Tackling the Mystery of History: The Poetic Perspective (A Series: 4/5)
I’d like to thank David Berliner, Courtney Bither, Bob Darnton, Loren and Pat Graham, David Handlin, Stan Katz, Anthea Roberts, and Dorothy Ross for their comments and guidance in writing this series on history.
In the previous blog posts in this series (click here: 1/5, 2/5, 3/5) I’ve asserted that competent historians are prototypical synthesizers. But while historians often write insightfully about their chosen field, it’s been difficult to determine from the written record just how historians themselves go about synthesizing.
Perhaps there is nothing magical or mysterious about synthesizing—it’s simply following a set of steps carefully and faithfully. And indeed, excellent guidebooks for students of history lay out the basic steps for producing a historical synthesis. I’ve termed this an “approach in prose”; and I outlined some of its features in the most recent blog post (click here: Synthesis in History: A Version in Prose).
But I have not been satisfied with this guidebook approach to historical synthesizing. It seems too pat, too prosaic. It’s neither deep nor broad enough to provide revealing insights into what yields impressive historical syntheses—the sorts of syntheses that are valued and that continue to be consulted over the years.
Accordingly, in this blog post, I take a more poetic posture. I draw lessons from two contemporary historians—one considered at some length, the other more briefly. In very different ways, these historians have provided me with deeper insights into the nature of historical synthesis. And then I cite two other historians whose reflections have provided additional insights into the way noteworthy historical synthesis works.
Exemplar #1: Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn, who taught at Harvard for over half a century, is generally considered to be the doyen of historians on the colonization of the North American continent—for both the quality of his scholarship and his deft mentoring of dozens of doctoral students in history. Bailyn was born in Hartford CT, in 1922. He attended Williams College, and also served a stint in the Army during World War II. In 1946, after a year in Europe, but before attending graduate studies in history at Harvard, he jotted down three “areas of interest” that he wanted to pursue:
“The first was the relation between European and American life. The second was the transition between the pre-modern and modern worlds, a period of history close enough to the modern world to show palpable continuities between past and present; the third was the interplay between social history and cultural or intellectual histories.” (Kammen and Katz in Hanretta et al. 6-7)
These were not minor questions. Indeed they constituted his research agenda—we might say “his overriding purpose as a historian”—for the next seventy years!
Over the course of that lengthy career, Bailyn wrote many books and articles that address this ambitious agenda. Fortunately for the topic of this blog post, he also reflected on how he did this:
“My procedure in research and writing followed a pattern too. I found myself involved in a series of projects. In each case I wrote a main publication and then worked further around the margins and implications in lesser publications until I had little more to say. And in almost every case I discovered, unexpectedly, within the plentiful data, one or more obscure documents or individuals that in themselves, in some peculiar ways, illuminated the greater picture. I did not search for these uniquely revealing lives and documents: they simply came to hand. But I found them to be vital encapsulations of what would become major developments in the emergence of modernity.” (Bailyn 295-303)
If I can paraphrase Bailyn’s reflection: In the background were the three very broad questions that had motivated his turn to history (he had actually studied literature and philosophy in college). He would then arrive at a topic that seemed manageable, study it, and write about it. But because of his very broad background of interests, he was perennially cognizant of new sources of information that could be relevant. And should one of these novelties happen to “pop up”, he could and did seize the moment to illuminate a further piece of these overarching puzzles.
While Bailyn did not particularly prize works that tried to characterize history—he was not a fan of historiography, which he construed as a kind of navel-gazing—he nonetheless provided an important characterization of the status of history as an area of inquiry. He clearly conceded that
“no one can tell a perfectly objective account. But you have to make sense of what you have gathered as well as you can. After all, you, as an historian, know how things turned out and the historical actors don’t.” (205-6)
The historical imagination must be closely bounded by documentation—limited by the evidence that has survived, and the content that has been previously established.
