Fashioning History

Also by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.

Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and
American Indian Response, 17871862
A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis
The White Mans Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present
Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse

Fashioning History
Current Practices and Principles

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.

fashioning history
Copyright Berkhofer, Jr., 2008.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United Statesa division
of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,
company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies
and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60868-9
ISBN-10: 0-230-60868-X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berkhofer, Robert F.
Fashioning history : current practices and principles / Robert F.
Berkhofer, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-230-60868-X
1. History--Methodology. I. Title.
D16.B466 2008
901--dc22
2008017163
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

For Sally

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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

ix
xiii

Part I Construing the Past as History:

Processes and Presuppositions
1

Historical Methods: From Evidence to Facts

2.

Historical Synthesis: From Statements to Histories

3
49

Part II Comparing Histories: Forms, Functions,

Factuality, and the Bigger Picture
3.

Texts as Archives and Histories

4.

Things in and as Exhibits, Museums,

and Historic Sites

133

Films as Historical Representations and Resources

175

5.

93

Afterword: The History Effect and Representations

of the Past

215

Notes

219

Index

259

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Preface
Understanding the past as history changes over time in how we know
about the past, what we know about the past, and what we think important about the past. Historical practice over time as a result has its fashions of method, interpretation, and meaning. Do new times bring forth
new answers to old questions? What do historians do today? How do they
know what to do? Why do they do it that way?
Fashioning History offers my report on the discipline of history in the
early twenty-first century as the historical profession tries to reconcile
long-standing approaches to evidence and synthesis with the challenges
posed in recent decades by the so-called postmodern critique of history as
a way of understanding the past and by the explosion of sources and historical interpretations on the Internet and mass media. Each development
questions in its own way how historians identify and interpret evidence,
create arguments and histories, and give public meaning to the past.
Postmodern theorists questioned the very ability of historians to represent the past accurately or truthfully. As a consequence, such theory
seemed to undermine the very authority of the profession, and many historians reacted initially with hostility. Few attempted much explicit accommodation. With the options and outcome now clearer after a few decades
of dispute, we can examine to what extent postmodernism actually influenced the discipline and profession. This is not a book about what historians ought to do as some of my previous books argued but rather my take
on what they do practice today.
The proliferation of historical sources and histories on the Internet has
made the basic jobs of historians both much easier and more difficult
and, in my opinion, more needed. The rapid and ever-increasing digitization of documents and other historical sources on the Internet has
made the task of those who would infer the past from surviving evidence
amazingly easier than in the days when only visiting archives and other
repositories all over the world allowed access to the documents. At the

Preface

same time the increased access to such documentation also multiplies

those who interpret such evidence without the training professional historians receive in these matters. Such democratization of doing history
frequently challenges the long-standing rules of method and interpretation that were and are the common grounding of professional historians.
When the identification and interpretation of evidence and the creation
and critique of larger arguments and stories can be asserted by anyone
and everyone, what is the role of professional historians in testing the
accuracy of facts inferred from the evidence surviving from the past or in
evolving and evaluating the larger arguments, stories, and meaning given
the past?
Traditionally during the last century books and articles on what historians did was answered mainly in relation to other books, articles, and
learned editions of documents, which I have included among texts in
Chapter 3. Beyond their schooling, most people today learn about the
past from historical tourism or from television and motion pictures.
Chapter 4 discusses how historians curate and design museum exhibits
and manage and interpret historic sites of various kinds, based broadly on
what I have characterized as things. Not only do most adults gain their
knowledge today about the past from moving pictures and television but
historians increasingly appear on screen as well as advise on documentary
films and television shows. I discuss all these forms of moving visual
imagery under the generic term films in Chapter 5. By examining these
various types of history in relation to each other, we see better not only
what historical practice actually encompasses today but also recognize
more clearly the principles justifying and grounding historical practice in
general. Such comparison provides deeper insight into the general as well
as varied nature of history as a way of construing the past.
Because I treat texts, things, and films as equally valid approaches to
interpreting the past, I have adopted the awkward consumerist word
products as shorthand for all of these results collectively instead of
always listing individually the multiple forms histories take today. Thus
all kinds of histories are products, and conversely all products in this
usage are histories of one kind or another. Likewise, a single history is a
product just as such a product is called a history.
Historical methods and so-called methods books traditionally described
how historians should derive their facts from their evidential sources,
which were long equated mainly with texts. Even expanding methods to
cover researching facts inferred from material objects and moving and
other visual images covers only a small part of what historians must do in

Preface

xi

producing a history no matter what its form. Historians must also organize or synthesize various and often intellectually contradictory components into what they call a history. Thus I have devoted a chapter to the
elements common to histories as finished or synthetic products (Chapter
2) in addition to methods and the idea and uses of evidence (Chapter 1).
To indicate both methods and synthesis at times I have chosen the word
processes to go along with products to signify that various methods and
ways to synthesize exist. Moreover, I want to suggest by that word that
both historical methods and syntheses apply to things and films in addition to the usual texts.
In an attempt to offer my readers a chance to consider their own conclusions on the topics I discuss, I have adopted two rhetorical conventions. I often pose a series of questions as a way of looking at a problem.
Although the book reveals my own answers to these questions in its organization and phrasing, I hope my rhetorical strategy affords readers an
opportunity to consider their own answers to the same basic questions.
Second, I try to present sides to an issue on (if not always in) their own
terms for the same reason so that readers have some basis for their own
conclusions. If nothing else, I want to suggest in my own efforts that fashioning histories has its own fashions. In this way I hope to illustrate as
well as argue that the connections among histories as products, history as
an approach to the past, and historians organized as a profession are various, dynamic, complicated, and perhaps problematic in the end.

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Acknowledgments
Intellectual and personal debts accrued while working on a book are
always pleasant to acknowledge. I owe intellectual debts to all the authors
cited (and often those unnamed as well), especially when venturing into
fields new to me. Most pleasant to acknowledge are debts that are personal as well as intellectual to Robert Berkhofer III, Martin Burke, Robert
Chester, Martin Dolan, Sally Hadden, Martha Hodes, Mary Sies, David
Shorter, and particularly to the late Genevieve Berkhofer.

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PART I

Construing the Past as History

Processes and Presuppositions
Fundamental to all aspects of historical practice is an idea of the past.
Crucial to any idea of the past is its very pastness: the fullness of what
once existed previously no longer persists as such in the present. That the
past cannot be observed today as it was once lived and experienced by
persons alive then poses the conundrum of understanding the past as history. How and what can we know of that past if so much of it is gone by
definition and experience? Thus understanding the past as history demands
assumptions about its nature, ways to study it, and how best to depict it
to a modern audience. Without a relatively clear idea ofor at least definite presumptions aboutthe character of the past, historians and others would not know what to look for, where to look, or what to do with
it when found. Thus a rich set of presuppositions about the past precedes
any research into it and exposition or representation of it as history. Such
presuppositions are the stock in trade of the professional historian.
Chapter 1 examines the research or empirical side of the historical
enterprise. Chapter 2 looks at the literary and artistic side of histories as
representations of the past as history.

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CHAPTER 1

Historical Methods
From Evidence to Facts

lthough the past is gone, historians not only presume that the past
was once real but that they can comprehend what happened then
from those things postulated as surviving from the past into the
present. Even though the past no longer exists as such, historians maintain it can be inferred from such things as manuscripts, monuments, and
other material objects that exist in the present but have been accepted as
survivals from previous times. In particular, memories not only seem to
offer clues to past matters themselves but also justify the reality of a past
once existing as such. But texts and things and even memories do not
replicate the entire context of which they are presumed part. Thus historians must envision or postulate the larger context of the survivals they
study even as they explore them for clues to that larger world. Efforts to
overcome this hermeneutical paradox became known as the historical
method in the profession.1 The variety of techniques that come under this
rubric are considered the empirical or scientific side of what the profession does, according to many historians and other scholars.2
The Idea of Sources as Evidence
All such empirical historical research rests upon three fundamental premises.
First, the past actually existed: people in the past really did think, act,
and experience their own times as a living reality. Second, their thoughts
and activities resulted in a variety of artifacts at the time that have survived into the present. Third, these artifacts today offer both valuable
and valid clues to the actual thoughts, activities, and experiences of those
past peoples. The connections posited among these three presumptions

Fashioning History

allow historians to consider surviving texts and other artifacts as sources

or evidence for what past peoples did indeed do or think. Likewise, the
linkage presupposed among the three suppositions enables historians to
infer factual particulars, or what they call facts, about past persons,
activities, and institutions from these sources. Both the conversion of the
variety of surviving artifacts into sources and the creation of facts from
those sources have been the subject proper of books on what the profession calls the historical method.3
Historical method, although singular in professional use, embraces in
practice a multitude of techniques for converting survivals into, first,
sources and, then, facts. If the ultimate end of historical method is to produce facts, or more accurately statements of fact, then survivals only
become sources or evidence through inference or argument directed to
historians ends. To call a survival a source or evidence, even a trace or
a remain, presumes whole sets of assumptions orienting historians to
the past as a grounding for history, to identifying specific survivals as possible sources according to certain aims and current intellectual outlooks,
as well as inferring statements deemed facts from such sources.4 The term
source, therefore, packs a series of intellectual assumptions into a seemingly simple operation that supposedly and seamlessly converts survivals
into information, then that information is considered as evidence for
something the researcher wants to know, and finally statements labeled
facts are extrapolated from that evidence. To unpack this series of operations, the first three sections of this chapter summarize the nature of survivals themselves, their identification as sources, and their customary
classification into primary and secondary sources for historians purposes.
The subsequent two sections examine what kind of connection particular
kinds of factual statements have to the evidence supposedly supporting
them. Last, I consider memories as reliable historical sources, clues to
providing context, and as history.5
Survivals from the Past
All the things around us are survivals from the past, but not all are of
equal interest to students of history. Mere persistence over time does not
make them historic or historical in the eyes of historians, and it is not
merely a matter of time and ancientness. Their historicalness, or historicity in one sense of that word, depends upon their utility to historians or
others, and their usefulness in turn depends upon how well they fit into
some framework or context employed by the historians and others to

Historical Methods

understand the selected survivals. That framework or context derives in

turn from the desires and needs of the historians and their society and
culture. When the historical profession stressed political, constitutional,
diplomatic, and military history as the fundamental focus of any study of
the past, then the records, relics, and monuments produced by politicians, generals, and others important in the stories of nation-states or
empires held greatest interest.6 The development of economic, labor,
intellectual, and social histories in the middle decades of the twentieth
century began a shift to the nonelite and common people, often in general as a collectivity. The emphasis on feminist, minority, postcolonialist,
cultural, and microhistories in the last decades of that century continued
the trend towards the common people but reflected new interests and
produced new stories. In each instance, historians searched for new
sources or exploited existing ones with new as well as old methods and,
more importantly, questions.
Pictures, public buildings and monuments, coins, arms, and particularly documents suggest the main kinds of records or materials traditionally studied, just as censuses, photographs, films, electronic messages, and
everyday artifacts like garbage dumps and latrines suggest the newer or
additional kinds of materials investigated more recently. Letters, diaries,
newspapers, legal documents, government records, statues, coins, and
paintings were (and are) collected and preserved in public and private
libraries, national and local archives, and museums of all kinds. The chief
criterion for what was saved in general was thereby interpreted (and vice
versa) according to national or local pride in the statements and deeds of
great men and great families or stories of the nation state and nationality.
As historians broadened what they covered in their histories, so too did
they expand what wasor should besaved for new stories of previously
uncovered persons, groups, or sectors of life in the past. (Of course, they
also mined the older, traditional materials with new questions.) Older
museums, archives, and libraries have expanded their collections, or new
museums, libraries, and archives were founded to include photographs,
films, electronic data, and more mundane artifacts. Historical preservation and reconstruction broadened from great government buildings,
military forts, and large private houses to whole towns like Colonial
Williamsburg in Virginia; factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, and
Ironbridge Gorge in England; suffragists houses and slum tenements; or
stops for slaves fleeing the Southern United States on the Underground
Railroad.7

