berkhofer 2

CHAPTER 2

Historical Synthesis

From Statements to Histories

The historical method does not produce histories, only statementsthat can be used in a history. The procedures do not even producea story or argument as such unless these are repeated directly from

a source. Every history is much more than a simple summary or compila-tion of factual statements. Each history in its very form as well as contentnavigates the tension among the many grander and lesser goals historiansand others pursue in representing the past as history. In the end, then, anyhistory must be judged by what it is: an organized or synthesized totality.Historians consider this complex production the literary or artistic side oftheir practice.

Histories as Form and Content

Many schemes exist for classifying kinds of histories. Some stress forms ofpresentation and the nature of the medium: monographs, reports, essays,lectures, documentary films, museum exhibitions, historic sites, andreenactments among others. Alternate schemes categorize by the intendedaudience: general surveys and films destined for classrooms; televisionprograms, popular histories, and historical pageants for the lay public;scholarly monographs and articles directed to the professional historian;the preservation of historic sites and reconstruction of old buildings andvillages for antiquarians, preservationists, and historians. One can sorthistories by the sectors of life covered: political, legal, diplomatic, mili-tary, economic, social, intellectual, cultural, ecological, and so on. Thesein turn are further divided. Social histories, for example, include urban,educational, medical, working-class, women’s, minority, and old age among

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other topics. Still newer kinds of histories focus on diasporas, tourism, thehuman body, emotions, masculinity and gender, books and reading,memory, childhood, and local everyday life or microhistory. Other classi-ficatory schemes center on technique: biographical; statistical and quan-titative; narrative; and analytical among others. Some stress space—localor national in the age of the nation-state; regional, world, comparative, ortransnational in more global times. Some concentrate on time: from a fewdays to centuries and eras, from stable times topically organized (syn-chronic) to dynamic times and change diachronically organized. Historiansoften see various historical works as belonging to one or another school.Thus they might distinguish among Marxist, bourgeois, French Annales,or social science histories. Or, they might designate various schools ofwhat they call interpretations. The basic interpretation of United Stateshistory, for example, is said to have moved through the so-called progres-sive or economic interpretation, consensus or counterprogressive, and theNew Left or neoprogressive schools during the twentieth century.1

All these are reasonable and standard ways of classifying types of his-tories, but they do not identify the general and common component partsof histories as such, especially across mediums and schools. Professional his-torians and those who theorize about historical practice agree that“proper” histories are more than mere assemblages of factual statementsbut much less than grand speculations on the ultimate meaning of thehuman past. Historians deprecate compilations or lists of facts as a “chron-icle” or “annals” at the same time as they repudiate giving some overall pat-tern to the entire past as “universal” or “speculative” history. Beyond agreementon these extremes, however, historians differ on the nature and purposesof historical synthesis and therefore its component parts.

Nevertheless, such disagreements suggest starting places for a generalscheme of categorization. Long-continuing disagreements over whether ahistory is an art or a science, an empirical study or a literary synthesis sug-gest one basis for a general categorization of components.2 Older dis-agreements over whether “proper” explanation in histories is best providedby narration or (social) science-like reasoning points to the various modesof connecting the facts of a history as another starting place.3 Social sci-ence historians as well as theorists of history also propose considering themodes of explanation broadly conceived as theories and models.4 Morerecently, rhetorical and narrative theorists add categories for understand-ing the modes of exposition chiefly as text and discourse.5 The enduringconflict over the possibility of objectivity in historical practice and perva-siveness of bias in historical works indicates the role of evaluation and

50 • Fashioning History


perspective as another basis for categorizing the general component partsof a history.6

Regardless of the forms the many kinds of histories take or the topicsthey cover, each one embodies in varying proportions description, argu-ment, and/or narrative as forms of exposition; generalization, explana-tion, and/or interpretation as modes of connecting the facts and providingperspective on them; and politics, morals, and/or other lessons and usesas ways of evaluating past matters and giving them meaning. What dis-tinguishes among different kinds of histories in this view is not theirlength, specific subject matter, or medium as such but how the many syn-thetic components discussed above are combined in any given project. Atthe risk of separating what is combined in text and practice, let me brieflydiscuss each of these general components before looking at examples oftheir combination in the next three chapters. From the standpoint of thisbook, each component must also be considered in relation to re-presen-tation or construction in the uses of evidence.7

Narratives and Arguments

Forms of expression may vary by the kinds of histories and media, butthey all show the use of language or image to present a story and/or makea case. For some scholars, narrative is the traditional and preferred modeof historical synthesis, as the words “story” and “history” indicate by beingthe same or allied terms in so many European languages. To convey thisidea in English, some scholars resort to parentheses: (hi)story. Other his-torians choose argumentative, topical, and analytical approaches to makea case or prove a thesis. Usually both narrative and argument are com-bined in a proper history, even if the overall combination is categorizedunder one or another name. In practice each kind presumes the other,frequently explicitly but always implicitly, for both are modes of organi-zation and of making connections. As modes of organization, all areprocess as well as product in historical practice.8

A narrative is considered the genre of time par excellence, because itanswers the question what happened by tracing the development, changes,and resolution of events over time. Agents, aims, actions, settings, andoutcomes are plotted to reveal the changes from beginnings to conclusion.Stories are told as events are sequenced into a series as situations change,lives are lived, and meaning is given to their modifications and transfor-mations. Narratives are organized by the author who orders the events,actors, and settings into coherent temporal structures of plot and subplot.

Historical Synthesis • 51


The author emphasizes some matters and subordinates others to giveinterpretation and meaning to (and to explain, in a sense) the changesselected to be part of the story. Such selection in the historian’s hands cutsthe complexity, indeed chaos, of the past down to (narrative) size.9

Narrative in historical practice is always a stream of events unfoldingin time. The order of statements in a history need not follow the actualchronological sequence of events as such for stylistic and/or explanatoryreasons. Historians may telescope time for dramatic reasons or use flash-backs and flashforwards to point out implications. Thus one can analyzethe relationship between the form of a historical narrative as textual ordiscourse time in contrast to its content as calendar time in the telling ofa (hi)story. Regardless of any such separation of chronological and textualtime, a historical narrative is always presented as accurate to past personsand events—or at least the surviving evidence about them—unlike fic-tional stories. Histories share the narrative as a literary form with manyother genres such as novels, certain paintings, operas, many songs, films,comic books, and jokes. These other genres may even include actual per-sons, events, and settings as part of their stories, but only histories promisenothing but the truth based upon past evidence. Historical narratives pre-sume that their characters, the events, and the larger context into whichthey fit characterize accurately the pasts of those persons, actions, andmatters.10

Many histories are not explicitly narrative in form. Their content isorganized by argument, theme, analytical category, or topic.11 Argumentativehistories, as the name suggests, present one or more arguments ratherthan stories as such about past persons, events, and times. Analytical andtopical histories organize their contents by argument and/or theme.Synchronic histories stress an extended middle over beginnings and end-ings by showing the interrelationships among matters at a given cross sec-tion of time, be it a year, decade, century, or more. While each of thesehistories eschew traditional narrative explicitly, they presume some largeror overall (hi)story as context for their subject matter and their ownforms. Sometimes that historical context is no more than the standardhistory that frames the times that the arguments, analyses, and topics areabout. The cross-section of time elaborated in a synchronic history, forexample, presumes standard history as the narrative that contextualizesthe times that lead into and away from the era it explores extensively forthe multiple interconnections among ideas, events, and institutions.12

Narrative and nonnarrative histories alike espouse explicitly or, morefrequently, implicitly one or more larger stories as a way of contextualizing



their data, offering an interpretation, and providing perspective andmeaning. Variously called in the profession grand, master, dominant, orgoverning narratives if explicit and metanarratives and metastories ifmore implicit, all offer the larger context needed for organizing the sub-ject matter and form of individual historical syntheses. The advance of(Western) liberty and democracy, the struggle of the masses versus theelites, and the imminence of ecological apocalypse are just some amongmany such contextualizing master narratives. Their larger truth dependsnot upon evidence so much as the outlook and values shared by histori-ans with their audiences.

Many historians feel that narrative is more congenial than other dis-cursive forms to historical synthesis because it stresses the actions of indi-viduals as the causative agents in the unfolding of events. Byconcentrating upon the actions of concrete individuals as opposed toabstract forces to explain how (and why) what happened in the past, nar-rative histories allow for contingencies, choices, and other acts of humanagency in influencing peoples’ destinies. In such a case, actors’ intentions,desires, judgments, and beliefs connect as they explain the sequence ofoccurrences. The emphasis on concrete actors’ intentions and choicesallows narrative historians in their syntheses to lay blame or lavish praiseupon specific individuals in causing wars and peace or depressions andprosperity; in leading social movements and cultural trends; in formulat-ing political ideologies and scientific ideas among many matters. ToAmerican intellectual historian Thomas Haskell, causal attribution,including narratives, and ethics and moral responsibility are “two sides ofthe same coin.” As he argues, “To be an agent is to be causally efficacious,a producer of intended consequences. To hold people responsible is topresume that they are causally efficacious agents and therefore capable(within limits) of which consequences to produce. Judgments of praise,blame, responsibility, liability, courage, cowardice, originality, deliberate-ness, and spontaneity are just a few of the quintessentially ethical qualitiesthat ride piggyback on perceptions of cause and effect.”13 For this reason,historian of American women Nancy Isenberg posits “individuals whoshape their destinies” as the basic “canon of historical behavior.”14

Such a connection between human agency and narrative raises theissue of the relationship between narrative as a literary form and theactual course of past events and lives. Postmodernists argue that histori-ans impose, that is, create, narrative structures in their efforts to organizetheir factual and other statements into some sort of synthesis. Other his-torians argue that narrative is natural to human affairs, because individuals


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plan their lives and understand what they do and did in terms of narrativesequences.15 The sociologist Margaret Somers throws light on this debateby arguing for four different kinds or uses of narrative. Ontological nar-ratives are those that the social actors use to make sense of their own livesin order to act. They define who one is; they provide a notion of self andan identity for the individual, though developed as the result of interac-tions over time with various social structures. Public, cultural, or institu-tional narratives are those used by “publics” to understand and explainfamily, workplace, religious groups, government, nation, or society. (Isthis social or collective memory?) She designated narratives constructedby social interpreters or researchers as conceptual, analytic, or sociologicalnarratives. Such narratives speak of social forces, market patterns, culturalpractices, or other constructed entities as the “actors.” The challenge fromher view is how to combine ontological and public narratives into theanalyst’s or historian’s own analysis or narrative. Metanarratives, herfourth kind, depict the epic forces of modern times such as Capitalismversus Communism, Individual versus Society, or the Rise of Nationalismor Capitalism or Democracy as some teleological unfolding of events in acosmic drama.16

All histories offer description, argument, and narrative in various pro-portions, even though a specific work may claim to be mainly narrative orargument. In practice if not in explicit exposition in any work, narrativeand argument presume each other, even if only between the lines or sub-textually. Almost all narrative histories today contain sections devoted toargument and analysis in addition to description and storytelling. Allanalytical, argumentative, topical, and thematic histories presume animplicit, if they do not contain an explicit, narrative. From the perspec-tive of the last chapter, the big question is whether the narratives, argu-ments, reports, and descriptions in a historical work are re-presentationsaccepted as true by the historian from the sources? Or, are these elementsconstructed and integrated as going together from the inferences and cre-ativity of the historian? And from whose point of view are they presented?