In a way that I found particularly illuminating, Bailyn compares history to literature:
“History in the richest sense must be, I believe, both a study and a story—that is structural studies woven into narratives that explain the long-term process of change and short-term accidents, events and encounters which together changed the world from what it had been. But we must still be storytellers, narrators—though of events lodged deep in their natural contexts” (218)
“The historical imagination must be closely bound by the documentation—limited by the evidence that has survived and limited to be consistent with what has previously been established.” (206)
But Bailyn goes on to explain what makes for the exceptionally creative historians:
“it is the wholeness of their visions, the capacity to conceive of an entire world and not merely one problem or one issue or theme, that is the crucial element. In this capacity these historians are comparable, I believe, less to the scholarly historians than to the novelists who have created entire worlds, like Faulkner….Historical genius, the capacity to project, like a novelist, a non-existent, an improbable world in all its living comprehension, and yet to do this within the constraints of verifiable facts.” (218)
As Bailyn quips, history can be disproved, a novel can’t be. Few would challenge Bailyn’s place in the pantheon of great American historians. But let me invoke—more briefly—a very different kind of witness.
Exemplar #2: Robert Caro
Still active in his middle 80s, Robert Caro became known originally as the biographer of Robert Moses, a titan of New York building policy and related matters in the earlier decades of the 20th century. Having published The Power Broker, his critical account, in 1974, Caro has devoted the rest of his lengthy career to a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, arguably the most powerful American president in the last 75 years.
Caro’s background is quite different from that of Bernard Bailyn. After graduating from Princeton, where he majored in English, Caro became an investigative journalist. While he did not enjoy going to large meetings or interviewing minor officeholders, he was fascinated by the challenge of identifying and solving crimes. And in the process, he became obsessed with the question of what it means to accumulate power and then to use that power—benignly or malignantly.
Despite the time that it takes, reporter Caro found lengthy biography preferable to short news items produced on deadline. And while he considered writing a biography of Fiorello H. LaGuardia, another titanic New York figure, he was easily convinced to write instead about Lyndon Johnson—an assignment that he has been pursuing for almost half a century.
Caro is not trained as a historian. But he proceeds as a historian of the contemporary era would, one writing about figures who are still alive or who died recently. Caro depends heavily on interviews—spending many hours with the people who knew and worked with Robert Moses or with Lyndon Johnson; he also spends thousands of hours going through archives. In the case of Johnson, Caro actually relocated to the hill country of Texas so he could get a feeling for the land where Johnson grew up and the kinds of individuals and groups with whom he rubbed elbows, worked, pandered to, and/or served.
Caro has been driven by a guiding hypothesis or theme: if one wants to gain and wield power, and one does not start with enormous resources, one has to be ruthless in climbing the ladder and in dealing with contemporaries. Correlatively, as a historical biographer of such personalities, one must leave no stone unturned in unmasking the sluices of power.
In the cases of both Moses and Johnson, Caro has been able to locate the “smoking gun”—the evidence in detail of what Moses, first, and Johnson, later, had done to seize and maintain power. In a manner of speaking, Caro emerges as the detective who has “solved the mysteries” of two larger-than-life power brokers.
In his study of Robert Moses, the turning point came when Caro received a phone call from a woman whom he did not know. Here’s his account: The unexpected informant said to him
“‘I hear you can’t see his (Moses’) papers.’ I told her that was right. She said ‘Well, he forgot about the carbon copies.’”
The woman led him to an entire row of four-drawer file cabinets containing not just carbons but thirty years of memos, orders, and directives from Robert Moses. (Caro 65-66)
The memos indicated exactly the leverage—money, power, prestige—that Moses used to get reluctant people to go along with him. And once Caro had these papers—as he put it
“I could track down these people and go to them and say ‘Tell me more.’” (Caro 67)
As he sought to understand how Johnson initially got elected to office and then was able to advance swiftly to higher and higher ranks, Caro engaged in a similar quest. Caro was certain that Johnson must have made huge secretive financial deals with powerful Texans. As he put it in his memoir
“I had only one question left, and there was only one man who could answer it. I might know the answer, but knowing it wasn’t proving it. Herman Brown was dead—I had to talk to (his brother) George.” (129)
And, as Caro reports, against all odds (George Brown had boasted that he had never given an interview) Caro found a way to have the crucial conversation with George. George confirmed that Johnson had “bought” the support of the Brown Brothers giving them hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts. As geometers say, QED.
