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.
As a former history major this was such a great read. I’ve been so exhausted by the recent slew of historical movies/TV shows that just give up on any sort of historical verisimilitude in favor of using history to promote modern philosophical and intellectual ideals, and justify this by the idea that you can’t know the past etc. or that knowing what really happened in the past doesn’t actually matter
This is a super piece, Joel. And it's timely, in my case, for several reasons. For one, I am trying to make sense of my couple of decades in frontline foreign news, reporting to an absurd deadline on very complicated matters that I often got wrong. It is hard to enough to examine oneself well at the best of times, but I was often reporting at the very worst of time, with managers who were worse than mediocre in some cases and culpably negligent in a several.
Added to which today, the whole craft of journalism is regularly scorned in the first place by those who believe the post-modern, post-structuralist schtick - or who don't, but choose to promote it to sow discord (like the Kremlin and the RT brigades).
Your piece reminded me of how much I admired Herodotus (whom I first read off the back of The English Patient) and why his method is valuable not just to historians, but to journalists, and to ex-journalists looking critically at their own personal history/ies and wondering if their time was wasted (not great) or caused harm (much worse).
Another reason is that I spent a lot of my career based in Moscow, care about the country, and have pretty strong experiences to back up my thoughts about the war in Ukraine and Putin's deliberate choice of carnage. As you'll be aware, there are plenty of bots and Kremlinites pushing a different story - as one would expect. What troubles me more are the crowds of Europeans and Americans who cheerfully take the same line, and to satisfy their Chomskian need to trash everything western are prepared to buy into the most recherché monomaniacal theories for why hundreds of thousands of people are being killed by Putin's soldiers.
(Spoiler, in sum: 'it's the west what's to blame because we are much better at being evil, yet much worse in every other respect than those (who are actually wielding the weapons and murdering people but) who would otherwise be living in an unspoiled state of nature looking at grazing unicorns at rest, were it not for us'). I drive myself to distraction trying to engage in good faith with those who, in some bizarre narcissistic urge, seem wedded to this notion.
Historiography might be an antidote to some of this - it is, after all, scientific method done properly, and proposes that all knowledge is provisional until better evidence is adduced. I will dig into your suggested reading with pleasure - and some relief.
(The only somewhat world-weary footnote I would add is that good historiography, scientific method, harsh journalistic scruple, even, will get minimal purchase on only a tiny minority of one's audience if the latter is highly emotionally invested in feeling righteous, and being seen to be so.
I didn't understand very much of Kant at all when I studied him, except for this well-known quote: 'Of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made'.)
I am not too sure why certain (popular) 'narratives' take hold so firmly when even a cursory understanding of literary theory shows them to be biased - all knowledge is provisional until better evidence is added, how humble. To some extent journalism always has had to accept its portion of blame - but the shrillness of condemnation and the plain ignorance we are subject to now has gotten us to a not very pleasant place.
Thanks for this info. As a humble history major who pursued a career in journalism -- where the first (dubious) drafts of history supposedly are drafted, right? -- I bow to all those pros who know how to use footnotes and other research tools to make their cases for 'truth.' I've always said 'Hollywood can never be trusted with reality.' And I'll add Ty Cobb to my list of horrible movie/TV docudramas that claim to tell 'the true stories' of real people and real events but too often have their facts deliberately fudged up by writers/producers who abuse their dramatic licenses. I worked briefly in CBS' Docudrama Department in the late 1970s, and saw how 'truth' was regularly mishandled by the network in the pursuit of higher ratings (i.e., profits). In the mid-1980s, while working at the LA Times Sunday Calendar section, I tried to help the papers' readers -- then around 1.1 million people -- with this guide to spotting the 'Truth' and the BS that were hidden in TV docudramas about real people and real events. I guess Ken Burns and Ron Shelton didn't read it. https://clips.substack.com/p/what-tv-and-movies-do-to-reality?utm_source=publication-search
I'm excited to look into some of these books. "Revisionist" is kind of a trigger word in my circles; is there another term you could suggest that would open the conversation rather than shut it down? I understand the resistance on the one hand, both because revision could, of course, be done nefariously and because it's hard to change what you think you know (I'm over here thinking, "But I KNOW Ty Cobb, and he's a meanie", even though I don't know that at all, of course.) But on the other hand. . .people understand and expect in other fields that we'll draw different conclusions as our knowledge expands. Why would history be different?
I find that when talking with someone suspicious of "revisionist history," simply describing what a book or particular historian has done to revise our understanding--without using the word "revision"--suffices. Talking a bit about the actual work also helps distinguish something like Andrew Roberts's fair and insightful revision of the life of George III from something that is merely ideologically motivated. (A good test to see what kind of revision you're dealing with is to see if it offers any new information or is simply spinning it a certain way.)