Fashioning History

So multiple is the number of survivals of interest to students of history

today that it is difficult to find any easy classification system of their
nature. Traditional classificatory systems mainly listed kinds of written
documents, while recognizing the worth of material artifacts to the historian. The American historian of France, Louis Gottschalk, in a primer on
historical method first published in 1950, covered almost exclusively
written testimony in his chapter on Where Does Historical Information
Come From?8 The British historian Arthur Marwick, in the third edition of his The Nature of History (1989), presents a comprehensive listing
of sources relevant to all types of historical research. In eight pages he
offers and describes a dozen categories of survivals: half of which are composed entirely of written materials and four of which combine words, pictures, and objects, for example, films, oral testimony, and inscriptions on
buildings and coins.9 Just two of his categories contain only unwritten
materials such as aerial photographs, artifacts, and observable practices
persisting from the past. In a 2001 introduction to historical methods,
early modern and medieval historians Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier
discuss briefly the evolution and complementarity of source typologies. They quickly cover the traditional narrative and literary sources
from diaries to newspaper articles; formal legal and juridical documents
whether court proceedings, medieval charters, or mortgage papers; and
such social documents as produced by governments, businesses, and
other bureaucracies old and new. Two-thirds of that section discusses
unwritten sources: archaeological, oral, photographic, sound recordings,
and electronic.10
The more comprehensive the lists and the more varied the artifacts
and media, the more difficult it is to find a classificatory system. Whether
traditional or more recent, these systems rest on dividing records and
writing from other kinds of remains and relicsin other words, between
texts of all kinds and other things. They also depend upon separating
texts from other kinds of media. Categories of artifactual survivals overlap in the following scheme, but the three groupings suggest implications
for where they may be found and how they might be used in research.
Physical/material objects versus textual. Historians have long referred to
physical survivals as relics or remains, while they referred to the texts
as documents or testimony.11 All survivals are physical objects or artifacts, but scholars of material culture separate the documentary from the
other physical artifacts. Buildings old and new, whether palaces or modest cottages; capitols or other governmental buildings nationally or
locally; churches and schools and even museums themselves; factories,

Historical Methods

shops, and other businesses, all interest some historians today. Such artifacts of past everyday living as clothing, bottles, cooking utensils, tools,
and machines can interest todays historians as much as weapons, coins,
monuments, and religious relics did yesteryears historians. Village and
city houses and streets as well as farm fields and fences gather as much
attention as battlefields and roads; railroads and canals as churches and
temples; jails as well as courtrooms; servant and slave quarters as mansions; slum tenements and immigrant ghettoes as suburbs. Even bodies,
bones, and hair now interest some historians as much as their anthropological and medical colleagues. Physical artifacts of all sorts are found in
museums of all kinds and historic sites, while textual artifacts are usually
located in libraries and archives.12
Written versus other media. The bibliographies of current histories like
those of older ones reveal that documentary remains still constitute the
largest category of artifactual survivals of interest to most historians.
These range from personal documents like diaries and letters to such public documents as local and national legislative and court records, from
scribbled memoranda to local and national censuses, from signed essays
and editorials to anonymously mass-produced newspapers and pamphlets, from memoirs to treaties and maps, from inscriptions on ancient
monuments to codices. School records vary from pupils essays, university
syllabi, report cards, internal communications, and board minutes. Religious
documents include church membership lists, religious pamphlets, doctrinal statements, sacred books, sermons, hymnals, and official proceedings.
Business documents embrace bills, receipts, accounts, and contracts as
well as meeting minutes, stock certificates, and letters. Historians are always
delighted to find individual diaries, whether by housewife or midwife,
minister or parishioner, businessman or worker, professor or student,
government official or lawyer, general or soldier in any place and in all
eras.13
Among unwritten media are visual and auditory materials that still
communicate directly. Pictorial artifacts have always been important to
historians, but the category has expanded from statues, paintings, drawings, and maps to include photographs, films, and videotapes.14 Sound,
long lost to the historian, now includes audiotapes and other sound
media starting in the late 1800s, but these sources prove to be as fragile as
any manuscript.15 Oral history also in a sense conveys the sounds of the
past though recorded after the fact or in the present.16
Personal versus institutional. This categorization cuts across the previous two. It stresses the mode of production and distribution, both of

Fashioning History

which are relevant to their evidential use as sources. Personal artifacts

stress the uniqueness of their production, whether letter, diary, or artisancrafted object, and their probable lack of wide distribution. Institutional
artifacts betray their bureaucratic origins through their place in a filing
system or archive, or their frequently widespread, even mass, distribution,
whether coins, newspapers, or movies. Although past bureaucracies produced unique documents and other artifacts, such as a chancery letter or
church edict for example, the institutional is usually associated in modern
times with multiple copies of text or object, best symbolized by the mass
media and mass production. Mass media began with the printing press,
and mass production is a hallmark of the industrial revolution.17 Whether
a textual source is institutional or personal makes a difference not only in
how it is interpreted but also in how it is classified and organized in
archive, library, or manuscript repository. Similarly, whether a material
object is institutional or personal makes a difference in interpretation and
in what kind of museum or historic site.
This basic partitioning of all artifactual survivals into material objects
and documents, into unwritten and written materials, reflects a long-held
assumption in traditional historical method that texts contain their own
interpretations in a sense (and thus can be repeated with little or no interpretation by the historian?), while material objects, such as tools, clothing, and landscapes, only yield their meaning through the historians
active interpretation. The latter require the historian to infer meaning;
the former offer their own through report, record, or testimony, and so
on. On one level of understanding, this is a truism. Communication is
direct in textual materials, indirect in other things. In a sense, documents
are already represented versions of the past, already interpreted by those
of the time in light of their categories and perspectives. Thus they appear
to present their information directly. Other artifacts only offer information indirectly through inference and interpretation by the historian, even
in those cases when the existence of the object is taken to correlate with
the artistic or technological level of a population or indicate its social
organization and cultural values.
But to separate conceptually textual artifacts from other things, written from unwritten materials, implies that one is more symbolic than
another for historians purposes when all survivals are read symbolically
to establish one or more contexts in the past from one or more contexts
in the present. Pragmatists as well as postmodernists agree today in theory
that all survivals are interpreted in one way or another, and all historians
concur in practice. Thus Howell and Prevenier define a source as those

Historical Methods

materials from which historians construct meanings.18 Statements of fact

therefore are always inferred, never found, even when they are repeated
from statements found in a source. Historians must always decide what
are valid facts for their purposes.
Even today, however, historians do not use all the artifacts persisting
from the human past because in general they still consider the more
recent millennia as their chief focus. Or, at least they still have not found
a context sufficient to interpret all that persists from human behavior in
the past, although archaeology and environmental history seem to be
stretching the old boundary that separated history from prehistory.
Conversely, much that historians might want from the past has not survived. Few or no events as such persist from the past, and even very old
persons remember only relatively recent parts of the past. Moreover,
many documents and other artifacts resulting from the thoughts and
activities of past peoples exist no longer. Those that do endure sustain the
idea of traces, remnants, traditions, and collective memories as survivals. In general, however, the older the period, the less material survives.
Wood and fiber products rarely survive from ancient times; stone and
metal artifacts more so. The materials of burial practices remain more
than farming practices, although the latter may persist in some places
from a not so recent past.19
The loss of relatively recent material happens even today to the chagrin of historians, for example, the fragility and disappearance of early
movies and sound recordings. Messages and Web sites on the Internet
prove even more evanescent than old manuscripts. Newspapers and pamphlets of the eighteenth century, for example, survive better than those of
the early twentieth century, because of the rag content in eighteenth-century paper as opposed to the wood pulp and high acid content paper that
was used later in the nineteenth century. Similarly, books published
between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries are far more
vulnerable than those produced before or after those hundred or so years.
In the hope of preserving their books from that period, the Library of
Congress, for example, plans to deacidify 8.5 million of its 18.7 million
books.20
Modern technology has proved a mixed blessing in the historians
efforts to discover as well as interpret past survivals. On one side, new
technology provides new information about the past. Aerial surveys disclose old settlement patterns by tracing, for example, Roman roads in
Britain or the spread of Aztec cities in Mexico and beyond.21 DNA analysis traces ancestry, most famously recently to test the two-hundred-year-old

10

Fashioning History

charge that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children with his slave
Sally Hemings.22 The radioactive decay of carbon-14 or the comparison
of tree rings dates grains, buildings, and artifacts. And of course the computer analyzes massive amounts of data faster and surer than the manual
methods of old. Technology moves so fast these days that it makes obsolescent popular applications of just yesterday. We no longer possess
devices to read old punch cards, hear older audiotapes, or read earlier
computer inputs. These obsolescent but very recent technologies now
pose problems of salvage as severe as any other preservationists face.23
Archives, libraries, and museums today face the modern dilemma of
too much material. On one hand, they command ever better methods of
storage and preservation. On the other hand, even the largest and richest
have space and money to collect and retain only so much. If too few
things survive from the long ago past, too many things are produced in
the present. The National Archives of the United States contained at the
end of the twentieth century 4 billion pieces of paper, 9.4 million photographs, 338,029 films and videos, almost 2.65 million maps and charts,
nearly 3 million architectural and engineering plans, and over 9 million
aerial photographs.24 Modern governments and other institutions are
generating too many records and other matter far too fast to keep and
store all of them. Should the state of Florida, for example, preserve or
destroy the nearly six million punch card ballots of the controversial 2000
presidential election that introduced the word chad into the vocabulary
of the average American voter as everyone waited for the recount and the
eventual close victory of George W. Bush? The Florida Secretary of States
office estimates that it will cost a quarter of a million dollars to move and
store the documents and another one hundred thousand dollars a year to
maintain them. 25
Historians assume that the many documents, buildings, pictures, and
other survivals from the past constitute but a small part of all that once
existed. Even most formal, written, and bureaucratic records no longer
survive let alone those of oral communications, informal interactions,
illegal activities (unless noted in court proceedings), and numerous other
human activities, including faxes and e-mails today. One Italian scholar
estimates that the ratio of lost ancient world texts to those that survive
today equals at least 40:1 but believes his figure is far short of actual loss.26
An English scholar of medieval history estimates that only about one percent of the once existing documents of the era from 1066 to 1307 still
survive from that countrys past.27 Thus Louis Gottschalk writes of documentary sources in his historical methods handbook under the heading

Historical Methods

11

Historical Knowledge Limited by Incompleteness of the Records, And

only a part of what was observed in the past was remembered by those
who observed it; only a part of what was remembered was recorded; only
a part of what was recorded has survived; only a part of what has survived
has come to the historians attention; only a part of what has come to
their attention is credible; only a part of what is credible has been grasped;
and only a part of what has been grasped can be expounded or narrated
by the historian.28
With appropriate allowances for the exact nature of a given artifact,
Gottschalks lament applies in general to other kinds of physical artifacts
as to survival rate, the difficulty of contextualizing them, and their use in
interpreting and narrating history. Although historians cannot create
facts when no evidence from the past exists, they must and do extrapolate by educated guess from the presumed context of the existing survivals to cover the silence of the nonexistent. (Oral history can help fill
the void in more recent times.) In the end, even the documented must be
interpreted, and so we turn in the next section to the transformation of
survivals into sources.
The Identification of Sources
A fundamental goal of the historical method is to convert survivals of various kinds into what historians call sources. Sources provide the evidence for the historians own representations of the past. From such
evidence historians derive the facts that support their statements about
the past and which they incorporate into their histories. According to
modern historical methods, sources are not found so much as identified
and isolated according to a historians research agenda. The conversion of
survivals into sources depends upon a set of assumptions governing their
relationship between their present-day existence and the role they presumably played in the lives and institutions of past peoples.
If historians must infer factual particulars from survivals, they need to
know that any given survival can be trusted to be what it represents itself
to be. If the artifact is fraudulent in some way, at worse a forgery or a fake,
it will cause historians to draw invalid inferences, hence to posit inaccurate factual particulars about the past. Therefore, before historians can ask
what can a survival as source reveal about what happened in the past, they
must ask the prior question about whether any given survival provides a
reliable basis, that is, a trustworthy source, for their inferences of fact. Is
the artifact what it appears to be so historians can presume it a valid base

