The Methods of History

Javier Ergueta

December, 2012

Get the story.

“At the heart of good history is a naughty little secret: good

storytelling.”

– Steven Schiff

Get the other side of the story.

“Everyone falsifies history even if it is only his own

personal history. Sometimes the falsification is deliberate, sometimes unconscious; but always the past is altered to

suit the needs of the present.” – Joseph Freeman

“No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing

but a printer's error.”

– W. C. Williams

Identify points in conflict.

“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with

syphilis.”

– Schopenhauer

Look at the ending and try to reconstruct the key steps that led

up to it.

“Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood

backward.”

– Søren Kierkegaard

See past events through the eyes of

contemporaries.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently

there.”

– L. P. Hartley

“If you want to know why things happened in history, the best

thing is to seek out the intentions of the people concerned and to

examine the circumstances, favourable or unfavourable, in

which they had to act.”– M. Stanford

Simplify the complexity of

experience to make it intelligible.

“No sane historian pretends to do anything so fantastic as to embrace more than a minute fraction of the facts even of

his chosen sector or aspect of history. The world of the historian, like the world

of the scientist, is not a photographic copy of the real world, but rather a working model which enables him more or less

effectively to understand it and to master it.”

– G. R. Elton

“What we call history is the mess we call life reduced to

some order, pattern and possibly purpose.”

– G. R. Elton

(Usually) give your representation a narrative form.

“Systems with small numbers of variables lend themselves to modeling. Systems with many variables don’t: the only way

you can explain their behavior is to simulate them, which means to trace their

history…Only historical investigation, therefore, can account for what actually happened. ‘The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as

usually conceived’.”

– John Lewis Gaddis

“What narratives do is to simulate what transpired in the past. They’re

reconstructions, assembled within the virtual laboratories of our minds, of the

processes that produced whatever structure we’re trying to explain…In all of them, we ask ourselves, ‘How could this

have happened?’ We then proceed to try to answer the question in such a way as

to achieve the closest possible fit between representation and reality.”

– John Lewis Gaddis

“History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of

what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeing them in a simple

form.”– Johan Huizinga

Avoid single cause explanations; look for multiple causes and their intersections.

“The goal [of social scientists] is not just to explain the past but to

predict the future. The oversimplification of causes,

thus, is a necessity to them. It isn’t to historians, for whom

multiple causation is the only feasible basis for explanation.”

– John Lewis Gaddis

“The relation of the historian to his causes has the same dual and reciprocal nature

as the relation of the historian to his facts. The causes determine his interpretation of the historical process, and his inter-pretation determines his selection and

marshalling of the causes. The hierarchy of causes, the relative significance of one cause or set of causes or of another, is

the essence of his interpretation.”

– Edward Hallett Carr

Cast the net of your imagination broadly to grasp the significance

of evidence.

“Without the imaginative insight which goes with

creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.”

– C. V. Wedgwood

“Let the science and research of the historian find the fact

and let his imagination and art make clear its significance.”

– George Trevelyan

Contextualize: Interpret what

something meant at that time and in that

place

“History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully

and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict

causal connections.”– Johan Huizinga

Test your own interpretation by

seeking out disproving counterclaims

“The duty of the historian is not exhausted by the obligation to see

that his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all

known or knowable facts relevant, in one sense or another, to the theme on which he is engaged and to the

interpretation proposed.”

– Edward Hallett Carr

Adjust your interpretation to fit your facts and your

facts to fit your interpretation.

“The historian is neither the humble slave, nor the tyrannical master, of his facts.

The relation of the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take…The

historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his

interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to

one over the other.”– Edward Hallett Carr

Accept there will never be a definitive

account.

“Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the

way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all

that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as

well as the smallest occurrence.”

– Goethe

Accept that your historical account is

tied to the present you inhabit.

“The judgments any historian applies to the past can’t help but reflect the present the historian inhabits. These will surely shift, as present concerns do. History is constantly being remeasured in terms of

previously neglected metrics: recent examples include the role of women,

minorities, discourse, sexuality, disease, and culture. All of these carry moral

implications...”– John Lewis Gaddis

Accept that you have no choice but to make moral judgments–but you can make them

responsibly.

“The idea that the historian can or should stand aloof from moral judgments

unrealistically denies…the impossibility of objectivity in history. The only way

around this problem, I think, is to accept the historian’s engagement with the

morality of his or her time, but to distinguish that engagement explicitly

from the morality of the individual, or the age, the historian is writing about.”

– John Lewis Gaddis