Book review: "From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods," Howell & Prevenier

This is a review of the academic title From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

As it declares on the cover, this very readable academic book is an introduction. It is broadly a history of the craft of writing history. Its review of the writing of history uses examples primarily from the late mediaeval to the modern periods. My area of study is antiquity, but there is much here that is relevant, whether in regard to skills, or the challenges of crafting historiography in the modern era. But it is an introduction, not a handbook, and particularly to western historical methods. I have enjoyed reading it, except for a strange thing that develops which leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and which I will leave till later.

This book, as an introduction, speaks of the most useful techniques that historians use but does not lay them out in the manner of training. It speaks of some of them being scientific, but admits that in application it is more art than science, and explains how historians are reaching across to other disciplines to try to overcome that deficiency. Although it talks of historians using ever more sophisticated techniques, reading this book will not leave you ready to apply them yourself. Rather, it outlines things, and gives examples to illustrate how the writing of history has changed over the millennia, with changing worldviews and techniques, and how it has changed rapidly in the modern era, especially post-Karl Marx (more on how his work is pivotal in western academia in a moment).

Our authors' - Howell and Prevenier - style of arguing is often to set up premises and knock them down. Thus: “the historian’s basic task is to choose reliable sources, to read them reliably, and to put them together in ways that provide reliable narratives about the past” – but “reliability is a stubbornly elusive goal” (page 2). This develops into a deep sense of futility by the end, with a few crumbs of optimism offered, such as that “useful knowledge about the past” is obtainable, but not a true picture of ‘what really occurred’ in the events of the past. It leans towards minimalism: critically reading the work of an ancient historian reveals the picture of reality that the ancient one is weaving, but not an actual reality beyond it (because, basically, we weren’t there to witness it ourselves). Past historians thought otherwise about the usefulness of writing history, and were naïve to do so, apparently. In the modern crisis, historical documentary sources are interrogated, not trusted; the key questions being, why did that ancient person write such and such, and why did people preserve it? A testimony may have useful content, but a modern historian may be more interested to ask for what motives the testimony exists, wary that we can’t do much better than that. I am wary that one seems to see that maxim applied inconsistently by historians: some modern social history more or less relies on the testimony of minority voices being heard in their own terms, and this poses a question of the interrogation of testimony of minorities by historians, a problem that this book does not venture to discuss. It opens a door that the authors may not want to open: is what's good for the goose good for the gander? You won't find the answer to that here. (When this book was published, critical theory - and its idea that social justice requires the relative privileging and protection of certain voices - was only in its infancy, and so this book does not directly address the question of how this could affect historical investigation more broadly.)

We are to be self-aware of our own biases. This means of course that we should also be sensitive to Howell and Prevenier’s biases: the historian creates narratives with meanings and that applies to their own narrative about the history of history. Their biases gradually become apparent.

Their book takes us through advances and failings in historiography through the ages, through antiquity, the mediaeval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and multiple post-Marx phases.

Highlights of chapter one include helpful and concise definitions of different kinds of historical source materials, and kinds of preservation, summary explanations of why some documents are preserved and available, and others not. Its summary of why so much from the ancient period is lost is particularly helpful (37-39). Its explanations of the changes in history-writing from one era to the next are commendably concise.

Chapter two opens the historian’s toolbox to examine the properties of palaeography and archaeology, the growing role of statistics due to input from other academic disciplines, and a wide number of other tools. There are plenty of cautions about over-simplifying their use. There is also an appraisal of source criticism, that it still has its uses despite its weaknesses; and this includes a helpful list of factors that historians use in evaluating how much to depend on this or that source.

Chapter three covers “traditional basics” for interpreting the past – strategies hailing from the nineteenth century onwards – whereas Chapter four brings us up to historiography in the modern era. Chapter four especially factors in the difference made from cross-disciplinary input, particularly from the social sciences, in terms of insights and methods. This is not only about gaining more scientific methods but also about new worldviews. On the outside, it’s the abandonment of old certainties in regard to what we can know about the past. On the inside, well, let me take you there: “no historian after Marx escaped his influence.” Not so much his views on human agency or his economic critiques, but his theories on class, on how social change can happen. This helped enable the rise of social history as different to the histories of great men. Naming historians whose work embodies sequences of evolutions in thought, our authors introduce us to ideas about seeing societies as whole structures; collective consciousness; the idea that “Social facts are those ways of acting, thinking, and feeling which exist outside the consciousness of the individual and which have enormous coercive power” (92). We visit the discredited positivism of trying to treat the historian’s craft like a laboratory science. Also, we touch on tools derived from Freud, Jung and Eriksen “to discover the anxieties of an age” (95). All this is hedged in with the doubt that human life is too complex for over-conceptualisation of rules and systems to work. But it is notable that, in the authors’ view, essential to the development of modern historiography is both the legacy of those pioneers of psychology, and also the academic descendants of Marxist thinking. These different streams speak to each other. This steers modern historiography away from religious or political conservatism (with a small ‘c’), for better or worse. The authors never claims that these tools are neutral, but it’s worth noting in order to better understand more of what follows.