12

Fashioning History

for their inferences about the peoples and times of its production? In
other words, can the historian trust the document to be what it claims to
be or the material artifact what it seems to be in order to derive the factual particulars she declares? Are a documents dates and authorship accurate and its text the original one? Are the producer and the date and site
of production of a material artifact correctly attributed? To validate a survival as a useful source, then, presumes a division between the facts establishing the authenticity of the artifact itself as opposed to the facts to be
derived by the historian from the artifact.29
The techniques, traditionally considered the scientific basis of the profession, for validating artifactual survivals of all kinds as proper sources
follow from this methodological assumption of a division between the
legitimacy of a source as source and the nature of it as evidence for facts
about the peoples and events of the past. The techniques vary for these
purposes depending upon the form of the medium: whether charters or
censuses, buildings or diaries, paintings or photographs, coins or cemeteries, battlefields or agricultural field systems, oral histories or collective
memories. Or, they vary depending upon the date of the artifact and the
technology used to produce it.30 The basis of the appropriate technique
distinguishes essentially between whether the artifact is documentary or
textual in the broadest sense or is some other kind and form of material
object. An artifact, of course, often combines text plus significant material aspects. Coins or monuments contain linguistic inscriptions and pictorial matter as well as form and materiality. Murals and paintings are
pictorial but also frequently symbolic or depict a story. Songs and newsreels are verbal as well as musical or pictorial. Often sources from the
medieval and ancient worlds demand special techniques and skills provided by what were once called auxiliary or ancillary sciences such as historical archaeology, numismatics (the authentication and dating of coins
and the deciphering of their inscriptions), diplomatics (the critical study
of official and other corporate forms of documents), paleography (the
study of the appearance and stylistic conventions for the dating, authentication, and transcribing of medieval and other archaic handwritten documents), epigraphy (the study of seals and inscriptions on ancient and
later gravestones, monuments, buildings, and other hard surfaces), and
chronology (the study and reconciliation of different dating systems).31
But even more modern sources need special skills and knowledge to
detect forgeries and read images and maps.32
All the techniques have three or four main goals: attributing authorship of a document or the producer of an artifact; determining the date

Historical Methods

13

and place of its creation; ascertaining the authenticity of its form and/or
the accuracy of its contents; and perhaps deciphering its content. Such
deciphering may range from the translation of its language from one to
another or from an ancient one into a modern one or even from past
words and usage into their present-day equivalentsif such exist. A simple example would be those terms for material objects that no longer exist
and for which modern people can only guess at their function. (As for
example, a strip of bronze from a sixth-century English grave, which a
museum staff in 1988 labeled wittily God knowsbut we dont.)33 Many
modern documentary and other artifactual survivals are sufficiently clear
about their producers, times and places of production, and genuineness,
and so they pose little or no problem about serving as valid sources for the
historian. Historically, scholars developed many of the classic techniques
to cope with the problems posed by manuscripts, coins, monuments, and
other survivals from early modern, medieval, and earlier times. The general implications of these methods alert all historians to the common
premises underlying this aspect of historical method and the resulting
uses of various kinds of contexts.
The most basic question about any artifact as source is always about
whether it is genuine or spurious? Is it by whom, from when and where,
and in the exact form it was originally? The most notorious examples of
false survivals, hence unreliable sources, are outright forgeries, frauds, and
hoaxes. Scholars developed modern documentary techniques for studying
medieval documents, with their profusion of forgeries. Scholars estimate
that from maybe ten percent to perhaps one-half to two-thirds of medieval
documents in some places, periods, and categories are forgeries or corruptions.34 The Donation of Constantine was perhaps the most historic
of these, for, one, it had real effect for seven hundred years in the history
of the Roman Catholic Church and, two, the exposure of its anachronisms
in 1440 is frequently credited with starting modern critical source analysis. Supposedly an edict from Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to
convert to Christianity in 312 CE, the document gave the Pope dominion over Rome, the Italian provinces, and perhaps the entire Western
Empire. Pope Stephen II used the document in 754 CE to challenge the
effort of Constantinople to diminish the authority of the papacy over the
Western Empire. Scholars assume the Donation of Constantine was produced in Stephen IIs chancery for that purpose. In 1440, Lorenzo Vallas
analysis of anachronisms of style and reference in the document questioned its authenticity. Historians of historical scholarship and method

14

Fashioning History

often point to his and other philologists techniques at the time as the
beginning of modern critical documentary method.35
Artistic, textual, and other kinds of forgeries and their critical unmasking appear in all eras from ancient times in both the Western and Eastern
worlds to the present. Textual forgeries range in time from ancient Greek
authors, for example the letters of Socrates and Euripides, to twentiethcentury dictators, for example the diaries of Benito Mussolini and Adolph
Hitler. The still popularly accepted tale of romance between Abraham
Lincoln and Ann Rutledge rests on forged love letters publicized by the
Atlantic Monthly in 1928. The Vinland Map, supposedly showing the
Viking discovery of America and depicting the continent for the first
time, still perplexes historians and other scholars a half century after its
donation to Yale University in 1957. If authentic, it would arguably be
the most valuable map in the world; if a forgery, as most now claim, it has
fooled many an expert for the last half century.36 Forgeries of letters and
other documents and artifacts will continue as long as money, political
influence, propaganda, religious, egotistical, and other purposes call them
forth.
Probably the most notorious and harmful forgery of the twentieth
century was the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose twentyfour sections supposedly revealed the conspiratorial plans of a secret Jewish
government for economic, political, and religious dominion over the
world. Mainly plagiarized from a French satire on Napoleon III, the
Protocols culminated a century of anti-Jewish forgeries. The Protocols were
first published in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century
but soon appeared in many languages after World War I to fuel the virulent anti-Semitism of the times. The automobile maker Henry Ford publicized the document in the United States. Hitler used it in Germany to
further the Nazi cause. The small book had been translated into at least
twenty languages by the end of the Second World War, and it is still in
print and on the Internet in this century. It was even the basis for a Ramadan
multipart special on Egyptian television in November 2002.37
Even past photographs and newsreels of past events were doctored for
propaganda or other purposes. Live soldiers played dead, and deceased
soldiers were rearranged and posed by some Civil War photographers to
enhance the effect of battlefield slaughter.38 In contrast, United States
authorities allowed no photographs of dead American soldiers to appear
in the mass media during the entire nineteen months of the First World
War and not for the first twenty-one months of the Second World War.39
Edward Curtis, the noted late nineteenth-century photographer of Native

Historical Methods

15

Americans, carried a trunk full of hairpieces and clothing to make his

subjects appear more traditional than they were when he photographed
them.40 A team of English filmmakers doctored a newsreel sequence of
Adolph Hitler in Paris as it fell to the German Army in June 1940 so as to
show him dancing in delight as part of a British propaganda campaign.41
Great as the problems of using yesteryears photographs and films as evidence are, they pale before the possibilities of tomorrows computermanipulated simulation of past and present alike.42
Although not as bad for the historians purposes as outright forgeries,
but misleading in their own way for historical research are garbled, corrupted, plagiarized, or ghostwritten texts. Corrupted versions result from
inadvertent mistakes while hand copying texts before the advent of printing and intentional editing of texts by editors or publishers after that
time. The more copiers and the more times a manuscript text was copied,
the more likely words were misread or miscopied from the original. In
more modern times, the published version of an article or book may contain heavy or light editing of the authors words, so what the public reads
may be quite different from what the author wrote originally. Many modern political or other leaders neither write their own speeches nor compose their own letters. Often some of the most memorable phrases in
modern political speeches are the handiwork of speechwriters. Although
the mechanical production of newspapers and magazines guarantees multiple copies all equally original in a sense, modern American newspapers
produce variant versions by geographical region (such as the New York
Times metropolitan and national versions), and magazines, thanks to the
computer, can vary advertising content by postal code. Likewise, motion
pictures may vary by format, length, and even some content from the
original version when shown on a television or Digital Video Disk.
Methods old and new, then, ask the same fundamental questions of
the survivals studied to establish them as authentic. What must we know
of any survivals origins and subsequent history, its pedigree in a sense, in
order to trust it as a source? (1) What are its origins (genesis): who or
what, when, where produced? (2) What is its lineage (genealogy): original, copy, copy of copy, and so on? (3) What is its history (provenance, in
one of its meanings): Where was it found? How was it found? Who found
it? Who preserved it and how (and maybe why)? How did it come to be
in the possession of its present owner? These questions elicit the sources
chain of custody and what those links disclose about the authenticity of
its contents. Of course forgeries are their own kind of sources about the
times, places, and peoples of their creation. This history of origins,

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Fashioning History

genealogy, and provenance can become its own source of data for the diffusion and reception of an idea, memory, or myth.
The public associates such a pedigree most notably with paintings,
rare books, or antiques, where it is called a provenance or provenience.43
Art museums seek to know from experts whether a famous painting or
sculpture is by the artist, from his workshop or school of followers, merely
a copy by someone else in the past, or even a modern forgery. Whether a
painting or other art object is worth millions, much less, or nearly nothing often depends on its placement in one of these categories. How much
the object is worth for the historians purposes, however, depends not
whether it is the original or a copy but whether it portrays its times accurately. Thus much of what we know of Greek sculpture derives from the
Roman copies that have survived into the present. Rare book libraries and
manuscript collections try to ascertain whether what they possess is the
original authors version, a later edition or copy, a facsimile, a corrupted
version, or even a forgery. (Hence the importance of the debate over the
Vinland map.) Once again, the historians purpose may be served well by
a copy that is assumed faithful to the original. This is especially true if an
original no longer exists, for then a facsimile or other kind of copy must
suffice. The manuscripts of the ancient world were particularly vulnerable
to decay, erasure, destruction, and random recopying. So, for example,
the oldest full version of Homers writings is a copy made nearly eighteen
centuries later. The writings of the ancient Romans Cicero, Livy, Pliny
Younger and Older, Virgil, and Ovid only survive as traces beneath later
Christian overwritings. Medieval monks copied the works of Plato as
consistent with Christian doctrine but not those of Aristotle, which come
to us through Arab copyists.44
A pedigree is more important for documents produced prior to printing, because the repeated scribal copying, which preserved the text in the
first place, easily produced and multiplied errors in succeeding versions.
It was the printing press with its capacity for multiple copies of an original that ensured the survival of some of them into the present. But even
here the press operator or other intermediary between author and audience may have edited the text or image from what the author or artist
intended. Of course, the purpose of many original documents and artifactsold and newwas to mislead by misrepresenting matters. Thus
the document might be authentic, but its content is false to the facts,
whether intended to deceive an enemy in war or a population in peacetime about policy. Regardless of kind, only a small part of past documents
and other artifacts survive into the present.

Historical Methods

17

Tracing the history of the artifact over the course of its career or life, so
to speak, ensures that the present-day document or material object survives from the claimed or purported time and place and results from the
purported or claimed producer. Such a pedigree allows historians to know
when and where, by whom, and probably how any given artifact was created and, therefore, whether it can be trusted as a source from which the
historian can infer correct factual particulars about the times (and contexts) of its creation. The importance of a good pedigree for a document
even became an issue in recent international diplomacy after the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. Questions
arose immediately after the release of the Osama bin Laden videotapes
about their authenticity. Journalists, television pundits, politicians, and
scholars all debated how the tapes had been obtained and by whom, who
had made them and when, and why they surfaced when they did. (Also
debated was the adequacy of the English translation provided by the Bush
administration and whether the tapes supported the contention of the
White House about Al Qaedas role in the destruction.)
One of the main businesses of museums, archives, and libraries is the
certification of the artifacts in their possession as genuine, whether pictorial matter of all types, manuscripts, books, maps, films, recordings, and
written records or material objects of all kinds. Such certification allows
historians to be certain of the date of creation, the authorship or producer,
and other details vital to the establishment of those artifacts as authentic
sources for deriving factual particulars of and for a history.
The most important function of museums, archives, and libraries is
the preservation that allows survival of past texts and other artifacts into
the present. Students of historical memory therefore see archives and
museums as sites of official and collective memory(ies). Officially, these
institutions are places designed for receiving records and other artifacts,
organizing and cataloguing them, and storing them safely and systematically for their retrieval and viewing. Unofficially, as many researchers discover, numerous documents and artifacts are not catalogued, their retrieval
is not as certain as hoped, and many artifacts remain in private hands outside these institutions. Although of recent origin by historical standards,
scores of motion pictures and sound recordings are lost, and many of
those remaining are in fragile or worse condition. We have even less of an
idea of how much electronic data has been saved, let alone created. (But
Googles massive Internet scanning and storage may prove invaluable to
future scholars.)

