialorganization and cultural values.

But to separate conceptually textual artifacts from other things, writ-ten from unwritten materials, implies that one is more symbolic thananother for historians’ purposes when all survivals are “read” symbolically to establish one or more contexts in the past from one or more contexts

in the present. Pragmatists as well as postmodernists agree today in theory that all survivals are interpreted in one way or another, and all historiansconcur in practice. Thus Howell and Prevenier define a source as “those



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materials from which historians construct meanings.”18 Statements of facttherefore are always inferred, never found, even when they are repeated

from statements found in a source. Historians must always decide whatare valid facts for their purposes.

Even today, however, historians do not use all the artifacts persisting from the human past because in general they still consider the morerecent millennia as their chief focus. Or, at least they still have not founda context sufficient to interpret all that persists from human behavior inthe past, although archaeology and environmental history seem to be

stretching the old boundary that separated history from prehistory.Conversely, much that historians might want from the past has not sur-vived. Few or no events as such persist from the past, and even very oldpersons remember only relatively recent parts of the past. Moreover,many documents and other artifacts resulting from the thoughts andactivities of past peoples exist no longer. Those that do endure sustain theidea of “traces,” “remnants,” “traditions,” and collective memories as sur-

vivals. In general, however, the older the period, the less material survives. Wood and fiber products rarely survive from ancient times; stone andmetal artifacts more so. The materials of burial practices remain morethan farming practices, although the latter may persist in some placesfrom a not so recent past.19

The loss of relatively recent material happens even today to the cha-grin of historians, for example, the fragility and disappearance of early

movies and sound recordings. Messages and Web sites on the Internetprove even more evanescent than old manuscripts. Newspapers and pam-phlets of the eighteenth century, for example, survive better than those of the early twentieth century, because of the rag content in eighteenth-cen-tury paper as opposed to the wood pulp and high acid content paper that

was used later in the nineteenth century. Similarly, books publishedbetween the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries are far more

vulnerable than those produced before or after those hundred or so years.In the hope of preserving their books from that period, the Library of Congress, for example, plans to deacidify 8.5 million of its 18.7 millionbooks.20

Modern technology has proved a mixed blessing in the historian’sefforts to discover as well as interpret past survivals. On one side, new technology provides new information about the past. Aerial surveys dis-

close old settlement patterns by tracing, for example, Roman roads inBritain or the spread of Aztec cities in Mexico and beyond.21 DNA analy-sis traces ancestry, most famously recently to test the two-hundred-year-old



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charge that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children with his slaveSally Hemings.22 The radioactive decay of carbon-14 or the comparison

of tree rings dates grains, buildings, and artifacts. And of course the com-puter analyzes massive amounts of data faster and surer than the manualmethods of old. Technology moves so fast these days that it makes obso-lescent popular applications of just yesterday. We no longer possessdevices to read old punch cards, hear older audiotapes, or read earliercomputer inputs. These obsolescent but very recent technologies now pose problems of salvage as severe as any other preservationists face.23

Archives, libraries, and museums today face the modern dilemma of too much material. On one hand, they command ever better methods of storage and preservation. On the other hand, even the largest and richesthave space and money to collect and retain only so much. If too few things survive from the long ago past, too many things are produced inthe present. The National Archives of the United States contained at theend of the twentieth century 4 billion pieces of paper, 9.4 million pho-

tographs, 338,029 films and videos, almost 2.65 million maps and charts,nearly 3 million architectural and engineering plans, and over 9 millionaerial photographs.24 Modern governments and other institutions aregenerating too many records and other matter far too fast to keep andstore all of them. Should the state of Florida, for example, preserve ordestroy the nearly six million punch card ballots of the controversial 2000presidential election that introduced the word “chad” into the vocabulary

of the average American voter as everyone waited for the recount and theeventual close victory of George W. Bush? The Florida Secretary of State’soffice estimates that it will cost a quarter of a million dollars to move andstore the documents and another one hundred thousand dollars a year tomaintain them. 25

Historians assume that the many documents, buildings, pictures, andother survivals from the past constitute but a small part of all that once

existed. Even most formal, written, and bureaucratic records no longersurvive let alone those of oral communications, informal interactions,illegal activities (unless noted in court proceedings), and numerous otherhuman activities, including faxes and e-mails today. One Italian scholarestimates that the ratio of lost ancient world texts to those that survivetoday equals at least 40:1 but believes his figure is far short of actual loss.26

An English scholar of medieval history estimates that only about one per-

cent of the once existing documents of the era from 1066 to 1307 stillsurvive from that country’s past.27 Thus Louis Gottschalk writes of docu-mentary sources in his historical methods handbook under the heading



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“Historical Knowledge Limited by Incompleteness of the Records,” “Andonly a part of what was observed in the past was remembered by those

who observed it; only a part of what was remembered was recorded; only a part of what was recorded has survived; only a part of what has survivedhas come to the historians’ attention; only a part of what has come totheir attention is credible; only a part of what is credible has been grasped;and only a part of what has been grasped can be expounded or narratedby the historian.”28

With appropriate allowances for the exact nature of a given artifact,

Gottschalk’s lament applies in general to other kinds of physical artifactsas to survival rate, the difficulty of contextualizing them, and their use ininterpreting and narrating history. Although historians cannot “create”facts when no evidence from the past exists, they must and do “extrapo-late” by educated guess from the presumed context of the existing sur-vivals to cover the silence of the nonexistent. (Oral history can help fillthe void in more recent times.) In the end, even the documented must be

interpreted, and so we turn in the next section to the transformation of survivals into sources.

