Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 7 · Review
Week 1 · Carr, What Is History? (1961)
“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” Carr, p. 11
“Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us… by people who… thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving.” Carr, p. 13
Study the historian before you study the facts (p. 23) — the question for every week since.
Carr’s historian chooses one fact at a time. But the facts available to choose from were already filtered at a much bigger scale — by whoever decided, long before, what was worth keeping at all. Which scale matters more?
Week 2 · Herodotus and Thucydides
“…that the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.” Godley trans.
“The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.” Crawley trans.
One writes so the deeds are not forgotten. The other writes to find the cause. Are these equally valuable?
Herodotus writes at the scale of deeds — what people did, so it isn’t lost. Thucydides writes at the scale of causes — a shift in power nobody described. Which scale actually gets you closer to why the war happened?
Week 2 · Livy and Sima Qian
“…you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.” Preface (Foster trans.)
“I have cast a universal net to gather together all the old traditions of the world that were scattered and lost.” quoted in Popkin, p. 37
Livy sorts the past into models and warnings; Sima Qian tries to lose none of it. Two opposite ideas of what a complete history would be.
Livy’s scale is the single exemplary act, repeated until the past reads as a monument. Sima Qian’s scale is everything, with nothing allowed to drop out. Is there a scale where a history can still be both complete and useful?
Week 2 · recap
A single war’s cause (Herodotus, Thucydides) and a civilization’s worth of exemplary acts (Livy, Sima Qian) — four writers, two very different sizes of the past to work at.
Week 3 · The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede
“This year dire forwarnings came over the land of the North-humbrians… fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these tokens; and a little after that… the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.” Giles trans.
“For if history relates good things of good men, the attentive hearer is excited to imitate that which is good.” Preface
The annal puts portents and a raid in one breath; Bede gives the whole thing a purpose. Neither of them doubts the ultimate cause.
The Chronicle logs one year at a time, with no thread connecting the famine to the raid. Bede reads the same centuries as one plan unfolding under God. Does either scale offer a pattern?
Week 3 · Al-Biruni and Machiavelli
“No one will deny that in questions of historic authenticity hearsay does not equal eyewitness… How could we know the history of nations but for the everlasting monuments of the pen?” preface
“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.” ch. 6 (Marriott trans.)
Al-Biruni examines the reporter; Machiavelli mines for examples. One is building a method, the other is looking for techniques.
Neither of these two is zooming out: al-Biruni has one report, Machiavelli has one great man. So the difference between them is not scale. What is it?
Week 3 · recap
A year at a time with no plan, or one report at a time with no end-use beyond proof — against centuries read for a providential arc, or mined for one reusable lesson.
Week 4 · Voltaire and Kant
“Whosoever thinks, or, what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were carried to perfection.” Introduction, p. 5
“Each, according to his own inclination, follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal.” Introduction (Beck trans.)
Voltaire measures the past against a standard of taste; Kant gives it a plan no one living in it could report. Both are telling you where history is headed.
Voltaire zooms out to a few golden ages and judges them by taste. Kant zooms out further still — to the whole species, following a plan nobody alive could ever see. Is there a scale too large to actually test?
Week 4 · Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker (1824)
“History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the present for the benefit of the future ages. To such high offices the present work does not presume: it seeks only to show what actually happened [wie es eigentlich gewesen].” Ranke, 1824 introduction (GHDI trans.)
Livy’s lessons, Bede’s providence, Voltaire’s standard of taste and Kant’s plan — all of it, in one sentence, as offices history should not presume to hold. The paragraph after it lists the sources the book rests on instead.
The sentence that founded the profession is a refusal, and everything since has argued with what it refused.
Ranke refuses every scale bigger than the document in front of him. Does that make him the most careful historian in the room, or the one who gave up on explaining anything?
Week 4 · recap
A few golden ages, then the whole species moving toward reason nobody inside it can see — and then Ranke collapses it all back to the single document, refusing to say what any of it adds up to. Week 5 asks whether that collapse was necessary.
An engraving of a long factory hall with two rows of power looms receding into the distance, driven by belts from shafting that crosses the ceiling, tended almost entirely by women and girls in long dresses
Power-loom weaving, from Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 1835 · T. Allom, engraved by J. Tingle · public domain
Week 5.1 · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx and Engels, Manifesto, Part I
Capitalism creates “…its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” Manifesto, Part I
How people make a living drives history. People still have to act.
Marx’s scale is the whole sweep of “hitherto existing society” — but it cashes out in people who have to act, one factory and one decision at a time. Is that one scale, or two stitched together?
An oil painting of a grove of olive trees with twisted trunks on rough ground, a ridge of blue limestone hills behind them, and a white cloud curling across a blue sky
Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees, Saint-Rémy, June 1889 · Museum of Modern Art, New York · public domain
Week 5.2 · Braudel, “The Longue Durée” (1958)
“Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow, and in hindering it shape it.” Braudel, p. 31
Both explain by structures; Marx names one motor, Braudel refuses to name any. “Marx explains why an order ends. Braudel explains why one lasts.”
A structure is defined by what it forbids.
Braudel’s scale is centuries, and from there the hillside outlasts the battle. Name one thing that scale cannot see — and who disappears at it.
A hand-colored etching of a man in a woman’s blue spotted dress and bonnet striding forward with a club, arm flung out, while behind him figures with raised weapons attack a burning mill
The Leader of the Luddites, May 1812, inscribed “Drawn from Life by an Officer” · Working Class Movement Library · public domain
Week 6.1 · Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
“I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” Thompson, p. 9
“…the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Thompson, p. 12
Every rule about what counts as evidence is also a decision about whose past can be known.
Thompson shrinks Marx’s scale back down to lived relationships — the stockinger, the cropper, one weaver at a time. Does the big structure disappear at that scale, or just get harder to see?
An oil painting of a high gilded hall: two dozen men in uniforms, sashes, frock coats and fezzes stand and sit around a long table under tall curtained windows, one shaking hands at the center
Anton von Werner, Der Kongreß zu Berlin — the closing session, 13 July 1878; painted 1892 · Deutsches Historisches Museum · public domain
Week 6.2 · Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category” (1986)
“Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” Scott, p. 1067
“High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power … precisely in its exclusion of women from its work.” Scott, p. 1073
Adding women to a syllabus and treating gender as power are two different projects — this class read the second one.
Scott’s scale isn’t bigger or smaller than Marx’s or Thompson’s — it’s a different axis. What does the exclusion of women mean at any scale, from one room to the whole category of “high politics”?
Week 7.1 · Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (1976)
A miller in sixteenth-century Friuli said the world had curdled into being like a cheese, with angels generated in it like worms. The book takes its title from his image.
His answers survive because the Inquisition found him interesting enough to write them down. Ginzburg reads that trial record as a window onto a popular culture that left almost nothing else behind.
Carr, in its purest form: we hear this man only because somebody with power over him wanted it written down.
Ginzburg’s scale is the smallest the course has tried: one miller, one trial. At that scale you get a mind in full — but can one case ever tell you it was typical?
Tonight’s refraction · scale
Gets: why conventions last, what no one could change, the hillside that outlives the battle.
Loses: the afternoon, the decision, the name. Nobody in the longue durée chooses anything.
Gets: a mind in full, in his own words, that represents a whole world.
Loses: any claim about how many others thought this. One case cannot tell you it was typical.
Zoom out and you can explain everything and decide nothing. Zoom in and you can decide everything and explain almost nothing.
There is no right scale. How does the scale a historian picks tell you what they think history is for?