Explaining and Interpreting

Historians make connections among their facts in their syntheses byoffering explanations and interpretations, especially in proper histories.Argumentative and analytical works provide explicit reasons and causes asexplanations and even, at times, use generalizations, models, and theoriesof human behavior, institutions, and societies to make their cases. Narrative,



topical, and synchronic works offer implicitly always and usually explic-itly reasons, causes, explanations, and influences among diverse ways ofconnecting their factual statements and patterning their generalizations.

If description answers the traditional reportorial questions of who,what, when, and where, and maybe how, then explanation answers thequestion why. Questions and answers are always dependent on the knowl-edge of asker and answerer as to what is to be explained (explanandum inphilosopher’s parlance) and what explains (explanans). For some askers,learning who, what, when, or where answers their why questions. Eventhese seemingly simple questions become complicated when asking, forexample, what makes a revolt a revolution, or a cultural awakening arenaissance? For many other inquirers, learning how something cameabout explains why it happened, and that is often the common mode ofhistorical explanation, especially in a narrative synthesis. Tracing thecourse of events—or recounting—is basic to one form of narrative expla-nation. But explanation, in the sense of accounting for, asks why it waswho it was, where it was, when it was, what it was, or how it was. This isthe explicit goal of analytical and argumentative histories—and good nar-rative histories as well.17

What constitutes appropriate answers at this level of why question? Ata minimum, we should distinguish between the type or form of an expla-nation and the content of it. Types of explanation cluster around twopoles. Those theorists advocating understanding as interpretation believethat human beings and their affairs are best explained by the webs ofmeaning the actors construct to understand and interpret their world.Making connections in this way presumes that the observer can under-stand the actors and their world(s) as they understood themselves andtheir world(s). Interpretive explanations in this mode stress such mattersas intentions, desires, motives and rationales, beliefs, patterns of meaning,cultural practices, values, and worldviews as the keys to explaining whyactors did what they did. Those theorists who support explanation as cau-sation construct images or models of the actors’ behavior or circum-stances that might be quite different than seen by the actors themselves.Explanations of this kind may range from the statistical correlation ofvariables to expositions of the material or ecological circumstances of peo-ples to the nature of bureaucracies and other complex social organiza-tions. Whether a narrative explains depends on how and what one acceptsas proper explanation in all these cases. The content of an explanation isnot just what it includes explicitly about the connections it makes inexplaining its subject but also the philosophical premises and social models



that ground those connections. What does the theory, model, or evenimage presume about social reality that justifies the relevance of its useeven as it shapes the content of its application?

Historians frequently rely on so-called common sense versions of under-standing and explaining human affairs. They often divide explanatorycauses into long and short range; primary and secondary; necessary andsufficient; definitely or probably; sequential, cumulative, or interacting.Often such attributions are done without explicit, rigorous comparisonor analysis to isolate the cause(s) or to provide an explicit patterning orhierarchy of causes. Sometimes historians offer thought experiments onwhat if so and so had not happened or something else had occurred, ineffect counterfactual arguments. Historians, for example, speculate in arecent book on what if Charles I had avoided the English Civil War orwhat if Soviet communism had not collapsed in 1989.18 Historians all toooften explain human goals, actions, and outcomes by armchair psycholo-gizing about what any human would do in the same situation. (To whatextent does this approach presume a basic and universal human nature,which was until recently usually a male rather than a female version?)They often treat social classes, institutions, and whole societies through adhoc theorizing and impressionism, supposedly justified by their immersionin the sources.

Many historians belittle the social and psychological sciences for theirpretension to theory, because the results seem all too often trivial, tauto-logical, and, worse from a historian’s view, ahistorical. Rather historiansseek not generalizations about all human beings and institutions, as thepositivistic social sciences once did, but explanations for what they take tobe particular occasions and events occurring at specific times in specificplaces among specific persons and groups in the past. As the Australianscholar Inga Clendinnen writes, “Large theories may generate good ques-tions, but they produce poor answers. The historian’s task is to discoverwhat happened in some actual past situation—not to produce largetruths. The most enlightening historical generalizations tend to be thosethat hover sufficiently close to the ground to illuminate the contours anddynamics of intention and action in circumscribed circumstances.”19

With such an impression of the profession’s goals, historians’ basic theo-ries and models of human behavior, institutions, and societies are frequentlymore implicit image than explicit structures but no less determinative oftheir explanations.20

Once upon a time (in the 1960s and 1970s) social science history inthe United States sought to make historical research and exposition



organized and orderly by making the theories and models explicit andthe operations systematic.21 The so-called new economic, political, andsocial histories never achieved the revolutionary results promised in theirmanifestos. Meanwhile the interests of the profession shifted to more press-ing political and moral concerns. Consequently, much of what was oncethe approach and content of these new histories has returned to the socialscience departments from which they were borrowed in the first place. Inrecent decades the ahistoricity of the social sciences has been mitigated bya historic turn in all human science disciplines. The rapprochement betweenthe social sciences and history is marked in the United States both inbooks and other productions and the many joint appointments betweenhistory and other departments.22

The content of social explanation cuts across the forms of social expla-nation. Philosophers of social science range the basic content of socialexplanation between two extremes they have christened “method-ological individualism” and “methodological holism.”23 Individualismasserts, as its name suggests, the primacy of the individual in determiningwhat happens in human affairs, while holism declares the dominance ofthe social whole in explaining human affairs. Individualistic explanationsemphasize the conscious intentions and beliefs of individuals to accountfor their actions. This view of the efficacy of human agency assumesthat social institutions are individuals acting in association. A societyas a whole is the aggregation of all acting individuals in it. This approach tosocial explanation is known as methodological individualism, because itviews individuals as both the real creators and the real foundation of(a) society. The voluntary actions of individuals can really change socialinstitutions and collective outcomes. Such a view of individualistic expla-nation is presumed to ground as it flows from a classic nineteenth-cen-tury liberal view of society.

Holism, or collective or social structural explanation, stresses the coer-cive effects of the social whole upon the beliefs, actions, and so on, of theindividuals in it. A social organization, system, or structure persists overtime and can be considered independently in some ways from a set of specificindividuals in it. Although not really separate from the individuals compris-ing it, it nevertheless constrains their behavior in certain ways and actsapart from their individual volitions. A bureaucracy is a good exampleof such a social structure with its rules, roles, and lines of authority, but sotoo are economic organizations and systems (capitalism or land tenuresystems, for example), political systems and organizations (political partysystems or government bureaucracies), multinational or international



relations (diplomatic customs and treaty systems), religious organizationsand doctrinal systems (church hierarchies and liturgies), and cultural sys-tems (persisting values and languages). Historians like social scientists canstudy why such structures arise, persist, or end in terms of the social con-text and other social factors. In this view, society is composed of (individ-uals operating as and through) classes, institutions, and other organizedentities. This position is termed methodological holism, because the exis-tence of a society as a whole shapes, some might say determines, the real-ity of the various lives within it. This view of a society as the collectivecausative foundation for understanding the totality of human interactionin it derives from a version of Marxism or of French social theory follow-ing Émile Durkheim.24 Scholars, of course, seek to reconcile or find amiddle way between these two methodological extremes, but let me usethe extreme views to highlight some of the implications of interpretiveand explanatory models for historical research and synthesis.

Even my brief summary of methodological individualism and method-ological holism suggests some implications for the historical method andthe derivation of facts. Proponents of the two views read sources differ-ently, because they see social reality and its explanation differentlyIndividualists are more prone to accept peoples’ expressions of intentions,desires, and motives in sources at face value, because they accept theautonomy of the individual in explaining social behavior. They thereforeprefer re-presentation and paraphrase to make their points. A holistmight see these same expressions as “false consciousness” because “com-mon sense” beliefs all too often conceal the “real conditions” governingindividuals’ existence. Most persons would not understand their trueinterests because of hegemonic manipulation of one sector of society byanother. Any system of common beliefs becomes an ideology justifyingthe way the inequalities of the social whole are organized. At worse, powerso determines knowledge, desires, and hopes that explicit expression ofsuch in the sources must be taken with a very large methodological grainof salt. Individualists might accept polling results, for example, as trulyindicative of people’s attitudes, while holists see just another demonstra-tion of false consciousness. In this latter case the historian understandsthe true interests of people as a result of their class or other societal loca-tion as opposed to what they themselves say (and presumably believe).Historians of this persuasion resort to construction as their main mode ofderiving and expositing facts.

In line with their basic premises holists have trouble with the positivistempirical bent of individualists, especially those who rely on statistical



analyses of census data. Opponents of this approach to social science his-tory argued against assuming the aggregative behavior of individuals to bethe explanation of (a) society. As one American social historian pointedout long ago, numerical analysis “is based upon the fiction that the actionsof different individuals or cultural groups are, epistemologically speaking,the same—that they are identical and discrete entities that can be com-pared with one another in a scientific manner.”25 Opponents of this kindof statistical history argued that its results like its premises are those ofpolitical liberalism. Each side in this debate, like so many in social andpolitical understanding, accused the other of assuming what it needed toprove and proving what it assumed.