The Identification of Sources

A fundamental goal of the historical method is to convert survivals of var-ious kinds into what historians call “sources.” Sources provide the evi-

dence for the historians’ own representations of the past. From suchevidence historians derive the facts that support their statements aboutthe past and which they incorporate into their histories. According tomodern historical methods, sources are not found so much as identifiedand isolated according to a historian’s research agenda. The conversion of survivals into sources depends upon a set of assumptions governing theirrelationship between their present-day existence and the role they pre-

sumably played in the lives and institutions of past peoples.If historians must infer factual particulars from survivals, they need toknow that any given survival can be trusted to be what it represents itself to be. If the artifact is fraudulent in some way, at worse a forgery or a fake,it will cause historians to draw invalid inferences, hence to posit inaccu-rate factual particulars about the past. Therefore, before historians can ask

what can a survival as source reveal about what happened in the past, they

must ask the prior question about whether any given survival provides a reliable basis, that is, a trustworthy source, for their inferences of fact. Isthe artifact what it appears to be so historians can presume it a valid base



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for their inferences about the peoples and times of its production? Inother words, can the historian trust the document to be what it claims to

be or the material artifact what it seems to be in order to derive the fac-tual particulars she declares? Are a document’s dates and authorship accu-rate and its text the original one? Are the producer and the date and siteof production of a material artifact correctly attributed? To validate a sur-vival as a useful source, then, presumes a division between the facts estab-lishing the authenticity of the artifact itself as opposed to the facts to bederived by the historian from the artifact.29

The techniques, traditionally considered the scientific basis of the pro-fession, for validating artifactual survivals of all kinds as proper sourcesfollow from this methodological assumption of a division between thelegitimacy of a source as source and the nature of it as evidence for factsabout the peoples and events of the past. The techniques vary for thesepurposes depending upon the form of the medium: whether charters orcensuses, buildings or diaries, paintings or photographs, coins or ceme-

teries, battlefields or agricultural field systems, oral histories or collectivememories. Or, they vary depending upon the date of the artifact and thetechnology used to produce it.30 The basis of the appropriate techniquedistinguishes essentially between whether the artifact is documentary ortextual in the broadest sense or is some other kind and form of materialobject. An artifact, of course, often combines text plus significant mater-ial aspects. Coins or monuments contain linguistic inscriptions and pic-

torial matter as well as form and materiality. Murals and paintings arepictorial but also frequently symbolic or depict a story. Songs and news-reels are verbal as well as musical or pictorial. Often sources from themedieval and ancient worlds demand special techniques and skills pro-vided by what were once called auxiliary or ancillary sciences such as his-torical archaeology, numismatics (the authentication and dating of coinsand the deciphering of their inscriptions), diplomatics (the critical study

of official and other corporate forms of documents), paleography (thestudy of the appearance and stylistic conventions for the dating, authen-tication, and transcribing of medieval and other archaic handwritten doc-uments), epigraphy (the study of seals and inscriptions on ancient andlater gravestones, monuments, buildings, and other hard surfaces), andchronology (the study and reconciliation of different dating systems).31

But even more modern sources need special skills and knowledge to

detect forgeries and “read” images and maps.32

All the techniques have three or four main goals: attributing author-ship of a document or the producer of an artifact; determining the date



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and place of its creation; ascertaining the authenticity of its form and/or

the accuracy of its contents; and perhaps deciphering its content. Such

deciphering may range from the translation of its language from one toanother or from an ancient one into a modern one or even from past

words and usage into their present-day equivalents—if such exist. A sim-

ple example would be those terms for material objects that no longer exist

and for which modern people can only guess at their function. (As for

example, a strip of bronze from a sixth-century English grave, which a

museum staff in 1988 labeled wittily “God knows–but we don’t.”)33 Many

modern documentary and other artifactual survivals are sufficiently clearabout their producers, times and places of production, and genuineness,

and so they pose little or no problem about serving as valid sources for the

historian. Historically, scholars developed many of the classic techniques

to cope with the problems posed by manuscripts, coins, monuments, and

other survivals from early modern, medieval, and earlier times. The gen-

eral implications of these methods alert all historians to the common

premises underlying this aspect of historical method and the resulting uses of various kinds of contexts.

The most basic question about any artifact as source is always about

whether it is genuine or spurious? Is it by whom, from when and where,

and in the exact form it was originally? The most notorious examples of

false survivals, hence unreliable sources, are outright forgeries, frauds, and

hoaxes. Scholars developed modern documentary techniques for studying

medieval documents, with their profusion of forgeries. Scholars estimate

that from maybe ten percent to perhaps one-half to two-thirds of medieval

documents in some places, periods, and categories are forgeries or cor-

ruptions.34 The Donation of Constantine was perhaps the most historic

of these, for, one, it had real effect for seven hundred years in the history

of the Roman Catholic Church and, two, the exposure of its anachronisms

in 1440 is frequently credited with starting modern critical source analy-

sis. Supposedly an edict from Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to

convert to Christianity in 312 CE, the document gave the Pope domin-

ion over Rome, the Italian provinces, and perhaps the entire Western

Empire. Pope Stephen II used the document in 754 CE to challenge the

effort of Constantinople to diminish the authority of the papacy over the

Western Empire. Scholars assume the Donation of Constantine was pro-

duced in Stephen II’s chancery for that purpose. In 1440, Lorenzo Valla’sanalysis of anachronisms of style and reference in the document ques-

tioned its authenticity. Historians of historical scholarship and method



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often point to his and other philologists’ techniques at the time as thebeginning of modern critical documentary method.35

