Some of you may know that I’m currently taking a course on history methodology, in preparation for writing my senior thesis next year. If you do know, however, you probably didn’t remember until I mentioned it just now: it’s a somewhat boring class, which could and should last one hour every other week, rather than two hours every week. The students and professor alike do their best to keep the conversation dynamic, but if, at the end of each class, you asked me what I’d learned, I’m not certain what I’d answer. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled with good seminar; after all, discussing historical methodology at a party won’t get you a date, in the way discussing the Enlightenment or European Fascism will. Although I’m looking forward to finally reading Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, and Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, there is one topic definitely missing on my syllabus, covered only vaguely in the first week’s reading, and tangentially in one article in the fifth week.
That topic is what I call concreteness in history. It has to do with a very delicate balance in historical writing. When historians seek to describe the events of the past, they information they present falls somewhere on a scale of specificity, ranging from the anecdote on the one side to the generalization on the other. Although I emphasize that this is a scale, and that there is a well-sized grey area, most event can be classified without much difficulty as one or the other. Whereas an anecdote (from Greek, “unedited”) is a specific event involving or in the presence of a certain individual or group at a particular time and place, a generalization (from Latin generalis, in contrast to specialis) sweeps anecdotes into a blender, sets it to “purée” for ten minutes, and tells you how the smoothie tastes, thus “editing” the unedited. If a generalization is quantitative, we call it a statistic. When selecting, interpreting, and presenting the primary sources that reveal the events of the past, historians must write in both anecdotes and generalizations. This is a fine balance to strike: how often to generalize, and how often to recount anecdotes.
Too many anecdotes, and too few generalities, leaves the reader uncertain just to what he should importance, and how much. Herodotus is a classic example of this (Ibn Daud is too, but less well-known, and a certain neighbor of mine might not appreciate criticism of Sefer HaQabalah). The man just loved anecdotes. For instance, he tells us, the names of the bravest soldiers in every battle, and of individual acts of heroism. For instance, at the battle of Plataea, the Athenian Sophanes “wore an iron anchor, fastened to the belt which secured his breastplate by a brazen chain; and this, when he came near the enemy, he threw out; to the intent that, when they made their charge, it might be impossible for him to be driven from his post: as soon, however, as the enemy fled, his wont was to take up his anchor and join the pursuit” (Histories 9.74, where there follows a second, contradictory story about Sophanes). Even Herodotus’s generalities are more curiosities to be admired than meaningful topical summations. For instance, he describes non-Greeks to his all-Greek audience in part by their foreign eating-habits: Assyrians lived exclusively on fishcakes; Massagetaeans were cannibals, milk-drinkers, and lacked agriculture; and Persians were unmatched in the decadence of their cuisine (Histories 1.200, 1.216, and 9.82, if you don’t believe me). Although the citations reveal that I’m pulling these from different books, my point is that these may be generalizations, but by the time you pull up Facebook again, you’ll have forgotten these passages. This is the problem of Herodotus: though his descriptions of battles are riveting, and his anthropological observations are fascinating, one week from now, you won’t remember who Sophanes is, nor will you know anything about Assyrian eating habits.
The opposite problem is much more common among contemporary historians, particularly (in my own experience), those who study East and Southeast Asia. For instance, all I remember about the Tang Dynasty (618-907) from a semester-long class on premodern China and Japan is that some people played polo in the North. So that I won’t be comparing apples and oranges, I’ll choose a written source, instead. Seymour Drescher wrote the most boring assigned course reading I have ever read, the introduction to a book-long debate over the precise connection between capitalism and the abolition movement (the same people involved, the best example being the Quakers). Throughout the entire Introduction, only the name of a single historical actor (a wealthy British merchant) is ever mentioned, and the non-scholarly reader is left clueless as to just what the natures of the abolitionists and capitalists were like. All I can remember is the premise of the article: I derived no benefit, because there were only generalizations, no anecdotes.
John Lewis Gaddis, in his Landscape of History (don’t bother reading it), writes that historical writings are to the events of the past as maps are to a landscape. Historical writing cannot describe all aspects of the past without becoming as vast, clumsy, and “unedited” as the past itself (or, rather, the vestiges it leaves behind, which Gaddis calls “relics of the past,” which, upon historical scrutiny, become primary sources). To borrow a statisticians’ adage about models, all historical writings are false, but some are very useful. Anecdotes must be selected, and generalizations must be made; major questions remain which ones, how many, and in what proportion to each other (bearing in mind, of course that no single historian, no matter how dedicated, can ever exhaust all primary sources on a subject). Many students of the past have successfully struck this balance over the years. To name just a few, Edward H. Schafer (The Vermillion Bird), Thomas Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization), Arturo Valenzuela (The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile), Benedict Anderson (“Census, Map, Museum” in Imagined Communities), Mark Kurlansky (Cod), Philip Deloria (Indians in Unexpected Places), Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers), Belinda Davis (Home Fires Burning), Ada Ferrer (Insurgent Cuba), John Ellis (Eye-Deep in Hell), David Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace), and every contributor to The Cultures of the Jews have all produced excellent, informative, well-written, and well-balanced works.
