Hollywood vs. the Historians: Can We Know the Past?
What Historiography Shows Us about Finding the Truth
Last year as filmmaker Ridley Scott did the interview circuit to promote his movie Napoleon, Scott was asked by history podcaster Dan Snow about the problem of “accuracy” in his historical movies. What he would say to historians critical of his films?
Scott had a curious response: “I would say, ‘How would you know? Were you there?’” After a nervous laugh from Snow, Scott elaborated: “You know, Napoleon had 400 books written about him. So it means maybe the first was the most accurate. The next one is already doing a version of the writer [sic]. By the time you get to 399, guess what? A lot of speculation.”
Scott’s answer annoyed a lot of historians, including yours truly. But between his contempt for what historians do, his backwards understanding of historical research, and his serious underestimate of the number of books about Napoleon, he also managed to raise one of the most important questions anyone can ask about history: How do you know what happened?
The answer is historiography.
Getting the Basics
Historiography is a subfield of the historical discipline and includes two broad areas of study: first, how history has been studied and understood over time—the history of history—and, second, method and philosophy.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus was a small child when the Second Persian War, of Thermopylae fame, was fought. As an adult, he decided to investigate why it was that the Persians and Greeks went to war. He sought his answer in written records, by interviewing survivors and eyewitnesses, and by traveling to the places where these events took place. He approached his work critically, not merely recording what he found out but weighing conflicting accounts and explaining his judgments. Appropriately, he called his big, sprawling, colorful, nigh-encyclopedic book The Histories, from the Greek ἱστορία (historia): inquiry.
There had been historical writing before—ancient kings inscribed monuments with lists of their deeds, and the scribes of literate peoples preserved vast bodies of tradition in writing—but it was Herodotus who first approached the past as the object of methodical study. His achievement lies in establishing methods by which historical information could be gathered, narrated, and, perhaps most importantly, examined, argued over, and confirmed to be true.
Establishing the Facts
When I teach modern history and want to give students an impression of how history is done, I often recommend two books on an attention-getting subject: the death of Hitler.
The first is Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Hitler’s fate was not immediately clear. German radio had reported him killed, but the Soviet occupiers of Berlin proved cagey, refusing to rule out his escape. Trevor-Roper was then a military intelligence officer, and when tasked with finding out the truth he pursued it like a detective.
He interviewed survivors of the bunker who had fled into British or American captivity, studied documentary evidence like a copy of Hitler’s last will and testament smuggled out of Berlin, and visited the bunker itself. This was a limited selection of sources and the narrative that emerged from his investigation was incomplete, but the verdict was still clear—Hitler had killed himself and his body was burned. Trevor-Roper’s report appeared as The Last Days of Hitler in 1947.
And then something remarkable happened: Trevor-Roper lived another fifty-six years.
By the time of his death in 2003, he had published a seventh edition of his book, having revised it as more evidence became available. Bunker survivors, for example, including ordinary joes like telephone operator Rochus Misch and mechanic Johannes Hentschel, as well as those closest to Hitler like Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, his personal adjutant and valet and the first two men into the room after Hitler shot himself, were released from years of Soviet captivity and their testimony filled vexing gaps. Changing world politics also clarified the context of Hitler’s death: the Soviets had known that Hitler was dead and lied about it, sowing doubt in order to prolong the crisis and destabilize the Allies.
Reading the final edition of The Last Days of Hitler is thus doubly interesting. It provides a good account of a seminal event in world history and, since Trevor-Roper includes his original epilogue and prefaces from earlier editions, it also offers a look at how historical information-gathering is done: first in the moment and then, as events recede in time and immediate impressions fade, with the benefit of hindsight and more material.
Arguing the Facts
The second book clearly shows the importance of the second of Herodotus’s achievements: leaving an account open to question and argument on the merits of evidence.
Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy by Luke Daly-Groves, builds upon the work of Trevor-Roper and subsequent historians but studies this event in a different mode. Rather than narratively, like Trevor-Roper, Daly-Groves works analytically. He examines both the standard account and the kind of alternative accounts put forward in popular books and History Channel shows and judges both on the merits.
Daly-Groves treats the conspiracy theories seriously and without condescension but firmly demonstrates that the standard account is the one supported by the mountains of available evidence. Arguing for Hitler’s survival and escape is not merely a matter of questioning one fact, but of controverting a complex interlocking picture based on dozens of sources, all of which agree: Hitler shot himself and his staff burned his body.
Hitler’s Death is a brilliant example of good historiography. I recommend it regularly to students. Read alongside Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler these two books provide a solid education in both gathering and assessing evidence.
But while I’ve emphasized the role of sound methodology, it is that aspect of historical inquiry—judgment, assessment—that deserves more than the mere mention I’ve given it so far.
Interpretation and Its Dangers
Evidence, of course, does not interpret itself. Those who vocally argue that history classes should present “just the facts” have gotten a fundamental dimension of historical study wrong. Historians don’t merely collect evidence but try to nail down where it came from and how valuable it is. Who wrote this? Why? What did they know and what can we know based on that?
These and many other questions effect how we understand the evidence as it has come down to us. Herodotus himself openly works through his judgments to explain how he arrived at his interpretations and conclusions.
But not all interpretations are created equal. David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies is a chastening guide to the faulty assumptions, blindspots, and errors of judgment that can wreck historical interpretation. Avoiding these myriad errors is the chief task when it comes to interpretation, something especially true in an age dominated by theories.