Artistic, textual, and other kinds of forgeries and their critical unmask-ing appear in all eras from ancient times in both the Western and Eastern worlds to the present. Textual forgeries range in time from ancient Greek authors, for example the letters of Socrates and Euripides, to twentieth-century dictators, for example the diaries of Benito Mussolini and AdolphHitler. The still popularly accepted tale of romance between AbrahamLincoln and Ann Rutledge rests on forged love letters publicized by the

Atlantic Monthly in 1928. The Vinland Map, supposedly showing theViking discovery of America and depicting the continent for the firsttime, still perplexes historians and other scholars a half century after itsdonation to Yale University in 1957. If authentic, it would arguably bethe most valuable map in the world; if a forgery, as most now claim, it hasfooled many an expert for the last half century.36 Forgeries of letters andother documents and artifacts will continue as long as money, political

influence, propaganda, religious, egotistical, and other purposes call themforth.Probably the most notorious and harmful forgery of the twentieth

century was the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose twenty-four sections supposedly revealed the conspiratorial plans of a secret Jewishgovernment for economic, political, and religious dominion over the

world. Mainly plagiarized from a French satire on Napoleon III, the

Protocols culminated a century of anti-Jewish forgeries. The Protocols werefirst published in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century but soon appeared in many languages after World War I to fuel the viru-lent anti-Semitism of the times. The automobile maker Henry Ford pub-licized the document in the United States. Hitler used it in Germany tofurther the Nazi cause. The small book had been translated into at leasttwenty languages by the end of the Second World War, and it is still in

print and on the Internet in this century. It was even the basis for a Ramadanmultipart special on Egyptian television in November 2002.37

Even past photographs and newsreels of past events were doctored forpropaganda or other purposes. Live soldiers played dead, and deceasedsoldiers were rearranged and posed by some Civil War photographers toenhance the effect of battlefield slaughter.38 In contrast, United Statesauthorities allowed no photographs of dead American soldiers to appear

in the mass media during the entire nineteen months of the First World War and not for the first twenty-one months of the Second World War.39

Edward Curtis, the noted late nineteenth-century photographer of Native



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Americans, carried a trunk full of hairpieces and clothing to make hissubjects appear more traditional than they were when he photographed

them.40

A team of English filmmakers doctored a newsreel sequence of Adolph Hitler in Paris as it fell to the German Army in June 1940 so as toshow him dancing in delight as part of a British propaganda campaign.41

Great as the problems of using yesteryear’s photographs and films as evi-dence are, they pale before the possibilities of tomorrow’s computer-manipulated simulation of past and present alike.42

Although not as bad for the historian’s purposes as outright forgeries,

but misleading in their own way for historical research are garbled, cor-rupted, plagiarized, or ghostwritten texts. Corrupted versions result frominadvertent mistakes while hand copying texts before the advent of print-ing and intentional editing of texts by editors or publishers after thattime. The more copiers and the more times a manuscript text was copied,the more likely words were misread or miscopied from the original. Inmore modern times, the published version of an article or book may con-

tain heavy or light editing of the author’s words, so what the public readsmay be quite different from what the author wrote originally. Many mod-ern political or other leaders neither write their own speeches nor com-pose their own letters. Often some of the most memorable phrases inmodern political speeches are the handiwork of speechwriters. Althoughthe mechanical production of newspapers and magazines guarantees mul-tiple copies all equally original in a sense, modern American newspapers

produce variant versions by geographical region (such as the New York Times metropolitan and national versions), and magazines, thanks to thecomputer, can vary advertising content by postal code. Likewise, motionpictures may vary by format, length, and even some content from theoriginal version when shown on a television or Digital Video Disk.

Methods old and new, then, ask the same fundamental questions of the survivals studied to establish them as authentic. What must we know

of any survival’s origins and subsequent history, its pedigree in a sense, inorder to trust it as a source? (1) What are its origins (genesis): who or

what, when, where produced? (2) What is its lineage (genealogy): origi-nal, copy, copy of copy, and so on? (3) What is its history (provenance, inone of its meanings): Where was it found? How was it found? Who foundit? Who preserved it and how (and maybe why)? How did it come to bein the possession of its present owner? These questions elicit the source’s

chain of custody and what those links disclose about the authenticity of its contents. Of course forgeries are their own kind of sources about thetimes, places, and peoples of their creation. This history of origins,



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genealogy, and provenance can become its own source of data for the dif-fusion and reception of an idea, memory, or myth.