Staying with social sciences, the authors tell us that “historians of more recent generations owe their most direct debts to anthropology” (97). This did, early on, lead to gross errors of judgment, judging peoples in over-simplified and anachronistic terms that fostered imperialism and racism, leading to a sense of guilt in western academia, followed by the epistemological crisis that has gripped historiography. In its wake, we have seen the rise of two things in particular:

• structuralism (the big idea “that “systems” precede and structure experience”; such that we and our knowledge are products of experiences in a matrix of structural forces almost beyond our control [105]; and such thinking encompasses, for example, “Marxian sociology”);
• and post-structuralism (doubting that there is any stability in what signs signify, and conceding that language gets in the way of knowing reality, and the text gets in the way of knowing “truth”, such that we don’t know what’s the story and what’s the telling of the story).
• One impact of post-structuralism is that it is undermining confidence in interpreting language and texts in history departments and across the humanities. As a result, the skills required to read texts critically have increased in range. The rise of semiotics and the idea of “signs” to be decoded, is followed by loss of confidence in the same, and all of which is now usurping the old confidence in a ‘common sense’ approach of relating 'words' to 'things' which is how people of the past had thought was how language was functioning. Of course, these remain contested philosophies that are never static as the moving targets of academic thinking. 

In the face of this twin onslaught, the Enlightenment’s stable idea of the “person” collapses, and people are basically whatever the crossfire of life makes. Critics of novels become, for example, more interested in the structure of a novel than in the stories it seems to tell; and it’s the same with historical investigation into the sources we find.

Some historians – and other academics - have fought back and tried to do ‘common sense’ history, but the balance of power in academia, pursuing the course I have described, is unconvinced by the attempt to do so. (For a sense of what 'common sense' methods have been in the past, see Chapter three, which captures the good, the bad and the ugly of it. As to what a 'common sense' approach would be today, the authors don't say, but this book isn't necessarily the place for that.) We are in the realm of “discourse” now, where our knowledge is really our own experience of “systems of speech, thought, and action” (108). The old certainties are gone, and out of the melting pot of uncertainty, people produce new “systems of speech, thought, and action”. So, it becomes possible to recognise that “facts” are potentially something we can create, and thus new categories come into being for “homosexuality… depression… genius” as new social facts (108), and even the idea of “popular culture” as a new social fact (112). We can speak facts into being and re-make the world. Put in those terms, there is something very ancient as well as modern about this posture, as if the academic becomes a magician creating reality with spells. I'll come back to that.  

Those academics who want to write about the past with some reasonable degree of a stable narrative can’t throw up their hands in despair, and “while we can never isolate a definitive truth of any text, we can discern its relative location in the consensus reached by the largest body of competent readers.” It seems to me that the danger here is that the academy, in supposedly denying access to truth, in a strange way becomes the gatekeeper of realities, with special access that those who are less 'competent' inevitably lack (although the authors push back against that caricature). It’s the rise of the new intellectuals, so to speak, and they are re-making the world.

We come to the non-neutral politics of modern history writing. And at more or less the same time to the democritisation of it, achieved by widening access to the academy. The historian makes a virtue of not pretending to be neutral or impossibly objective, and has a standpoint instead. So, we have a more politically engaged historian, and the more standpoints the merrier, where this represents previously under-represented social groups. In light of Marx’s theories about how societies can change, social history becomes interested in how ordinary people – of various backgrounds - change culture: this becomes an important argument of historical research.

Which historians brought this into being? “Most important of these was the so-called new left, a largely unorganized group of historians who, after World War II, adopted and revised Marxist theory to found new kinds of progressive history” (112). Now, in a new sense, there was room for “women’s history” written by and about and not least for women (and many of the writers have been feminists); also “lesbian and gay history” (note not “LGBT” history in this 2001 book); “African American history” (the book was published in the United States); and “Ethnic history”. These can all be described as “the new social history” featuring “close observation of small details, careful listening to every voice, every nuance of phrase” (115).

With these things comes a shift. We are no longer structuralists putting people into categories they didn’t choose for themselves. As to our method, people of the past must be understood in categories that they chose for themselves, assuming that we can see their world from their point of view: that is, “the subjective and objective strategies by which they apprehended and manipulated family, community, political parties, and networks of clients”; and this method has been “widely adopted” (116). The rituals of everyday life come under close scrutiny. And, guess what? Narrative and storytelling make a comeback, which helps to reveal how cultural rituals play a part in people’s lives.