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Fashioning History

Museums, archives and libraries are not impartial preservers of past

survivals. Their guardianship of local or national heritage skews their collections toward the concerns of those in a position to influence such decisions or who pay for the acquisitions. Until recently art museums exhibited
the great and not-so-great (male) artists as defined by the Western tradition. This stance neglected women and minority artists as outside this
traditionusually not even defining their work as art. Perhaps the
most invidious distinction is the division of art into the prehistoric kind
usually housed in natural history and archaeological museums and the
historic kind, especially European, displayed in art museums. Manuscript
repositories customarily preserved and perhaps preferred the documents
of the powerful and the upper classes. Even state archives reflected the
same biases in their collections, and historians thought this appropriate
when they concentrated on the history of elites so long traditional in the
discipline. As the British oral historian Paul Thompson graphically described
this bias, The very power structure worked as a great recording machine
shaping the past in its own image.45 To see how this principle worked in
a concrete physical setting, one has only to remark the survival of the
great Southern plantation mansions in the United States and the disappearance of the slave quarters surrounding them.46 Even though museums, archives, and other repositories are trying these days to compensate
for previous biases by searching out new artifacts and documents, historians need always to remember to ask of all these institutions: what they
save or saved and why? What they neglect or neglected or destroyed and
for what reasons? Such questions hint at what data is missing from the past.
Primary versus Secondary Sources
Different kinds of artifacts require different kinds of techniques for their
validation, dating, authorship, and accuracy or authenticity, but the
major assumptions underlying these techniques are similar across mediums and disciplines. Although the practitioners of oral history, documentary research, visual image analysis, and historical archaeology may differ
in their specific methods, they share the basic critical methodological
assumptions for understanding and analyzing survivals as sources.47
Survivals become certified as sources through relevant questions, and
those are framed according to one or another presumed or postulated
context. These questions are traditionally discussed in the classic methods
manuals in terms of external criticism or in newer ones as source criticism. External or source criticism establishes the authenticity of the survival:

Historical Methods

19

that it originated at the time and in the place (its when and where) it was
supposed to. It was called external criticism (as opposed to internal criticism discussed in the next section) because that confirmation occurs
through operations external to the artifact itself, usually through comparison with the same or similar kinds of artifacts. Though the object of analysis is the document, the context of that analysis depends how it fits in
with other texts, or its intertextuality as literary theorists call it. Negatively,
external criticism looks for, among other things, anachronistic words in
texts or objects in pictures, anomalous paper and canvas or other medium
and material, and variation of its general appearance from others of its
kind. Positively, it proposes a date for the undated, attributes authorship
if anonymous or wrongly signed, and places it in a tradition of form and
content if that is not clear from the artifact itself. Since the latter are attributions, such placements have proved wrong at times.
The main goal of all these techniques from the viewpoint of historians
is to warrant that artifactual sources are really contemporaneous to the
times of their production, because historians prefer to work from such
original sources.48 They believe those sources coming most directly from
the times they are researching offer the best clues to those times. Historians
emphasize this preference in their research by distinguishing between
what they call primary as opposed to secondary sources. Primary sources
are those documents and other things both from and about the times
being investigated. Secondary sources are those referring to matters and
times earlier than their own time of production. In that sense all history
books are secondary sources (except for a history of history-writing), but
so too are historical re-enactments, documentary films, simulated artifacts, and virtual computer images of past texts, artifacts, peoples and
places. Such a distinction always depends upon the question asked, for
what is a secondary source for one question may be a primary source for
another question, but this is a topic for the next section on facts as statements about particulars. Conversely, that a single source can be both primary and secondary shows the importance of using contemporaneous
evidence in historical research that applies to the question asked.
Even many sources historians accept and use as primary may be secondary in a technical sense. In traditional historical methods manuals,
only eyewitness, that is, actual witness as opposed to hearsay, accounts
constitute original or primary sources. Were they written down at the
time of occurrence or only later from memory? What if the source is a
report of rumor or hearsay? Newspaper accounts? Are the court records or
legislative journals verbatim transcriptions from stenographic or sound

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Fashioning History

recordings, or merely summaries of what occurred? Memoirs or autobiographies, even though written long after the events they chronicle, may
recount matters for which there is little or no other evidence. For lack of
better survivals about these matters, all these latter kinds of documents
could, might, and, often, must serve as primary sources. Even though
removed from the persons or events reported, they are closest to what is
represented or reported. Thus, although not original in the sense of being
contemporaneous, they become primary in terms of what is to be known.
Historians also accept as primary sources such hybrid materials as photocopies, facsimiles, microfilms, published editions of manuscripts, and,
increasingly these days, digitized versions of texts and artifacts. Such
hybrid materials save the researcher much time and money and allow a
more deliberate study of the materials than a hasty visit to archives, rare
book library, or museum. Increasingly, these repositories do not allow
study of the originals in order to save them from the deterioration wrought
by too many researchers physically handling them. (The Manuscripts
Division of the Library of Congress, for example, allows only a very select
few researchers to handle the actual letters of the Founding Fathers as
opposed to copies.) Although clearly not the actual sources themselves,
these copies can be accepted if they are good faith and, even better, accurate, reproductions of the original sources. Even so, the researcher must
ask of each such reproduction just how much interpretation the editor or
compiler employed to produce the copy or edition.49
The present state of many artifacts, buildings, ships, and landscapes
illustrate the problems of understanding such hybrid sources. How should
one understand reconstructions and restorations as opposed to the originals of such material objects? Many wooden ships and buildings, for
example, have been replaced part by part so that almost nothing original
remains, but still the ship or building is accepted as the original. For
example, both the HMS Victory, Lord Horatio Nelsons flagship at the
Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the USS Constitution, better known as
Old Ironsides as a result of a War of 1812 battle, lay claim to being the oldest commissioned warships afloat, and both have been so totally reconstructed that they are essentially mere replicas of their original wooden
selves.50 A historic garden is a good example of replacement accepted as
original, but many of the plants have necessarily been renewed, trimmed,
or replaced. No matter what the ideal mode of preservation preferred by
professionals, no restorer today is likely to paint the Great Sphinx and
ancient Greek statues, for example, in the bright colors they wore originally. On the other hand, many a grimy painting today is restored to the

Historical Methods

21

supposedly vivid colors the artist intended. The brighter colors of the
restored Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo and the most recent attempt
to save the deteriorating Last Supper by Da Vinci provoked widespread
criticism. Da Vinci, for example, used a quite unstable medium for his
masterpiece, finished in 1498. Restoration began already in 1726. Each
of the nine subsequent restorations tried to undo the mistakes of the previous one. Each of the restorers attempted to preserve what they thought
Leonardo had intended. All contributed their own touches more or less to
what we still call the original. The most recent restoration lasted twenty
years, and some scholars question whether the brighter colors are consistent with Leonardos vision or achievement. They accuse the restorer of
repainting rather than restoring the masterpiece.51
Even supposedly unrestored monuments and buildings no longer
appear as they did to people who constructed them due to the ravages of
time and human intervention. Of course, the greatest difference between
the originals in the past and their existence now is the changed context in
how they are seen, heard, and, in general, experienced today. Those who
would preserve battlefields fight the encroaching sights and sounds of
modern civilization, whether the threat is tall buildings, communication
towers, amusement parks, or modern highways. The very surroundings
that earlier people developed as part of a living environment are now condemned as unhistorical and are removed in order to capture the supposed
past as interpreted by nostalgia, historians, politicians, or tourist boards.
Colonial delegates used the Pennsylvania State House, or what is now
called Independence Hall, in Philadelphia to declare their independence
in 1776, and others drafted the Constitution there during the summer of
1787. Moderate size skyscrapers now dwarf it, and modern traffic noises
and tourists now surround it. To build the Independence National Historical
Park around the buildings, almost all nineteenth-century buildings were
torn down, including some considered architectural landmarks in their
own right. In other words, all the historical fabric that had grown up
around the building was removed in the name of restoring the original
environment. Yet only some of the contemporary structures surrounding
the historic buildings were reconstructed to give the visitor a sense of the
late eighteenth-century urban environment. The park itself contains
empty but once occupied spaces and such alien buildings as the Liberty
Bell Pavilion, National Constitution Center, and the visitor orientation
center.52 Even documentary filmmakers must search out built environments without the paraphernalia of electric wires, anomalous buildings,
and modern inventions. A 2002 documentary miniseries on Benjamin

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Fashioning History

Franklin used locations up and down the eastern seaboard for historic
buildings and landscapes to portray his American experience of the time
but had to look to Lithuania to find eighteenth-century urban exteriors
free of modern buildings or inventions to depict his years in London and
Paris.53 Tourists, of course, are their own kind of context; over a million
persons a year visit Colonial Williamsburg for example.
The most important of the post hoc contexts historians use is knowing the future of the past and therefore the outcome of past persons
beliefs and actions. Not only do historians know now what diplomats
thought then would follow from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
in 1914, but they also know how the First World War ended and what
followed thereafter. And the same is true for the discovery of radium and
the invention of dynamite. At the same time, much of what happened in
the past and the reasons for those events, and so on, are lost to us because
the sources do not survive. So we both know more and know less than
those persons of the past knew.54 Divided by city-state or country, by ethnicity or religion, by class or gender, by education or association, let alone
by era, past persons saw events through their own perspectives. Thus all
sources come to the historian through some perspective. Just as universal
omniscience is denied to persons in the past, so too is it denied to historians. Even if the future of the past is known, it must always be depicted
from some point of view.
The assumption of one or more kinds of context allows the historian
to first collect survivals relevant to a research project and another context
or two to interpret them as sources for that research. As Howell and
Prevenier remark, all sources are read both historically in light of the
context of their past existence and historiographically in light of how the
historical profession looks at and understands the materials today.55 In
line with this admonition, we must also remember that the historian is
just the most recent person to interpret the documents and artifacts.
What the historian of early modern times Peter Burke observes of documents in general applies to all sources (with allowances for the specific
kind): It is impossible to study the past without the assistance of a whole
chain of intermediaries, including not only earlier historians but also the
archivists who arranged the documents, the scribes who wrote them and
the witnesses whose words were recorded.56 This observation is broadly
true of specific museum exhibitions and even their general collections:
from producer of artifact, through successive owners, to its acquisition by
a museum, through successive winnowings of selection or deacquisition,

Historical Methods

23

until interpreted as part of a permanent exhibition or saved as part of a

general collection, until the next round of selection, and so on.
At the heart of historical research therefore lies a certain circularity of
reasoning about the relationship between past and present through the
study of these surviving artifacts as sources: survivals or traces found in
the present tell us about the past just as the past is made known to us
through these survivals and traces. For this circularity to achieve its
methodological ends, historians use context in several ways. First, historians use currently accepted historical knowledge and interpretations to
provide one or another kind of context to read these present-day survivals
as clues to the past they postulate and hope to describe. They, in short,
must have some idea of what they are looking for and whether they have
found it. They gain the basis for doing this from the context of current
interpretations and knowledge. Second, historians organize the facts they
elicit in the present from these survivals according to some context said to
operate in the past. They presume some kind of a context created, so to
speak, the survivals, and, in turn, those survivals will yield through study
that self-same context. In that way, such a context not only organizes the
data about the past but also gives meaning to those facts adduced from the
survivals studied. In these ways, the overall context of historical methodology and modern methods presumes the context (intertext) of current
knowledge to understand the traces and data of the past in order to see
them as (and in) context in order to produce further knowledge about
the past or to correct that knowledge. The penultimate context for such
factual derivation therefore is the consensual and traditional practices of
the historical profession. The ultimate context is, as neopragmatists, Marxists,
and many traditionalists alike point out, the society (and culture) that
both fosters and polices the historical genre by how it supports archivists,
museum curators, historians, and other specialists as professionals.57
The assumption of the historical method that artifacts assumed to
come from the past can now reveal how the once living lived presumes a
peculiar kind of relationship between past and present peoples and, in a
sense, vice versa. To what extent must historians presume that past and
present peoples think and act similarly in the same basic situations in
order to derive facts according to the historical method? But is such an
assumption the temporal equivalent of ethnocentrism? Or, should historians assume that the past is a foreign country, but then how do historians escape the temporal equivalent of solipsism that follows such an
approach to the otherness of past peoples? Naturally, historians prefer a
middle path between these extremes, but where that lies may depend