In juxtaposing Bailyn and Caro, I’m aware that I have linked two bedfellows who are quite different from one another—and quite possibly, in the process, antagonized fans of either or both of these excellent historians. But I have run the risk for two reasons:
First, both men have life-long vocational missions that they have pursued over lengthy and productive careers.
Second, while neither claim to be literary figures, the genres they pursue and the linguistic devices that they use are in many ways similar to those of writers of fiction—and, I would add, particularly those who write mystery stories. Hence “The Mystery of History”.
In sum: case studies of two individuals who, by virtue of their life-spanning projects and their manner of procedure, have helped me to understand historical synthesis.
Let me now shift gears and introduce the individual who, at least for me, has done more than others to illuminate the burden of the historian.
Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian who lived from 1872-1945. He is best known for his studies of culture (Homo Ludens portrays the importance of play throughout human history) and for The Waning of the Middle Ages (a study of Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, with particular focus on art, fashion, and culture).
More so than any other historian whom I have read, Huizinga writes directly about historical synthesis. As he portrays it, the historian is always engaging simultaneously in analysis and synthesis. In lieu of paraphrasing, I’ll quote three passages from his reflections:
“Is it the historian’s task to analyze or to synthesize? Here again. The answer is to do both….no knowledge of the particular is possible with its being understood within a general frame…every historical fact opens immediately into its past.” (Huizinga in Stern, 300)
“The historical observer never confronts a bare and simple fact unrelated to a broader general context. Even the smallest fact has significance for him only because it fits into a system of ideas that he has already formed, to which in some way or other it corresponds. A historical fact is particularly only insofar as it can be included in a more general frame.” (291)
“In history, synthesis occurs to a certain extent in the act of analysis itself. Since historical knowledge is primarily a view of something—much as people passing through a landscape absorb its beauty as they go.” (300)***
Reflection
I’ve done a lightning tour of historiography, stopping at three quite different sources:
The autobiographical reflections of historian, Bernard Bailyn
The autobiographical reflection of investigative reporter-turned-biographer/historian, Robert Caro
The portrayal of his chosen field by historian, Juan Huizinga
Though in very different ways, I interpret these three reflective figures as arriving at a common portrait—a poetic portrait—of synthesizing in history.
In each case, the practicing historian has a major preoccupation, goal, or set of goals. These remain vivid in the historian’s mind throughout their career.
The historian is immersed in an examination of all the materials that might illuminate the guiding projects/concerns/goals.
There is a constant interplay, dialectic, dialogue, between the large general goals, and individual morsels of information that might help achieve the illuminating goal.
While not primarily a literary figure, the historian in many ways resembles the novelist—and, in particular, the writer of mysteries. There is a puzzle to be solved, facts and figures are cited along the way, and in the end, the historian puts together the best account possible.
The historian resembles the detective—except that the evidence has to be genuine, and subject to scrutiny and even disproof—it can’t just be neat, it has to pass the challenging test of validity.
And like the best of detectives, the historian then moves onto a new case—sometimes one arrived at by accident, sometimes by design, sometimes easily solved, at other times left for another occasion.
In the final blog in this series, reflecting on my reflections on history, I will attempt to draw some lessons for synthesizing across the scholarly landscape—and perhaps beyond.
Footnote
*** Since I drafted this blog, I encountered The Landscape of History, a set of lectures by the contemporary historian, John Lewis Gaddis. Gaddis makes much the same points as Huizinga, and if I had not already taken my examples from Huizinga, I could easily have done so from Gaddis. Let me give credit where it is due, while adhering to the conventions of a series of blog posts.
References
Bailyn, B., 2020. Illuminating history: A retrospective of seven decades. New York: Norton.
Caro, R., 2019. Working. New York: Vintage.
Henretta, J., Kammen, M., and Katz, S., 1991. The transformation of early American history. New York: Knopf.
Gaddis, J.L., 2002. The Landscape of History. New York: Oxford.
Ginzburg, C., 2013. Clues, myths, and the historical method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Juan Huizinga in Stern, F., (Ed), 1972. The varieties of history: From Voltaire to the Present. New York: Vintage.