This is not exactly post-structuralism in the broad terms I spoke of above. Allowing voices to be heard means to a degree trusting their testimony. We arrive at a major shift of emphasis “from structure to culture”. For culture can be an instrument of change and a means to understand change. We can note, for example, how the English working class made their own history, because class itself was a cultural product “made by men out of the materials of their lives”; so, taking control of their own history was possible (116-17). We are within a strain of “marxist perspective”. This is not about writing “neutral” history. This is mapping out the levers of change for understanding the past with a view to future use.

In this train, historians have asked “what made “women” women”; and have had “methods of analysis… that allowed direct scrutiny of how gender is created, experienced, and changed” (117). And historians have generally become more aware of their own role in putting together the world that they tell us about. And “culture” is key.

We thus have a view of what has provided “the turn to narrative and fuelled interest in cultural history; it helped create what became called “cultural Marxism,” in which a culture is seen not as a reflection or even as a “semi-autonomous” system but as an agent in historical development.” It’s noticeable that these historians did not in 2001 treat the term “cultural Marxism” with a sense of the toxicity that it has today, where it is used as a term of abuse towards outworkings of critical theory.

Chapter five follows on with reflections about historical knowledge. It pauses to consider the optimistic “teleology” of Augustine’s Christian view in which history is the playing out of God’s plans for the world; and notes “the marxist theory of history is, in its strict form, teleological as well, for it conceives of history as an inevitable progression toward communism” (120). The contrived ideas of historical periods as mediaeval and modern come in for criticism as historians’ self-serving categories created to justify ideas such as history being a story of ‘progress’ towards the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Such happen to be Eurocentric categories whose claim to progress has been undone by twentieth century pessimism over humanity’s self-destructive tendencies, which have played out on a global scale; and undone by the realisation that so much of human nature does not actually change over time.

Events have causes, but these can be complex; and historians, helped by other sciences, are taking a wider view of how one thing is possibly the cause of another, if it's even possible to be sure about this. For example, in the flow of twentieth century pessimism, new attention falls upon the role of natural ecology and climate as one cause of change in human history. (Bad harvests make bad news and can have society-changing consequences, for example.)

As to historians' big ideas about the direction of change, the authors talk not only of teleological change but also, by way of comparison, cyclical change, slow change, fast change, and so on. It becomes the job of the historian to propose the reasons why this or that change happened, not just to accept a system of thought or the word of voices from the past. The authors make it clear that they want historians to carefully consider what they mean by “cause”, as there is an underlying philosophy(ies) to this matter. With the right tools, it should be possible to conclude that some events, “aligned with certain conditions,” cause other events, but this is not an easy kind of judgment to make (131).

Amongst causes of change, the authors pass quickly over religion (rather rashly assuming that Saddam Hussein and George Bush appealed to “the same God,” which would be surprising news to any Muslim if this meant that their God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit!). The authors have rather more to say about “Karl Marx’s theory of causality … probably the most influential single body of work concerning socioeconomic factors and historical change,” including the notion of “class war” as a key example of a tension internal to the social system (132). Here, the authors’ biases seem to come to the surface in a surprising way: “feudalism collapsed because the nobility lost power to a rising bourgeoisie… Capitalism will, in turn, collapse when the bourgeoisie can no longer extract enough surplus from the labor of the proletariat to sustain economic growth” (133). Although they are setting out Marx’s position, it doesn’t feel like they are necessarily distancing themselves from it.

Moving on to “biology and race” in the discussion of change-causing factors, there is brief comment about how “race” became a historical category in the wake of the misuses that flowed from Enlightenment ideals, Social Darwinism, and imperialism. I’ll have to skip over much here, but pause to note the difficulty in defining social “power”, and also attention now given to the power of rumours – useful definitions and explanations are found here.

There is brief but useful discussion of the fact that an individual can cause change, albeit within systems that enable their control, such as “class interests”. This complicates reading of texts in determining cause. For this and other reasons, it becomes important to look at how a text was received in its time of origin, not merely looking at a text’s structure or content. Reception history is thus a growing field.

We also remain aware of post-structuralist thought, to assist in both understanding a society’s status quo and understanding change. Thus,

“ideology is almost unconscious … a system of values that inform action … about what is “natural” and “given” and what, in contrast, is “changeable” or “man-made.” In this sense, ideology is a product of culture … Modern scholars have helped some of us see that fixed categories of gender are also ideological constructions, that in fact there is no coherent, stable “woman” or “man” in human history, that any culture’s “woman” or “man” is an ideological product” (147).

As that quote hints, that remains a controversial view.

Signing off with some optimism about historiography, ‘”objectivity” is not possible, but [historians] would insist that historical study can, nevertheless, yield useful information.’ Albeit reading history from the standpoint of the reader’s position in the world (148). But “we have to settle for studying the reality that sources construct rather than “reality” itself” (149). The authors step back from the caricature of modern historians as magicians able to reveal hidden truths, although it seems to me that post-structuralism is at times vulnerable to that charge. Future history writing, as it were, still has to consider whether it can find a better way, and various forces will inevitably vie to be the prevailing historiography of tomorrow.