The plainest implication of these differences over the nature of socialreality and its explanation is for the historical method. Individualistacceptance of sources’ testimony at face value encourages the re-presenta-tion of facts through quotation or paraphrase. Holist suspicion of ideol-ogy and false consciousness on the other hand encourages constructingfacts by inferring from the sources’ content or perhaps re-presenting theviews of those people considered to have the most informed, that is, cor-rect, view from the analyst’s standpoint. Many historians interested in thesubordinated and the marginalized, for example, see persons in thosesocial positions as a better guide to the nature of what “really” went on insociety than those placed in high positions. As historian of science DonnaHaraway phrased this position, “‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferredbecause they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, trans-forming accounts of the world.”26 To some poststructuralist theorists thetreatment of peoples on the margins of a society reveals best the centralvalues of that society—or at least of its elite sector. But Jesse Lemisch, thefirst American historian to advocate in print viewing the United States’past “from the bottom up,” argued before poststructuralist theory was pop-ular in the United States, “sympathy for the powerless brings us closer toobjectivity.”27 If nothing else, proponents of each position would judgethe reliability of a witness and maybe of a source itself by their views ofwhat an individual is and can do and the overall organized (structured)nature of a society in general. In the end, a historian’s social theory influ-ences how she determines whether, for example, a cluster of ideas ina source should be denominated an ideology, false consciousness, and anexample of hegemony on one hand or reasons, values, and proof of a beliefsystem on the other hand. Thus the sorting out of what are actors’ viewsand what historians’ views in a history often reveal the latter’s allegiances



to specific social theories (as we shall see below in the fight over culturalhistory and the proposed rehabilitation of social history).

Proponents of holism and individualism might see the factuality ofsummative classificatory terms differently. Those leaning to holism mightbe willing to accept the “reality” of social structures as terms because ofhow they see societies working. Those tending to individualism, on theother hand, deny the reality of social structures and thus their value evenfor analysis since they believe such entities are mere social fictions. Althoughboth sides might accept such concrete organizations as labor unions, cor-porations, churches, governments, and armies as empirically real, theymight differ over according that status to the identity of classes and othersocial structures and systems. In any case, individualists would always denycausative agency to postulated structures and disaggregate empiricallyreal ones.

Do divergent premises lead to different methods? If the historianaccepts actors’ ideas and beliefs at face value, then does she use empathy,interpretation, or imagination to reconstruct the actor’s so-called logic ofthe situation or cultural framework? If the historian suspects suchhermeneutic methods, then does she employ causal analysis and explana-tion? We have already seen the argument over statistics. In any case, thecontent of social explanation influences the choice of explanatory form.

That the two positions differ so much in what they take social realityto be and how best to explain it has implications not only for deriving factsfrom sources but also how to put them together in a synthesis. The dif-ferences show up in vocabulary, in the identification of historical “actors,”and in the way the “story” is told. The most obvious differences are the“actors” in each position’s story. Concrete individuals, their decisions andaims, and their groupings into associations are the actors in individualiststories and explanations. Social actors, so to speak, take pride of place inholist stories and explanations. Even to discuss the two positions means(mis)using vocabulary favored by and based on one or the other side.28 Ifdiffering vocabularies make hazardous any description of what the twosides stand for, they make easier their identification in historical produc-tions. What are ideas and belief systems for the individualist become ide-ologies for the holist; texts and language become discourses and hegemony;rank and strata become classes; and perhaps sex and ethnicity becomegender and racial systems. What are competing choices for the individu-alist become conflicting interests as the result of contradictory social loca-tions for the holist. Interest group demands for the individualist becomeevidence of class struggle for the holist; social systems become social



structures or formations; leaders or elites become ruling classes. The indi-vidualist describes society as associations of people banding together vol-untarily as churches, corporations, governments, and other organizations,and society itself is essentially conceived as a voluntary association of indi-viduals. Society for the holist is conceived as a complex, organized set ofstructures. Racism, for example, is a mainly a matter of psychology andindividuals’ prejudices under individualist premises and a system ofpower and structured inequality under holist assumptions. Racism has apsychological cause and solution for the former, and a social structuralcause and solution for the latter.29

Individualists in the end portray history as a series of events in whichactors’ views and actions determine to a large extent the social outcomes.Change is explained by the actions of individuals. In traditional political,military, diplomatic, and religious history the spotlight was on kings, gen-erals, ambassadors, bishops, and other leaders. Many argue that the nar-rative form is particularly congenial to this approach to history. Thedilemma of individualistic explanation is to cope with supraindividualformations and macroscopic change. Holists depict history in terms ofstructures in which their contradictions cause conflict and change for theindividuals in them. Argumentative and analytical histories seem theform best suited to this approach. The once new social history preferredexplicit theory, social categories, and even statistical analysis of causationin opposition to the implicit model of human behavior and social theoryof traditional history. To its critics the weakness of too much social his-tory (and all of social science) was explaining change through abstractentities and external forces as opposed to concrete individuals and theirchoices. The American colonial historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich indictedthis approach to social history, which “in abandoning the individualisticand institutional biases of conventional narratives sometimes substitutesone form of exclusion for another, freezing people into a collectiveanonymity that denies either agency or the capacity to change.”30

As I pointed out earlier in this section, scholars in practice attempt toavoid the dilemmas posed by individualism and holism by seeking somemiddle way. It is easy to condemn the oversimplifications of individual-ism and holism but difficult to surmount their problems and premises.That reconciliation or middle way must try to balance the agency of theactors with the constraints imposed on them by social institutions andtheir position(s) in them. Such a way must resolve the conflict betweenthe autonomy of individual action based upon free choices in spite ofsocial constraints versus the denial of any human agency in an oversocialized



model of human behavior. At the same time the middle way must explainwhy groups of individuals choose to create social rules, coercive collectiv-ities, and inequitable distribution of social benefits and power. To steerthe delicate course between total societal determination of individual livesand the complete societal laissez-faireism of individualism, these theoristsmaintain that one must delineate how individuals initiate, maintain, ortransform a group or society. The continuing existence of any social wholeneeds to be explained, not just assumed—especially those called a nation,a society, or a culture. Ideas are not simply ideological reflections, and cul-ture is not simply reducible to the political or social. The only choicedenied historians in this matter is no conscious choice: for some theory,implicit if not explicit, on the nature of human behavior and the workingsof a society always grounds every history.31

The conflict between agency and structure in historical practice par-ticularly came to focus in two schools that became increasingly popular inthe profession after the mid-1970s. Microhistory originated amongItalian scholars and alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, amongGerman scholars. At the risk of neglecting their differences, both schoolsrevolted against the impersonal structures and large-scale processes ofmacrosocial analysis, whether exemplified in the long-term trends studiedby the Annales school or the impersonal aggregation of individuals, evennonelite ones, by the social science school. Both groups of historiansexplored the relationship between structure and agency through concen-trating on the microcosm of specific individuals or small communities forclues to the macrocosm of institutions and society. Both favored anthro-pology over sociology as inspiration, particularly the intense local ethno-graphic study and the “thick description” of Clifford Geertz. Bothconcentrated on concrete life situations and the forms of daily experienceand perceptions of individuals as the basis of their generalizations. Howdid ordinary individuals perceive, cope with, accommodate to, resist,innovate in small ways, creatively modify, or support the larger forceswith which they lived and to which they contributed? How did such indi-viduals alone or as a small group mediate between what they wanted andwhat they were forced to do by custom, law, religious and governmentagents, or material circumstances?

Both schools sought out and emphasized the ambiguities, fluidity, andcontradictions of thought and behavior of the “small people” they stud-ied. Microhistorians produced noted works on rebels, heretics, criminals,or other individuals whose confrontations with social customs and offi-cial institutions produced detailed records. Although microhistorians



studied both premodern and modern times, their work mostly exploredearly modern persons and situations. Carlo Ginzburg’s intensive analysisof sixteenth-century inquisitorial records to reconstruct the heretical cos-mos of a northern Italian miller was a microhistory best seller of thiskind.32 Some historians of alltagsgeschichte studied peasants and folk cul-ture in the early modern era, but most preferred studies of workers, pop-ular culture, or support for Nazi ideals and institutions in the modernperiod. The alltagsgeschichte exploration of ordinary people’s relationshipto Nazism in their mundane experience and behavior particularly showedthe nexus between lives at the micro level and societal macrotrends.33

The debate over social explanation goes on today in the discussionsabout the nature and place of the social as opposed to the cultural inhuman affairs. Those uneasy with the seeming arbitrariness of the culturalseek to resuscitate a more sophisticated social history and particularlyclass analysis in order to once again organize their histories through somesort of structural explanation.34

As even this section’s brief exposition of social explanation reveals,social theory, whether explicit or implicit, presumes political and ethicalchoices. These choices have implications for perspective, meaning, andmorality. The editors of a reader on the “new social theory” observe a nor-mative turn by the 1990s in the field. As they conclude, “we always theo-rize or do research from a socially situated point of view, that socialinterests and values shape our ideas, that our social understandings arealso part of the shaping of social life.”35 Historians are agents in regard tohistories about the past but also members located in their societies in thepresent. To paraphrase Karl Marx, historians make their own histories butnot always under conditions of their own choosing. The historian’s ownsocial context derives from social traditions, collective memory, and pro-fessional socialization. Whether the historians’ multiple social locationshave little or no influence or mostly determine their social theory andexplanations depend upon who theorizes the situation and according towhat kinds of social explanation. And, of course, this choice affects whetherthe explanations are re-presented or constructed from the evidence.