The public associates such a pedigree most notably with paintings,rare books, or antiques, where it is called a provenance or provenience.43

Art museums seek to know from experts whether a famous painting orsculpture is by the artist, from his workshop or school of followers, merely a copy by someone else in the past, or even a modern forgery. Whether a painting or other art object is worth millions, much less, or nearly noth-ing often depends on its placement in one of these categories. How much

the object is worth for the historian’s purposes, however, depends not whether it is the original or a copy but whether it portrays its times accu-rately. Thus much of what we know of Greek sculpture derives from theRoman copies that have survived into the present. Rare book libraries andmanuscript collections try to ascertain whether what they possess is theoriginal author’s version, a later edition or copy, a facsimile, a corruptedversion, or even a forgery. (Hence the importance of the debate over the

Vinland map.) Once again, the historian’s purpose may be served well by a copy that is assumed faithful to the original. This is especially true if anoriginal no longer exists, for then a facsimile or other kind of copy mustsuffice. The manuscripts of the ancient world were particularly vulnerableto decay, erasure, destruction, and random recopying. So, for example,the oldest full version of Homer’s writings is a copy made nearly eighteencenturies later. The writings of the ancient Romans Cicero, Livy, Pliny

Younger and Older, Virgil, and Ovid only survive as traces beneath laterChristian overwritings. Medieval monks copied the works of Plato asconsistent with Christian doctrine but not those of Aristotle, which cometo us through Arab copyists.44

A pedigree is more important for documents produced prior to print-ing, because the repeated scribal copying, which preserved the text in thefirst place, easily produced and multiplied errors in succeeding versions.

It was the printing press with its capacity for multiple copies of an “orig-inal” that ensured the survival of some of them into the present. But evenhere the press operator or other intermediary between author and audi-ence may have edited the text or image from what the author or artistintended. Of course, the purpose of many original documents and arti-facts—old and new—was to mislead by misrepresenting matters. Thusthe document might be authentic, but its content is false to the facts,

whether intended to deceive an enemy in war or a population in peace-time about policy. Regardless of kind, only a small part of past documentsand other artifacts survive into the present.



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Tracing the history of the artifact over the course of its career or life, so

to speak, ensures that the present-day document or material object sur-

vives from the claimed or purported time and place and results from thepurported or claimed producer. Such a pedigree allows historians to know

when and where, by whom, and probably how any given artifact was cre-

ated and, therefore, whether it can be trusted as a source from which the

historian can infer correct factual particulars about the times (and con-

texts) of its creation. The importance of a good pedigree for a document

even became an issue in recent international diplomacy after the destruc-

tion of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. Questionsarose immediately after the release of the Osama bin Laden videotapes

about their authenticity. Journalists, television pundits, politicians, and

scholars all debated how the tapes had been obtained and by whom, who

had made them and when, and why they surfaced when they did. (Also

debated was the adequacy of the English translation provided by the Bush

administration and whether the tapes supported the contention of the

White House about Al Qaeda’s role in the destruction.)One of the main businesses of museums, archives, and libraries is the

certification of the artifacts in their possession as genuine, whether picto-

rial matter of all types, manuscripts, books, maps, films, recordings, and

written records or material objects of all kinds. Such certification allows

historians to be certain of the date of creation, the authorship or producer,

and other details vital to the establishment of those artifacts as authentic

sources for deriving factual particulars of and for a history.

The most important function of museums, archives, and libraries is

the preservation that allows survival of past texts and other artifacts into

the present. Students of historical memory therefore see archives and

museums as sites of official and collective memory(ies). Officially, these

institutions are places designed for receiving records and other artifacts,

organizing and cataloguing them, and storing them safely and systemati-

cally for their retrieval and viewing. Unofficially, as many researchers dis-

cover, numerous documents and artifacts are not catalogued, their retrieval

is not as certain as hoped, and many artifacts remain in private hands out-

side these institutions. Although of recent origin by historical standards,

scores of motion pictures and sound recordings are lost, and many of

those remaining are in fragile or worse condition. We have even less of an

idea of how much electronic data has been saved, let alone created. (ButGoogle’s massive Internet scanning and storage may prove invaluable to

future scholars.)



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Museums, archives and libraries are not impartial preservers of pastsurvivals. Their guardianship of local or national heritage skews their col-

lections toward the concerns of those in a position to influence such deci-sions or who pay for the acquisitions. Until recently art museums exhibitedthe great and not-so-great (male) artists as defined by the Western tradi-tion. This stance neglected women and minority artists as outside thistradition—usually not even defining their work as art. Perhaps themost invidious distinction is the division of art into the “prehistoric” kindusually housed in natural history and archaeological museums and the

“historic” kind, especially European, displayed in “art museums.” Manuscriptrepositories customarily preserved and perhaps preferred the documentsof the powerful and the upper classes. Even state archives reflected thesame biases in their collections, and historians thought this appropriate

when they concentrated on the history of elites so long traditional in thediscipline. As the British oral historian Paul Thompson graphically describedthis bias, “The very power structure worked as a great recording machine

shaping the past in its own image.”45

To see how this principle worked ina concrete physical setting, one has only to remark the survival of thegreat Southern plantation mansions in the United States and the disap-pearance of the slave quarters surrounding them.46 Even though muse-ums, archives, and other repositories are trying these days to compensatefor previous biases by searching out new artifacts and documents, histori-ans need always to remember to ask of all these institutions: what they

save or saved and why? What they neglect or neglected or destroyed andfor what reasons? Such questions hint at what data is missing from the past.