After reading this book, it's clarified my sense of a growing dichotomy, in historiography. Going further than the book does, here are some of my forward-looking reflections about the state of historiography in the academy. On the one hand, there is the pessimistic minimalism of only being able to get useful information about the past but not an account of what actually occurred in the past. This attitude has a curious parallel amongst some young people's uses of smart phones. I note a recent trend where any unusual claim among them on social media receives the response "Pics, or it didn't happen!" No photo, no credibility. Whereas on the other hand, there is the journalists' dictum "trust but verify." 

To assist understanding of the impact of the minimalist way of thinking, I will give my own illustration (not from their book). The first century Jewish writers Philo and Josephus both state more or less that in their own days there was universal education for Jewish children so that they could read Hebrew sacred scripture. These remarkable statements have in the past served as enough “evidence” to convince many readers. After all, these two would know, and naturally they offer an explanation ... More recent scholarship, however, treats these statements not as evidence but as claims. Against Philo and Josephus’ claims in this regard, scholars are cautious because these claims would be contrary to high levels of illiteracy most everywhere else in the ancient world; and so scholars want evidence on the ground, which is lacking. Therefore many scholars today do not accept Philo and Josephus’ claims here. Instead they think this is probably an example of ancient propaganda to give the outside world the impression that Jewish education was as at least as sophisticated as that of Greco-Roman elites. This would be an example of the strict tough standards of modern historiography, especially towards claims that are contrary to analogous norms: “pics, or it didn’t happen” in the modern idiom. But it is notably different from the idea promoted by some critical theory to privilege some voices.

That is, the method of historiography that has grown around once neglected voices of the disadvantaged. So it's possible to do a history that "trusts" the lived experience of a woman's voice, a native American voice, and so on. In recent developments in application of critical theory, a deep division seems to be appearing between those who think minority voices should be heard and not questioned by the "establishment"; and in such historiography the journalist's "trust but verify" could be reduced merely to "trust" - the uncritical and somewhat romantic idea of "letting voices from the past speak for themselves" as some might put it. 

Two methods that are not easily reconciled. This "trust" of testimony does not necessarily sit well with the minimalism of obtaining mere "information" from a past that is basically inaccessible. Anyway, those are some thoughts of mine on future problems that the book does not seem to spot as a potential dichotomy.

From Reliable Sources is a book I would recommend, so long as it is not the only introduction to historiography that one reads. I hope I have given a sense of some ways in which it is useful. As it majors on the trajectory taken by western historiography in light of Karl Marx's influence, it would be interesting to speculate about how the writing of history in the twentieth century might have taken a different course had his influence not been there, but that would be a different book. 

Finally, I want to note something that I found a little odd in the book. There is a constellation of mentions of Jews and one feels compelled to question potential bias in the authors’ selection – you can talk about these things, but why this constellation in this book?

• “Israel’s role … in the massacre in the Palestinian camps in Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut” (72)
• “Exactly how many people died in the Nazi concentration camps, and how many among them were Jews? No numerical example given to a question like this, no matter how plausible, can ever be absolutely proved.” (80)
• “Once again, the case of Israeli’s [sic] role in the 1982 attack on the refugee camps in Beirut” (74)
• “[concentration] camps where certain Jews assisted in the exterminations in exchange for their own lives” (83)
• “… argued that religion was not the dominant mover in capitalism, putting his emphasis instead on the psychological need for achievement that minorities feel (in the case he studied, Jews in western Europe)” (91) – implying that Jews are a prime mover in capitalism
• “A notorious example [of a rumor] … The story was that Jewish shopkeepers in Orleans were luring girls to work as shop assistants and then selling them off into prostitution. in fact, no girls were ever reported missing. Like this rumour, all rumors work best when they build upon already existing suspicions or fears.” (140) [emphasis added] The authors hardly explain why these should be existing suspicions or fears of Jews.

This is not wholly representative. There are positive statements about Jewish people too. But I’m sure I won’t be the only one who will find this constellation of tropes disconcerting, the role of Jews in the rise of capitalism, Jews helping to kill Jews in the holocaust, Israeli atrocities, etc etc. Given everything that the authors have told us about how historians create their own realities, how are we to take this? Is it an unfortunate co-incidence that a book with a deep interest in post-Marx readings also has what could be taken as a selection of anti-semitic tropes (in light of concerns about these two being married in some contemporary trends)? But it is not wholly negative about Jewish people, and perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt to the authors.

And that is not to take away from the many valuable features of this book, and the history student can certainly benefit from reading it closely, albeit with the caution required in reading the work of historians, to detect their biases and our own, just as the authors tell us to do.