Good to see a history teacher who understands the wrecking functions of postmodernism and de(con)struction, nihilistic "methodologies" designed to harm, disfigure and behead the great civilizational ideas far more talented, hopeful and vigorous constructive individuals labored to discover and express over millennia.
Excellent article. Skepticism has its place, but reliance on well-established methods, carefully applied, can give reliable results, though always subject to change as new information appears. Ridley Scott's vapid response was self-serving and wrong. Thanks for the book references, as well.
It was my introduction to historiography and one of my favorite things about it! Something I would have pointed out had I had the space was that reading the ancient historians especially is still fun: as I point out to my students, Greek and Roman historians especially used to write for literal audiences, to whom they would publicly read their work, so they were obliged to be interesting. "Unlike your textbook," I usually add as an aside.
It is important for me as a historian to get the correct facts that I need to tell the stories I want to tell with both objectivity and personal advocacy. As you show in the case of Cobb, we cannot allow unsubstantiated legends to eclipse the fact about anyone or anything's life.
I love Josephine Tey's 'The Daughter of Time' for this very reason. Tey is similarly thought provoking about how current stories are reported in 'The Franchise Affair'. She and Dorothy Sayers made truly great art out of the detective novel.
I have read Trueman's book and find his maxim that 'theories of history must be disproveable' - that a theoretical framework can be laid aside if contradictory evidence is found - very helpful in approaching so many explanatory frameworks, not just of history.
In regard to Hollywood historical adaptations, G. K. Chesterton said this about misrepresentation of historical events in film: "A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film." - From "About the films" in the essay collections 'As I was saying'.
Falsifiability is a really helpful concept in this regard. Trueman's example--the Marxist concept of "false consciousness" as a way to explain away behavior that doesn't fit Marx's class theories--is well chosen but there are many more he could have added!
Thank you for this. I teach Church History at a Catholic high school and I love my subject, but am not formally educated in the history field. So I am always to trying to learn more, not just about the history of the faith, but also about how to better study history in general. These are some good resources for me to look into.
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.
It is a good morning when it starts with a mention of Herodotus.
My thoughts exactly!
Timely observations! I would add to the suggested readings: David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country.
As a former history major this was such a great read. I’ve been so exhausted by the recent slew of historical movies/TV shows that just give up on any sort of historical verisimilitude in favor of using history to promote modern philosophical and intellectual ideals, and justify this by the idea that you can’t know the past etc. or that knowing what really happened in the past doesn’t actually matter
This is a super piece, Joel. And it's timely, in my case, for several reasons. For one, I am trying to make sense of my couple of decades in frontline foreign news, reporting to an absurd deadline on very complicated matters that I often got wrong. It is hard to enough to examine oneself well at the best of times, but I was often reporting at the very worst of time, with managers who were worse than mediocre in some cases and culpably negligent in a several.
Added to which today, the whole craft of journalism is regularly scorned in the first place by those who believe the post-modern, post-structuralist schtick - or who don't, but choose to promote it to sow discord (like the Kremlin and the RT brigades).
Your piece reminded me of how much I admired Herodotus (whom I first read off the back of The English Patient) and why his method is valuable not just to historians, but to journalists, and to ex-journalists looking critically at their own personal history/ies and wondering if their time was wasted (not great) or caused harm (much worse).
Another reason is that I spent a lot of my career based in Moscow, care about the country, and have pretty strong experiences to back up my thoughts about the war in Ukraine and Putin's deliberate choice of carnage. As you'll be aware, there are plenty of bots and Kremlinites pushing a different story - as one would expect. What troubles me more are the crowds of Europeans and Americans who cheerfully take the same line, and to satisfy their Chomskian need to trash everything western are prepared to buy into the most recherché monomaniacal theories for why hundreds of thousands of people are being killed by Putin's soldiers.
(Spoiler, in sum: 'it's the west what's to blame because we are much better at being evil, yet much worse in every other respect than those (who are actually wielding the weapons and murdering people but) who would otherwise be living in an unspoiled state of nature looking at grazing unicorns at rest, were it not for us'). I drive myself to distraction trying to engage in good faith with those who, in some bizarre narcissistic urge, seem wedded to this notion.
Historiography might be an antidote to some of this - it is, after all, scientific method done properly, and proposes that all knowledge is provisional until better evidence is adduced. I will dig into your suggested reading with pleasure - and some relief.
(The only somewhat world-weary footnote I would add is that good historiography, scientific method, harsh journalistic scruple, even, will get minimal purchase on only a tiny minority of one's audience if the latter is highly emotionally invested in feeling righteous, and being seen to be so.
I didn't understand very much of Kant at all when I studied him, except for this well-known quote: 'Of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made'.)