Perspectives and Meaning

History, once promoted as philosophy teaching by example, still has itsinstructive side in the right hands. Politicians, generals, and social scien-tists are more prone than historians to draw lessons from the past, but somehistorians do draw explicit lessons from their subject for policymakers



and the public. Historians of military affairs, foreign policy, and educa-tion are particularly generous in offering lessons learned from the historyof their subjects. The historian of military affairs Michael Howard offershis essays simply as The Lessons of History.36 The historian of Americanforeign policy Ernest May has written two books whose very titles indi-cate his purposes: “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History inAmerican Foreign Policy 37 and Thinking in Time: The Uses of History forDecision Makers with Richard Neustadt.38 Likewise, the title of the vol-ume of essays edited by Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learningfrom the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform,39 shows the samefor educational history. Many more historians make their lessons lessobvious in their titles than these examples but still offer such instructionimplicitly if not explicitly. Most environmental historians, for instance,particularly point out the dire implications of their studies.40

Debunking time-honored heroes and heritage is also an ancient andhonorable tradition in the history profession. While some historians urgethe profession to reinforce tradition and patriotism, others seek to exposethe myths of classroom pieties and national heritage. In the latter vein,one author titled his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything YourAmerican History Textbook Got Wrong.41 The authors in The Invention ofTradition exposed how recent many a supposedly ancient tradition was,including Welsh and Scottish national culture, British royal rituals, andthe celebration of May Day.42 If popular history is society’s memory ofthe past, then these historians hope to set the record straight.

Some historians seek to restore a submerged or subordinated group toits (rightful?) place in the nation’s or the world’s history. The goal isencapsulated in the very title of Hidden from History.43 Chief amongthose hidden from traditional history was the half of the population whowere women. To the extent that standard history had focused on politics,foreign policy, and wars, the nation-state as the arena, and the so-calledpublic sphere over the private or domestic, it emphasized male roles andde-emphasized or concealed entirely female roles—except for such womenas Queen Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia.44

Likewise to divide prehistory from history was to hide, even deny, the“people without history” their place in the past. 45 Aboriginal peoples mayhave been first on the ground, but they were last to get a spot in the “whiteman’s history.” (Canadian scholars now call their native societies “FirstNations” as a remedy.) When historians write about subordinated oroppositional groups, should they side with them? Does that mean notonly presenting but even adopting their views on matters?46



The new National Museum of the American Indian on the CapitolMall in Washington, DC, exemplifies in architecture, grounds, andexhibits the dilemmas of representing minority viewpoint in majorityinstitutional setting. After extensive consultation with diverse NativeAmerican groups and individuals, the museum planners focused on threemain themes to organize the exhibits. “Our Universes: TraditionalKnowledge Shapes Our World” presents indigenous cosmologies as vitaltoday to native understanding and life as they were yesterday. Such anapproach reinforces native religious traditions as it educates others aboutthe overriding importance of the sacred in native lives past and present.“Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories” seeks to correct throughtribal histories the “narrow and inaccurate ways” the dominant society hasportrayed the past of native peoples in its story of imperial conquest andachievement for the past five hundred years. On one hand, native soci-eties were victimized: “In the struggle for survival, nearly every Nativecommunity wrestled with the impact of deadly new diseases and weaponry,the weakening of traditional spirituality and the seizure of homelands byinvading governments.” On the other hand, it is “not entirely a story ofdestruction,” for it is also about “how Native people intentionally andstrategically kept their cultures alive.”47 To emphasize this point, the lastexhibition’s theme, “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities,”shows that native peoples, their cultures, and their identities not only sur-vive but flourish in the twenty-first century even in the midst of economicand other hardships and contrary to white perception. Through thesethemes, the museum’s planners hope to refute the usual cultural imperial-ism long expounded and exemplified in dominant society media andinstitutions. Through the shape of the building, the layout of its grounds,the arrangement and purposes of interior spaces, as well as the nature andmessage of the exhibits, the planners seek to adapt a dominant culturalinstitution to traditional (and traditionalist?) native ends. Critics of themuseum believe that the efforts of its Native American staff to discoverand disseminate the values and outlooks of the many Native Americanpeoples go too far in creating a new kind of museum that crosses borderssupposedly separated in other museums: the secular and the sacred, his-tory and heritage, scholarship and advocacy, and lay versus professionalauthority.48

In the end, the problems of perspective, morality, and political partial-ity exist beyond explicit political and other partisanship. That a historiantakes the side of a political party or government, a religious or ethnic group,the working classes or the entrepreneurs, and so on, is clear enough to those



not convinced of those arguments already. So too are the judgments ren-dered on the evils of the past. All professional historians these days areagainst slavery, racism, and genocide and for justice, democracy, andequality in general. But what do such commitments involve in the end?Aside from praise for abolitionists and Allies and condemnation of slave-holders and Nazis, for example, what does such a commitment entail?Ought the historian also use the past to expose the inner workings oftoday’s society that still perpetuates social and racial inequality, hege-monic and oppositional ideologies, and globalism and imperialism?

Should all history be critical history that seeks to challenge, even sub-vert, the status quo as some historians advocate? Such critical history canpoint out past options not taken by a society, provide alternative framesof reference to its members, defamiliarize the long accepted in the society,and demystify the institutional facades hiding the people actually run-ning the social machinery.49 In the end should historians in the West, forexample, praise or condemn, uphold or oppose the gap between the idealsof liberal society and how they were practiced at home and particularlyabroad? These questions about politics suggest how perspective and mean-ing penetrate to the very core of the historical project. The only unac-ceptable answer is no answer to such questions as any brief examinationof the role of perspective and meaning in historical synthesis shows.

Both historians and their audiences use history and therefore historiesfor their own purposes. The study of history is justified for many reasons:to entertain and edify, advance cultural literacy, instill patriotism, challengethe status quo, show God’s works, encourage toleration, teach lessons,expose social evils, promote social identity, empower minorities, portrayeveryday past lives and institutions, foster or condemn nationalism orreligion, study the past for its own sake, and prove the usefulness orinutility of history among the many professed uses. The audiences andthose interested are many: the state through educational curriculums,financing, and certification; social and political movements through pro-paganda and organizational recruitment; religious groups through iden-tity and boundary maintenance; museum exhibitors and documentaryfilmmakers for information, audience appeal, and funding; historical sitesand pageants for commemoration, identity, and support; publishers andentertainment moguls for service, amusement, and remuneration; ethnicgroups for preservation of memory and identity; and not least the profes-sion itself for almost all these reasons. These interests, audiences, andindeed historians themselves disagree on how best to attain their goals. Allagree that histories should provide perspective on the past, offer lessons



(especially including the denial of any), and give meaning to their subjectmatter, but they differ over what History conceived as an overall approachto the past proves and therefore how a normal history achieves their ends.The differences result from—as they show—the complexities of modernsocieties and the multiple social locations of their citizen/subjects.50

Professional historians agree that proper histories offer perspective onthe past and give meaning through their syntheses, but the means to theseends not only vary but are also in dispute. Perspective implies distancefrom past peoples and events, and that distance supposedly lends objec-tivity to the historian in her understanding of those past persons and theiractions. What distance in space lends to perspective in painting, distancein time supposedly lends to perspective in history.51 The greatest perspec-tive undoubtedly arises from the historian knowing the future of the past:the outcomes of past aims and actions. At its extreme such retroactive pre-diction underlies titles that contain such words as “The Invention,” “theIndividual,” or “the Event” followed by a phrase like “That Changed theWorld.” A best-selling recent example of the genre is How the Irish SavedCivilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rometo the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill.52

Some argue history(ies) should show how today’s peoples, their soci-eties, material objects, and ideas evolved from those of yesteryear’s. Suchmottoes as the present grows from past or the past is prologue to the pre-sent embody this somewhat teleological approach.53 Others propose his-tory(ies) should show how the past was quite different from the present.This anthropology of time, so to speak, issues forth in a maxim like “thepast is a foreign country” or speaks of the “otherness” of the past.54 Ineither case, the job of the historian is to recontextualize the past so as tomake it mean something to the present-day audience. At the least, thehistorian must adopt a context understandable to a modern audience. Atbest, the historian renders a new perspective, exhibits a new context thatmakes the past memorable or useful or interesting to people in the present.Given this necessity of connecting to an audience, the traditional caveatabout avoiding present-mindedness oversimplifies and distorts what his-torians do and must do in lecture, book, exhibition, report, or film.

Part of the perplexity about political and moral judgments and per-spective and meaning stems from the incompatibility of the dual tasks ofClio, the ancient muse of history: to exhort her listeners to great deeds onone hand and to record their feats on the other hand. Exhortation entailsadvocacy at the least and justifies propaganda at the most. Reportingdemands accurate representation and even fair-mindedness about past



persons, events, and institutions. To what extent then should historiansallow purpose to shape their projects and perhaps even control their find-ings? How open and explicit should political, social, and moral commit-ments therefore be? Should historians confess them in preface, prologue,or other place? It seems easy enough to confess the explicit commitments,but what about the implicit ones entwined in choice of subject, researchdesign, framework of interpretation, or even what is considered historicalreality or the nature of time?55

It is the imputation of meaning that arouses claims of bias, partiality,partisanship, and the like. At their most fundamental histories give thepast meaning through the arrangement of their stories, facts, and gener-alizations into syntheses, and those syntheses in turn provide the meaningof the story and the context of the facts and generalizations. Historiansbelieve only through such organization does an assemblage of factsbecome a proper history. Modern historians search not for the essentialmeaning of all the past, once the domain of universal history or the phi-losophy of history. Rather they seek arguments, stories, explanations,interpretations, and perspectives that fashion a multitude of factual andother statements into a meaningful synthesis—one that an audience canunderstand and appreciate. It was and is here that grand and metanarra-tives play such an important role in providing meaning for the professionand audiences alike, especially implicitly, by offering a larger frameworkfor the narratives, arguments, moral and political evaluations, and otherstatements. What seems objective and factual to one audience or inter-pretive community, however, appears biased and implausible to another.At times what is profoundly meaningful to one audience makes little orno sense to another audience.

