The Leisurely Historian…

Novick breaks up the book into four periods: the 1880s through 1910s,
WWI and the interwar period, the mid-40s through the mid-60s, and
finally, the 60s into the 80s. The “narrative” is that of, in the
corresponding time periods, the rise of “scientific” objectivist
history, followed by the ascendancy of challengers to these claims of
objectivity, most famously with the speeches of Becker and Beard at the
AHA, the incorporation of some of this group’s criticisms during WWII
and the early years of the Cold War to remodel and reconfigure what
“objectivity” meant, while at the same time putting it back at the fore,
and finally, with the social unrest of the 60s, the loss of the goal of
objectivity to specialization. The sometimes rather passionate critical
responses to this book that I have found make me ask if the objectivity
question is as settled as he makes it out to be.

Novick’s periodization is rather essentializing, and I have to question
to what extent it creates a sort of “cherry picking” effect, not
allowing for the voices of historians who may have been out of step with
their historiographical period.

Likewise, his fourth section was somewhat difficult for me to grasp. I’m
not sure I agree with or even understand how historians no longer trying
to produce work that is catholic, all-inclusive, generalized actually
means that there is a breakdown of the myth of objectivity. Couldn’t one
be objective and still specialized? Are ichthyologists not being
objective by studying fish, instead of all of biology? Also, using the
brick metaphor from the first section, couldn’t the compartmentalism of
post-60s historians be looked at as just “making smaller bricks?”

In his introduction, Novick explains his view of history, and espouses
the view that historic events tend to be the effects of
“overdetermination.” The only time I’ve encountered this term used with
reference to historical events is usually in work drawing on the Marxist
theory of Louis Althusser. This leads me to believe that in certain
respects, Novick is essentially a structuralist. His quoting Emile
Durkheim in the same introduction would reinforce such a view.

Which makes me ask, where’s the Poststructuralist History? Shouldn’t
there be, couldn’t there be, a real movement challenging the myth of
objectivity by using Derridian techniques of deconstruction on the
truth-claims of history?  The closest I’ve heard of to this is the late
Jean Baudrillard’s work on the Gulf War, but I haven’t read it yet. Did
the book come out too early for Novick to witness Poststructuralist
History’s moment, or has it not materialized? It seems to me that it
would be a worthwhile project, if only because it might be a useful
technique to put aside the objectivity question once and for all.

So as I was downloading the Sockwave player onto my Internet Explorer, which I haven’t used since I bought this computer except to check how my web pages look on a non-standards-compliant browser, something I asked a couple members of this class last week came back to me:

Could someone tell me why we should even worry about how our web pages look in IE? Why bother with the little hacks and fixes?

Seriously. If the entire web starts ignoring IE, and users’ experience on all websites just starts slipping, won’t that just encourage a) users to jump over to Firefox or something that’s similarly compliant and open-source, and/or b) Microsoft’s developers to realize that there’s a real problem with being non-compliant, and getting with the program?

What really drove this home was reading about (and in the case of WebAim, simulating) the experiences and difficulties of those with disabilities using the web. The fixes are all doable, and not too hard to implement on an example-by-example, but overall, it’s a lot of extra coding, a lot to keep in mind, a lot of extra work.

Don’t get me wrong– the work is worthwhile, and even admirable. People with disabilities use the web. If anything, my experience as a big ol’ geek who spends too much time in internet communities, BBS’s, and networking sites seems to indicate to me that it’s actually a disproportionately high number– or at least that the handicapped have a disproportionately high presence on the web. My personal experience having a roommate with Parkinson’s has only backed up this concept– he spends more time online than almost anyone his age I know. It’s his livelihood and a major connection to the outside world for a guy who has to take a van to go even a block from home.

So I’m all for implementing accessibility measures on my web pages. It makes sense. It’s the humane thing to do. And it’s catering to a good potential audience of highly-engaged users.

But at some point, the camel’s back will break. I’m all for geeking out on doing your design, etc, but at some point you really just want to put the stuff up on the web and get it out where people can see and use it. If you’re looking for somewhere to cut corners for speed or convenience, it just makes a lot more sense to try to make your page accessible to the greatest number of people. Cut corners by not designing to the people whose only "handicap" is having a rotten web browser. And then, if you feel like trying to get those people to come over to the non-IE, compliant side, don’t coddle them, but prosthelytize!  Try to tell– or even show– people just how easy it is to install a nice, simple compliant browser.

My comments in other blogs can be found here, here, and here.

I personally found Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre
quite informative and enjoyable.  I seem to be in the minority within my class, however, as many people seem to feel the book is quite simply not
history.  I disagree.

Personally, I feel that Davis did an amazing job of making an historical
work out of scant details. Moreover, by taking on the story of Martin
Guerre, she has done something that few historians I’ve read have
actually pulled off—she created a work that relies on the methods and
works of social history that nevertheless has a story.

The book is a
model of how much can be done with so little. And I find that rather
inspiring, as I always seem to think the meatiest, most fascinating bits
of history are the ones that you find in that single, throw-away mention
in a book about another topic completely.