Primary versus Secondary Sources

Different kinds of artifacts require different kinds of techniques for theirvalidation, dating, authorship, and accuracy or authenticity, but the

major assumptions underlying these techniques are similar across medi-ums and disciplines. Although the practitioners of oral history, documen-tary research, visual image analysis, and historical archaeology may differin their specific methods, they share the basic critical methodologicalassumptions for understanding and analyzing survivals as sources.47

Survivals become certified as sources through relevant questions, andthose are framed according to one or another presumed or postulated

context. These questions are traditionally discussed in the classic methodsmanuals in terms of “external criticism” or in newer ones as “source criti-cism.” External or source criticism establishes the authenticity of the survival:



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that it originated at the time and in the place (its when and where) it wassupposed to. It was called external criticism (as opposed to internal criti-

cism discussed in the next section) because that confirmation occursthrough operations external to the artifact itself, usually through compar-ison with the same or similar kinds of artifacts. Though the object of analy-sis is the document, the context of that analysis depends how it fits in

with other texts, or its intertextuality as literary theorists call it. Negatively,external criticism looks for, among other things, anachronistic words intexts or objects in pictures, anomalous paper and canvas or other medium

and material, and variation of its general appearance from others of itskind. Positively, it proposes a date for the undated, attributes authorshipif anonymous or wrongly signed, and places it in a tradition of form andcontent if that is not clear from the artifact itself. Since the latter are attri-butions, such placements have proved wrong at times.

The main goal of all these techniques from the viewpoint of historiansis to warrant that artifactual sources are really contemporaneous to the

times of their production, because historians prefer to work from such“original sources.”48 They believe those sources coming most directly fromthe times they are researching offer the best clues to those times. Historiansemphasize this preference in their research by distinguishing between

what they call “primary” as opposed to “secondary” sources. Primary sourcesare those documents and other things both from and about the timesbeing investigated. Secondary sources are those referring to matters and

times earlier than their own time of production. In that sense all history books are secondary sources (except for a history of history-writing), butso too are historical re-enactments, documentary films, simulated arti-facts, and virtual computer images of past texts, artifacts, peoples andplaces. Such a distinction always depends upon the question asked, for

what is a secondary source for one question may be a primary source foranother question, but this is a topic for the next section on facts as state-

ments about particulars. Conversely, that a single source can be both pri-mary and secondary shows the importance of using contemporaneousevidence in historical research that applies to the question asked.

Even many sources historians accept and use as primary may be sec-ondary in a technical sense. In traditional historical methods manuals,only eyewitness, that is, actual witness as opposed to hearsay, accountsconstitute original or primary sources. Were they written down at the

time of occurrence or only later from memory? What if the source is a report of rumor or hearsay? Newspaper accounts? Are the court records orlegislative journals verbatim transcriptions from stenographic or sound


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recordings, or merely summaries of what occurred? Memoirs or autobi-ographies, even though written long after the events they chronicle, may

recount matters for which there is little or no other evidence. For lack of better survivals about these matters, all these latter kinds of documentscould, might, and, often, must serve as primary sources. Even thoughremoved from the persons or events reported, they are closest to what isrepresented or reported. Thus, although not original in the sense of being contemporaneous, they become primary in terms of what is to be known.

Historians also accept as primary sources such hybrid materials as pho-

tocopies, facsimiles, microfilms, published editions of manuscripts, and,increasingly these days, digitized versions of texts and artifacts. Suchhybrid materials save the researcher much time and money and allow a more deliberate study of the materials than a hasty visit to archives, rarebook library, or museum. Increasingly, these repositories do not allow study of the originals in order to save them from the deterioration wroughtby too many researchers physically handling them. (The Manuscripts

Division of the Library of Congress, for example, allows only a very selectfew researchers to handle the actual letters of the Founding Fathers asopposed to copies.) Although clearly not the actual sources themselves,these copies can be accepted if they are good faith and, even better, accu-rate, reproductions of the original sources. Even so, the researcher mustask of each such reproduction just how much interpretation the editor orcompiler employed to produce the copy or edition.49

The present state of many artifacts, buildings, ships, and landscapesillustrate the problems of understanding such hybrid sources. How shouldone understand reconstructions and restorations as opposed to the origi-nals of such material objects? Many wooden ships and buildings, forexample, have been replaced part by part so that almost nothing originalremains, but still the ship or building is accepted as the original. Forexample, both the HMS Victory , Lord Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the

Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the USS Constitution, better known asOld Ironsides as a result of a War of 1812 battle, lay claim to being the old-est commissioned warships afloat, and both have been so totally recon-structed that they are essentially mere replicas of their original woodenselves.50 A historic garden is a good example of replacement accepted asoriginal, but many of the plants have necessarily been renewed, trimmed,or replaced. No matter what the ideal mode of preservation preferred by

professionals, no restorer today is likely to paint the Great Sphinx andancient Greek statues, for example, in the bright colors they wore origi-nally. On the other hand, many a grimy painting today is restored to the


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supposedly vivid colors the artist intended. The brighter colors of therestored Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo and the most recent attempt

to save the deteriorating Last Supper by Da Vinci provoked widespreadcriticism. Da Vinci, for example, used a quite unstable medium for hismasterpiece, finished in 1498. Restoration began already in 1726. Eachof the nine subsequent restorations tried to undo the mistakes of the pre-vious one. Each of the restorers attempted to preserve what they thoughtLeonardo had intended. All contributed their own touches more or less to

what we still call the original. The most recent restoration lasted twenty

years, and some scholars question whether the brighter colors are consis-tent with Leonardo’s vision or achievement. They accuse the restorer of repainting rather than restoring the masterpiece.51

Even supposedly unrestored monuments and buildings no longerappear as they did to people who constructed them due to the ravages of time and human intervention. Of course, the greatest difference betweenthe originals in the past and their existence now is the changed context in

how they are seen, heard, and, in general, experienced today. Those who would preserve battlefields fight the encroaching sights and sounds of modern civilization, whether the threat is tall buildings, communicationtowers, amusement parks, or modern highways. The very surroundingsthat earlier people developed as part of a living environment are now con-demned as unhistorical and are removed in order to capture the supposedpast as interpreted by nostalgia, historians, politicians, or tourist boards.