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Fashioning History

upon how long ago the historical actors lived or how different their culture was. It is not clear how well either memory or social tradition can
bridge quite different eras. This suggests the hypothesis that the farther
away in time and/or culture, the more difficult the reconciliation between
past and present; the closer to our time and culture(s) the easier the historians task. The basic conundrum is clear, its resolution far less so. The
proliferation of historical techniques and the multiplication of so-called
auxiliary sciences and disciplines are meant to alleviate if not solve these
dilemmas. In the end, as we shall see, the past and the present are always
linked through contextual assumptionsoften with some metanarrative
as intellectual foundation or ultimate context.
In the end, then, what converts survivals into sources are the questions
asked of them and the postulated contexts used to judge the answers
about their credibility, authenticity, and utility. As a consequence, there
obtains no one-to-one correlation between any given survival and its
interpretation as a source, because one survival can be interpreted in multiple ways and, therefore in effect, as many sources. For a similar reason,
no one-to-one correlation obtains between a source and the facts inferred
or hypothesized from it. As we shall see in the next two sections, a source
can yield through interpretation multiple facts, and, conversely, a single
fact can be developed from many sources.
Facts as Re-presentations
The ultimate goal of the historical method is to produce facts about past
persons, their ideas and actions, their experiences and institutions, and
the events involving them. The working assumptionsome postmodernists might say prevailing mythof historians is that their productions
rest on an empirical basis of factuality. That factuality is presumed to constitute the accuracy of history and therefore its truthfulness. That truthfulness is both produced and warranted by the techniques of the historical
method. Thus the factuality, accuracy, truthfulness, and methods of historical practice all depend upon one another in both theory and practice.
In fact, many, but especially traditional, historians argue that the whole
historical enterprise, and therefore the theoretical nature of history itself,
should and can be understood only in light of its empirical practices.58
The relationship between assertion of fact and use of evidential sources
can be divided into two broad categories. The first, covered in this section, I label re-representation or re-presentation for short, because the
historian repeats, that is presents again, one or more statements (to whole

Historical Methods

25

arguments and stories) that she accepts as factual just as given in one or
more sources. The second, treated in the next section, I label construction
because the facts (let alone arguments and stories) need not only to be
inferred but developedthat is, constitutedby the historian from one
or more sources. The basic distinction between re-presentation and construction, then, hinges not upon how simple or general or how concrete
or abstract the factual statement adduced but whether it comes directly
by way of quotation or paraphrase from the source or sources or indirectly
by interpretation and development from the source or sources. Re-presentation always implies the possibility of comparing the text or other
artifact with a verified, authentic original. Without the possibility of such
comparison, an alleged copy or simulation must be considered a representation constructed by the historian. Both depend equally upon inference and interpretation by the historian. Both represent the past as
history. Representation, however, is the more inclusive term. All re-presentations are representations, but representations can take many forms
other than re-presentation.
If the historian re-presents factual statements originally recorded,
reported, or otherwise presented in one or more sources themselves, then
the sources must be presumed to communicate such statements in the
first place. This approach explains why historians traditionally studied
sources that were testimonies or reports, or at least documentary or textual in a general sense. Classic methods manuals developed rules particularly for this level of historical practice.59 If testimony and reports are to
constitute the foundation of re-presentation as a historical practice, then
the documentary sources must be as authentic, as trustworthy as possible
in the first place. Only after the pedigree of a document or other textual
survival establishes it as authentic can historians investigate it for the particulars it can reveal as a source for their goal of re-presenting facts about
past peoples ideas and beliefs, activities and behavior, institutions and
experiences, events and transformations.
Such re-presented facts can range from statements about simple physical and behavioral manifestations to abstract, symbolic constructions,
from, say, uncomplicated plain everyday beliefs and activities to complicated imagery and social events to complex statistics and poetry. If external criticism asks whether a source can tell us what it claims to or seems
to represent, then internal criticism inquires what a source can tell us
about the past that we want to know. If the task of source criticism is to
establish the trustworthiness of the source, especially documentary, then
the job of internal criticism is to extract the factual particulars from it. If

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Fashioning History

external criticism seeks to establish the factual basis of the document,

then internal criticism seeks to derive historical knowledge from it.
Historians dependence on the author or other producer of a document or text for the discovery, validity, and authority of their information
led to a set of basic rules in traditional historical methods manuals.
Although these rules were meant to apply to constructed as well as re-presented facts, they seem particularly appropriate for the latter, especially
since the source can be quoted or paraphrased. The rules sought to answer
as best possible: who (or what in the case of institutionally produced documents) knows best and how and why.
The most fundamental rule was summarized in the stress on original
or primary as opposed to secondary sources. The more the text was produced at the time by someone or some group who witnessed or participated in the event, the better the evidence and the more probable the
historian could trust (and repeat) the facts stated. So a basic rule looked
at the degree of removal of the testimony, report, or other document from
the specific place and time of the event. Was it firsthand eyewitness
knowledge, secondhand hearsay, thirdhand information, fourthhand speculation, or further removed? Was the testimony, report, or other text produced by someone or some group at the time, a little later, or much later?
In all instances, but particularly in these latter ones, is the report or testimony consistent with other sources? Do different documents report the
same fact or set of facts? Ideally, corroboration depends upon two or more
independent witnesses, but historians are often lucky to have one witness
to an event.
Another set of maxims deal with how good a witness or reporter was
the producer of the document. These maxims query the witness credibility, reliability, and authority. How competent was the witness to understand and report the event, to ask the right questions about it, or come
from the right social group to best comprehend matters? What were the
witness biases in the matter and in whose favor? Did the witness have
personal interests or purposes in the matter or in views of the matter
itself? Did the witness desire to please a certain audience then or later?
These rules assume certain conditions are more favorable to credibility:
the testimony or report was a matter of indifference or, better, prejudicial
to the witness; the matter was common knowledge at the time; the matter was purely incidental or even contrary to the expectation of what the
witness usually says or does. Last, what of the style of the document and
what does it tell the historian about the credibility of what is expressed in
the contents? Was it satire, pathos, or other literary form that may not

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27

mean what it seems at face value? Does the document follow standard
conventions used in letters, laws, reports, or treaties at the time? The sentiments of letters and diaries often follow the conventional sentiments
and formulas, so to speak, of their time. Thus they reveal more of what
was expected at the time (which is valuable too) than report what the
individual may have actually felt.
Such rules eventuated in a hierarchy of documents based upon their
time of production, the size of the intended audience, their private versus
their public nature, and, of course, the accuracy of their rendition. These
maxims are expressed as probabilities or what is more likely to be the case
in any given instance. First, contemporaneity to the event is valued over
subsequent production, because it is assumed that the closer the testimony is to the event the better it is remembered. Thus letters, diaries, and
newspaper reports from the time are thought more likely to be accurate
and better testimony than memoirs and autobiographies written long
after, especially if they are ghostwritten. This seems true of memories and
oral history too.
Second, according to these rules historians preferred private and confidential letters, reports, and dispatches to public ones, because the rules
presumed the smaller in number and the more discrete the producers and
consumers the more likely the testimony was not slanted for public consumption. (But what of slanting for an audience of one, especially a powerful or influential person?) Thus letters of all kinds, whether business,
political, family or otherwise, whether addressed to one or a few persons,
are considered more likely to reveal what actually happened and why than
newspaper reports, public speeches, or other medium directed to a large
or mass audience. For the same reason, a private diary is preferred to a
published memoir and a confidential military or diplomatic dispatch to
general information released to the public, even though the diary entries
may be highly conventional in their expression of feelings or formulaic
according to the standards of the document or time.
Third, the accuracy of the testimony is assessed. Is it as close to what
was said, thought, or experienced at the time? British parliamentary proceedings, for example, were secret until well into the eighteenth century.
After that time what records of the debates were published were summaries by reporters. The British House of Commons only supported a
substantially verbatim record of their proceedings beginning in 1909.60
Although in the United States the House of Representatives opened its
galleries to the public including reporters from its founding and the Senate
a decade later, not until the establishment of the Congressional Record in

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Fashioning History

1873 was a substantially verbatim record kept of the speeches and debates
in the two chambers.61 Did and do public opinion pollsters receive the
unvarnished thoughts of their subjects, and do the aggregated opinions
projected from sampling procedures represent how the public perceives
something? Autobiographies and memoirs often embody the combined
thoughts and talents of the subject and the ghostwriter. Who writes a letter signed or a speech delivered by the president of the United States, or,
for that matter, any major leader around the world today? These problems plague all historians use of documentary materials but are especially
important to those seeking to repeat, paraphrase, or otherwise re-present
facts from documentary sources.62
Re-presentation of evidence as fact limits the nature of the sources to
texts that can be understood like testimony. Material objects without
writing, for example, even when their very existence is taken as indicative
of a fact about the nature of a society or culture requires the historian to
infer that fact (such as coins and commerce, palaces and power, or weapons
and war). Thus objects in museums, for instance, need labels at a minimum, if not lecturers and booklets, as noted later in Chapter 4. Even
though such texts as poetry, songs, novels, and other creative and symbolic materials can be reproduced by the historian, they only become represented facts through the historians interpretation.63 Similarly such
visual materials as paintings and photographs can also be reproduced, but
the historian needs to provide the facts they are said to prove. Oral histories and memories only become textual evidence through the intervention
of the historian or someone else in the first place, but they can be quoted
or paraphrased as fact. And of course the existence of a textual source
rarely proves facts about its reception at the time and certainly not later or
by whom.
Louis Gottschalk declared that the primary purpose of the historical
method is the derivation of factual particulars.64 According to him, historians should investigate documentary sources not as wholes but for specific answers to the classic questions of who, what, when, where, and how
(and maybe why). Although historians may pose the questions when representing the facts, they expect and, more importantly, accept and reproduce the answers given as such in the document itself. To re-present facts
as given in an authenticated source means that the historian agrees with
and therefore accepts what is presented in the document at face value.
The more facts historians repeat as given in the document, the more they
tend to adopt the actors or actors points of view or ways of understanding the matters under study. At its most inclusive, that means the historian

Historical Methods

29

adopts the documents point of view of who are the actors, what took
place, where it occurred, how it happened, and maybe even why. The
more historians re-present the facts as given in the document, the more
they allow the historical actors to define the situation, to frame the questions, to explain the matters at hand, and also, most likely, to shape the
overall point of view on the matters.
Thus, the re-presentation of facts works best in those cases in which
historians seek to offer actors views of matters. Explanation proceeds by
intention, desire, and motive as actors describe, understand, or profess to
understand events. The historian acknowledges that how the historical actors understood social categories and groupings, social and physical
environment, culture and politics describes matters best and most accurately. Thus factual re-presentation worked well for discussing elite goals
and actions in the old political, diplomatic, military history. It also serves
well in the newer cultural and microhistory as shown in such classics as
Carlo Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller and Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries, Montaillou: The Promised Land of
Error.65 But there is a fundamental problem with using the views of a single social group, whether subaltern or dominant, whether oppressed or
elite to represent matters. Without extreme care, the actors orientations
and presumptions can all too easily become the historians own way of
looking at these matters. Even the mere quotation of a view can imply the
historian shares it as the correct and accurate one. For example, what if a
historian quotes at some length a source disparaging French Canadian
colonists, African American slaves, or Native American males as lazy in
her book as if she accepted that biased description as her own and correct?
Recent attention to the histories of racial and ethnic groups, women,
gays and lesbians, subalterns or other subordinated persons caused historians to search out new documentary sources. The new documentary
sources could now be investigated for factual particulars not found in the
traditional documentary sources produced by the elites in a society. At the
level of re-presentation, though, this still means the acceptance of the
facts as presented in the sources themselves.
In recent decades, these re-presented facts about minorities were
added to the sum total of historical information. As a result, these facts
challenged general interpretations of the nature of society as presumed
previously by most professional historians. If questions convert sources
into facts, then multiculturalism changed the questions asked of old
sources as well as fueled the search for new sources. It also provided new
kinds of contexts in which to ask and answer those questions. This challenge