Voice and Viewpoint

Both perspective and meaning, whether explicit or implicit, find theirexpression through voice and viewpoint. Questions about voice ask whospeaks and for whom in the text or other medium, and the analyst inquireshow and in what form. Questions about viewpoint ask from what andwhose viewpoint, that is, for what and whose perspective. Once again theanalyst queries about form as well as content. Only by taking a viewpointcan the historian select and organize her factual and other statements.Viewpoint gives coherence to facts and statements about the past; voicegives expression to them. At the same time, it is adoption of a viewpointthat leads to what others label bias, partiality, and lack of objectivity. The



big question (from the perspective of the preceding chapter) is whetherthe voices and viewpoints are found in the sources or supplied by the his-torian. Are they re-presented or constructed?56

Do the historical actors speak for the historian as well as themselves, ordoes the historian speak for them in and through the construction of thehistory? In a re-presentation the historian often accepts the actors’ view-points along with their statements. Is the best mode of exposition thenquotation with paraphrase a second choice? In a construction the histo-rian always speaks for herself, but frequently in the name of the actors.Can the actors speak for themselves or only through the historian in eachsynthesis? Who speaks for the unrecorded, the undocumented? Oral his-torians claim their approach recovers evidence of such activities andthoughts not available through traditional means.57 Must a historianshare class, gender, ethnicity, religion, or politics with the actors in orderto speak for them? Must biographers admire, or at least like, their subjectsto be fair in their representation of them? Ought historians make a con-tract with past peoples, so to speak, to represent their actions and theirviewpoints as honestly and authentically as possible as one noted scholaronce avowed in a session of the American Historical Association?58

Historians efface their personal presence in a history by using thethird-person voice. Such effacement is supposed to enhance objectivity.Historians are warned and usually criticized for using the first-personpronoun outside of footnotes, introductions, or their equivalents in othermedia. At the same time such effacement of authority implies an omni-scient viewpoint. Would use of first-person voice better cue the reader tothe viewpoint of the historian in a specific work?

Arguing and narrating from a viewpoint differs from arguing for aviewpoint. The second is usually explicit in story or argument as theme orthesis, but the first is usually implicit. Both select and shape the facts pre-sented, but, if the viewpoint is implicit, the audience must read betweenthe lines or look behind the image to find it. Viewpoint in a history maybe from the perspectives of the historical actors or the historian, that is,from within or outside the historical world being conveyed. Whether his-torians re-present or construct statements about a historical time andplace, whether they adopt viewpoints and voices from the past or offertheir own, they must consider and combine at least four different kinds ofviewpoints in lecture, book, film, report, or exhibit.

First, viewpoint may be perceptual. From whose perspective or angleis the physical world perceived or represented? Point of view in film is agood literal illustration of this viewpoint. How much is seen through the



eyes of the actors and how much from beyond them, even an overallbird’s-eye or synoptic view by the director? How is the landscape con-ceived as well as perceived in a history? Historians visit the locality of theevents they describe, although the events occurred long ago, because theyhope to see what past persons saw. For the same reason, some historiansjoin others in trying to preserve some historic buildings, battlefields, andsites from modern development. What and whose names are on the landand what does that show about its comprehension in the past? Whoseecological understanding is conveyed by whether aboriginal or con-querors’ place names are used? How did those living then understand spa-tial and social matters as opposed to how we look at them today? Historicaland perceptual geographers as well as historians try to convey a “sense ofplace.”59

On the other hand, for historians to imagine the past as people thenfelt and perceived it becomes ever trickier if not harder as transportationand communication speeded up over the millennia. The transition fromoral to scribal to print to cyber cultures not only determined the nature ofthe surviving evidence of past worlds but also offers its own evidence ofdifferent perceptual and conceptual worlds. The almost instantaneouscommunication of the telegraph and the increased speed of travel first bysteamship and railroad and then by the airplane shrank the earth andincreased the interchange among peoples. As the result of these commu-nication and transportation changes, historians need ever greater imagi-nation to picture the physical and social context of peoples the fartherremoved they are from the present.60

It is of course fashionable for scholars in today’s world to stress howgreat social and cultural interchange was even in the farthest past andamong all peoples, even those once considered “primitive,” as if the worldof yesteryear was similar to the global now. Hence past societies and cul-tures once pictured as isolated, self-contained islands outside the streamof history are now depicted as archipelagos wide open to constant com-mercial and intercultural exchange very much in the flow of world his-tory.61 In fact, the very conception of a culture or a society, even in theextreme past, has only an attenuated meaning in scholarly usage todaygiven the extreme permeability of their borders and their continuouschange, hence the vocabulary of transnational, intercultural, translation,negotiation, creolization, and hybridity to describe the past and presentencounters of peoples, the effects of decolonization and subalternity, andthe impact of border crossings and diasporas.



The debate over the social construction of nature versus its indepen-dent material effect seems another aspect of perceptual viewpoint. Whoseand what understanding of nature should be used in a history: the actors’or the historians’? Those historians conveying the perceptions of theactors re-present those views as such through quotation or paraphrase.For them, the natural environment, like the social one, is the creative con-struction of the inhabitants. Such an approach is likely to offer the socialconstruction of nature by those who modified it as they used it. The users’understanding of their physical environment is a social and ideationalartifact in this view. Others argue that historians willingly or otherwisejudge the environmental soundness of their actors’ views and, moreimportantly, their actions. It is this step that contrasts the historian’s the-ory of what is nature and how it works with that of the actors. Of course,all historians seek varying and complex relationships between pasthumans and what they called or we call “nature.” Historians who pointout the unintended consequences of deliberate policy and uses depend inthe end on more than the social construction of nature. These historiansbase their findings upon their understanding of the coercive reality of thenatural environment when humans tried to fool “mother nature” toomuch. In the end all environmental histories take a stand on the degree towhich nature in a given place and time is chiefly a cultural interpretationof a society’s relationship with its physical environment and the degree towhich nature possesses an independent environmental reality, or as somesay a “material agency,” in those circumstances? Both actors and histori-ans define what is natural and nature.62

Considered equally natural was the rise of nationalism and the nationin history. Romantic nationalism and modern scientific historical methodarose together in the nineteenth century, especially in the Germanies asthe idea of the “Fatherland” was created historically as well as symboli-cally and territorially. In line with these dual trends, the nation becamenot only the preferred unit of analysis but was presumed the most appro-priate—even most natural—one for history. Historians assumed in manyways that the national histories of England or France or even the UnitedStates were not only the normative goal of actual history for all peoplesbut also its normal route and the focus of its narration as a result.63 Mostprofessional historians continued until recent decades to stress the nationas the proper stage, the best context, for history (as well as the basic socialactor), whether conceived as a state, a society, or a culture. Questioningthe simultaneous rise of a nation, nationalism, and nationhood and see-ing nation formation as a multiple concatenation of events and persons



led to two distinctly different results in today’s historical practice (besidesabandoning the Western European model of nationalism as normative,normal, and natural).

First, historians no longer assume that the nation is a naturally occur-ring and normal entity or that nationalism is a primordial drive in peo-ple’s psyches and a part of human nature. Historians today increasinglyexplore how national territories, a national political system and state,national institutions and a society, and corresponding symbolic and cul-tural representations come into being through changing boundaries, thecreation of governments and political allegiances, new social and institu-tional arrangements, revised ethnic and gender definitions, culturalinventions and symbolic attachments, commemoration and collectivememory. In this manner, nations were constructed first by their citizensubjects and then by historians.64

Secondly, historians have also displaced increasingly the nation as theprincipal stage for histories in favor of local communities and everydaylife or transnational movements and border crossings to focus on whatand who was involved in past processes and what were the effects.Whether or not the extrapolation of the globalized world of the twentiethcentury to the past will be found as insightful in the future as now, histo-rians today speak in terms of capitalist world systems, colonial and impe-rial systems, the Atlantic world, hybrid cultures, and transnationalism.They have transformed the earlier study of migrations from one nation toanother that stressed the recipient society and culture into diasporas froma source society or culture that emphasizes the interaction between earlierand later times in both provider and recipient societies. They prefer tolook at movements and cultures that transcend national boundariesrather than the older approach to the nation-state system and the result-ing diplomacy and international relations. And last, they feel that thestudy of everyday life uncovers the people, events, and institutions thatcreated, sustained, or opposed the larger trends and social arrangementspreviously presumed in national histories or omitted from them whenusing the nation as the primary focus. The transformation of local historyinto microhistory, international relations into transnational trends,migrations into diasporas, and newer definitions of ethnicity and nation-alism all seem part of the recent movement from social to cultural history,from structural analysis to narrative agency and contingency.

The last example of perceptual viewpoint concerns how the geographyof the world is represented ideologically. Just by repeating, for example,the terms “New World” and “Old World” promotes European societies



and devalues other peoples’ cultures. Such ideological geography includesthe arbitrary division of the planet into continents and hemispheres; intoWest and East or West and the “rest”; and even the common favorablejudgment of the North over the South whether in so many countries(France, Germany, Italy, and the United States for example) or continentsand hemispheres in general. The longtime concentration in histories onnations, their lands, and their boundaries worked against portraying thepast according to sea- and ocean-based systems until recently. Historianswere slow to accept the idea of the Atlantic world of eighteenth centuryor even the Pacific Rim in the twentieth century unlike the MediterraneanWorld of ancient times and later. Confusion over the boundaries of theMiddle or Near East and of North and Latin America versus North andSouth America reveal their ideological foundation. That presumption iseven more evident in the once popular designation of the so-calledEuropean (and other “advanced” nations); the former “CommunistEast”; and the rest (called successively the “undeveloped,” “underdevel-oped,” and “developing” nations) as the First, Second, and Third Worlds.The numbering system makes clear the Eurocentric basis of the nomen-clature even as it elevates the economy and/or the political system of cer-tain so-called Western nations as the chief criteria for making the ranking.(The “core,” “semiperipheral,” and “peripheral” zones in World Systemstheory resemble in number and function if not in moral judgment theEurocentric history of imperial expansion.) The once extensive red orpink color on world maps to designate the British Empire quite literallycolored the imagination of those viewing the map about the place of thatisland in the planet’s affairs. The red- and blue-colored states from the2000 electoral map of the United States have become a short hand for ahost of attributions about the cultural as well as political divisions in thenation. All such “metageography” conceals complex actuality in the eyesof many scholars even as it supposedly conveys that reality to thoseexpounding it.65

Such metageography poses the usual problems for historians. If theyre-present it through repeating the views of some past actors, they mustbe careful not to accept its premises and perspective as determining theirown geographic views. If they construct the world of past actors, theymust not substitute their own geographical stereotypes for those of theiractors. This is the message of Edward Said’s influential book on Orientalism,which exposes the ideological biases of Western conceptions of the “East,”particularly of the Middle East. Of course, such metageographicalnotions have their own history.66



