Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 8.1
Thursday · 7.2 · scale
Gets: why conventions last, what no one could change. Loses: the afternoon, the decision, the name.
Gets: a mind in full, in his own words. Loses: any claim about how many others thought it.
Zoom out and you can explain everything and decide nothing. Zoom in and you can decide everything and explain almost nothing.
Each scale buys one thing by giving up another. So what would it take for one of them to count as an improvement on the last?
Part one · progress
Voltaire judged the past by taste. Ranke will say only what a document can show.
Marx reads underneath Ranke’s states and princes, to who was producing what they ran on.
Marx’s class is a structure. Thompson makes it something people do to each other.
Thompson’s weavers arrive in numbers; Ginzburg gets one man’s cosmos in his own words.
Each turn answers a fairly specific complaint about the one before it. Whether four of those in a row add up to progress is a different question.
Weeks 3 and 4 · Al-Biruni and Ranke
“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
“History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the present… To such high offices the present work does not presume: it seeks only to show what actually happened.” introduction (GHDI trans.)
Ranke made the refusal new. The test underneath it was already eight centuries old, which is odd for a sequence supposed to run forward.
Part one · discussion
Is there any “progress” in historical writing? Are we now closer to the truth, or just accumulating competing frameworks?
Real progress on narrow questions — whose sources, which test, what counts as evidence. The big one stays open, mostly because almost nobody agrees what the target is.
Part two · purpose
The past set out as examples: “choose for yourself… what to imitate,” and mark what to avoid.
Judging the past and instructing the present are “high offices the present work does not presume.”
The stockinger and the hand-loom weaver, pulled back “from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Quoted phrases: Livy, Preface (Foster trans.); Ranke, 1824 introduction (GHDI trans.); Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 12.
Ranke refuses the job Livy took for granted. A century later Thompson hands history a new one.
Part two · the trial record
Ginzburg’s source is an inquisition trial record, the official record of a church tribunal. Ranke could have read this file.
Ranke reads it for what the tribunal did, and gets a procedure carried out. Ginzburg reads the same pages for what the miller believed, and gets a cosmos made of cheese.
What each one wants from the page settles it before the document does. Both are reading carefully; they just get different books.
Part two · discussion
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?
These aren’t always compatible goals — they produce different histories from the same sources. Pick one and you have mostly decided in advance what you can notice.
Today · looking back
Four turns each fixed one complaint. Al-Biruni already had the test in 1017, so the sequence is probably older than it looks.
Livy picks examples out of it, Ranke won’t use it for anything, Thompson goes back for whoever got left out. The same trial record becomes two different books depending on which job you hold.
The take home
The tests got stricter and the evidence got wider: who counts as a source, what counts as proof, whose past can be known at all.
Every writer we read decides which facts get the floor, and most of them believe the decision is justified.
Ask whether history has progressed and you have already been asked what it is for. This course has five answers to that question, and no agreed way to rank them.
Next · Week 9, after the break
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.