Chapter 1 - Defending and Lamenting History
This chapter explores 19th century (German) attempts at a objective/scientific history.
While not the first, Leopald von Ranke was perhaps the most well known proponent of the "scientific" historical method, which focused much of its attention on reading document as windows to the past. Nietzsche strongly criticized this method, claiming it stripped the life from history (and modern living). More moderate critiques (such as Dilthey) took something of a middle road. Rather than reject the documentary method and move to art, there was the rejection of positivism (to some extent).
Ranke comes to the US and history starts pushing toward attempting to be objective, "what actually happened". That said, the later critique was not brought over. Furthermore, the more recent German historians become tainted with Nazism. The resulting historical approach divests itself of questions of philosophy or theology. Truth becomes unitary and not perspectival. One went to the archives after divesting oneself of one's own biases. Meanwhile, in the sciences, objectivism was being undercut by relativity. However history continued to revel in the concept of an objective perspective.
The biggest problem facing historians then became questions of epistemology: how can they show that their reconstruction of a past event is "what actually happened"? Historians had no ready answer for this. Further, their methods (which involved digging into documents and archives), could not answer this question.
History lacks a direct object from which to extract empirical data. Rather, all history is done by examining documents and other "texts" which have been constructed by other persons. Thus, we cannot observe the past and create "eyewitness" accounts after the fact, but instead we are constructing a view of the past with multiple (at least 2) layers of bias to be dealt with -- our own bias and the bias of the creators of the archived material. (To say nothing of the bias of archivists, any possible redactors, and the randomness of what survives and what does not.)
Structuralism might argue that one still must attempt and objectivist history, or at least one in which one does not inject one's own bias into the retelling. Conversely, many post-structuralist histories (feminist, ethnic, sexual identity, etc.) argue that one's own bias is unremovable, thus one should embrace it and create histories which will conform to one's own bias. While the argument against this is based on the idea that these are appropriating history for one's own goals, Harlan argues that this approach is actually bringing forgotten/hidden voices out of the graveyard of history and letting them speak again.
With the advent of feminist historians and historians of color, history as a discipline was thrown into chaos. The traditional historians argue that objectivity could be attained and that to embrace one's own bias in one's history pollutes it. These new historians argued that the "objectivity" claimed by traditionalists was an illusion: it was simply the accepting as "normal" the biases of a white, male historian (and we might add cisgendered, Christian to the list of assumptions).
This leads to the fear of relativism. If these blatantly biased histories become accepted as valid, does history itself become completely relative? Is any interpretation equally valid in all circumstances? Shifting from relativism to "ethnocentrism", the claim becomes a bit different. Now, there are possible universal (or near-universal) claims which can be made, however, one must acknowledge one's social/historical location.
The ensuing "war" between traditional and theorist historians left some to fear for history itself. It was not history that was being besieged, but rather historians. Thus, traditional historians bemoan what they felt was a lack of academic rigor in theorists' work. The theorists felt they were being misunderstood, their work no less meticulous than the traditional historians. Today, most historians would admit that any single work cannot present the fullness of any event in history, though they may still present a traditionalist understanding and a desire to attempt as full and objective a history as possible. On the other side, theorist historians will fully admit their biases, but will also carefully work through nuances of texts (in all their forms) to find historical meaning.
Clark, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 2004.
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