The most influential interpretation of American history dependedupon just such ideological geography. Frederick Jackson Turner’s concep-tion of “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to use thetitle of the paper he delivered in 1893, outlined how (white) Americansettlement recapitulated continually the evolutionary stages from sav-agery through agrarianism to civilization as it advanced across the UnitedStates.67 Each section of the country repeated the process from Englishsettlement on the East Coast until the Superintendent of the Censusdeclared the frontier had effectively ceased in 1890. For Turner, the con-stant recapitulation of evolutionary stages on each frontier explained whythe United States differed from European nations in values, outlook, andnational character: the reversion to earlier social relationships reinforcedthe democratic society of that level throughout United States history. Theschool that Turner founded dominated the interpretation of UnitedStates history until after the Second World War.68

As these last paragraphs indicate, a second kind of viewpoint may besummarized as conceptual, that is how the world is represented from thestandpoint of a belief system, ideology, or worldview. This is the domainproper of intellectual and cultural history. The history of ideas fromArthur Lovejoy’s earlier mapping out of what he called “unit ideas” torecent Anglophone attention to the history of political discourses to thecurrent Germanic interest in begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, alltrace formal ideas over time. Lovejoy’s interest in the assumptions ground-ing the Elizabethan chain of being, Quentin Skinner’s detailed examina-tion of how the meaning of Hobbes’ and Locke’s words derived fromintended action and political context, and Reinhold Koselleck’s extendedhistorical analyses of political and historical concepts all focus on the lan-guage of academic and other formal thinkers.69 Although cultural historyalso takes the human symbolic realm as its subject, it stresses collectiverepresentations, general assumptions, common perceptions, and evencommunal feelings, particularly of ordinary people. Just as philosophy asa discipline proved handy to intellectual historians, so anthropology pro-vided inspiration and models for cultural historians. If intellectual histo-rians frequently deal with the academic and formal ideas or even theso-called elite culture of a people, cultural historians attempt to interpretculture more generally according to their anthropological insight.70

Cultural history of this kind was perhaps best known first through theFrench study of mentalités but more recently the field has proliferatedthrough the study of cultural practices, representations, productions, per-formances, and contingent but structured occasions. Two of the classic



studies in the field utilized detailed inquisitorial records to reconstruct theworldviews of common people. The Italian microhistorian Carlo Ginzburgused the seemingly eccentric but original cosmology of Menocchio, a six-teenth-century Friulian miller who was eventually burned at the stake, toportray the conflict between and yet interdependence of elite and popu-lar culture.71 The French Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie seemed topresent the very lives and thoughts of the early fourteenth-century vil-lagers of Montaillou, whether that was the nature of their housing andhabits, sheepherding and ecological practices, the relations between menand women, sexual norms and experiences, gesture and gossip, or atti-tudes toward death, nature, the hereafter, and the past.72 More recent cul-tural historians explored the image and representation of the body and itsparts, Parisian apprentices massacring cats, the nature and practice ofreading and the culture of the book, and common emotions and generalperceptions of all kinds. Just as cultural historians enlarged their purviewto include such topics, so too have they begun to apply their approachesto political, economic, and social history topics. In doing so, these histo-rians have reversed the long-standing professional commitment to theprimacy of the political, economic, and social history of culture to developinstead the cultural history of the political, the economic, and the social.73

Intellectual and cultural histories would appear a prime application ofre-presentation of the evidence given their methods and goals, but con-struction always accompanies such efforts as interpretation, conclusion,or lesson. Although cultural history, for example, supposedly seeks tounderstand past worlds in terms of how their inhabitants did, such a goalnecessitates as much construction as any other kind of history. Even CarloGinzburg artfully organizes his seemingly endless quotation from theinquisitorial records, carefully construes the significance of the questionsasked and how answered in terms of his own inquiries, and ultimatelyextrapolates some larger conclusions about the relationship of popularand elite cultures from the recorded evidence as he re-presents it. Even theliteral re-presentation of the past through authentic material objects in amuseum requires much interpretive construction, as we shall see in Chapter 4.

Perhaps more than in any other kinds of history, intellectual and cul-tural histories juxtapose past and current conceptions of reality. Such jux-taposition poses choices which in turn necessitate interpretation andconstruction by historians. While such choice particularly confronts thehistorians when their evidence describes the actuality of witches, magic,and miracles, they face the same basic problem when the sources presentor posit racial, gender, or ethnic inferiority. Ultimately intellectual and



cultural history probes the very foundational assumptions of professionalhistory today. When and why did the past become considered differentfrom the present? When, how, and why did the assumptions of sourcecriticism allow the winnowing of facts from their evidential context?When and how were the nature of narrative and other modern expositoryforms accepted as the mediums appropriate to professional history?When and how were the divisions of time naturalized and made funda-mental to historical understanding? How and when did factual accuracy,objectivity, neutral chronology, and temporal plenitude come to measurewhat was proper for professional history?

The third kind of viewpoint may be designated in general as evalua-tive, that is, people and events are judged according to some one’s moralstandards or value system. Do the values and morals come from the his-torical world of the past or from world of the present? Should historians(and their audiences) judge the morals of past people by our own? Or, areethics best appreciated and applied as a matter of time and place? Absolutemoral judgments condemn some behavior as bad no matter when andwhere. Situational or contextual ethics seem inadequate for the sins ofracism, genocide, and oppression. But what about equal condemnation forpoverty, sickness, illiteracy, war, and criminal executions? What of praisefor the ethical treatment of animals and the philosophy of vegetarianism?

Historicism as the principal insight of the modern historical profes-sion only compounds the ethical problem. Although the meaning of theword has generated controversy since its German invention in the nine-teenth century, the core of the conception lies in the assumption thatthoughts, activities, and institutions are best described and explained assomehow fitting together in the era in which they are said to occur.Understanding past people’s ideas and actions in terms of their timesstresses specificity, uniqueness, and temporal location, and that orienta-tion has remained fundamental to the historical discipline.74

Such an orientation suggests two approaches to ethics and morality:(1) each era as well as people has its own standards for judging the behav-ior of then and there and (2) historians today have their own moral crite-ria as a result of their own changed times. Should historians thus acceptthe morality and ethical criteria of past actors as agents or the standards ofmodern times and society? Historicism would seem therefore to hoist his-torians on the petard of their most cherished insight. The historicalmethod goes only so far in ameliorating the problem. The moral views ofpast persons and their societies can be re-presented as “facts” in their ownwords and perhaps actions from the surviving evidence. On the other



hand, the historian can construe, that is infer and construct, past ethicsfrom the silence of the sources on the matters investigated. Of course, thehistorian can eschew explicit moral evaluation but certainly imply itthrough the quotations and paraphrases she uses in re-presenting matters.In still another strategy, the historian can assert that her moral ends givemeaning to facts about the past for a present-day audience. In all thesecases, the professional principles or context of the modern historian donot resolve the moral issues of re-presentation and construction, of implicitversus explicit judgments, and absolute morality or contextualist ethics.75

The fourth and last kind of viewpoint is grounded on an emotionalstance or empathetic identification. How should the historian and theaudience feel about the subject of a biography, the goals of a political orsocial movement, or the nature of a cultural achievement after hearing alecture, reading a book, attending an exhibition, or seeing a film? Was somemoment in the past a golden age from which the present is a decline? Or,should the audience feel better about the present in light of comparison,explicit or implicit, to the past? No matter what museum curators do toforestall such implicit comparisons between past and present lifestyles,museum viewers usually note the great progress in technology at the sametime as some lament the more rushed and complicated life such progressbrought. In the end, should the book reader, lecture listener, museumattendee, or film viewer feel good, bad, or neutral about change, persis-tence, stability, or transformation in the past?76

Diverse perspectives and meanings as with other kinds of interpreta-tions arise from historians, their critics, and their audiences being situatedin specific but different social (and temporal) locations with differentialaccess to power, knowledge, and its distribution. Their very situationssurely influence, perhaps determine, what they consider truth, reality,facts, and the meaning of history. When approved of by a wide circle ofpeople in and out of the profession, the perspectives and meanings areconsidered truthful and objective. When they are confined to a small cir-cle of advocates, the majority considers them biased and subjective or justunimportant. Does this mean that truthfulness, objectivity, and factualityare ultimately a function of numbers and/or power, first in the professionand then in the larger society?77

Arguments in the historical profession over partiality and impartiality,truth and propaganda, partisanship and neutrality, fact and value havetraditionally centered on the notion of objectivity.78 Conventionally, thenotion of objectivity pertains to the relation between the observer and theobserved object. By definition, objectivity presumes the characteristics of



the object itself solely determine the understanding of its nature by allobservers—as is supposedly the case in the physical sciences. In this viewof matters, therefore, the perspectives of the observers are not relevant tothe description of the object and maybe even to its explanation. Subjectivityin contrast assumes the understanding of the object depends upon theperspective of observer. Explanation in this view is not only dependentupon the perspective taken by the observer but so may the description ofthe object. For those who believe in the possibility of objectivity in his-torical practice, truth results from the correspondence between the pre-sumed reality of the past and the empirical investigation of the record itgenerated. If interpretations differ, then the facts will determine theirtruth, for in the end facts exist prior to and independent of interpretation.If perspectives are many, truth is one for the known can be separated fromthe knower and facts from values and viewpoints. Ultimately in this view,history must and can be separated from fiction in order to avoid the evilof relativism and all that means for the justification and very existence ofthe profession itself. Of course, the possibility of objectivity in historicalpractice depends upon one’s perspective on these issues.79

Although the ideal of rigorous objectivity has long justified profes-sional practices and products, most historians honor such strictness onlyin spirit today. Professional ethics, social theory, and contending inter-pretive community affiliations all point elsewhere. If (absolute) objectiv-ity means being free of all (social) context and independent of all interpretiveframeworks, then few today subscribe to such a view. If objectivity meansthat a project follows professional procedures and represents the majorityopinion in a profession, then many more subscribe to this version in the-ory and even more in practice. If objectivity means agreements onlyamong some and not other interpretive communities, then fewer maysubscribe in theory even though they may claim that the ideal still justi-fies their truths versus those of others. In that sense they are all espouserealism as the most useful philosophical foundation for the discipline.80

Both multiculturalism and postmodernism highlight the existence ofmultiple voices and viewpoints in practice as well as theory. Accordingly,viewpoint can no longer be considered from nowhere at all, a position theintellectual historian Allan Megill cleverly named “immaculate percep-tion,”81 or everywhere at once, usually denominated the omniscient orGod view. Thus Donna Haraway warns in her oft-cited article “SituatedKnowledges” against speaking universally but thinking locally. She argues,“objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment anddefinitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits



and responsibility.” She goes on to point out that from a feminist point ofview “The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objectivevision. . . . It allows us to become answerable for what we learn to see.”82

Social engagement, if anything, enhances the ability to see as well as promotethe truth.

