Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  He has a point. Reading, which is to say writing, is the greatest gift with which man has endowed himself, by whose means we may soar on unlimited voyages. Are we to spend it picking through the garbage of humanity? Certainly the squalid and worthless, the mean and depraved are part of the human story just as dregs are part of wine, but the wine is what counts. Sexual perversion and hallucinatory drugs, as Eliot Fremont-Smith said of a recent novel, “are not what drive us, not what human history is about.”

  The task then devolves upon historians to tell what human history is about and what are the forces that do drive us. That is not to say that history excludes the squalid and depraved, but, being concerned as it is with reality and subject as it is to certain disciplines, it deals with these in proportion to the whole.

  Historians start with a great advantage over fiction in that our characters, being public, are invested with power to affect destiny. They are the captains and kings, saints and fanatics, traitors, rogues and villains, pathfinders and explorers, thinkers and creators, even, occasionally, heroes. They are significant—if not necessarily admirable. They may be evil or corrupt or mad or stupid or even stuffed shirts, but at least, by virtue of circumstance or chance or office or character, they matter. They are the actors, not the acted upon, and are consequently that much more interesting.

  Readers want to see man shaping his destiny or, at least, struggling with it, and this is the stuff of history. They want to know how things happened, why they happened, and particularly what they themselves have lived through, just as after a record heat or heavy snow the first thing one turns to in the morning paper is the account of yesterday’s weather. And now more than ever, when man’s place in the world has never been so subject to question, when “alienation” is the prevailing word, the public also hopes to find some guidelines to destiny, some pattern or meaning to our presence on this whirling globe. Whether or not, as individuals, historians believe in one pattern or another, or some of us in none, the evidence we have to present provides reassurance in showing that man has gone through his dark ages before.

  When I was a young parent a series of books appeared on child behavior by Dr. Arnold Gesell and his associates of the Yale Clinic in which one discovered that the most aberrant, disturbing, or apparently psychotic behavior of one’s own child turned out to be the common age pattern of the group innocently disporting itself behind Dr. Gesell’s one-way observation screen. Nothing was ever so comforting. Historians provide a one-way screen on the past through which one can see man, at one time or another, committing every horror, indecency, or idiocy that he is capable of today. It is all already on his record, in kind if not in degree. I do not suggest that history can be as comforting as Gesell because the difference in degree that we face today is so great—in the speed and impact of the mechanisms we have created—that problems and dangers multiply faster than we can devise solutions. Henry Adams’ law of acceleration is proving perilously true. Nevertheless, Adams’ law is one of those guidelines historians have to offer. The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

  Historians cannot expect to take over the leading role in literature without competition. Last summer Albert Rosenfeld, science editor of Life, wrote in an editorial that creative writers must turn to science to revive literature because “That is where the action is.” There is a great and challenging truth in his statement. Science is formidably relevant and dynamic. “Great writing in any age,” Rosenfeld continued, “casts some illumination on the major contemporary dilemmas.” That is equally cogent. If science can evoke great creative writers who will do for space aeronautics or genetics or nuclear energy what Rachel Carson, for example, did for the sea around us, they will certainly win a large share of the public interest. The chief obstacle is language. Great writing in science must come from inside the discipline, and everything will depend on the rare talent which can break through the meshes of a technical vocabulary and express itself in words of common usage.

  Here, too, we have a head start. Historians can—though not all do—make themselves understood in everyday English, the language in use from Chaucer to Churchill. Let us beware of the plight of our colleagues, the behavioral scientists, who by use of a proliferating jargon have painted themselves into a corner—or isolation ward—of unintelligibility. They know what they mean, but no one else does. Psychologists and sociologists are the farthest gone in the disease and probably incurable. Their condition might be pitied if one did not suspect it was deliberate. Their retreat into the arcane is meant to set them apart from the great unlearned, to mark their possession of some unshared, unsharable expertise. No matter how illuminating their discoveries, if the behavioral scientists write only to be understood by one another, they must come to the end of the Mandarins.

  Communication, after all, is what language was invented for. If history is to share its insights with a public in need of them, it must practice communication as an art, as Gibbon did, or Parkman. History has, of course, other parts; like that other famous property, it is divisible into three: the investigative or research, the didactic or theory, and the narrated or communication. The elements that enter into communication are what I want to discuss, because history, it seems to me, is nothing if not communicated. Research provides the material, and theory a pattern of thought, but it is through communication that history is heard and understood.

  At the risk of stating the obvious, it is worth remarking that success of communication depends upon the charm (I use the word in its most serious sense) of the narrative. “Writings are useless,” declared Theodore Roosevelt, speaking as president of the American Historical Association in 1912, “unless they are read, and they cannot be read unless they are readable.”

