Getting History Righter

What You Need To Know To Do Historical Research Better

This is the eleventh in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.

While most articles in this series are behind the paywall, I feel that in this political moment it’s important to have this one be freely accessible. Our histories—yes, plural, always plural—are vital information that informs how we imagine, strategize, and build our future.

A lot of people interested in the past think that if they read history books and journals and spend time looking at primary sources, they already know how to do good historical research.

But good historical research doesn’t only include reading history books, or diving into history journals, or even spending time in archives looking at primary sources.

Good historical research starts with understanding what history is, what historians do, why histories and historians inevitably only tell us part of the story, and why that means we always have an opportunity to get history a little righter.

All historical work is an attempt to make a record of at least some portion of the past. But no historical work is a complete record of the past, and no historical work is an unbiased record of the past.

This is because history is far too vast for anyone to represent all of it, even if they only attempted to represent a single moment in time. This means we make a lot of choices about what to leave in and what to leave out.

Austin Kleon has some good stuff to say about this in relation to creative pursuits like art and writing.

It’s helpful to understand why things are the way they are (that’s kinda why we do history to begin with) so let me unpack this a little.

History is the practice of using written and other human-created documents (images, music, film, etc.) to chronicle and explain:

• Things human beings did in the past, whether creative or destructive

• Experiences, reactions, and thoughts human beings had in the past, especially those that led to particular actions or refusals to act

• Human cultures, communities, and shared beliefs, thoughts, and priorities, especially those that led to particular actions and experiences

• All the non-human variables affecting past events, especially those that affect human beings: weather, natural disasters, microbes/germs, animals and their activity, forces of nature like erosion

This is done in one of two basic ways, either taking a “snapshot” view of a particular moment in time (this is called the synchronic approach) or looking at how things change over time (diachronic). As much information as it requires to provide that synchronic, snapshot view, it requires exponentially more information to give an accurate picture of how things happen over time.

Nobody can chronicle everything. There’s simply too much. This is why no historical work is a complete record of the past: historians have to limit things somehow, and they do so by choose what subjects or issues they want to focus on and what period of time they want to work within.

From The Princess Bride, of course.

These choices are also why no historical work is an unbiased record of the past. Every limitation we place on the parts of the past we attempt to chronicle inevitably includes some things but excludes others.

The boundaries historians put on the topics they want to study and the time periods they want to work within are typically made on the basis of what they consider to be important and interesting. Not everyone considers the same things to be important or interesting. The things any given historian finds important and interesting are often intimately conditioned by that historian’s own life, identity, and experiences.

This is why the phrase “history is written by the victors” is so important: over the course of history, the accounts of past events that have been best represented and best preserved have been accounts of things that were considered important and interesting to people and cultures that had a lot of power. Part of having social and political power is having the resources to tell your own story and narrate your own past in ways that get disseminated and passed down and taught to others.

This is exactly why until recently, a lot of historical work focused on the pasts of people who have or have had a lot of power and authority.

In the West, this has meant that history has mostly been written about white, European or European-descended, male, high-status, married, educated or at least literate people. It’s also meant that people who shared those characteristics were the ones writing most of the history too. For good reason, this is often called Great Man History or Dead White Guy History.

I would’ve enjoyed this.

More recently, that picture has begun to change. Women historians, historians who are people of color, historians who aren’t European-descended, disabled historians, queer historians, and other people who don’t share all the Dead White Guy History demographics have begun the project of working on telling some of the other stories about the past. Beginning to include some of the aspects of history that were excluded by other historians’ choices has dramatically broadened the kinds of history to which we have access.

Another way of saying it: as people have chosen to research and write about the pasts of more different kinds of people, events, experiences, and cultures, we’ve gained a much broader picture of what history has contained.

Broadening the picture of what history contains is the core of doing history righter.

By “doing history righter” what I mean is including more of what actually happened and why it was important. Because “human history” is itself so vast, a more accurate version of history is by definition a version of history that includes a wider variety of information from a broader array of human experiences and perspectives.

So how can you or I, as writers who do research, do history righter?

First, we can make a point to ask some key questions about what historians do and how they do it and pay attention to the answers. These might guide us to doing additional research or taking our research in new directions so we can include more of what happened and understand why it mattered.

Second, we can be aware of a few common fallacies people (including some historians) fall into when they’re thinking and writing about history, and do our best to avoid them.

A page of entries from the 1950 US Census, from Chicago.

The questions:

• What are the boundaries or limitations on the topics, places, timespan, and individuals whose actions are being considered? What and who is included? What and who is not?

• What documentary evidence do we have relating to this topic/place/time/people? Where does it come from? Who created it? What choices (and/or biases) are reflected in the evidence that has come down to us? (This is a lot like the “consider the source” part of evaluating whether a research source is valid and why that was discussed earlier in this series.)

