What is history? sounds like a straightforward question.
But to answer it, we need to use a less then direct approach, as if we were going to sneak up and corner it, so it must reply honestly.
To answer the question What is history? the best question to begin with is Where does history come from?
This is a key point.
If I ask What is history? most of us would reply with some version of: Everything that’s happened in the past; or, a true and honest account of our past.
But how do we know what is a true or honest account of our past?
That knowledge only comes from what historians write and teach.
That’s why we need to ask, Where does history come from?
History, with very few exceptions, is written by people who were not alive during the times they were writing about. No one alive today was there in 1898 when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders helped conquer Cuba for the U.S.
Or in 1858 for the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which ruled that enslaved Black people were property, not persons before the law, and therefore it was in violation of the Constitution to pass any law limiting slavery, or prohibiting its spread; nor in 1565, for the establishment of the first European settlement in what became the United States of America.
That’s why, to find out about the past, historians rely principally on primary sources. Primary sources are written documents, pictures, artifacts, any material that was created at the same time that it is describing: newspapers, journals, medical records, pictures and photographs, government documents, personal letters or notes, recordings when available, church records.
(That’s, for example, how we know that the number of brides who went to the altar already pregnant in Puritan colonial New England was greater than in twentieth century New England. Seventeenth century church records included marriage and baptism dates.)
For the most part, learning from documents and primary sources works well. But learning about the past from primary sources also has its own problems.
For example, there’s a well-known primary source created by artists who came to this continent from Europe, late in the 1500’s, specifically to draw pictures of the indigenous peoples living here. One sketch of what they observed shows natives, clothed in the carcasses of previously killed deer, sneaking up to within four or five feet of unsuspecting deer drinking at a stream “without frightening them.”
What are we to make of this? Most of us today with any experience of deer in the wild might rightly react with puzzlement, or disbelief.
Yet the primary source was created by people who were there at the time. Their purpose was to describe what they observed. Are we to discount the validity of this 16th century primary source because it’s not congruent with our understanding of its subject – hunting deer in the wild – today?
Another drawing from this series, titled Hermaphrodites as Laborers, shows hermaphrodite natives carrying the wounded and sick on stretchers.
The description under the drawing tells us “Hermaphrodites are common in these parts. They are considered odious, but are used as beasts of burden, since they are strong. Whenever the Indians go to war, it is the hermaphrodites who carry the provisions.”
Again, what are we to make of this? Do we discount this sixteenth century first person source because of our own beliefs today about the existence of hermaphrodites – humans with the physical sexual characteristics of men and women? How do we know whether it is accurate? And what about other drawings produced by the same artists? Should we doubt them also?
What we can learn from these examples is that current interests and beliefs always influence the history told.
Our sense of our present — what the world is like now, according to us — effects how we understand the past. What we see as reasonable, or possible, now impacts how we understand primary materials from decades or centuries ago.
Here’s another example – pertinent today — from the history of historians writing about Black Americans.
The most up-to-date information in the 1940s and 1950s, from the most experienced and respected historians of slavery in the United States at the time, concluded that because the “Negro” was slow to learn, tended to laziness, liked to laugh and sing, was not responsible, or dependable, enslavement was really the best solution for them. And Negroes knew that, these historians concluded.
They appreciated their masters — masters who treated them kindly, made sure they had food every day, and adequate housing, and presents at Christmas time, and a safe plantation to live on. These conclusions from the 1940s and 1950s have been shown, repeatedly, by historians working in the last sixty years or so, to be false, inaccurate, and grossly misleading.
What can explain this radical change in our understanding of American history?
What we see here, again, is the power of our own current beliefs to influence how we see our country’s past.
The historians who wrote those distorted accounts of plantation life were men of integrity, honestly working with primary materials — and each other — to uncover information in an attempt to understand slavery in America.
But because those men — and historians were almost exclusively men then — were largely white, upper middle class, or even patrician, they used only those sources that made sense to them: sources that supported their own heartfelt certainty that Black people were — and are — inferior.
The history of slavery in America has changed so markedly in the past sixty or so years because the class, race, gender, age, and personal experience of historians has changed.
To add a personal note: I remember a noted historian of the Middle Ages who came to our university as a guest lecture in the early 1970’s Over dinner, before his talk, he told us what he thought was an amusing story. One of his graduate students proposed to do his research on antisemitism in Europe during the Middle Ages. How silly, he said; laughable! Of course, he told his student no.
As a young historian who happened to be Jewish, I found it neither silly nor laughable; it sounded like an important topic, not to be overlooked.
The same as with knowledge in every other field of study, historical understanding is constantly being revised. We wouldn’t want to be limited to the physics of sixty or seventy years ago — before big screen television, and the internet, and cell phones, intercontinental missiles, drones, satellites, and interactive maps.
Or the physical education conventions of sixty or seventy years ago, when girls and young women couldn’t play organized sports — no girls’ basketball, or softball, or volleyball, or soccer. Such activities were considered unsuitable for girls and young women. Why expect the nation’s schools to teach the history of sixty or seventy years ago, when women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and folks who worked in the trades were largely ignored?
All history is revisionist history. It’s constantly being revised and changed. That’s the only kind of history there is. There is not, and never can be, one uncontested, objective, true account of history.
(An authoritarian government may determine what can and cannot be taught. But that would not make its account accurate, or objective, or uncontested.)
What is the answer, then, to the question: What is history? Again, it’s not the story of the past, or whatever happened in the past, or even what the winners of wars write. History is whatever historians now care enough about to do research in primary sources, and then share their results.
