Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 8.1

Pick the Better One

  • Seven pictures. None of them is from the reading, and you answer each one out loud.
  • Bring Carr, Ranke, Marx, Thompson, Scott and Ginzburg to things they never saw.
  • Part one · has historical writing got better?
  • Part two · what was any of it for?
A large medieval world map drawn on vellum, roughly circular inside a pentagonal sheet, crowded with towns, beasts and figures The Apollo 17 photograph of the whole Earth, Africa and Antarctica under swirling white cloud against black space

Both are pictures of the whole world. One is centred on Jerusalem on purpose. The other is conventionally printed the other way up from how it was taken. Which one is edited?

The Hereford Mappa Mundi, c. 1300 · The Blue Marble, Apollo 17, 7 December 1972 (Left: Hereford Cathedral, via unesco.org.uk, public domain. Right: Harrison Schmitt / Apollo 17, NASA AS17-148-22727, public domain.)
A printed nineteenth-century French wall chart with diagrams of brains, rows of profile heads and faces, and a row of annotated palms Two rows of MRI brain slices with orange and purple heat-map blobs overlaid, beside a calibrated colour scale

Both of these claim to show where in the head a person's character lives. One of them also reads palms. In a hundred and fifty years, which half of this slide will the other one look like?

Phrénologie, physiognomonie, chiromancie, French wall chart, 19th c. · Basal ganglia activation, fMRI, 2014 (Left: Wellcome Collection V0009525, CC BY 4.0. Right: Miller et al., PLOS ONE 9(5), 2014, CC BY 4.0.)
A Minoan fresco on a red ground: a blue figure gathering flowers among rocks, with large areas of flat modern plaster painted between the surviving fragments

The solid paint is what survived. The flat areas between are what Arthur Evans's restorer added. He made this figure a boy — but the fragments have a tail, and it was a monkey. Which part of this is evidence?

The “Saffron Gatherer,” Knossos, restored under Arthur Evans by Émile Gilliéron · Archaeological Museum of Heraklion (Photograph Zde, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain. Evans’s excavation ran from 1900; the figure was re-identified as a monkey later in the 20th century.)
Two studio portraits of the same young man mounted side by side: at left in long hair, earrings and a blanket; at right with cut hair in a buttoned jacket and tie

Tom Torlino, Diné, photographed at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School about three years apart. The school made the pair, and printed it this way round, to show what it had achieved. What is it evidence of, and for whom?

Tom Torlino on arrival and after about three years at Carlisle, c. 1882–85 · photographs by John N. Choate (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain. Carlisle’s own promotional use of before-and-after pairs is documented in the school’s publications.)

Part one · discussion

Progress or accumulation

Is there any “progress” in historical writing? Are we now closer to the truth, or just accumulating competing frameworks?

Carlisle and Knossos were made by people who thought they were the rigorous ones. Which should slow us down about which half of the phrenology slide we are standing on.

A visitor presses paper against the polished black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and takes a pencil rubbing of one engraved name A plain white marble sarcophagus at the head of a wide paved plaza, a wreath on a stand before it, empty trees beyond

Both are for people killed in American wars. One insists on every single name; the other insists on no name at all. What does each one think remembering is for?

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, 2003 · Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington National Cemetery (Left: U.S. Navy photo by CWO Seth Rossman, 030616-N-9593R-145, public domain. Right: SNik7Real, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.)
A painted horse in ochre and black on a pale curved surface, lit from above in a museum display Painted bulls on a cast rock surface inside a constructed gallery, the artificial edge of the cast visible at the bottom

Neither of these is the cave. Lascaux was sealed in 1963 and almost nobody alive has been inside it. Millions of people have been to see it. What have they seen?

A Lascaux replica in the Anthropos Museum, Brno · the interior of Lascaux II, Montignac, built 200 m from the original (Left: HTO, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Right: Raimond Spekking, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)
A bronze statue of a standing man tilts from its plinth, hauled by cables, with a domed building and palms behind and a thinly populated plaza below

This was on front pages around the world the next morning. The plaza is nearly empty and the frame is tight. What is this photograph a source for?

The statue of Saddam Hussein pulled down in Firdos Square, Baghdad, 9 April 2003 (U.S. Department of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain. Wider shots taken the same afternoon show a sparsely filled square.)

Part two · discussion

Which purpose is defensible

Livy wants moral examples. Voltaire wants civilizational lessons. Ranke wants truth. Marx wants revolution. Thompson wants to rescue the forgotten. Which purpose do you find most defensible, and why?

Every picture today was decidable once you said what you wanted the history for, and undecidable until you did. Which is the answer you have been circling for seven weeks.

Next · Week 9, after the break

Many national traditions were invented, and recently

Nations feel ancient. Hobsbawm argues that many of their traditions were invented, often deliberately; Anderson calls nations imagined, not faked. Compare Kant’s plan nobody alive could see, in 4.1.