  The history most successfully communicated, as far as the public is concerned, can in one sense be determined by the annual lists of the top ten best-sellers. Up to 1960 the all-time best-seller in history was H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, first published in 1921, which stayed among the top ten for three years in a row and reappeared on the list in a cheaper edition in 1930. It is the only book of history up to 1960 to have sold more than two million copies—more, oddly enough, than The Kinsey Report. Since then the leading work in history has been William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had sold, at last report, close to three million copies in the United States alone.

  These names suggest what the evidence confirms: During the 1920s and 1930s, when serious books had a better chance of reaching the top ten, the best-sellers in historical biography and straight history (as distinct from personal history and current events) included four academics, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Carl Van Doren, and James Truslow Adams three times over; and twelve non-academics, Emil Ludwig with four books, Hendrik van Loon with three, Lytton Strachey, Claude Bowers, Van Wyck Brooks, André Maurois, Francis Hackett, Stefan Zweig with two each, Will Durant, Frederick Lewis Allen, Margaret Leech, and Douglas Southall Freeman with one each. During the 1940s, when the war books took over, one academic, Arnold Toynbee (with his one-volume condensation) and one non-academic, Catherine Drinker Bowen, made the top ten. After that, except for Shirer and Frederic Morton’s The Rothschilds, the swamping effect of the non-books begins and one has to look just beneath the top ten to the books which have been best-sellers during the course of the year without making the final list. Taking only the 1960s, these included three academics, Garrett Mattingly, Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and nine independent writers, Winston Churchill, Bruce Catton, Alan Moorehead, Thomas Costain, Walter Lord, Cecil Woodham-Smith, and myself with two or more books each, Stewart Holbrook and George Kennan each with one.

  To be a best-seller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication. That the independent writers have done better is hardly surprising, since communicating is their business; they know
how. To capture and hold the interest of an audience is their object, as it has been that of every storyteller since Homer. Perhaps the academic historian suffers from having a captive audience, first in the supervisor of his dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning the page has not been his primary concern.

  My intention is not to exacerbate the distinction between the professional historian and the so-called amateur but to clarify its terms. “Professional”—meaning someone who has had graduate training leading to a professional degree and who practices within a university—is a valid term, but “amateur”—used to mean someone outside the university without a graduate degree—is a misnomer. Graduate training certainly establishes a difference of which I, who did not have it, am deeply aware, sometimes regretfully, sometimes thankfully. But I would prefer to recognize the difference by distinguishing between academics and independents, or between scholars and writers, rather than between professionals and amateurs, because the question is not one of degree of professionalism but which profession. The faculty people are professional historians, we outside are professional writers. Insofar as they borrow our function and we borrow their subject, each of us has a great deal to learn from the other.

  An objection often made to the independents is that they are insufficiently acquainted or careless with the facts. An extreme case is the Cortez of Keats, staring at the Pacific with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Keats, of course, got the name wrong but the idea right. Through the power of marvelous phrasing and the exercise of a poet’s imagination he immortalized a historic moment. It is possible that his vision of the man on the peak is more important, for conveying history, than the name of the man. Poets aside, historians of course should offer both. There is no need to choose between accuracy and beauty; one should be clothed in the other.

  In pockets of survival there may be some historians who still retain the old notion imposed by scientific history that, as another president of the American Historical Association, Walter Prescott Webb, put it, “There is something historically naughty about good writing,” that “a great gulf exists between truth and beauty and the scholar who attempts to bridge it deserves to fall in and drown,” and that “the real scholar must choose truth and somehow it is better if it is made so ugly that nobody could doubt its virginity.” If some still believe this, communication is not for them.

  For the first element in communication, Webb gave the perfect triple criterion: a writer’s belief that he has something to say, that it is worth saying, and that he can say it better than anyone else—and, he added, “not for the few but for the many.” For coupled with compulsion to write must go desire to be read. No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel. Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page. Macaulay was a master of this contact with the reader. His sister Hannah cried when he read the History of England aloud to her. What writer could ask for more?

  When it comes to content, inspiration, what Webb calls the moment of synthesis—the revealing flash of a synthesizing idea—is obviously a help. Webb describes his own moment of insight when the idea came to him that the emergence of Americans from the life of the forests to the life of the plains was of dramatic significance. Admiral Mahan had his moment when, from the study of Hannibal’s failure to control sea communication with Carthage, the idea flashed on him of the influence of sea power on history. The moment is exciting but not, I think, essential. A theme may do as well to begin with as a thesis and does not involve, like the overriding theory, a creeping temptation to adjust the facts. The integrating idea or insight then evolves from the internal logic of the material, in the course of putting it together. From the gathering of the particulars one arrives at the general, at that shining grail we are all in search of, the historical generalization. To state it in advance does not seem necessary to me. The process is more persuasive and the integrating idea more convincing if the reader discovers it for himself out of the evidence laid before him.