• Can the documentary evidence we have actually answer the questions we are trying to ask? Sometimes it can and sometimes it can’t. Do we actually have sources that can answer our questions?
  (For example, a census report can tell us who was documented to be living at a particular place at the time the census was taken. It can’t tell us whether they liked living there. It also can’t tell us whether there were, perhaps, other people who sometimes lived there temporarily or who were sheltered there and hidden from the authorities for some reason. We’d need different evidence to tell us those things.)

• What things do we know must have existed in this historical environment that aren’t being included?
  (For example: Many military histories don’t discuss food or eating. But soldiers must eat! Where does their food come from and how do they get it? Who prepared it and how? Does any of this ever affect what militaries do or how? How is food part of a military history?)

  

  Contemporary French military field rations. Doesn’t look toobad, compared to the US version. Vive la France!

• Besides the individuals whose actions are being actively considered as part of historical events, who else was there at the time? What do we know about them? What roles did they play and how did they fit in to the larger picture?
  (For example: if soldiers were eating food, other people were growing, harvesting, transporting, and preparing it. Who? How? Where? Were they affected by the war and if so, how?)

The fallacies:

• Fallacy: History has a metanarrative or larger framework that somehow makes sense of all events involving human beings. This is called the teleological fallacy — starting with a particular outcome, then working backward to see what led up to it, then presenting that sequence of events as being somehow inevitable or preordained. The simple fact is that history is still unfolding and human beings are still involved in events and we have no way of knowing whether or not history as a whole has a metanarrative. Many metanarratives — for instance, that human history is a story of the war between good and evil or God and the Devil — are actually metaphysical, and not historical at all.

  

  Possibly the only context in which a historian can legitimately discuss this particular metanarrative.

• Fallacy: Events happen in order for specific historical outcomes to occur. This is another version of the teleological fallacy. Given just how many events happen in the world, and what a vast range of possibilities those events represent, we know that any such historical explanation is wrong simply because it is 100% reliant on cherrypicking highly specific events to explain a given outcome. For example, we can’t say that Ronald Reagan’s ancestors came to the United States in order for their descendant to eventually become President. We can only say that they did come to the United States and that their descendant eventually did become President.

• Fallacy: Nothing really changes, history just repeats itself. Human behavior has a lot of recognizable patterns at the level of groups and societies as well as at the level of the individual. But to say that the existence of patterns—for example the pattern of people rising up to resist abusive treatment—means that history is continually and literally repeating itself is flatly false. There are repeating motifs and patterns, but these patterns exist alongside massive changes such as the fact that we have ceased to believe in or select our leaders based on the notion of the divine right of kings, that although human beings have not always organized their economic activity on the basis of capitalism most now do, or that despite the fact that human beings have not always been capable of fairly reliable control over when they became pregnant, we now consider it common.

• Fallacy: People in the past viewed events with more or less the same viewpoints as we do today, and had more or less the same information about them as we do today. This fallacy, an example of what’s called “hindsight bias,” is simply and demonstrably untrue and can be exposed by carefully and rigorously separating the facts from the arguments. A famous example, outlined in 1970 by historian David Hackett Fischer in Historian’s Fallacies: Toward A Logic of Historical Thought, is the argument made by some analysts and historians that Americans shouldn’t have been surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII because there were — in hindsight — lots of indications that such an attack might take place. The problem is that in that actual moment, lots of other things were going on, including countless conflicting signs that suggested other things might happen. What actually did happen was not a foregone conclusion in part because there was so much else going on and so much other information in the mix… and we know this existed, we have the documents.
  Similarly, although we now expect people who get married to be in love with each other and have romantic and sexual feelings for each other, this has only been true for the past 150-200 years. Prior to that point, as historian Stephanie Coontz has elaborated, it would’ve been considered unusual, and the motivations of people who married for love, rather than more prudent considerations like whether their families got along or because it made economic sense, were often considered to be extremely foolish and short-sighted. We simply can’t assume that our forerunners did things the same way we did them or for the same reasons we might do them, or that they felt the same ways about them when they did.

What it says on the label.

There are many other historical fallacies that get repeated in historical writings; these are merely four of the most frequent and distorting. As when we are evaluating the reliability of any source, it’s wise to think about how much we want something to be true. Our own emotions, and whether or not we find a particular explanation to be emotionally or ideologically satisfying, can be a pretty good indicator of whether we should be a little suspicious as to whether the actual evidence supports that explanation.

The more of human experience we can include in our historical research, and the less we can even attempt to put a spin on that experience so that everything adds up in a way that seems to satisfy some desire for a bigger order, the more likely we are to be doing history righter. Human history, remember, is a very very big forest, and any one of us can only climb one tree at a time. Acknowledging that your tree is only one of many, and that not all the trees in the forest are exactly the same, is how we do a better job of historical research, historical analysis, and sharing the history we uncover with everyone now and in the future.