To serve the end of truthfulness, objectivity need not, indeed cannot,be neutral, as the American intellectual historian Thomas Haskell arguesso forcefully, “I see nothing to admire in neutrality. My conception ofobjectivity . . . is compatible with strong political commitment. It pays nopremium for standing in the middle of the road, and it recognizes thatscholars are as passionate and as likely to be driven by interest as thosethey write about. It does not value even detachment as an end in itself,but only as an end in indispensable prelude or preparation for theachievement of higher levels of understanding.”83

Such commitment and passion ensures conflict among rival perspec-tives, which in turn assures the individual scholar’s partial viewpointsbecome the community of scholars’ responsible pursuit of moral andother truths. (This passionate objectivity demands as it presumes opendebate in the profession and the larger society.) The German theorist ofhistory Jörn Rüsen makes the point even more forcefully: neutrality is thedenial of history because without perspective historical discourse has nomeaning. Neither narrative nor metastory can exist without the histo-rian’s viewpoint.84 Or, as the British military historian Michael Howardput it so pithily, “No bias, no book.”85

Objectivity, in short, is intersubjective agreement in both practice andtheory, as it derives from dialogues first within the profession and thenbetween the profession and the divisions of the larger society.86 The truthsaffirmed by such a view of objectivity are idiosyncratic or political untiltheir truthfulness is ratified by a majority of the profession voting byfavorable reviews, election to prestigious professional offices, awarding offellowships and jobs, and the conferring of prominent chairs and honors.Truthfulness and objectivity in this view depend upon how many differ-ent groupings hold how much in common about what it takes to producea valid history. Truthfulness and objectivity are, first, a consequence ofintersubjective agreement among individuals in an interpretive commu-nity and, second, negotiation between interpretive communities to expandthe original circle of agreement. Historical truths result from such objec-tivity, and both are the products of genre maintenance and policing. Bothtruthfulness and objectivity constitute the rationale for the practice ofprofessional history. As a result, both are said to ground as they supposedly



result from the procedures of historical methods and syntheses. Using therhetoric of factuality, truthfulness, and a new definition of objectivityagainst their supposed enemy relativism shows historians are once againbeing practical realists about their discipline and profession.

The more viewpoints and voices in the historical guild and in generalsociety, the more traditional history is challenged in forms of expositionand explanation. Such a challenge underlines not only the role politicsplays within historical arguments and narratives as such but also suggeststhe politics entwined in the various kinds of histories and the very natureof history in general. No place is this political foundation better seen thesedays than in the relationship between gender and genre. Concentration onfemale work and roles in and out of family settings not only changed orexpanded the facts but also the forms of history. Political and military his-tory excluded women and large sectors of society; social and cultural his-tory included more groups and made the past relevant to the hithertosocially marginalized.87 Indeed, some feminist theorists argue that thewhole fight over objectivity in the discipline and the search for the onebest story is a male approach to the world and the past. In their opinion,then, gender and genre maintenance had gone hand in hand earlier in theprofession.88

Regardless of one’s positions on these matters, one must conclude thatperspectives and meaning(s) pervade histories and find expression throughvoice and viewpoint in texts and other mediums. Sometimes they areexplicit as part of the argument, story, or explanation. Sometimes they areimplicit in the very framework of interpretation, choice of researchdesign, how historical reality is defined, or subtextually between the lines.Perspectives and meaning(s) in histories can re-present those found in thesources, or historians can impose them through their interpretive con-structions. Sometimes the perspectives are widely shared by other histori-ans and their audiences, sometimes not. In the latter instance, eachcontending side accuses the other of advocacy, partiality, bias, distortion,or propaganda and attributes to itself impartiality, perspective, factuality,and truthfulness. Both recontextualize the past according to their view-point and purposes.

Multiculturalist and feminist theory underscored the presence of view-point in every history at the same time as that understanding underminedthe monopoly or universality of any one viewpoint in the discipline. Inthis state of diversity, then, the lessons of history will always be most man-ifest to those who propound them but not necessarily to others. Themeaning of (a?) history will be clearest to those of the same interpretive



school that elucidates it but challenged by those in other schools. Fromthis standpoint, the uses of history are many but the ultimate purpose isthe same: to offer convincing, yet presumably accurate, representations ofthe past to as many individuals as possible. The diversity of viewpointsmakes such a goal a challenge. Perspective and context, meaning andviewpoint, interests and uses, purposes and products must therefore be asmuch a part of historical practice as they are always a part of historicaltheory. To put something into historical perspective is to put it into somehistorical context, and vice versa, and both are shaped by personal, pro-fessional, and larger societal contexts at the time.

Schools of Interpretation and Metanarratives

Schools of historical interpretation and metanarratives are not only theculmination but, paradoxically, often the inspiration for historical syn-theses, even their foundation. Historical synthesis culminates in interpre-tive schools and metanarratives because of the historian’s quest for anever-larger context to organize her story and argument, to interpret andexplain the multitude of events, and to provide larger perspective andmeaning for a history. Conversely, the historian can synthesize narrativeand argument, explanation and interpretation, perspective and meaninginto compelling relationships with each other in a history through con-textualization according to the premises of some historiographic school ormetanarrative.

In either case, the act of contextualizing history eventuates in a histor-ical interpretation. Interpretation is a much used term by historians,hence has many meanings in the profession.89 Interpretation is both apractice and a product of the historical enterprise. As a practice, as we seethroughout this book, it pervades all aspects of historical research andsynthesis. It possesses at least four meanings as a product of those practices.

An interpretation, in one widespread usage, is the personal imprint anhistorian gives any one history through the selection of facts and general-izations, their overall organization, the pattern of meaning presented, andthe lessons elicited and perspectives adopted. An interpretation in thissense refers to the style, broadly speaking, of a historical work, and is con-veyed primarily through voice and viewpoint. Such “style” embodies theindividualistic, creative side of historical practice—the great goal of allhumanistic enterprises in modern times. Scholars presume that such aninterpretation reflects the historian’s social background, political outlook,and scholarly and other commitments.



To the extent that several or more histories embrace the same specialmethods, set of arguments, or basic perspective, they are referred to as aschool of interpretation. That method is the basis of the school is clear inoral history and the quantitative and psychoanalytical schools of his-tory.90 The terms Marxist and neo-Marxist were applied to a number ofschools in the twentieth century that were inspired by the perspective andmethodology of the great nineteenth-century social theorist.91 Arguablythe most famous of twentieth-century schools was the French Annalesschool. The second name of its journal, Annales: Économies, Sociéties,Civilization, suggests its ambitious program.92 What distinguished thediverse practitioners of this school was the focus on the continuing effectsof long-term phenomena as opposed to day-to-day events: slow changingpatterns of trade and economy, persisting kinship and social relations,enduring intellectual systems or mentalités, or even slower climatic ordemographic cycles. As mentioned earlier, successive schools of UnitedStates historiography are commonly designated the progressive or eco-nomic interpretation from the first decades of the twentieth century tothe end of the Second World War; the consensus or counterprogressiveinterpretation in the 1950s and 1960s; and the New Left or neoprogres-sive interpretation from the 1970s onward. Those histories of history-writing known as historiography frequently study changing interpretiveschools. To consider the nature of an interpretive school begins the shiftfrom an individual history or histories to the idea of the past as history.

The search for a larger context for general histories or even history ingeneral underlies the third and fourth meanings of interpretation. Ifmany historians’ search for a larger context results in the same explicitoverall story, then we can call it a master narrative, perhaps a dominant orgoverning narrative, or even a grand narrative. Such a master narrativemight result from either the implications the historian draws from a morespecialized history, that is, the larger story of which the special history isa part, or it might be the topic of a more general history. Some well-known master or grand narratives are the rise and spread of Western cap-italism, nationalism, and imperialism across continents and centuries.93

When the framework or larger context is implicit in a number of his-tories, it may be termed a metanarrative.94 Metanarratives are literally thegrand or great stories behind the more explicit stories. These implicitgrand narratives or major interpretive codings are the strings that hold thenecklace(s) of facts, explanations, and generalizations together not only inboth specialized and general histories but also in any exposition of historyin general. They provide the contextual coherence for the larger truth of



a history, and they validate that history as they organize it. Where oncehistory revealed the working of God’s will, classic historical metanarra-tives since the Enlightenment relied on the ever-greater development anddominion of reason especially as seen in scientific and technologicaladvancement, the inexorable spread of freedom as institutionalized in lib-eral democracy or prophesied by Marxism, and the confidence in inevitableprogress to provide the ultimate, universal truths of history (even thoughmodeled on Western themes and institutions and from a Western per-spective). Recent metanarratives counter these classic ones by stressingthe persistence of ethnicity and social and cultural diversity, agency overnature in creating ethnic and sexual identities; the spread of global capi-talism with its many discontents; the empowerment of subordinatedpeoples and the rise of postcolonial hybrid cultures; the seemingly apoca-lyptic ecological constraints on modern economies; and finally even thearguments over the existence and effects of late industrialism and post-modernism. Like the old, the new metanarratives seek to provide ultimateanswers about the origins, purposes, and fate of a people, even though theclaims of the new may seem less universal and ethnocentric to us todaythan those of the old.