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Fashioning History

is better explored in the next chapter on historical synthesis with its focus
on explanation, generalization, story, argument, perspective, and meaning.
As these considerations remind us, newly accepted facts can contradict
old facts, challenge generalizations, and perhaps even revise older interpretations. The most obvious and elementary rebuttal occurs when one
derived factual statement discredits another. Somewhat more complicated is the challenge of a new fact or facts to a generalization. In this
sense, the factual particular proves useful as a check or test of others generalizations. While a compilation of many facts may not prove a point,
just one well-chosen fact can disprove a generalization. Still more complicated is the revision of prevailing interpretations through questioning the
previously asserted and accepted facts and offering newer, presumably
more accurate factual statements. I suppose that is the hope and remedy
expressed in the phrase sovereignty of the sources, tribunal of the documents. 66 The phrase implies that even a complicated synthesis of facts,
argument, viewpoint, and moral outlook can be tested as a whole by simple recourse to the facts. Interestingly, however, proof of inaccurate
statements or disputed facts need not overturn a historical synthesis by
themselves, since an interpretation or synthesis is much more than just
the sum of its inferred factual statements as we shall see in the next chapter.
It is at the level of factual re-presentation that the empirical foundation of historical practice, hence history, seems most evident. But even in
the re-presentation of the most rudimentary facts, the historian must
interpret the sources interpretations. At the least, historians must understand the language of a documentary source, including the possibility
that the text is a satire in which the words do not mean what they appear
to. A good example of whether a statement should be read as satire is provided by Benjamin Franklins comments on the possibility of the colonies
forming a union in a letter to James Parker, March 20, 1750/1: It would
be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be
capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union, and be able to execute
it is such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen
English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of
their Interests.67 For many years that sentence was interpreted as anotherexample of Franklins penchant for irony, but recent proponents of the
significant impact of the Iroquois Confederacy on (white) American ideas
of federation accept the statement as not only justified and prophetic but

Historical Methods

31

also as utterly sincere and serious in spite of its prejudicial reference to

ignorant Savages.68
The problem of translation extends from interpreting the words of one
language into those of another to interpreting from the conceptual categories of one time into those of another. That words and concepts had
different meanings in their own context from how historians had long
understood them is the argument of Quentin Skinner and others reclaiming the supposed meaning of tracts and debates in early modern European
political thought.69 Thus even elementary re-presentation of the facts
from a document must surmount the hermeneutic conundrum of the
historian translating from how actors interpreted matters in their time
through their own views and viewpoints to how the historian can understand actors in the past through todays views and viewpoints.70 That such
translation occurs guarantees the necessity of anachronism to smaller and
larger degrees in historical practice.71
How and what did actors understand as the appropriate context of their
thoughts and actions, and how and what can current historians understand
and re-present of that context? Must the historian share social and cultural traditions and maybe even language, customs, and politics with past
peoples in order to interpret past artifacts and records? If the past is really
different from the present, to what extent can the present-day historian
use re-presentation as a means of expositing that past for a modern day
audience? To what extent do the contexts of today determine what of and
how we today understand the past, and vice versa? Even though the contexts of past thoughts and actions give meaning to them, it is the contexts
of the present that must provide understanding of those earlier contexts.
The role of living tradition both helps and blinds us at the same time to
past contexts. It provides context to past documents and artifacts that are
still in use or at least recognizable. But tradition also blinds us to past texts
and objects by making them seem familiar when they are not necessarily
so, as recent arguments in intellectual history and political theory show
about the words of John Locke and others.72
Even at this basic level of factual re-presentation, documents are read
in light of accepted history in spite of the admonition of historical
methodologists, for the assessment of valid particulars is as much a function of current professional knowledge of a period in general as what is given
in the source. Where do the questions asked of the documents come from:
within or outside the documents? If inside, then the historian risks
accepting the authors viewpoint as her own. If outside the documents,
then what provides the context? First, that context may derive from the

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Fashioning History

historians knowledge of events from the future of the time studied.

Second, that context comes from the history profession at the time of the
research. Sources are always read from a historiographical context that
poses certain standard questions and screens certain answers as plausible
about a period or set of events. Last, collective memory and heritage shape
and influence the questions and answers, even if negatively. These problems arise even when the historian quotes or paraphrases the sources.
Facts as Constructions
Historians also construct factual statements fashioned from one or more
sources. A history, no matter how short, is obviously constructed, but so
too are many or most of the facts comprising such a history. Any resort to
more than one source for any matter other than simple corroboration
(that is, the same fact across sources) of a re-presented factual particular
involves the construction or constitution of factual statements. Any fact
not repeated or paraphrased from a source is constructed, and even paraphrases may be constructed to a smaller or larger extent. The two kinds of
facts, but especially those constructed, always depend for both their creation by historians and their acceptance by other professionals and the
public alike on the framework used to derive and interpret them.
Factual statements have to be constructed for all nontextual sources,
for the historian must develop their meaning through interpretation.
Material objects and even visual artifacts do not yield their factual information without the historians inferences. Although some persons profess
to believe that material objects speak for themselves, the presence of
labels if not more elaborate interpretive aids in museums suggests the
opposite. Even if the artifact itself is taken as direct evidencea direct
correlateof what it is said to prove, the historian must still construct the
facts. Historians take the very existence of a network of roads, aqueducts,
railroads, airports, or Web sites as indexes of technological skill and bureaucratic organization. The distribution of coins and the nature of artifacts
map the extent of commerce and trade routes. Censuses, court records,
and legislative proceedings prove governmental organization by their
existence as much as by what they say. Body and building ornamentation
like murals and paintings signify certain artistic techniques and taste.
Poems and stories suggest cultural premises and moral values. The nature
of the medium can disclose a great deal about its producer if not always
its consumer. Handwriting in a document, for example, can reveal a lot
about the author: quavering strokes might signify age or condition of health;

Historical Methods

33

spelling and grammar might demonstrate level of education.73 Maps not

only show an image of the landscape and even the world but also suggest
navigational skill, trade routes, printing skills, political power, and cosmology among other things.74 That historians take the very existence of a
source to prove factual points relies ultimately on the context constructed
by the historian to interpret the evidence in that manner.75
To the extent that historians reject any one documents or set of textual
sources versions of facts, be they presented as testimonies, reports, observations, summations, explanations, statistics, stories or otherwise, the more
they must resort to the development, that is, the construction of facts
through inference, analysis, interpretation, or other means from one
or more documents. Historians are forced to resort to constructions of
fact or facts in several instances common in documentary research. If
sources disagree on a fact, then the historian must either select one version to re-present or construct a fact by inference and interpretation.
Comparison of variations among sources may suggest the best version for
re-presentation but more likely it results in a constructed fact. A fact may
be created by inferring it from several sources.
My study of the Ordinances in the United States Articles of Confederation
Congress from 1784 to 1787 creating separate territories and eventually
self-government for them in the area between the Ohio and Mississippi
Rivers used all these methods of construction to arrive at the facts. Almost
no letters or legislative debates exist to provide motives or reasons for the
changing proposed ordinances over time. For many of the changes, therefore, we have only the bill itself reported out of committee. Sometimes
the only alteration in a bill was the word district being replaced by territory. That the word territory replaced ultimately the initial word
colony and then district indicates, I believe, that the politicians of the
time thought they had originated a new kind of colonial system that gave
the inhabitants equal status eventually with the original states in the
Confederation, even if they had to recapitulate the sequence of the thirteen states from colonies to independent states. Thus the reasons for the
modifications must be inferred or constructed rather than re-presented.
I concluded from the scanty evidence that the first scheme of governance usually ascribed to Thomas Jefferson was actually first proposed in
outline before he arrived to take his seat in late 1783. He did flesh out the
nature of government, and he particularly named and bounded the eventual states. However, Jeffersons own proposal for the location and size of
the new states-to-be violated the maximum size specified in his own
states cession to the new United States of its claims to this region in the

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Fashioning History

first place. I arrived at this conclusion by measuring his proposed states

boundaries against a map of the time with which he was likely familiar
and might have used himself.
Last, in a more controversial proposition, I argued that the evolution
from initial dependent territory to full-fledged statehood in the final
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was not as different politically from Jeffersons
1784 Ordinance as other historians had long argued. They portrayed
Jeffersons plan of self-government in the beginning stage as liberal in
keeping with the Progressive schools interpretation of the man himself,
while denial of self-government in the first stage in the final 1787 Ordinance
was characterized as conservative just as was the Federal Constitution of
that year compared to the Articles of Confederation of 1780 in their view.
I hypothesized rather that the two documents may not have been as different in Jeffersons eyes as Progressive historians argued, because he had
not discussed any changes very much in his usually voluminous correspondence. Moreover, he never mentioned the change in governance as
such. Whether such negative evidence proves my contention is debatable,
but these disputes show that the facts derived from such scarce evidence
rely more on the political views and historiographic school of the historian than empirical extrapolation. If nothing else, it is clear that scarce
sources point to the constructed nature of most historical facts derived
from them.76
Historians commonly reconstrue the facts already interpreted in a
document to create different or new ones. The most obvious reinterpretation occurs when there is great difference in cultures, worldviews, and
standards for behavior between the historian and the producer of the documentary evidence. The greater the difference between past and present
persons, the more obvious to historians is the bias of the sources. Past
documents can be good sources for the values and actions of their authors
but less so as they describe or categorize the values, activities, and institutions of the others observed in the source. Facts about these matters may
therefore be re-presentations or constructions. Such documents, however,
may be poor sources for the thoughts, experiences, and at times the
behavior of the others described in them, particularly when dominant
people depict those subordinated in a society or when those of one culture describe those of another. In such cases of past obvious bias, for example, against slaves, witches, and aboriginal peoples from todays viewpoint,
historians prefer to reinterpret the sources in light of modern-day standards and sensibilities. Thus so much history about the discriminated

Historical Methods

35

against, the subordinated, and the subaltern comes from constructed facts
about them according to a modern as well as past context.
In line with modern-day sensibilities in these and other instances, historians infer or postulate, then, quite different facts to describe who,
what, where, and how or to explain the why than given by the authors of
those primary document(s) seen as biased. Historians today, for example,
must sort out what they accept as facts from the assumptions about racial,
ethnic, and other inferiorities so long the context in which so many documentary sources were produced. This reinterpretation applies most
obviously to ethnic, racial, gender and minority groups, because so often
elites, oppressors, or others dominant in a situation or in a society produced the sources. Postcolonial histories, subaltern studies, and the pasts
of native peoples until recently rested mainly on such constructed facts.77
Construction of facts through reconstruing past evidence often comes
into play when describing the aggregate actions, values, social groupings
and categories by social class and other methods common to social analysis today. Although the British political historian Geoffrey R. Elton
thought such theory contaminated, even concealed, the facts from the
past, each historian must nevertheless construct or at least construe how
any given past society worked and what were its parts. Such analysis may
not be the explicit goal of the historians research, but her facts will presume these categories. The historian must be particularly careful about
assuming that persons in the past would act just like those in the present
when faced by a similar situation.78
Construction also results from historians using modern-day statistical
analysis to provide new data about a past society. Often such analysis
results in facts about a society that its citizens may have experienced but
did or could not describe or report in their documents as such. Economic
historians, for example, create previously unknown statistical facts about
the degree of unemployment, the impact of international trade, or the
gross national product. Social historians construct statistical facts about
social mobility, the literacy rate, and the social background of participants
in voluntary associations or riots. Demographic historians construct birth
and death rates or age at time of marriage. Political historians use statistical analysis to determine the presence and role of political parties in the
electorate and the government or the issues salient to voters. Such statistical analysis not only generates new facts but also new explanations of
past phenomena different than the people at the time may have conceived. While documents from the time are utilized in such analysis and
some past observers may have given the same generalizations and causes,

