How do we determine what is worth our attention when it comes to the past? What events, people, and movements matter most? What should we pay attention to?
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| "Caesar Crossing the Rubicon," attributed to Jean Fouquet, ca. 1475 |
When it comes to questions like these I always think back to E. H. Carr's classic What Is History?. It's a slim book, ideal for an intro to historical methods. It's Carr's G. M. Trevelyan lectures from 1961 at Cambridge University. At the outset he quotes C. P. Scott (1846-1932) the famous British journalist, publisher, and politician. "Facts are sacred, opinion is free," said Scott. Yet, writes Carr, despite Scott's confident motto:
every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack—it won't stand up till you've put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all (9).
Not surprisingly, Carr also pitched his tent with Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). He quotes Croce approvingly: "All history is contemporary history." (Of course, not everyone agrees with this kind of relativism.*)  |
| From an undated letter written by George Washington |
The Washington Post reports on the "auction of over 300 historical documents [that] includes rare letters written by Vincent van Gogh, George Washington, John Lennon and other iconic figures." By the dictates of the market, these documents matter a great deal. "Other luminaries whose papers will be sold include Lou Gehrig, Louis Pasteur, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Giuseppe Verdi, Peter Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, King Henry II and Napoleon I." Call it the Antiques Roadshow principle. Letters from George Washington and Vincent van Gogh are expected to fetch a whopping $200,000 to $300,000.
A high-dollar answer to the question of "What is History."
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* For a counter view, see G. R. Elton's The Practice of History (1967), a serious defense of history as a quest for objective truth. For a third view, see Richard Evans, In Defense of History (2000): "Nothing has outdated the views not only of Elton, but even of Carr, more than the arrival in the 1980s of postmodernist theory, which has called into question many, if not most of the arguments put forward by both of them" (3). See also, Donald Yerxa's 2003 interview with Evans in Historically Speaking.
