Thinking About History
by Sarah Maza
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2
1 The History of Whom? .................................................................................................................. 2
2 The History of Where? .................................................................................................................. 6
4 How Is History Produced? ............................................................................................................. 8
5 Causes or Meanings?................................................................................................................... 12
6 Facts or Fiction? .......................................................................................................................... 17
Overzicht gebruikte termen ........................................................................................................... 22
,Introduction
Most people would describe the discipline of history as “the study of the past”. What we mean by
“the past” in this context is “past enough that we have some perspective on it”. History as a field of
study is unusual in its lack of overarching structure or definition. There exists no historical “canon”.
History written by academics is low in jargon and technicalities and more accessible to general readers.
The technical requirements for researching and writing history can be steep. Eclecticism is what makes
the discipline of history so vibrant and broadly appealing: the skills required to do it are those both of
the specialist and of the nonspecialist. Aside from technicalities such as language and paleography,
“historical research” is mostly impossible to teach. It requires ingenuity, initiative and persistence.
Good historians know how to put a story together and make it understandable to a wide range of
readers. Most often the chaotic evidence produced by historical research ends up reframing the initial
question, which is never answered with any degree of certainty. As William H. Sewell has argued,
historians’ distinctive contribution to the social sciences is their analysis of how human action unfolds
over time. Historians operate according to distinct theories of temporality and causality, even if those
are most often left implicit.
1 The History of Whom?
HISTORY FORM ABOVE: “GREAT MEN” AND A FEW WOMEN
The “makers of history” were men with the power to affect the course of events in the world
around them. The rulers, military commanders, and other leaders of past societies mattered more than
anyone else because they made the decisions that shaped the experience of thousands or millions of
their contemporaries. Connecting the events of a period to the life of a prominent individual gives both
shape and color to the past. The actions and personalities of some individuals did have a defining
impact on their contemporaries.
The oldest histories center on political and military leadership. It is of course possible to take the
view that “great men” are mostly the products of circumstance. “Personality or circumstance?” is an
ultimately unanswerable question. While political and military matters are the oldest subjects of
historical writing, the history of ideas runs a close second. Intellectual “geniuses” have been the objects
of traditional history for the same reason as political and military leaders. Asking “whose history?”
amounts to pondering what sphere of human activity matters. No ruler or leader exercises power in a
social vacuum, and in much of traditional “top-down” history they share the limelight with a “ruling”
or “political” class. Implicit in the traditional prioritizing of political history are a set of assumptions, all
of which have been seriously challenged, if not necessarily overturned, over the last few decades.
SOCIAL HISTORY AND QUANTIFICATION
The discipline of history does not evolve through the abrupt and complete replacement of one
type of history by another. Social history has appeared at various points in the past, most notably in
the nineteenth century. # Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1848 History of England from the Accession
of James the Second, a landmark chronicle of the nation’s progress through political emancipation,
includes a section on England in 1685 that covers everything from social classes to coffeehouses, street
lighting, and newspapers. George Travelyan wrote a highly successful volume entitle English Social
History (1942). It is an account of social conditions in England from the Middle Ages to 1901. The type
,of social history written by Macaulay and Trevelyan, which has equivalents in other national traditions,
was clearly subordinate and accessory to political history. It was subscribed as “history with the politics
left out”.
In the 1960s “normal” history became part of a binary that academic historians referred to early
on as “history from above” versus “history from below”, or “top-down” versus “bottom-up”. The
destabilizing creativity of the new historical shift in perspective is perhaps best illustrated by the book
that in 1976 marked the advent of something called the new military history, # The Face of Battle by
John Keegan. Keegan’s book was the first notable work to mate the common foot soldier the central
subject of investigation and thereby to upend our views of how battles are fought, won, and lost.
Keegan’s work offers a vivid example of the insights that ca be gained by shifting perspectives from the
officers in tents and on horses to the men groping through black smoke.