Colonial delegates used the Pennsylvania State House, or what is now called Independence Hall, in Philadelphia to declare their independencein 1776, and others drafted the Constitution there during the summer of 1787. Moderate size skyscrapers now dwarf it, and modern traffic noisesand tourists now surround it. To build the Independence National HistoricalPark around the buildings, almost all nineteenth-century buildings weretorn down, including some considered architectural landmarks in their

own right. In other words, all the historical fabric that had grown uparound the building was removed in the name of restoring the originalenvironment. Yet only some of the contemporary structures surrounding the historic buildings were reconstructed to give the visitor a sense of thelate eighteenth-century urban environment. The park itself containsempty but once occupied spaces and such alien buildings as the Liberty Bell Pavilion, National Constitution Center, and the visitor orientation

center.52

Even documentary filmmakers must search out built environ-ments without the paraphernalia of electric wires, anomalous buildings,and modern inventions. A 2002 documentary miniseries on Benjamin



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Franklin used locations up and down the eastern seaboard for historic

buildings and landscapes to portray his American experience of the time

but had to look to Lithuania to find eighteenth-century urban exteriorsfree of modern buildings or inventions to depict his years in London and

Paris.53 Tourists, of course, are their own kind of context; over a million

persons a year visit Colonial Williamsburg for example.

The most important of the post hoc contexts historians use is know-

ing the future of the past and therefore the outcome of past persons’

beliefs and actions. Not only do historians know now what diplomats

thought then would follow from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinandin 1914, but they also know how the First World War ended and what

followed thereafter. And the same is true for the discovery of radium and

the invention of dynamite. At the same time, much of what happened in

the past and the reasons for those events, and so on, are lost to us because

the sources do not survive. So we both know more and know less than

those persons of the past knew.54 Divided by city-state or country, by eth-

nicity or religion, by class or gender, by education or association, let aloneby era, past persons saw events through their own perspectives. Thus all

sources come to the historian through some perspective. Just as universal

omniscience is denied to persons in the past, so too is it denied to histo-

rians. Even if the future of the past is known, it must always be depicted

from some point of view.

The assumption of one or more kinds of context allows the historian

to first collect survivals relevant to a research project and another context

or two to interpret them as sources for that research. As Howell and

Prevenier remark, all sources are “read” both historically in light of the

context of their past existence and historiographically in light of how the

historical profession looks at and understands the materials today.55 In

line with this admonition, we must also remember that the historian is

just the most recent person to interpret the documents and artifacts.

What the historian of early modern times Peter Burke observes of docu-

ments in general applies to all sources (with allowances for the specific

kind): “It is impossible to study the past without the assistance of a whole

chain of intermediaries, including not only earlier historians but also the

archivists who arranged the documents, the scribes who wrote them and

the witnesses whose words were recorded.”56 This observation is broadly

true of specific museum exhibitions and even their general collections:from producer of artifact, through successive owners, to its acquisition by

a museum, through successive winnowings of selection or deacquisition,



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until interpreted as part of a “permanent” exhibition or saved as part of a general collection, until the next round of selection, and so on.

At the heart of historical research therefore lies a certain circularity of reasoning about the relationship between past and present through thestudy of these surviving artifacts as sources: survivals or traces found inthe present tell us about the past just as the past is made known to usthrough these survivals and traces. For this circularity to achieve itsmethodological ends, historians use context in several ways. First, histori-ans use currently accepted historical knowledge and interpretations to

provide one or another kind of context to “read” these present-day survivalsas clues to the past they postulate and hope to describe. They, in short,must have some idea of what they are looking for and whether they havefound it. They gain the basis for doing this from the context of currentinterpretations and knowledge. Second, historians organize the facts they elicit in the present from these survivals according to some context said tooperate in the past. They presume some kind of a context created, so to

speak, the survivals, and, in turn, those survivals will yield through study that self-same context. In that way, such a context not only organizes thedata about the past but also gives meaning to those facts adduced from thesurvivals studied. In these ways, the overall context of historical method-ology and modern methods presumes the context (intertext) of currentknowledge to understand the traces and data of the past in order to seethem as (and in) context in order to produce further knowledge about

the past or to correct that knowledge. The penultimate context for suchfactual derivation therefore is the consensual and traditional practices of the historical profession. The ultimate context is, as neopragmatists, Marxists,and many traditionalists alike point out, the society (and culture) thatboth fosters and polices the historical genre by how it supports archivists,museum curators, historians, and other specialists as professionals.57

The assumption of the historical method that artifacts assumed to

come from the past can now reveal how the once living lived presumes a peculiar kind of relationship between past and present peoples and, in a sense, vice versa. To what extent must historians presume that past andpresent peoples think and act similarly in the same basic situations inorder to derive facts according to the historical method? But is such anassumption the temporal equivalent of ethnocentrism? Or, should histo-rians assume that the past is a “foreign country,” but then how do histo-

rians escape the temporal equivalent of solipsism that follows such anapproach to the otherness of past peoples? Naturally, historians prefer a middle path between these extremes, but where that lies may depend