Davis indicates that this story still has cultural capital, is still
being told and reiterated, almost five hundred years later. No story
stays part of the culture for that long unless it inherently hits on
some raw nerve of the culture, some theme that seems almost
inexhaustible to the people who keep telling the tale. When something
possesses this sort of cultural relevance, it is natural for an
historian to try to come in and attempt to see what light historical
knowledge can shed on it. 

Guerre’s case is a natural for such
treatment, as well, as it’s a “true story.”

Such work is difficult, however, there’s really only one primary source,
and another cotemporary source that may or may not be written by someone
with any firsthand knowledge of the events that transpired. Looking
through the footnotes, Davis definitely leans on Coras, but she then
went the extra step of incorporating a lot of nineteenth and twentieth
century works that applied to the case—and in this way, she was able to
flesh out things that may have been unclear in Coras’ text. She
elucidates peasant economies and family structures of the time. She
brings in the Guerre family’s Basque heritage, and how it helps to
explain why Martin may have left—something that likely was inexplicable
to his French neighbors.

This incorporation of knowledge of peasant life
at this time and place enriches the story, and gives a reader a far
fuller understanding of the events of the tale.

Where Davis speculates as to people’s mindsets or attitudes, she tends
to very reliably use those famous phrases that historians to indicate
such a shift. “It may be” and “it is possible” and “perhaps” are all
over this book. The book contains an entire chapter on Coras and his
strengths and weaknesses as a source. There’s even a selected annotated
bibliography at the end.

To me, these all indicate an historian who is
struggling to remain in the realm of “real history,” using the tools of
the trade and being quite transparent about her sources.

It all comes back to that persistent “objectivity question.” I think
that Davis saw the potential for a good book, and one that contributed
to an ongoing discussion of over four hundred years. When confronted
with the dearth of sources, Davis faced a dilemma—she could be
objective, or attempt to tell the truth. She chose the latter, and I
personally think it was the right decision. 

“Objectivity” would have
left the book unwritten, a single paragraph, as one of my classmates pointed out.
The use of reasonable inference and honesty about uncertainties and
ambiguities, however, brought about a book that I felt was a worthwhile
read.

Besides, I still feel that the truth is seldom “objective.”

Changes in the Land deals with the impact on the ecosystems of New England by Native Americans and colonial British settlers.

Cronon’s basic premise is that Native and English populations viewed the land and its use in fundamentally different ways, and that the decreasing population of the former and the increasing population of the latter led to a fundamental change in land use among both.

This in turn influenced the very environment itself, as the reordering of economies and land-use changed the landscape, the flora, the fauna, water quality… New England would have been almost unrecognizable in 1800 to someone who had seen it two hundred years prior.

The way man interacts with his environment fundamentally alters that environment. If Braudel was writing about how mountains and bodies of water influence human history, Cronon is writing about how human history influences mountains and bodies of water.

Cronon’s basic thesis—and the implications of adding the environment to how we view history—are unassailable and invaluable. This is definitely one of those books that’s a classic for good reason.

However, there were two small, niggling inaccuracies I noticed—things I only knew about due to later scholarship—that nevertheless I think point to some of the work’s biases. I don’t feel that either of these damage the worth of the book, by any means, but they are telling or at least interesting.

First—on page 14, and again on pages 92-93, Cronon explicitly argues that part of the difference between Indian and English economies is one of scale. While this is true, the scale of the pre-Columbian North American economy is somewhat underestimated by Cronon, who argues that it was exclusively limited to inter-village and occasionally regional trade.

While it is true that there weren’t Native wholesalers shipping stuff out to the Pacific in the able hands of Indian Teamsters, Daniel Richter’s Facing East From Indian Country has demonstrated that the pre-Columbian Native American trade network was definitely a continental one, while still supporting Cronon’s assertion that it wasn’t a centralized one. Cronon, researching this book in the late seventies and early eighties, makes the common (and often but not always accurate) conflation of “low-impact” or “sustainable” with “small.”

Second—when comparing English and Indian views of land use, husbandry, and property, Cronon dismisses the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s understanding of land ownership as the product of land improvement as “little more than an ideology of conquest…” (57) While this is true in terms of how it was applied to Native Americans, it only tells half the story. In a working paper for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, Harvard’s James Levitt has pointed out that this was actually a policy borne of quite progressive ideals.

The Massachusetts Bay Corporation, being allowed by its charter to govern itself from America without a direct overseer in London, brought many more of its shareholders to the new world than other of these colonial corporations. Once there, they quickly established this rule of land improvement as grounds for ownership—and then went the further step of making all land-holders members of the corporation. The result by 1631 was near-universal manhood suffrage in a direct democratic system via elections and town meetings—a level of franchise unmatched in the southern English colonies, and even in England after the English Civil War.

In focusing the book so exclusively on environmental concerns, Cronon’s history can at time lose sight of important things like civil rights and just governance.

Overall, though, I loved the book. It was a great read. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and I’m glad that my Historiography class has finally forced me to do so.