Even in its heyday (1960s) as the cutting edge of the discipline, there was little consensus as to
what “social history” was or how to do it. In the 1960s and 1970s a popular view held that is was the
history of the social structure which could be captured by what was known as quantitative history.
Quantification, still practiced by many historians, was initially a way of establishing the “scientific”
credentials of social history. Quantification works best for broad historical questions about population,
the economy, and mass politics. Sustained use of quantification in historical research prevails to this
day in the field of economic history.
Since the 1960s the “new economic history” has flourished, occasionally amid controversy, most
notoriously around a 1974 book, # Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman, which purported to
demonstrate that American slavery was an effective and relatively benign system of production.
Quantitative history in its heyday (cliometrics) asked big questions, which it answered with big
numbers. A distinguished example of the genre in United States history is # Stephan Thernstrom’s 1973
The Other Bostonians (the title meant “other than the Brahmin elite”), a study of social mobility in
Boston from the 1880s through the 1960s based on a computer-assisted analysis of large amounts of
data drawn from census manuscripts, marriage records, birth certificates, and the Boston City
Directory.
Work like Thernstrom’s represented the quintessence of “social history” if we mean by social “the
history of society”. This held two related problems: it reduces human beings to one-dimensional
aggregates and it rarely makes for exciting reading.
Statistic methods allow the historian to make claims about the largest groups of people available
in the sources and to address questions of change convincingly by tracking a database over time.
Quantification can show you what happened to the majorities in “society”, but not what individual
social actors did and what those actions meant to them.
The “social” in “social history” can refer to “the whole of society”, but to many historians and
social activists in the twentieth century “social” meant “the working class”. Early labor history was
social history with the politics back in, often to a fault. The classic labor-history version of social history
presupposes a hierarchical view of the world of the working poor in which the male union member is
the dominant figure: in this view the “working classes” were identical to “the labor movement”. As
such it represents an important form of “history from below”.
E.P. THOMPSON’S HISTORICAL REVOLUTION
, This background explains the radical novelty and enormous impact of one book, # The Making of
the English Working Class (1963), whose author, E.P. Thompson, has been called “the most widely cited
twentieth-century historian in the world. Some of the book’s influence surely had to do with its
author’s persona and reputation. Thompson was a Marxist historian, and shared with that intellectual
tradition the central project of documenting and explaining the destructive effects of capitalism on the
lives of the poor. But where standard Marxist histories focused on the triumphs and failures of labor
movements, Making focuses on the subjective experiences of its protagonists. It shows the effects of
early capitalism on England’s traditional workers.
It became immediately the gold standard for what was known as the “new social history”. Two of
its legacies have been especially important for historical writing. First, his “working class” includes the
very poor, the marginal, the inarticulate, those on the “losing side” of history. Second, Thompson
insisted that “class” and “class consciousness” were not sociological abstractions that could be
deduced from theories or numbers but particular relationships and experiences that needed to be
described in a specific time and place. Thompson’s work opened up the definition of who should be
considered a member of the “working class” (or classes), and with it the scope of social history.
Thompson devoted serious attention to material conditions and everyday lives. It was difficult, from
then on, for anyone to denigrate social history as “apolitical”.
From its beginning, social history has nearly always been linked to democratic or progressive
agendas, with “social” implying either “the majority of the people” or “the poor”. Histories in which
“the people” act out a nation’s destiny first appeared in the nineteenth century in Western
democracies. But while in its beginnings social history focused mainly on the poor, even historians with
solid left-wing credentials acknowledged that “the oppressors” were every bit as much a social group
as “the oppressed”, and that their collective behavior and fate was of serious historical import. Even
in the absence of major controversy, the social history of elites, including the middle classes, is now
widely accepted as crucial to understanding class relations and social change in any given society.