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upon how long ago the historical actors lived or how different their cul-ture was. It is not clear how well either memory or social tradition can

bridge quite different eras. This suggests the hypothesis that the fartheraway in time and/or culture, the more difficult the reconciliation betweenpast and present; the closer to our time and culture(s) the easier the his-torians’ task. The basic conundrum is clear, its resolution far less so. Theproliferation of historical techniques and the multiplication of so-calledauxiliary sciences and disciplines are meant to alleviate if not solve thesedilemmas. In the end, as we shall see, the past and the present are always

linked through contextual assumptions—often with some metanarrativeas intellectual foundation or ultimate context.In the end, then, what converts survivals into sources are the questions

asked of them and the postulated contexts used to judge the answersabout their credibility, authenticity, and utility. As a consequence, thereobtains no one-to-one correlation between any given survival and itsinterpretation as a source, because one survival can be interpreted in mul-

tiple ways and, therefore in effect, as many sources. For a similar reason,no one-to-one correlation obtains between a source and the facts inferredor hypothesized from it. As we shall see in the next two sections, a sourcecan yield through interpretation multiple facts, and, conversely, a singlefact can be developed from many sources.

Facts as Re-presentations

The ultimate goal of the historical method is to produce facts about pastpersons, their ideas and actions, their experiences and institutions, andthe events involving them. The working assumption—some postmod-ernists might say prevailing myth—of historians is that their productionsrest on an empirical basis of factuality. That factuality is presumed to con-stitute the accuracy of history and therefore its truthfulness. That truth-

fulness is both produced and warranted by the techniques of the historicalmethod. Thus the factuality, accuracy, truthfulness, and methods of his-torical practice all depend upon one another in both theory and practice.In fact, many, but especially traditional, historians argue that the wholehistorical enterprise, and therefore the theoretical nature of history itself,should and can be understood only in light of its empirical practices.58

The relationship between assertion of fact and use of evidential sources

can be divided into two broad categories. The first, covered in this sec-tion, I label “re-representation” or “re-presentation” for short, because thehistorian repeats, that is presents again, one or more statements (to whole



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arguments and stories) that she accepts as factual just as given in one ormore sources. The second, treated in the next section, I label construction

because the facts (let alone arguments and stories) need not only to beinferred but developed—that is, constituted—by the historian from oneor more sources. The basic distinction between re-presentation and con-struction, then, hinges not upon how simple or general or how concreteor abstract the factual statement adduced but whether it comes directly by way of quotation or paraphrase from the source or sources or indirectly by interpretation and development from the source or sources. Re-pre-

sentation always implies the possibility of comparing the text or otherartifact with a verified, authentic original. Without the possibility of suchcomparison, an alleged copy or simulation must be considered a repre-sentation constructed by the historian. Both depend equally upon infer-ence and interpretation by the historian. Both represent the past ashistory. Representation, however, is the more inclusive term. All re-pre-sentations are representations, but representations can take many forms

other than re-presentation.If the historian re-presents factual statements originally recorded,reported, or otherwise presented in one or more sources themselves, thenthe sources must be presumed to communicate such statements in thefirst place. This approach explains why historians traditionally studiedsources that were testimonies or reports, or at least documentary or tex-tual in a general sense. Classic methods manuals developed rules particu-

larly for this level of historical practice.59

If testimony and reports are toconstitute the foundation of re-presentation as a historical practice, thenthe documentary sources must be as authentic, as trustworthy as possiblein the first place. Only after the pedigree of a document or other textualsurvival establishes it as authentic can historians investigate it for the par-ticulars it can reveal as a source for their goal of re-presenting facts aboutpast peoples’ ideas and beliefs, activities and behavior, institutions and

experiences, events and transformations.Such re-presented facts can range from statements about simple phys-

ical and behavioral manifestations to abstract, symbolic constructions,from, say, uncomplicated plain everyday beliefs and activities to compli-cated imagery and social events to complex statistics and poetry. If exter-nal criticism asks whether a source can tell us what it claims to or seemsto represent, then internal criticism inquires what a source can tell us

about the past that we want to know. If the task of source criticism is toestablish the trustworthiness of the source, especially documentary, thenthe job of internal criticism is to extract the factual particulars from it. If



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external criticism seeks to establish the factual basis of the document,then internal criticism seeks to derive historical knowledge from it.

Historians’ dependence on the author or other producer of a docu-ment or text for the discovery, validity, and authority of their informationled to a set of basic rules in traditional historical methods manuals.

Although these rules were meant to apply to constructed as well as re-pre-sented facts, they seem particularly appropriate for the latter, especially since the source can be quoted or paraphrased. The rules sought to answeras best possible: who (or what in the case of institutionally produced doc-

uments) knows best and how and why.The most fundamental rule was summarized in the stress on originalor primary as opposed to secondary sources. The more the text was pro-duced at the time by someone or some group who witnessed or partici-pated in the event, the better the evidence and the more probable thehistorian could trust (and repeat) the facts stated. So a basic rule lookedat the degree of removal of the testimony, report, or other document from

the specific place and time of the event. Was it firsthand eyewitnessknowledge, secondhand hearsay, thirdhand information, fourthhand spec-ulation, or further removed? Was the testimony, report, or other text pro-duced by someone or some group at the time, a little later, or much later?In all instances, but particularly in these latter ones, is the report or testi-mony consistent with other sources? Do different documents report thesame fact or set of facts? Ideally, corroboration depends upon two or more

independent witnesses, but historians are often lucky to have one witnessto an event. Another set of maxims deal with how good a witness or reporter was

the producer of the document. These maxims query the witness’ credibil-ity, reliability, and authority. How competent was the witness to under-stand and report the event, to ask the right questions about it, or comefrom the right social group to best comprehend matters? What were the

witness’ biases in the matter and in whose favor? Did the witness havepersonal interests or purposes in the matter or in views of the matteritself? Did the witness desire to please a certain audience then or later?These rules assume certain conditions are more favorable to credibility:the testimony or report was a matter of indifference or, better, prejudicialto the witness; the matter was common knowledge at the time; the mat-ter was purely incidental or even contrary to the expectation of what the

witness usually says or does. Last, what of the style of the document and what does it tell the historian about the credibility of what is expressed inthe contents? Was it satire, pathos, or other literary form that may not