Developing a historical theory is natural enough. The human mind was created to handle bulk information using heuristics and shortcuts. But as intellectual historian Carl Trueman argues in Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, while a theoretical framework bring attention to previously neglected aspects of history or put big-picture events in new perspective, a theory can also become a Procrustean bed, with the historian stretching or mutilating his evidence to fit the theory.
Sometimes absurdities result and discredit entire theories. Freudian history declined in popularity following the publication of a biography of Martin Luther that traced his world-disrupting theology to his chronic constipation. And cliometrics (data-driven economic history made possible with modern computing) took a hard hit when a study of American slavery seemed to demonstrate that it was actually profitable and not overly harsh. The psychoanalysis of the dead and the spreadsheet, as it turns out, are incommensurate with human experience, and theory is no substitute for wisdom and judgment.
The simplifying impulse of historical theory—the reduction of the mystery of life to economics, or a great man’s leadership, or the blind workings of social structures, or mere power—is its greatest danger, and the more a theory seems to explain the more dangerous it is.
Recent theories like postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, which were imported into history from literary studies, explain away even the evidence, arguing that “truth” is an inevitably partial construct and all historical evidence mere “text” more indicative of privilege and power than of the events they mean to relate. These theories deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.
It is most often history of this stripe that is protested by the same people arguing for a presentation of pure “facts” in the classroom as “revisionist history.”
The Usefulness of Revision
As I hope is clear from the above examples, history must be revised in light of new evidence and—especially now—the exposure of bad theory. Objecting to “revisionism” on principle is objecting to the pursuit of the truth.
My favorite example of historical revision done right is a sports biography by Charles Leerhsen, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. Leerhsen originally pitched a new Cobb bio as one of those “everyone knows” stories: everyone knows he was a great baseball player, everyone knows he was psychopathically competitive, everyone knows he was a violently racist Southerner. But what Leerhsen discovered once he engaged with primary sources was that this picture was not only mistaken but false.
Stories of Cobb’s altercations on the field were either misunderstandings, the standard rough play of the time, or pure fiction, and far from being so racist that he would assault African Americans in the street (which should have been absurd on the face of it), Cobb came from an anti-slavery family and was in favor of integrating major league baseball when that was an unpopular opinion. He was an aggressive baserunner and competitive player, but a basically decent and ordinary man.
Leerhsen traced “the myth of the evil Ty Cobb” to Al Stump, a hack journalist whom Cobb had asked for help drafting an autobiography. Cobb died in 1961 with the book unfinished, and Stump twisted, exaggerated, and made up salacious material as he completed it. Word of mouth—the story too good to check—did the rest.
By the time Field of Dreams came out in 1989, Cobb could be slandered as a joke, and the consequences of Stump’s lies have only worsened in the present, with calls to “cancel” Cobb based entirely on falsehood.
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty provides a sterling example of what revision based on good historiography is for. Whether correcting the record on whole civilizations or simply saving one man’s reputation, honest revision based on good-faith investigation of the sources is not only necessary but should be welcome. And we should all be so lucky as to have a researcher like Leerhsen go to bat for us.
Historiography for Everyone
It’s that personal dimension that I want to conclude with. An understanding of historiography is helpful not only in history class but in everyday life.
Knowing how to gather information, assess its reliability, make judgments about its meaning—even to believe it has a meaning—and argue over and defend the truth: if these are not important skills today I don’t know what is. And whether one uses them to dig through biased accounts of current events or simply to dig deeper into a long-ago topic that one enjoys, the goal should always, as it was for Herodotus, be to find out why—even if, like Ridley Scott and his critics, we weren’t there. Because with good historiography, we didn’t have to be to know.
If you want to read deeper in historiography, I’d recommend any of the books I mention by name above. For a good formal introduction to the history of history, check out Heritage and Challenge: The History and Theory of History by Paul Conkin and Roland Stromberg, or, for the overachiever, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern by Ernst Breisach, which is an education all by itself. For Herodotus, Penguin’s translations by Aubrey de Sélincourt (older) or Tom Holland (newer) are both worthwhile. My favorite single guide to the dangers of overarching historical theories is Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 essay The Whig Interpretation of History.
Finally, for those who prefer to learn through the less painful medium of fiction, Josephine Tey’s classic mystery The Daughter of Time, in which a bedridden detective looks into the story of Richard III, is not only a good dramatization of digging through and assessing sources, but captures better than any other book the excitement of historical work.
Enjoy the hunt.
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What a delightful and thoughtful article! I’ll have to put the Ty Cobb and Josephine Tey books on my TBR because I always “prefer to learn through the less painful medium of fiction…” and also the sometimes more painful medium of baseball.
Great article. One of my favorite anecdotes about historians has Bruce Catton telling the annual conference of the American Historical Society in the early 1950s that “we now know just about everything we’re ever going to know about the Civil War”. Of course, he turned out to be seriously mistaken in that presumption as lots of material was discovered, rediscovered, reexamined, and approached with new techniques and in light of new information. In recent years, I began telling friends in the field that whenever an historian begins to speak about history their first words should be “As best we can tell now from the evidence presently available to us, this is what we think happened.” I think the idea of history being a simple collection of memorized dates and stray facts is a legacy from those students desperate for any mechanism that would free them from history class into their world. I recall a bedridden Inspector Morse pursuing a 19th Century canalside murder case from his hospital room as well.