On Studying History, Part 2

(Click here for Part 1 of this series. This is the second installment of a 3-part blog series, excerpted from a work-in-progress by Rachel Brewer. Comments and feedback are welcome and may be directed to brewer@providencestl.org))

The Challenges of History

It is evident that history has set itself a tremendous task in trying to understand and picture the entire past life of all people, at all times, in all places. The attempt will never be completely successful, yet we make a valiant effort! The great difficulty is that history is dependent for its knowledge of the people of the past upon those people themselves. Since they are dead and gone, we have to depend upon the writings, buildings, personal effects, works of art, and other monuments, memorials, and memories which they have left behind. For many periods and regions, there is very little such evidence. Another trouble is that former chroniclers were in many cases not interested in the same things we are, and so they do not tell us what we would like to know. They loved to dwell upon wars; we wish to hear of commerce and industry in times of peace. They chronicled the deeds of kings; we want to know the life of the people. The lives and experiences of women and children, the poorest and most ordinary, and other social subgroups have often remained shadowy due to lack of documentary evidence. The chroniclers took it for granted that their audience would understand the state of civilization, since they lived in the midst of it. Most of the manners and customs of the distant past were once too familiar for historians to think it worthwhile to mention them to their readers.

History is Like a Ruin—The story of the past as it has reached us is, indeed, in many respects like the ruin of some ancient amphitheater or medieval monastery. Some sections are better preserved than others, some parts are gone entirely, others have been faultily restored by later writers who failed to catch the spirit of the original. In some places nothing is left but a shapeless core of vague statements or a few bare dates and facts. Elsewhere we get a vivid glimpse of the life of the past in its original coloring. Sometimes the story has improved with age, as ruins are beautified by becoming weather-beaten or overgrown with moss. So, the haze of romance, or the glamour of hero-worship, or the mere spell of antiquity, add to the past a charm that is history’s own.

Recent Progress in History—But today we are better equipped for the study of history than ever before and are in a position to understand the people of any given past period better in some respects than they understood themselves—not because we are more intelligent, but simply because we have the benefit of hindsight. We can compare them with people of other lands and times of whom they knew nothing and can discover the origin of some of their customs or explain the true meaning of some of their institutions. Nevertheless, we must beware a tendency to place ourselves as authorities over those whose stories we have been fortunate enough to piece together; neither should we presume to impose our own motives, agendas, or feelings onto the figures of history where they have not shared such things with us. “History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions. . . A historian is seen at his best when he does not appear.”[viii] In our zeal to find the “full story,” we may be tempted to fill the holes in our understanding with our own creative interpretation or assumptions. That is the domain of historical fiction writers, however, and should be carefully avoided by historians. To be a student of history requires a great deal of humility and the ability to admit one’s own limitations

How We Know What We Know

Only a couple of centuries ago, historians were unable to make use of any evidence except oral or written evidence. Where no such evidence was available, they spoke of the period as “prehistoric” and beyond the bounds of history. The term prehistoric is still used today to describe the time in a society or region’s history before the advent of writing, but prehistory is no longer as unknowable as it once was, thanks to the contributions of archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and genetics. The history of ancient Greece used to start about 750 B.C., and all before that was reckoned prehistoric, and no one knew whether to believe in the Trojan War of Homer or not. But in the 1870s -1880s, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann led excavations in various spots in the ancient Greek world, and his efforts resulted in the discovery and unearthing of the once-fabled city of Troy. 

Archaeology—Archaeology, like history, is the study of humans. Instead of analyzing written records, however, archaeologists devote themselves primarily to the discovery, analysis, preservation, and interpretation of the material objects (artifacts) which people have left behind. Such materials include pottery, weaponry, jewelry, structural (building) remains, grave goods, human remains, and even entire settlement sites. Much of what we know about the daily life of ordinary people in the distant past has been inferred from the things they left behind, and still more is being unearthed every day. In the course of their investigations, however, archaeologists often come upon previously unknown inscriptions and other written records. For instance, until the 19th century, there was little evidence for the existence of the powerful Hittite civilization apart from numerous references in the Bible. Skeptics assumed, therefore, that the Hittites had probably never existed and that writers of the Bible had simply invented them. However, tablet and monument inscriptions found during archaeological investigations in Turkey in the 1800s, along with later discoveries, proved the biblical references correct. 

Anthropology—Anthropologists study humans themselves and are interested in observing, documenting, and interpreting the development of various social and cultural groups from both the past and the present. As with archaeology, anthropology is made up of a number of sub-fields, each of which focuses on a different aspect of human biological, cultural, and social development. In America, archaeology is considered a field under anthropology, but in Britain, the two fields stand on their own. Anthropologists are famous for their use of “ethnography” to increase our understanding of people of the past. The ethnographic method is a field-based, personal approach to research, in which the researcher spends an extended amount of time living among indigenous and tribal cultures that still exist in parts of the world. This allows them to observe all sorts of customs, beliefs, and practices, and these observations are often helpful for understanding societies and cultures about which the historical record has little or nothing to tell us.

Linguistics—Linguistics is the study of human language, specifically the development of sounds, structures, and meanings of languages across time and people groups. Since language is one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human, and since it both shapes and is shaped by culture, linguistics is often practiced as a field of anthropology. Studying a society’s use of language and its development through time can reveal much about that society—details no one ever thought to write down.  

Genetics—Contained within a person’s genetic code are amazing clues about their heredity going back over a hundred generations. As our understanding of DNA and genetics has improved over the last century, scientists have come to recognize just how much of our personal history is recorded in our genetic code. Geneticists are now able to study the DNA extracted from, for instance, the skeletal remains of a Viking warrior excavated from a grave in Denmark. They trace such things as human migration and adaptation to changing environments, nutrition, and disease. They are also able to study the genetic code of animal and plant remains in order to learn more about, for instance, livestock domestication and agriculture in Anglo-Saxon England. 

Primary Sources and Secondary Texts—To know the past truly, to appreciate the people of long ago fully, to grasp their spirit and point of view, we should read their own words in their own language and see their own handiwork. In other words, we should go to the original sources, from which so much knowledge of the past comes. Museums around the world house impressive collections of carefully conserved historical manuscripts and documents. While it is sometimes necessary to travel far and obtain a special permit to see an original document or artifact, digital scanning, transcribing, printing, and publishing technology has greatly lightened the labors of the modern historian. In transcribing (copying into typed form) documents, the original text is carefully edited; the handwriting and abbreviations are deciphered and printed in legible type with helpful footnotes. 

Even so, the sources may still be in Latin or Arabic or some other language unknown to or difficult for the ordinary student. Furthermore, there are many passages in the original documents which only the trained specialist can correctly interpret. Adding to the confusion, many primary sources are incomplete in character, or fragmentary, or full of errors which other sources correct. In short, from one document or monument we seldom obtain a full view of the past and often obtain a corrupted view. So, the historian who combines the fragments into a harmonious whole provides a great service. The writings of modern historians concerning the past, produced after a study of the original sources, are called secondary works. 

But even the student beginning the study of history should not confine his or her attention to secondary works. A number of medieval original sources have been translated into English in whole or in part and are publicly available. Every student of history should dip into these primary sources; we should supplement the picture of the past, which the historians draw from the sources, with our own vivid glimpses into the minds of the men of the past themselves.

(Click here for Part 3 of this series.)