  All theses run the risk of obsolescence. The pathways of history, said the great historian of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, are “strewn with the wrecks” of once known and acknowledged truths, discarded by a later generation. Revision and counter-revision roll against the shores of history as rhythmically as waves. Even so, a true inspiration or integrating idea such as Mahan’s or Turner’s will be valid and enlightening for its time, regardless of subsequent fortune.

  Though some will debate it, intuition, too, is an aid. The intuitive historian can reach an understanding of long-past circumstance in much the same way as Democritus, the predecessor of Aristotle, arrived at the idea of the atom. His mind, mulling over observed phenomena, worked out a theory of matter as composed of an infinite number of mobile particles. The process may have been cerebral, but its impetus was intuitive. Strict disciples of history as a science may scorn the intuitive process, but that attitude comes from being more Catholic than the Pope. True scientists know its value. It is an arrow shot into the air, which will often pierce the same target that the scientific historian with his nose on the ground will take months to reach on foot.

  Of all the historian’s instruments, belief in the grandeur of his theme is the most compelling. Parkman, in his preface to Montcalm and Wolfe, describes his subject, the Seven Years’ War in the American theater, as “the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent.” Its outcome determined that there would be an American Revolution. “With it began a new chapter in the annals of the world.” That is the way an author should feel about his subject. It ensures that no reader can put the book down.

  Enthusiasm, which is not quite the same thing, has a no less leavening effect. It was recognized by Admiral Mahan, who, in the course of studying Britain’s contest with Napoleon, developed a particular admiration for Pitt. “His steadfast nature,” Mahan wrote, “aroused in me an enthusiasm which I did not seek to check; for I believe enthusiasm no bad spirit in which to realize history to yourself and to others.”

  Mahan’s prescription disposes of the myth of “pure objectivity” when used to mean “without bias.” As John Gunther once said of journalism, “A reporter with no bias at all would be a vegetable.” If such a thing as a “purely objective” historian could exist, his work would be unreadable—like eating sawdust. Bias is only misleading when it is concealed. After reading The Proud Tower, a onetime member of the Asquith government scolded me in a letter for misrepresenting, as he thought, his party. “Your bias against the Liberals sticks out,” he wrote. I replied that it was better to have it stick out than be hidden. It can then be taken into account. I cannot deny that I acquired a distaste for Mr. Asquith as, for other reasons, I did for Henry Adams. There are some people in history one simply dislikes, and as long as they are not around to have their feelings hurt, I see no reason to conceal it. To take no sides in history would be as false as to take no sides in life.

  A historian tries to be objective in the sense of learning as much as possible, and presenting as sympathetically as possible the motives and conditions of both sides, because to do so makes the drama more intense—and more believable. But let us not pretend that this is being without bias—as if historians were mere recorders who have given up the exercise of judgment. Bias means a leaning which is the exercise of judgment as well as a source of insight. Admittedly, it is usually helped by emotional conditioning, but that is what makes for commitment. The great historians more often than not have been passionately committed to a cause or a protagonist, as Mommsen was to Julius Caesar or Michelet to the glorious power of the people.

  How commitment can generate insight and heighten communication is nowhere better shown than in G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Thousand, one of the finest works of history, I think, both for investigation and
narrative, produced in this century. Trevelyan’s commitment to his hero is explicit. Describing the foot track from the Villa Spinola down to the embarkation point in Genoa, he writes in a footnote, “I had the honor of going down it” with a veteran of the Thousand. There is no doubt where he stands. His feeling of personal involvement led Trevelyan to visit every place connected with the Garibaldini, to walk in their footsteps, to interview those still living, until he knew the persons, terrain, view, sounds, smells, sights, distances, weather—in short, the feel—of every scene of action he was to write about.

  As the Thousand marched to the Battle of Calatafimi, Trevelyan writes, “Their hearts were light with the sense that they were enviable above all Italians, that their unique campaign was poetry made real.” The quality of emotion here is not, as so often, created out of the historian’s feelings and foisted onto his characters, but drawn from the evidence. A footnote gives the original from a letter of one of the Garibaldini to his mother, telling her, “Questa spedizione è così poetica.” (“This expedition is a poetical thing.”) Approaching the battle, they pass through a green valley at early morning. “In the bloom of the early Sicilian summer,” Trevelyan writes, “the vale fresh from last night’s rain, and sung over by the nightingale at dawn, lay ready to exhale its odors to the rising sun. Nature seemed in tune with the hearts of Garibaldi and his men.” Here, too, he worked from evidence in diaries and letters that it had rained the night before and that the nightingale had sung. In these two passages he has conveyed the sense of miraculous freshness and noble enterprise which the Garibaldi expedition signalized for the liberal spirit of the nineteenth century. He could accomplish this, first, because of his quick sensitivity to source material, and, second, because he himself was in tune with the hearts of Garibaldi and his men.