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Fashioning History

modern-day statistical and other kinds of analysis allows denial or confirmation of those facts given at the time or provides new ones.79
As these paragraphs suggest, a good many constructed facts result from
the levels of abstraction and synthesis used to give content to social categories. Many generalizations about groups of persons, sets of events, institutions, societies, and other collective subjects are examples of constructed
facts. A notorious example is social class, but others are ideologies and
moral values. Although these constructed facts may be derived from a single document, they usually are developed from several or more. Statistical
descriptions, for example, may re-present what is given in one or more
documents, but more likely they are constituted from an analysis of many
sources. Statistical analysis aggregates and analyzes data in many individual documents to produce facts about general matters.
Facts are obviously constructed when they describe what past peoples
could not have known explicitly in the same way as a modern-day historian does. Perhaps the most important type of this reconstruing comes
from the historian knowing the future of past actions and beliefs. That
historians know the future of the past enables them to have post hoc predictive powers. They know how plans and actions, economic cycles and
political movements turned out. Such knowledge allows historians to
construct facts about the unintended as well as intended consequences of
aimed-for actions. Sometimes historians quote or paraphrase documents
by later persons describing the effects, particularly in the so-called old
political, military, and diplomatic history. In the newer social and political history, the historian derives the effects of past demographic and economic trends, electoral cycles and legislative coalitions from a multitude
of documents through sophisticated techniques. Other, usually later,
sources may mention one or another effect, but the historian needs to
look specifically for differential effects on specific sectors of the population. This is the domain of reader formation, reception and audience
response theory.80 Lizabeth Cohens Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers
in Chicago, 19191939 (1990) describes, as part of her general story of
mass production workers and the labor movement, how African Americans,
Mexican Americans, various immigrant groups, and poor white Southern
Americans each reshaped mass culture to their own purposes in the 1920s
and early 1930s.81
If the hazard to the historian of re-presented facts is adopting the
sources viewpoint on matters, then the risk of constructed facts is substituting the historians viewpoint for that of the source as the basis of the
fact. Both kinds of facts, however, result only from questions put to the

Historical Methods

37

sources. Those questions are framed according to the historians purposes,

social theories, explanatory models, understanding of human affairs,
social and cultural traditions, and what the historical profession endorses.
The resulting facts, or more precisely factual particulars, are of various
sorts depending upon what the factual statement refers to, how it refers to
it, and what the nature of the supporting evidence is as found in the sources.
If one were to conceive of factuality and truthfulness in historical practice on a scale of how much and closely the evidentiary sources are used
to make assertions of fact, then at one end are factual particulars given in
the source itself. At the other end of the scale are complex, summative or
classificatory statements developed from many sources. The English Civil
War and American Revolution, for example, are both facts in the sense
historians use that term. Facts on that level, however, embrace a myriad of
other facts about battles won and lost, generals plans and soldiers actions
in the field, the behavior of wives, politicians, merchants and others at
home, and millions of other facts, and they in turn rest on countless other
facts. Even to ask what was revolutionary about the events of each revolution elicits still other facts as answers. 82
Historians consider all these many kinds of statements factual and
truthful in their way, but the way matters greatly and varies widely in historical practice. And, of course, all depend upon one or more contexts of
use and understanding. They may, and more probably do, depend on
some social theory or model of explanation or even some interpretation
or moral or political purpose, but that is left to the next chapter. Whether
offered as descriptive, explanatory, or interpretive, all such statements,
however, are proffered as (and believed to be) factual in historical practice. All are considered part of historical knowledge.
As we move from facts about specific, concrete matters to facts as summative statements, classificatory terms, and abstract matters, even though
all are based (more or less) on empirical evidence, we can begin to see why
historians argue over what is a fact and what are the facts in a specific case.
Some facts are agreed upon by all (professional) historians. These facts, on
the whole, are those corroborated by many documents and are re-presentations of what is given in those documents or easily inferred according to
professional standards. These are so accepted as true that no one goes
back to the documented sources. Historians accept as historical facts that
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, that French citizens captured the Bastille in 1789, that George Washington became the first president of the United States in the same year, and that the Berlin Wall fell
in 1989. These facts mark what historians consider still other facts: the

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Fashioning History

end of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Roman Empire;
the end of the ancien rgime and the beginning of the French Revolution;
the end of the Articles of Confederation government and the beginnings
of the federal government under the United States Constitution; the end
of the cold war and the beginnings of whatever the postcold war era will
be called. Such second order statements are recognized as facts by professional practice and social custom and are therefore considered knowledge.
These second order facts may be constructed but they are considered factual and therefore true to the past.
Some statements about the past are considered true, that is factual, by
only some historians. Such facts are more likely to be constructed than represented, because of the greater degree of interpretation needed to establish the fact. Historians might differ over which documentary evidence is
pertinent, what the evidence really means, and what statements are therefore factual. Differences among historians over the truths of such facts are
likely to sort according to interpretations, schools, theories, or methods as
we shall see in the next chapter.
Whether a document can and should be accepted at face value illustrates well this point and its associated problems. Historians can agree on
the authenticity of the document as such but disagree over how to interpret it factually. The two proclamations, for example, issued by the
English king Charles II at the end of the 1676 Virginia rebellion that was
associated with the name of Nathaniel Bacon receive quite opposite treatments by the standard authorities on the subject. Wilcomb Washburn
argued in 1957 that the proclamations designed as propaganda leaflets to
aid the governor in breaking up the rebellion, placed a price on Bacons
head, but promised pardon to all his followers who would lay down their
arms within twenty days of its publication.83 Both an earlier authority
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker and later Stephen Saunders Webb accept
the documents at face value.84 To them the king indeed was more lenient
than the vengeful Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley. The reader of
these three experts can only conclude that their differing versions of these
two documents depend, first, on their appraisal of the character of the
two protagonists, Berkeley and Bacon, and, second, on the larger interpretive context they use to understand all the relevant documents.
Washburn favors Berkeley over Bacon and excuses all his actions, no matter how vindictive they appear. In this case, he defends Berkeleys own
more vengeful proclamation condemning the rebels by devaluing the
Kings more lenient proclamations as propaganda. Wertenbaker portrayed Bacon as the Torchbearer of the Revolution, as one of his books

Historical Methods

39

is titled, because he saw the rebellion as prelude to the American

Revolution. In line with this grand narrative of the growth of American
democracy, he sides with Bacon as a democratic forerunner and depreciates Berkeley as an aristocrat opposing democratic advances. Hence
Wertenbaker sees Berkeleys own proclamation as furthering aristocratic
ends even if it meant disobeying the kings orders and proclamations.
Webb places the events of 1676 in an imperial context, in which the
English officials were trying to consolidate a more centralized and bureaucratic imperial administrationthe end of American independence, as
his subtitle puts it. Thus they oppose Berkeleys longtime goal of operating a Virginia independent of the crown and mainly for the benefit of the
governor and his followers. Berkeley therefore saw the kings proclamations as furthering stability in a rebellious colony, which the governor
sought to undermine in order to continue his own independent exploitation of the colony inhabitants and resources. In each historians case, his
larger interpretive perspective governed his reading of the document and
whether to accept it at face value. In all cases, the facts were constructed,
and, in Washburns instance, his view even undercuts any reason to re-present any statement found in the document as factual.
Whether re-presented or constructed, the credibility of all facts depend
upon three general sets of contexts. One set comprises those contexts
derived from professional training and traditions. Another set revolve
about those attributed to various past societies and cultures. Still another
set includes the reception of facts by various audiences in the present.
These are interconnected in practice. Thus one persons generalization is
another persons fact. One persons fact is another persons hypothesis.
Some statements about the Washington Monument in the United States
Capitol illustrate the relationship among these contexts.85
All historians and their audiences accept the following statements as
fact and therefore true. The Washington Monument in Washington, DC
(to distinguish it from other monuments erected to him in the United
States) is a 555-feet, 5 1/8-inch tall neo-Egyptian obelisk. The object
itself is a survival that can be measured, but the attribution of its neoEgyptian style comes from historical knowledge of its documents and
context, partly a re-presentation and partly a construction. That the
twelve-ton plus cornerstone was laid July 4, 1848 and the one hundred
ounce aluminum cap was placed December 6, 1884, are statements represented from the documents. Likewise, that it commemorates George
Washington as the commanding general of the Continental Army during
the American Revolution and first president of United States under the

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new federal Constitution comes from the tradition of its name and, more
importantly, from generally accepted acknowledgment of the facts.86
Most historians and many of their audiences would accept as true and
probably a fact that the obelisk erected to him is a phallic symbol. Some
might even say that this is appropriately ironic given that Washington
could father a country but not children. The first fact owes its inspiration
to the theories of Sigmund Freud. The second is an inference from the
absence of records about any children with Martha Washington, even
though the documents reveal she had two children with her first husband.87
Fewer historians and probably fewer of their audiences (especially
males) might accept as true that for Americans to call George Washington
the father of his country perpetuates the patriarchal myth that oppressed
women throughout United States history. That Washington is called the
father of his country is documented tradition. That this is a patriarchal
myth and that it oppressed women throughout American history depends
upon a feminist interpretation of American history.88
Almost no historian but perhaps more of the audience accept as true
that the monument points upward toward Heaven where Washington has
resided since his earthly death. The factuality of this statement presumes
a particular interpretation of the Judeo-Christian belief system. The proponents of this statement as fact believe that the elevation of the monument indicates or symbolizes a pointing upwards. This belief in turn
hinges upon an anthropomorphic interpretation of the obelisk: elevation
represents direction. They of course assume the location as well as the
existence of heaven. The denial of such an interpretation, let alone as a
fact, shows the secular assumptions underlying modern historical knowledge and even interpretation. Of course, the east face of the capstone contains the words LAUS DEO, but this is an artifact of the 1880s. So
what evidence is this pro forma statement either of what was believed at
the time of the monuments origin or now? 89
As these various statements suggest, historians cannot separate the
establishment of a fact from its creation according to some framework of
interpretation. Nor can they split the acceptance of a factual statement
from the context provided by an audience, whether other professionals or
members of the larger public. To separate facts from interpretation is to
misunderstand and misrepresent what historians do and can do. Both represented and constructed facts use contexts and interpretation in their
own ways. Many historians also argue that facts cannot be separated from
ones ultimate values and beliefs. The production of factual statements is
the culmination of the historical method, but it is only the beginning of

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41

fashioning histories. Factual statements, whether re-presented or constructed, are among the elements synthesized into histories, which is the
subject of the next chapter.
Memories as Sources, Context, and History
Memories are a special kind of survival. Our memories seem to give immediate access to the past. Moreover that impression of the past grounds and
warrants our certainty that the past once really existed. Such a common
sense existential notion of the past as real justifies ultimately both the profession of history as an intellectual enterprise and the historical method as
its chief technique.90
Peoples memories provide evidence about earlier events, customs,
thoughts, and traditions. Some memories seem just like any other form of
testimony about the past. In fact, historians have long used memoirs and
other documents produced by individuals remembering events, activities,
and attitudes from their own past. Oral history interviews of those who
were famous or infamous add to the customary historical data about past
lives, activities, organizations, movements, or events. In practice, the distinction between primary and secondary sources and the maxims employed
to evaluate and develop the facts from secondary sources handled these
forms of memory like other evidential sources. In this use of memory,
such testimony supplements other forms of documentation.
Some memories provide information obtainable in no other form
about the past of an individual, group, or society. Oral historians query
workers, soldiers, women, minorities, and other members of the subordinated and exploited for the view from the bottom up or from below
in order to get a glimpse of the past otherwise undocumented. Museum
and historic site curators discover the uses of tools, objects, and other
material artifacts from those who used them or at least remember how
they were once used. By such means they gain knowledge about obsolete
machines and tools, antique toys and games, and once common household artifacts and practices.91 Museum curators and archivists also find
invaluable at times the information supplied by informants who remember neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and schools no longer in existence. At times, such memories help provide a larger context for museum
exhibits and historic sites. Documentary filmmakers include individuals
to give firsthand accounts of their previous lives or times as a way of
adding authority as well as authenticity, information as well as interest, to
their movies and television shows.