RESISTANCE AND AGENCY
A central agenda of social history has always been to recover the lives, voices, and struggles of
society’s disempowered groups. The “new social historians” of the 1960s and beyond were drawn to
other forms of protest: the archaic, apparently fruitless and irrational rebellions of the poor. Thompson
provided a model, in an influential 1971 essay entitled “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in
the Eighteenth Century”. Thompson noted specific patterns of behavior and of demands. Rural crowds
countered, in word and deed, the amoral workings of the market with a “moral economy” based on
community values.
With the rise of the new social history, we have learned a great deal about how people with little
access to power or education protested and made demands. Historians have explained these acts of
resistance by carefully researching their socioeconomic context, accounting for what triggered them
(in most cases a decision by outsiders perceived as an attack on customary livelihoods and values), and
interpreting their symbolic dimensions. Concepts such as infrapolitics have greatly expanded our
understanding of the ways in which the mundane activities of daily life can be reconceived as a
framework for resistance to oppressive power.
Many historians of oppressed groups in the last few decades have stated that their aim is to award
or restore “agency” to the people they study – to show that they did not suffer passively but took
, purposeful action against their circumstances. Walter Johnson has written a series of incisive essays
asking who are we to “give back” agency of anything else to people long dead? More importantly, he
cautions, we should keep in mind that “agency”, roughly equivalent to “self-directed action”, usually
refers back to an implicit ideal of liberal individualism (Western!).
POWER AND THE PRIVATE SPHERE
Even among the radical young historians of the 1960s and 1970s, busily recovering the history of
the working man, the assumption lingered that women in the past had lived outside of history. As late
as the 1980s, young women were warned away from women’s history when choosing their
dissertation topics. At best it was viewed as a scholarly ghetto with little relevance to the important
questions about the past; at worst choosing the field might mark you as an “angry feminist”.
Much of the pioneering feminist work in women’s history stressed either the oppression women
suffered in the past of the difference of their experience from men’s. But despite a continued emphasis
on separate female experiences, almost from the start historians of women recognized that the real
power of women’s history lay in the demonstration that women’s story was inseparable from that of
men, that crucial aspects of any history would be overlooked, incomprehensible, or impoverished
absent careful consideration of gender relations.
In nearly every known society, the majority of women have engaged in lifelong labor, paid or
unpaid, and their work has been a central component of most economies. One of the main tasks of
women’s history has been to make this simple fact visible and to assess its consequences in any given
society. Female work was obscured, to contemporaries as well as to later historians, because families
have traditionally been defined by the identity and status of the men who headed the households.
A central task of women’s history has been to show how the relationship between women and
men has shaped every society in the past, even when the presence of women as actors is concealed
by dominant ideologies. Some historians of women prefer the expression “gender history”, which
captures the ways in which women’s and men’s histories are intertwined as well as the ideological
dimensions of that relationship. As the historian Joan Scott explained in her article # ‘Gender. A Useful
Category’ (1988), “gender”, a term derived from linguistics, serves to express the idea that masculinity
and femininity are socially constructed categories that vary according to time and place and cannot be
reduced to stable biological sex differences. Gender is also, she points out, “a primary way of signifying
relationships of power”.
Gender history can encompass the most traditional realms of historical writing – war and politics
– precisely because such domains are “male” in the sense of “explicitly not female”, and press male
and female actors into sharply defined roles. Not only did gender analysis expand the reach of women’s
history, it also helped open up other fields, especially gay and lesbian history. Much of the early
scholarships recovered worlds ignored by historians up to then: passionate friendships between
medieval male clerics, sodomy in Renaissance courts, male prostitution in the eighteenth century,
intimate relationships at same-sex boarding schools, and so on.
Since the 1980s major works in gay and lesbian history have challenged everything we thought we
knew about sexual and social identities, even in the recent past. Until the publication of # George
Chauncey’s Gay New York in 1994, it was generally assumed that gay male life in American cities was
swathed in secrecy and shame until the 1970s. Chauncey demonstrated that the homosexual world of
New York form the 1890s to the 1930s was infinitely more complicated and surprising, and more