I am not too sure why certain (popular) 'narratives' take hold so firmly when even a cursory understanding of literary theory shows them to be biased - all knowledge is provisional until better evidence is added, how humble. To some extent journalism always has had to accept its portion of blame - but the shrillness of condemnation and the plain ignorance we are subject to now has gotten us to a not very pleasant place.
Thanks for this info. As a humble history major who pursued a career in journalism -- where the first (dubious) drafts of history supposedly are drafted, right? -- I bow to all those pros who know how to use footnotes and other research tools to make their cases for 'truth.' I've always said 'Hollywood can never be trusted with reality.' And I'll add Ty Cobb to my list of horrible movie/TV docudramas that claim to tell 'the true stories' of real people and real events but too often have their facts deliberately fudged up by writers/producers who abuse their dramatic licenses. I worked briefly in CBS' Docudrama Department in the late 1970s, and saw how 'truth' was regularly mishandled by the network in the pursuit of higher ratings (i.e., profits). In the mid-1980s, while working at the LA Times Sunday Calendar section, I tried to help the papers' readers -- then around 1.1 million people -- with this guide to spotting the 'Truth' and the BS that were hidden in TV docudramas about real people and real events. I guess Ken Burns and Ron Shelton didn't read it. https://clips.substack.com/p/what-tv-and-movies-do-to-reality?utm_source=publication-search
I love getting a list of half a dozen or so new books for my TBR pile first thing in the morning!
I'm excited to look into some of these books. "Revisionist" is kind of a trigger word in my circles; is there another term you could suggest that would open the conversation rather than shut it down? I understand the resistance on the one hand, both because revision could, of course, be done nefariously and because it's hard to change what you think you know (I'm over here thinking, "But I KNOW Ty Cobb, and he's a meanie", even though I don't know that at all, of course.) But on the other hand. . .people understand and expect in other fields that we'll draw different conclusions as our knowledge expands. Why would history be different?
I find that when talking with someone suspicious of "revisionist history," simply describing what a book or particular historian has done to revise our understanding--without using the word "revision"--suffices. Talking a bit about the actual work also helps distinguish something like Andrew Roberts's fair and insightful revision of the life of George III from something that is merely ideologically motivated. (A good test to see what kind of revision you're dealing with is to see if it offers any new information or is simply spinning it a certain way.)
Thank you, that's helpful!
I adore Tey's Daughter of Time! Thanks for this article; I'm adding some of the books you've mentioned to my wish list.
Good to see a history teacher who understands the wrecking functions of postmodernism and de(con)struction, nihilistic "methodologies" designed to harm, disfigure and behead the great civilizational ideas far more talented, hopeful and vigorous constructive individuals labored to discover and express over millennia.
Excellent article. Skepticism has its place, but reliance on well-established methods, carefully applied, can give reliable results, though always subject to change as new information appears. Ridley Scott's vapid response was self-serving and wrong. Thanks for the book references, as well.
“The history of history” is something I’ve been unaware of being interested in for a long time, if that makes any sense.
It was my introduction to historiography and one of my favorite things about it! Something I would have pointed out had I had the space was that reading the ancient historians especially is still fun: as I point out to my students, Greek and Roman historians especially used to write for literal audiences, to whom they would publicly read their work, so they were obliged to be interesting. "Unlike your textbook," I usually add as an aside.
It is important for me as a historian to get the correct facts that I need to tell the stories I want to tell with both objectivity and personal advocacy. As you show in the case of Cobb, we cannot allow unsubstantiated legends to eclipse the fact about anyone or anything's life.
I certainly agree that it is all too easy to stir the pot.
I love Josephine Tey's 'The Daughter of Time' for this very reason. Tey is similarly thought provoking about how current stories are reported in 'The Franchise Affair'. She and Dorothy Sayers made truly great art out of the detective novel.
I have read Trueman's book and find his maxim that 'theories of history must be disproveable' - that a theoretical framework can be laid aside if contradictory evidence is found - very helpful in approaching so many explanatory frameworks, not just of history.
In regard to Hollywood historical adaptations, G. K. Chesterton said this about misrepresentation of historical events in film: "A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film." - From "About the films" in the essay collections 'As I was saying'.
One of my favorite GKC lines! Unfortunately, I have frequent cause to remember it.
Falsifiability is a really helpful concept in this regard. Trueman's example--the Marxist concept of "false consciousness" as a way to explain away behavior that doesn't fit Marx's class theories--is well chosen but there are many more he could have added!
Thank you for this. I teach Church History at a Catholic high school and I love my subject, but am not formally educated in the history field. So I am always to trying to learn more, not just about the history of the faith, but also about how to better study history in general. These are some good resources for me to look into.