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Memories also perpetuate traditions and customs and venerate the

verities of a groups or societys heritage as people commemorate what
they at present believe best or most important about their past. Today
some museums or other repositories even collect memories to remember
experiences of those events too horrendous to leave to the ordinary forms
of written history. Such collections of memories are meant to guarantee
that such sacrifices were not in vain and will not disappear with the death
of those who experienced the events they recall. Forgetting is not an
option in this urgency to remember the evil horrors of the past and propels much of the recent emphasis on the importance of memory in scholarship. Such uses of memories raise the problematic relationship between
memory and history and exemplify the difficulties of applying the traditional maxims of evaluating sources as evidence for facts.92
To students of memory, everything seems based on itpersonal identity, culture, gender, ethnicity, and nationality as well as heritagebecause
everything not of the present moment is from the past and therefore a
memory or depends upon a memory. Such an approach to memory
absorbs all other kinds of study and is too imprecise for the use of the historian. To students of history, memory is at best a source, although it also
serves as context for historians and heritage for others. If everyday experience tells us memory of the past can be vivid, it is also warns us that memory is fallible as we forget. As fundamental and elemental as memory
seems to the historical enterprise, it poses problems as survival and source,
resource and context, heritage and history.93
One major problem stems from memories being both personal and
social. On one hand, all memories are those of individuals about their
lives, families and friends, neighborhoods, regions and nations, rituals
and places of worship, professions and occupations, schools and schooling, military service, ethnicity and gender, and a multitude of other matters. That almost all memories are shared by at least some other persons
and often by many in a society poses problems of description as well
as explanation for the scholar of collective memory. Even most immediate individual memories and their local contexts are social: family, friends,
neighborhood, workplace, church, school, and military camp. But even at
this level do all the participants share the same memories of the same
events let alone of a longer past? That peoples memories of matters, frequently the same matters, so often vary by the persons age and generation, social class and organizational position, place and time, ethnicity
and gender among other contexts suggest both their social dimension and
the problem of descriptive aggregation. Hence whether a person is a general

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43

back at headquarters or a soldier in the field, a grandparent or a grandchild, a boss or a worker, a master or a slave, a patrician or a proletarian,
in one ethnic group or another, a member of an old aristocratic family or
a new immigrant, a nurse or a housewife, a politician or a professor, a
priest or a poet, a suffragist or a nun makes a difference in memories, oral
recollections, and folk and formal histories.94
Even more difficult to describe and explain are memories seemingly
shared by all within a society or culture. Yet it is these collective social or
public memories that have most fascinated historians and other scholars
in the last few decades. According to Pierre Nora, the editor of a sevenvolume compendium of scholarly essays on French sites or realms of
memory, such lieux de mmoire are specific objects that codify, condense, anchor . . . national memory.95 They can be immaterial as well as
material, for he includes mottoes, festivals, speeches, treaties, customs,
flags, and holidays as well as commemorative monuments, palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries, school textbooks, national founding documents, paintings, and archives among the many such sites. According to Nora, these
sites embody and reinforce as they trigger and represent the past in the
popular consciousness. Such memories are cultural to the extent they are
shared and constitutive of a culture to the degree they comprise and perpetuate the collective identity of those said to share it. They are historical
both in the sense they survive from the past and they symbolize the past
of (and to) a society.
In pursuit of the mechanism and medium of cultural or collective
memory, scholars have studied a wide variety of social phenomena: public holidays, rituals of all manner sacred and secular, school lessons and
texts, commemorative parades and ceremonies, patriotic monuments and
memorials of all kinds, street and other place names, museum exhibitions
and heritage displays, preserved or restored old buildings and towns,
jokes and popular songs, childrens stories and television programs, and
visual and verbal objects of all sorts that exemplify as they prompt memories (so-called mnemonic memory). Today television is one of the great
mnemonic memory generators. As a result of its dissemination then and
its frequent repetition later of the collapse of World Trade Towers on
September 11, 2001, people across the globe instantly recognize the scene
when played. Of course the differing interpretations of that event across
organized groups and nationalities hints at the difficulty of generalizing
about what a supposedly collective memory signifies to different persons,
let alone what it shows about popular historical consciousness.96

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The profusion of terminology in the field indicates the disagreement

on how best to describe let alone explain such phenomena. As the several
termscollective memory, social memory, public memory, national
memory, official memory, vernacular memory, countermemory, and even
at times the older terms remembrance and mythall suggest, the problem revolves around who shares what and how. As the various terms
imply, some differences result from the varying assessments of who creates the memories and how, who perpetuates the memories and why, who
uses the memories for which purposes, and what are the traditions and
modes of representation by which they are transmitted.97 Thus, for example, notions of national and official memories presume they are shared
throughout a society, though the latter probably originates from governmental or other bureaucratic sources. Vernacular and countermemories
suggest that memories are situated in differing social sectors and may
derive from an oppositional impulse to the national and official ones.
Students of social or collective memory agree that present-day concerns
screen the memories of the past, that many past events are not remembered by social groupings, that memories serve present-day political and
other purposes, and that such memory is objectified because it is public
and therefore intersubjective. Just who shares and how is open to argument but memories are always mediated by time, space, cultural values,
and social position. In that sense and way the problems of description and
explanation in collective memory are no more or less problematic than
most other inquiries into social and cultural phenomena.
Another major problem concerns the connection between collective
memory and history, or more precisely, the relationship between historical scholarship and popular or vernacular historical consciousness. Whether
collective memories of past matters agree with historians interpretations
of those places and times is once again an importantand openissue.
Once upon a time not so many decades ago, memory and history were
considered opposites in goal and reliability. Historical scholarship was
thought to describe the past as it really was, while collective memory
imagined a past that never existed as remembered. Historians proved such
memories all too often to be merely nostalgic or even mythical in the
sense of being false. Pierre Nora asserted, for example, that history and
memory are in fundamental opposition. He declared dramatically in
his 1984 introduction to Lieux de Mmoire, Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution,
open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its
successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation,

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45

susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on

the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. . . . At the heart of history is a critical discourse
that is antithetical to spontaneous memory.98
Compare the similar distinction historical geographer David Lowenthal
makes between dead history and vital heritage in Possessed by the Past:
[H]eritage and history rely on antithetical modes of persuasion. . . .
Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets, and
thrives on ignorance and error. . . . Heritage is immune to critical reappraisal because it is not erudition but catechism; what counts is not
checkable fact but credulous allegiance.99 History employed documentary analysis because living memory of the past was extinct or disappearing.
However, with the modern disbelief in standard grand narratives of
progress, or other grand narratives, to provide a larger context for heritage
and the seeming postmodernist reduction of so much historical scholarship to textual representation, the gap between memory and history narrowed in the opinion of many scholars. As historical representation
becomes more invented and fictive according to postmodernist assumptions, collective memory becomes another important form of representation of the past. Scholars study how memories come about and are shaped
and transmitted in the hope of learning how societies come to understand
their past. Thus historian of recent Germany Wulf Kansteiner defines collective memory as the result of the interaction among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our
representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and
manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore,
or transform such artifacts according to their own interests.100 The ultimate question about collective memory as heritage is how and to what
degree popular historical consciousness fashions the past even in professional histories. (Of course, individuals memories of historic events offer
valuable evidence for historians through oral history.)
To what extent do the social and temporal positions of individual historians in relation to collective memories of their time shape their histories? Those claiming to be the 1960s generation prefer to remember those
times and their generation more favorably than those coming before and
after. From the clashing experiences of the 1960s come the contending
memories of that and other generations as they all age.101 Many historians
from that generation distrust big institutions, public or private, national or
international, and all huge processes, whether the global spread of capitalism
or mass media (usually depicted as working in union). They therefore

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frequently prefer the local and transnational over the national and international, countermemory to the official version, and even the peoples
experience and memory over long- dominant formal histories in the profession. While older historians in the United States still enthusiastic about
the possibilities of politics, as manifested in the New Deal for example,
trusted modern liberalism and the national government, a younger generation of historians condemned that liberalism for the actions of the big
state it justified and the warfare, racism, gender inequality, and continuing poverty it allowed, or even fostered.102
Thus a historians individual autobiographical or shared collective
memories offer a resource that provides personal guidance for measuring
what is factual, plausible, and moral in the documented past. On one
side, postgraduate seminars often question what the aspiring historian
had learned as official memory in elementary and secondary school and
perhaps even in college. On the other side, historians bring their own
family, social class, political, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, regional, national,
and other experiences to the formal training they receive in graduate
school. These memories may challenge prevailing professional knowledge
and interpretations. In that sense, family traditions and vernacular memory may act as counter-memory in a historians life and work. Surely some
of the reason for the rise and popularity of oral history must be ascribed
to efforts of historians and others to counteract official memory as represented in earlier twentieth century histories with the experience and
knowledge embodied in the vernacular memory they possessed, whether
of workers, women, or subalterns. Perhaps the greatest influence of background as opposed to professional training may show in what a historian
accepts as realistic and ethical in a history. That Armenian and Turkish
histories still differ over the 1915 massacre of Armenians, or Japanese and
Chinese histories over the so-called Rape of Nanking, Hispanic and Texan
memories of the Alamo, or Irish and English accounts of Northern Ireland,
for example, shows the influence of background and tradition versus professional training in the production of histories as well as memories.103
Continuing social traditions and living collective memory provide
historians and their audiences with a context for understanding the past
as history. When memory and tradition are shared by historian and public alike, there seems little need to describe and less need to explain those
institutions, customs, languages, societies, cultures, governments, economies,
tools, weapons, and other things still used and shared. Living memory, for
example, provides a ready-made context for understanding past artifacts
no longer used in the present and customs no longer prevalent. Whether

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47

and how much living memory is required to understand a past society

was raised provocatively many decades ago by a president of the American
Historical Association. He suggested to loud dissent that American historians who came from families of recent immigrants and were reared in
cities could not really understand the rural and Protestant lives of English
colonists in what became the United States.104 What experiences and
background enables a historian to cross religious faiths, gender boundaries, racial groupings, ethnic cleavages, and quite different cultures is a
matter of controversy.
As social traditions change or become extinct and memory becomes
weak or nonexistent, the more the historian must approach the past like
an anthropologist in a foreign land. Without living memory and continuing social tradition, the more the historian needs to imagine a context to
make sense of the documentary and other artifactual survivals in order to
understand the past as history. That context is generated by formal training to interpret documentary and other remains through the historical
method. Those once living documents, monuments, and other sites of
memory are studied now for what they reveal about how past peoples
imagined and represented matters: to embody communal values; to exemplify virtue; to offer warnings and lessons; to legitimate practices and
institutions, to provide self and/or collective identity. Commemorations,
memorials, and other forms of collective memory now become sources to
be interpreted as representations by a past society of its then present and
past.105
That both collective memories and professional historical interpretations have their own histories, then, complicates their relationship to each
other and their uses in understanding the past. The question of continuity or discontinuity of tradition and memory between a given past, a later
point, or now (or vice versa) is posed starkly in the idea of invented traditions: those rituals and other practices purporting to be ancient in origin
but actually recent in creation. Many such invented traditions arose to
create and support a collective identity, like the Scottish Highland tradition, the rediscovery of Celts, the cult of Shinto in Japan, or Confederate
flags and other symbols. Other traditions sustain the hegemony of a modern national state, like British royal pageantry, the French Joan of Arc
Day, or the American Thanksgiving and Memorial Days. The discovery
of such invented traditions demands customary historical analysis.106
Even though such traditions misrepresent the ancientness of their practice, they constitute their own kind of historical data about past and present societies and cultures. They just cannot be accepted at face value as

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Fashioning History

an accurate representation of what they claim occurred in the actual past.

The very idea of an invented tradition challenges the validity of social tradition as a guide to the past. On the other hand, official and collective
memories and professional histories may accept the same metastories as
their ultimate contextualization.
In the end, memory studies and professional histories share the same
problems and often demand the same approaches as a result. As Kansteiner
concludes, memories like professional historical representations are
negotiated, selective, present-oriented, and relative, while insisting that
the experiences they reflect cannot be manipulated at will.107 To the extent
that memories are collective they offer important intersubjective clues to
how a society conceives and represents its past. To the extent that collective memories are about history, they pose the same problems of analysis
and interpretation as any other survivals converted into sources, hence,
for example, both the value and problem of oral history.
As invented social traditions demonstrate about the past of a society,
collective memory as a guide to the actual history of society can perpetrate its own kind of obfuscation. What collective memories can tell us
about the past that historians seek to explicate in their own works elicits
a different approach to memory as source than what such memories
reveal about how a group of people represent(ed) their past to themselves.
In both cases historians use memories as sources but to different ends. In
exploring sites and realms of collective memory for clues to popular historical consciousness, historians ask who are the makers and perpetrators
of such memories in a society, through what means and to what ends, and
how and why were these memories received and interpreted in the ways
they were by a group or society. In investigating memories as sources for
the historians own interpretations of the past, they ask what kinds of
facts can be developed from what kinds of materials and how reliable are
the inferred or hypothesized facts about the past? In both cases, historians
approach sites or realms of memory with the same critical attitude and
often the same basic questions as they would for validating any other artifact as a reliable historical source.