What separates the third and fourth meanings of interpretation is howevident or hidden, how explicit or implicit, is the “string” holding togetherthe necklace of facts and other statements in an individual history, a gen-eral history, a school of history, or especially in what is referred to as his-tory in general. Whether explicit or implicit, grand or metanarrativesprovide the most basic and largest contexts of all kinds of histories. Thelarger the contextualization provided by such a narrative, the more likelyit is implicit, and the more likely it is this implicit story that gives coher-ence to the ostensibly disparate facts, explanations, and generalizationspresented. Metanarratives underlie both individual and collective memo-ries and supply the links between them. Such metanarratives, by provid-ing a fundamental context, shape histories regardless of medium and topic.95

Questions of identity and origins particularly evoke metanarratives fortheir answers. Who are the “we” presumed in a lesson, book, exhibit, orfilm? If national progress has abated as a dominant narrative to organizehistories, the central role of the nation as the chief setting for history stillthrives. While the idea of the nation no longer is accepted as the inevitableand natural outcome of a people’s history, the nation is still the normalstage for presentation of many histories, although called the state, a soci-ety, or a culture. The academic history profession is still divided mainlyaccording to national histories. Nationalism may need to be explained in



history but history departments remain mainly organized by national his-tories. Many major journals, such as the American Historical Review, arrangemost of their reviews by geographical area as well as time. American,English, French, and German exceptionalism still thrives in metahistori-cal practice if not always in theory.96

Ethnicity is not only a major component of collective memory butalso the basis of many a national history yet today. Whiteness studies tracethe evolution of certain nationalities becoming “American” and predom-inant in United States history. “White” constituted the main ethnic affil-iation of those Americans that figured prominently in the history of theUnited States from its English colonial beginnings, which concealed anyNative American or Spanish genesis. Anglo-Americans long assumedthemselves the majority and without “ethnicity.” Only “immigrants” or“minority” persons possessed race or ethnicity in this story. And histori-ans seconded this opinion explicitly and tacitly until recently wheneverthey spoke or wrote of the “American people.”97 In a similar manner, thepreferred metanarrative of the “English people” traces their roots to theinvading Angles and Saxons rather than the indigenous Britons andancient Celts.98 Such competing metanarratives of national racial andethnic origins are common to many peoples.99

That ethnic metanarratives even ground the origins of Western civi-lization is shown by the heated controversy over the claims of political sci-entist Martin Bernal that ancient Greek civilization originated with SemiticPhoenician and Egyptian peoples rather than later Indo-European north-erners. In his provocatively titled, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots ofClassical Civilization, he argues that this history, acknowledged by theancient Greeks themselves, was ignored or distorted beginning in the lateeighteenth century in order to give a white European ancestry to thoselater Greek achievements considered the foundations of Western civiliza-tion.100 By the early twentieth century this racist-motivated “Aryan myth”had triumphed over ancient knowledge, according to him. Bernal’s asser-tions elicited a vast outpouring of books and Web sites denying or sup-porting his scholarship and reasoning.101

The whole idea of otherness depends as much on a metanarrative asdoes sameness.102 Sameness and otherness receive visual, often vivid, por-trayal in museum displays. Do the peoples depicted in the exhibit lookand act like “us” to encourage identity, or are they presented in ways toshow difference and relativism? The answers to this question are particu-larly evident in museum exhibits about early humans: are they repre-sented as more ape-like or more “human”? Questions about similarity and



difference can be applied to any of the so-called prehistoric peoples andtheir modes of life. The lives and artifacts of Native Americans and otherslong presumed “people without history,” to once again use Eric Wolf ’stitle, are displayed in natural history or anthropological museums asopposed to history museums. On the other hand, archaic Greek, Roman,Egyptian, and Near and Middle Eastern peoples and their societies arerepresented in historical museums as well as archaeological ones. Onlyrecently are the Mayan, Incan, and Aztecan civilizations being accordedthe same status.

Feminist scholars and women’s historians still fight the metanarrativeof male-dominated histories that either exclude the activities of womenaltogether or relegate them to the margins of the story. Once again thisissue is depicted visually in museum murals and dioramas of gender. Thismatter concerns less the physical appearance of men and women andmore where they are located in a display and what they are doing. Are themen central and active while the women are peripheral and passive oreven absent? Do the men’s activities, such as fighting or business, and thewomen’s activities, such as cooking or housekeeping, confirm traditionalstereotypes of male and female roles and, more importantly, the worth ofthose roles?103 According to some scholars this male bias is even markedin archaeology’s naming of cultural stages by tool making. To designatehuman cultural epochs as Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages is to stress maleactivities and artifacts. Even to argue that civilization and history beganwith writing favors male over female activities.104 In the end, is the “mas-ter” narrative of western civilization still a male story in all too many texts,films, and museum displays?

Although Enlightenment faith in the progress of civilization appearsdead for moral and political affairs, that metanarrative still constitutes theimplicit if not explicit basis for medicine and technology in many a lec-ture, book, and museum exhibition. Though the historians producingthese histories deny such an explicit lesson, their hearers, readers, andattendees draw that conclusion so popular is the metanarrative. Even his-torians writing about the history of history all too often imply that recentinterpretations are superior to older ones. That trend is reinforced by thenormative turn in the return to history in the social sciences as well as thehistorical profession itself. Emphases on the morality of historic agentsleads to judgments of their actions as better and worse, which extends tolauding newer histories emphasizing that approach over older ones seek-ing, even professing, neutrality if not always finding it. Particularly revealing



are the changing judgments on past historical interpretations and thesearch for the precedents of today’s more approved histories.105

In the end, all kinds of histories, whether argumentative or narrative,whether the history of a life, a town, a region, a nation, or the world; of aday, year, decade, century, millennium, or longer; no matter how partialor comprehensive, all rely explicitly or implicitly on a larger narrativecontext to frame their arguments, specific stories, moral lessons, and per-spectives. To cover both the explicitness of grand narrative and the implic-itness of metanarrative, I employed the term “Great Story.”106 Great Storiesserve as the larger or largest framework for organizing the disparate,embedded stories and arguments of a segment of history, whether partialor more general, short term or longer. They provide the coherence so nec-essary to make what otherwise would be a chronicle or annals into a nar-rative history. In current practice, such Great Stories serve as the largercontext for an overall approach to a national, transnational, or even globalhistory.107

Such Great Stories underlie even the past itself conceived as (a) history.The only question, as the parenthesis in the preceding sentence indicates,is whether the ultimate context of the past as history is one or more GreatStories. Numerous Great Stories exist in normal historical practice, butdoes the profession seek or at least prefer one overall Great Story as the(an?) ultimate and necessary context for all the other contexts? Historiansonce thought such comprehensive Great Stories were only the province of(and most evident in) the speculative or universal histories seeking theultimate meaning of the entire human past, whether as class struggle,clash of civilizations, technological improvement, or democratic advance.Now they recognize that even less grand interpretive efforts use some sortof Great Story to provide conceptual structure in humbler, everyday his-tories. The construction of a Great Story or Stories as context in a history,in an interpretive school, or for history in general constitute the ultimateintervention by the historian to make “sense” of the past as history. Somescholars therefore believe the greatest metanarrative is the standard,unquestioned approach to historic time in western discourse.108

Subtextual analysis, or “reading between the lines,” of a history or his-tory in general is the domain proper of metahistory. No longer reservedfor the great universal interpretations of all history or the search for theultimate meaning of the past, metahistory today explores on one hand thelarger and largest contexts posited by histories in general in the professionand on the other hand the foundational premises of historical methodol-ogy underlying those histories and therefore the fashioning of them. In



the former case, metahistory examines the implicit models of humanbehavior (classically hidden in traditional histories), the implications ofthe politics presumed in a history, or the premises and nature of a histor-ical narrative. In the latter case, metahistory looks at the epistemologicaland ontological presumptions of a history or history in general as prac-ticed by a school or the whole profession or examines the linguistic rules,the rhetorical strategies, and the premises of historical narrative in gen-eral. (The study of such rules and premises is known in literary theory asnarratology and what is studied is called narrativity.) Metahistory in bothof its forms provides as it studies the context of contexts, the frameworkfor the embedded layers of a history, and the premises that generates them.

In its most controversial form, metahistory studies the imaginativeconfiguring historians perform to shape their material at its very founda-tions. Hayden White, whose Metahistory gave the term its new meaning,argues that historians emplot their (hi)stories according to the same fourbasic forms of romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire as other literaryauthors. Likewise, he insists that the imaginative prefiguring that groundstheir texts takes the form of four classic rhetorical tropes: metaphor,metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Whether dividing all of the historicalimagination into four parts is too few, too many, or just right is of lessconcern to my argument at this point, then what such a scheme impliesabout the nature of history and historical practice. To extend for themoment White’s reasoning, are there only so many general plots by whichhistorical syntheses can be organized? Students of literary narratives findonly a limited number of plot elements and structures. Hayden White’sstress on four basic emplotments and prefigurings as common literarystructures suggests that historical narratives are restricted in their basicvariety in the same way, despite the infinity of actors, events, and timesthat such structures may contain. In the end, must all of the past be fash-ioned into one or another Great Story in order to comprehend thechanges in human actions and institutions over time? Or, can historianspostulate and conceive of the past as a big picture that cannot be fullynarrativized? If the entire past cannot be narrativized as such, then mustone understand that big picture as some great annals or great chroniclesrather than a version of proper history? If this is the case, the past onlybecomes history through the creation of histories by historians. Historyconceived as a whole is the idealized or hypothesized story of the past pos-tulated and extrapolated from various historians’ histories.

All of history therefore shares the same characteristics common to allhistories. Historical syntheses may be narrative or argument, but most



histories use both. Historical syntheses unite explanation and interpreta-tion through style and rhetoric. Historical syntheses combine meaningand perspective through voice and viewpoint. Contextualization rangesfrom the simple juxtaposition of factual statements to Great Stories them-selves. Great Stories vary from explicit petit récits to overt master narra-tives, from complexes of implicit presuppositions to entire metanarratives.While all histories have common characteristics, they vary by degrees ofintervention and interpretation by historians acting as supposed interme-diaries between the survivals from the past and the type of historical prod-ucts they create in the present. The next three chapters examine therelationships among the empirical and the literary and artistic elementswithin various genres of history.



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