What Is History? Letting the Market Decide

Randall Stephens

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?

"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

Here's one crass answer to the question of what matters: let the market decide.  What do people treasure most?  What history books tend to fly off the shelves?  What kinds of history programs do people watch?  (A: Anything about Hitler or ancient aliens.  Or, preferably, a combination of the two.)  

The Washington Post reports on the "auction of over 300 historical documents [that] includes rare letters written by Vincent van Gogh, George Washington, John Lennon and other iconic figures."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."

________

* 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.

Letters, Memoirs Roundup

.
Michael Dirda, "The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank," Washington Post, March 8, 2012

Freud insisted that during the analytic hour, the psychoanalyst should maintain the detachment of a surgeon, staying reserved, objective and unemotional. It’s hard not to find this ironic, given the often soap-operatic lives of the men and women who formed Freud’s inner circle. Doctors sometimes like to be perceived as Olympian gods, but these letters remind us how often gods are venal, petty, jealous and spiteful.>>>

Graham Robb, "Balzac's Business," TLS, March 14, 2011

What does a novelist need? Balzac’s letters suggest the following: a peaceful place to work; a home full of beautiful, expensive objects to create “happiness and a sense of intellectual freedom”; coffee strong enough to maintain the flow of inspiration for two months; debts and publishers’ contracts with draconian penalty clauses to reinforce self-discipline with compulsion; several aliases and hiding places to prevent the creditors’ bailiffs from confiscating the expensive objects; and a constant state of romantic excitation without the time-consuming consequences of love.>>>

The Letters of Henry James (1920), Archive.org

Colm Tóibín, "A Man with My Trouble," LRB, January 3, 2008 (Colm Tóibín reviews 'The Complete Letters of Henry James)

After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received. He often added an instruction to the letters he wrote: ‘Burn this!’ To one correspondent, he wrote: ‘Burn my letter with fire or candle (if you have either! Otherwise, wade out into the sea with it and soak the ink out of it).’ In two of his stories, ‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘Sir Dominick Ferrand’, valued letters are turned to illegible ashes – ‘as a kind of sadism on posterity’, in the words of his biographer Leon Edel. James was fully alert to the power of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’>>>

Michel Martin, "Can I Just Tell You? The Power Of Memoirs, Biographies," NPR, February 29, 2012

Can I just tell you? The stories of other people's lives are the one true remedy of arrogance. When you think about what your forebears went through so you could have the luxury to judge them, it is truly humbling. But it is also exciting because however ridiculous the political campaigns get, however high gas prices go up, however hard it gets to make that mortgage payment, you can be assured that someone has gone through worse.>>>

So You Want to Go to Graduate School?

Randall Stephens

A big hat tip to Matt Sutton who passed along this hilariously bleak cartoon. It's a conversation between a college student and an English professor. "Humanities is under attack . . . You will begin to question the nature of your own existence."

“I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad"

Randall Stephens

What's not to like a about collections of private letters? (Well lots, if you think they are boring, tedious, self-serving, etc.) I almost always enjoy reading the letters of novelists, historians, critics. Collections of letters, like memoirs, make for good reading. You can tell a great deal about an author’s opinions by reading his/her intimate thoughts on all manner of subjects. Often, the more unrestrained the letter writer is, the more interesting the letter.

I recently came across passages on history in the collected letters of two of the most famous authors of the 20th century. Flannery O’Connor makes a passing reference to C. Vann Woodward, while disparaging much of southern historical writing. High praise, indeed, to have O’Connor’s stamp of approval.

Flannery O’Connor to "A," May 25, 1963, Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, pp. 521-22.

I have taken up with reading C. Vann Woodward. Have you ever read this gentleman—Burden of Southern History is what I have but I intend to order off after more. Southern history usually gives me pain, but this man knows how to write English.

C. S. Lewis is far more pessimistic about the history trade. A young fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis, at least in this 1927 letter to his brother, has little patience for historians. Historians, he laments, typically fail to capture the truth of experience. Lewis’s meditation on “fact” sounds a little like E. H. Carr on the same. Though Lewis is here writing more than three decades before Carr.

Letters like this, though, often reflect the thoughts of a writer in the moment. They are like a snapshot, not a meticulously painted landscape.

C. S. Lewis to his brother, December 12, 1927, in Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905-1931, 741.

I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with there is always such a difference. What is in my mind at present is (on the one hand) Beowulf and Alfred and the Sagas, and (on the other) Gibbon and Oman about 'the barbarians'. What common measure is there between 'Odoacer had alienated the sympathies of his Italian subjects by seizing a third of the land to reward his veterans' and 'Oft Scyld Scefing overthrew the mead benches of many a kindred. The dwellers round had to obey him across the whale's way. That was a good king . . . So shall a young hero do good and give lordly gifts, that his retainers may repay him when war comes.’ The implication (always present) in the first version that Odoacer oughtn't to have given the land to his men, or that any choice in the matter could have occurred to him, as against the perfectly untroubled sincerity with which the other describes the hero as 'doing good' in scattering the 'lordly gifts' (acquired no doubt at the cost of 'alienating the sympathy' of someone) makes one despair. Then 'his veterans’—memories of Chelsea Hospital! Of course one can see in some sense that the two passages refer to the same sort of fact. But what is left of the 'fact' if you take away both its two 'appearances'? And if you plump for one of them, is that historical truth?

See also these collections in full at Google Books:

The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters (1921)

Letters of Thomas Carlyle to His Youngest Sister (1899)

The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, Volume 2 (1908)

The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898)

Letters of Jane Austin (1905)

The Autobiography and Correspondence of Edward Gibbon, the Historian (1869)

Mark Twain's Letters (1917)

Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, with Portraits and Facsimile Letters (1902)

A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, vol. 1 (1920)