My favorite example, however, of balanced historical writing, is Thucyidies.. In Book I of his sadly-unfinished History of the Peloponnesian War, the old Greek general establishes the great conflict, that all Greece ought to have seen coming. Athens and Sparta had been on a collision course since the Persian Wars more than a half-century before: the Delian League had become the Athenian Empire, and every year, more poleis were joining, ever increasing the Athens’s resources of ships, warriors, and treasure; before long, Sparta, long the most fearsome Greek polis, would be in an obvious position of inferiority: Athenian power posed a direct threat to Spartan hegemony, and Athenian coercion of traditional Spartan allies, most importantly Corinth, and most cruelly, Megaros. But though Thucydides’s political acumen was great enough to write such cogent generalizations of international relations in Classical Greece, he was also capable of including the anecdotes necessary to make the generalities stick. One of Thucydides’s famous contrasts between Sparta and Athens, for instance, is that the former’s power is land-based, and the latter, naval. This is best illustrated in his numerous descriptions of battles. For instance, early in the war, an Athenian fleet fights a group of enemy ships, who are so frightened by the Athenians’ navy, famed as the mightiest across the Hellenic world, that they form an outward-facing circle, and back water to maintain a safe distance. The Athenians threateningly close in circularly, and, eventually, their enemies bump into each others, their sterns and riggings tangle, and they surrender to the Athenians. The ease with which I just wrote this passage (notice the lack of citation) should convey Thucydides’s ability to make his ideas memorable. What he has done is make history concrete: the reader understands larger themes (generalizations), through specific incidents (anecdotes).
To return to Gaddis’s metaphor of historical-writing-as-map, if generalizations are the paper of the map, then anecdotes are the pushpins which “fix” it, and prevent it from curling up around the edges as the map ages. With no generalizations, pushpins in the wall are boring things; with no anecdotes, maps, no matter how valuable, will remain forever furled in the corner.
Concreteness is the effect of a proper balance between anecdote and generalization: it is not the balance itself. When the two are in proper proportion, one knows the physical, visibly human actions on a small scale, as well as the significance of these actions to a larger historical narrative. What many modern historians fail to do, in their generalization-based history, is remind the reader what his generalizations mean, and what they look like. When I was in France, studying at the Sorbonne, I vigorously studied the Finance Ministry of Louis XIV. I read and reported on the entire process of direct (and indirect) tax collection and assessment. The different courts and tribunals, the various officers and commissars, the lands of election and of estate, their calendars and timetables: all I tried to explain to my classmates, with my friend Pauline Renoir, in 20 very, very short minutes. Throughout the project, though, I was bothered by two closely-related questions as to the historical relevance and importance of the presentation I was crafting and the material I was sifting through. The first was: was any individual involved in this hierarchy of transfer actually aware of any of the other actors? My conclusion, at the end, was a tentative no: the higher-ups didn’t care how each receveur particulier (the crucial intermediary link in the chain) came up with the money he delivered to the receveur general, and the humble collecteur had no way of knowing what happened to the tax money he levied. My second question still remains unanswered: how did the average taxpayer physically pay his taxes? Would twelve soldiers, armed to the teeth, knock on his door demanding money, the way so many bad Robin Hood films have taught us to imagine tax collection? Or was he obliged to visit the collecteur and his staff with a purse of silver coins at some sort of regional office?
The negative answer and non-answer to my questions reveal that the books I was reading lacked concreteness: I could not ascertain the physical, visible aspects of the actions described therein. Concreteness is important for two reasons. First, it forces you to understand what you are saying when you are making historical claims. If, for instance, I made the sweeping claim that “in its early years, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile was particularly brutal,” something I learned from my course on Latin America, and somebody pressed me for examples, I would know how to respond. I could say: “The day after Pinochets’s September 11th 1973 coup, approximately seven thousand known supporters of the just-murdered democratically-elected president Allende, were rounded up, and detained in the stadium in the capital city of Santiago. Many of these people were beaten, tortured, and executed by machine gun fire.” Here, I not simply using a blanket statement, such as “coup,” “repression,” or “military crackdown.” If pressed for details, I could provide the example of Víctor Jara, the famous leftist folk singer, most of whose upper body was broken in the severe beating he received, who was taunted by his tormenters to try to play his guitar in such a state, and who began the composition of a poem (successfully smuggled out), unfinished because he was dragged away to be executed by machine gun.
Such an event is as vivid as it is shocking; and this brings me to my second point: concreteness is necessary in order to “fix” certain events and milieus in the mind of the reader. Just as medical students have their mnemonics (“On Old Olympus’s Topmost Top, A Fat-Eared German Viewed A Hawk” in order to memorize the names of cranial nerves), history students need their mental pictures, sound bytes, and video clips to prevent what they are learning from dribbling out of their ears. For instance, I still bear in my head the vivid picture of a housewife in wartime Berlin smacking an offending policeman with her milk pot. This instantly summons forth a host of other images and ideas: starvation and shortage, the colored rationing cards, steaks cut out of every horse which collapsed in the streets, the terrifying gun-toting and sword-wielding German police, the vast slaughter of one third of Germany’s pig population, the “turnip winter,” public kitchens, black market butter, k-bread and double-k bread: I suddenly recall the milieu of starvation in Berlin in World War I. Like turning over a seemingly ordinary stone, only to reveal a scuttling swarming universe beneath, each one of these scenes (and I have collected many, over the years), “reveals” a throng of interrelated images.
Many historians write concretely, consistently: others do not. Some professors at Cornell include concreteness in their lectures: many others do not. In less than one year, I will, for the first time ever, be in the position to write as a historian does: I only hope that my writing will be as concrete as it is insightful, and as original as it is interesting.
~JD
“A salient feature of the plantation period is the number of European accounts that actually credit slaves with the introduction of specific foods to the Americas, all previously grown in Africa” (Judith Carney, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the Atlantic World, 123).
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