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mean what it seems at face value? Does the document follow standardconventions used in letters, laws, reports, or treaties at the time? The sen-

timents of letters and diaries often follow the conventional sentimentsand formulas, so to speak, of their time. Thus they reveal more of what was expected at the time (which is valuable too) than report what theindividual may have actually felt.

Such rules eventuated in a hierarchy of documents based upon theirtime of production, the size of the intended audience, their private versustheir public nature, and, of course, the accuracy of their rendition. These

maxims are expressed as probabilities or what is more likely to be the casein any given instance. First, contemporaneity to the event is valued oversubsequent production, because it is assumed that the closer the testi-mony is to the event the better it is remembered. Thus letters, diaries, andnewspaper reports from the time are thought more likely to be accurateand better testimony than memoirs and autobiographies written long after, especially if they are ghostwritten. This seems true of memories and

oral history too.Second, according to these rules historians preferred private and con-fidential letters, reports, and dispatches to public ones, because the rulespresumed the smaller in number and the more discrete the producers andconsumers the more likely the testimony was not slanted for public con-sumption. (But what of slanting for an audience of one, especially a pow-erful or influential person?) Thus letters of all kinds, whether business,

political, family or otherwise, whether addressed to one or a few persons,are considered more likely to reveal what actually happened and why thannewspaper reports, public speeches, or other medium directed to a largeor mass audience. For the same reason, a private diary is preferred to a published memoir and a confidential military or diplomatic dispatch togeneral information released to the public, even though the diary entriesmay be highly conventional in their expression of feelings or formulaic

according to the standards of the document or time.Third, the accuracy of the testimony is assessed. Is it as close to what was said, thought, or experienced at the time? British parliamentary pro-ceedings, for example, were secret until well into the eighteenth century.

After that time what records of the debates were published were sum-maries by reporters. The British House of Commons only supported a “substantially verbatim” record of their proceedings beginning in 1909.60

Although in the United States the House of Representatives opened itsgalleries to the public including reporters from its founding and the Senatea decade later, not until the establishment of the Congressional Record in



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1873 was a “substantially verbatim” record kept of the speeches and debatesin the two chambers.61 Did and do public opinion pollsters receive the

unvarnished thoughts of their subjects, and do the aggregated opinionsprojected from sampling procedures represent how the “public” perceivessomething? Autobiographies and memoirs often embody the combinedthoughts and talents of the subject and the ghostwriter. Who writes a let-ter signed or a speech delivered by the president of the United States, or,for that matter, any major leader around the world today? These prob-lems plague all historians’ use of documentary materials but are especially

important to those seeking to repeat, paraphrase, or otherwise re-presentfacts from documentary sources.62

Re-presentation of evidence as fact limits the nature of the sources totexts that can be understood like testimony. Material objects without

writing, for example, even when their very existence is taken as indicativeof a fact about the nature of a society or culture requires the historian toinfer that fact (such as coins and commerce, palaces and power, or weapons

and war). Thus objects in museums, for instance, need labels at a mini-mum, if not lecturers and booklets, as noted later in Chapter 4. Eventhough such texts as poetry, songs, novels, and other creative and sym-bolic materials can be reproduced by the historian, they only become re-presented facts through the historian’s interpretation.63 Similarly suchvisual materials as paintings and photographs can also be reproduced, butthe historian needs to provide the facts they are said to prove. Oral histo-

ries and memories only become textual evidence through the interventionof the historian or someone else in the first place, but they can be quotedor paraphrased as fact. And of course the existence of a textual sourcerarely proves facts about its reception at the time and certainly not later orby whom.

Louis Gottschalk declared that the primary purpose of the historicalmethod is the derivation of factual particulars.64 According to him, histo-

rians should investigate documentary sources not as wholes but for spe-cific answers to the classic questions of who, what, when, where, and how (and maybe why). Although historians may pose the questions when re-presenting the facts, they expect and, more importantly, accept and repro-duce the answers given as such in the document itself. To re-present factsas given in an authenticated source means that the historian agrees withand therefore accepts what is presented in the document at face value.

The more facts historians repeat as given in the document, the more they tend to adopt the actor’s or actors’ points of view or ways of understand-ing the matters under study. At its most inclusive, that means the historian



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adopts the document’s point of view of who are the actors, what took place, where it occurred, how it happened, and maybe even why. The

more historians re-present the facts as given in the document, the morethey allow the historical actors to define the situation, to frame the ques-tions, to explain the matters at hand, and also, most likely, to shape theoverall point of view on the matters.

Thus, the re-presentation of facts works best in those cases in whichhistorians seek to offer actors’ views

Berkhofer Fashioning Histories

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