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Writing History Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Thomas Postlewait
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Type
Review Essay
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , November 2000 , pp. 83 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2000

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References

1. These events are reported by Joseph R. Strayer and Lucien Febvre in introductions to The Historian's Craft. Lucien Febvre also reports that Bloch's wife, who helped Bloch in his work and was committed to the same cause of Resistance, was captured and murdered.

2. Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, trans. McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984),31–87Google Scholar.

3. The importance of The Historian's Craft in the history profession, where it is regularly assigned to history majors, is comparable to the place of The Elements of Style by William Strunk. Jr. and E. B. White in English and composition programs. For decades both books have been guides to the elementary principles of their disciplines. And of course many historians swear by both books.

4. Trilling, Lionel, Beyond Culture, (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 4Google Scholar; reprinted in The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, ed. Howe, Irving, (New York: Horizon Books, 1967), 60Google Scholar.

5. Howe, Irving, “The Idea of the Modern” in The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts. ed. Howe, Irving. (New York: Horizon Books, 1967), 15Google Scholar.

6. Of special note, he dedicates the book to his colleague, Judith Milhous, whose scholarship exemplifies the practice of archaeo-historicism.

7. This criticism follows rather closely the critique of Jauss that David Perkins made in Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 23–27Google ScholarPubMed.

8. Proclaiming Roach's documentation “unsound and unscholarly” (174), Hume announces that he was shocked by Roach's unsupported assertion that slaves were sold in the coffeehouses. Conducting his own research, Hume discovered that an advertisement appeared in the Tatler for the sale of a slave (not slaves). Also, as Hume discovered, rewards for runaway slaves were advertised occasionally in other issues of the Tatler. So, though Roach failed to provide documentation, his argument about the complicities between racial prejudice and national cultures at least has a purchase on historical events and evidence. And on historical conscience, then and now. Beyond this preliminary information, we know that slavery was a condition and a concept that operated in the British empire at the time. Disagreements about the practice of slavery were expressed in public venues and political debates. And as is well documented, a number of English “gentlemen,” but not Richard Steele, were active in the slave trade. It is thus possible, I would argue, to construct a contextual argument about the operation of slavery, politics, memory, performance, and ethical issues in early eighteenth-century London.

9. Roach's failure, then, is not his lapses over the handling of evidence—one of several kinds of documentary lapses that we all occasionally make, as Hume admits about himself. Roach's key mistake was apparently the decision to write in the ambitious, speculative mode of cultural history and theory instead of the contained, disciplined mode of archeo-historicism. Necessarily, then. Roach's perspective on the eighteenth century does not agree with Hume's viewpoint, yet they both plant a claim to the territory.

10. Hume seems to put forward this idea in the spirit of the argument that David Perkins presents in Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google ScholarPubMed. See, for example, Perkins on “plausibility” and the “criteria of credibility.” But Hume does not seem to share Perkins's sympathy for Nietzsche and his ideas on the ethical dimensions of history for us. Nor does he seem much interested in the problem of change.

11. The principles of archeo-historicism would apparently disallow Simon Schama's Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Random House. 1991)Google Scholar, which reconstructs and reinvents the events around two deaths, one famous (General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759) and one infamous (the Harvard professor George Parkman in 1849). Both deaths have remained enigmatic, though often investigated and represented. So, speculation is unavoidable. Schama's investigations, which are imaginative acts of historiography, require both evidence and viewpoints beyond those of the historical figures of the era.

12. For some comments on the debate about Davis's book and method, see the essays by Jim Sharpe and Joan Scott in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing. In several ways, Hume's critique of Roach tracks a course similar to the complaints about Davis's handling of evidence and her methods of speculating on its possible meanings. Such criticism raises questions about cultural analysis, especially when it speculates on the performative attributes and codes of daily life and popular cultures.

13. Microhistory may look familiar to—and appeal to—scholars in the humanities because it is a kind of close reading, blending the traits of formalism and cultural history. At the same time, it requires rigorous archival research and historical imagination. In a sense, microhistorians are the Chekhovs and Becketts of their profession. Instead of offering War and Peace or Ulysses, they put before us The Three Sisters and Krapp's Last Tape. And, like Chekhov and Beckett, who carried on complex literary relations with Tolstoy and Joyce, the microhistorians honor their father figures in the history profession who write the grand works of synthesis, but they respectfully choose another path to the truths that history holds.

14. Baer, Marc, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. King, W. D., Henry Irving's Waterloo: Theatrical Engagements with Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig, Late-Victorian Culture, Assorted Ghosts, Old Men, War, and History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

16. Donohue, Joseph, with Ruth Berggren, Oscar Wilde's “The Importance of Being Earnest:” A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production, St. James's Theatre, London, 1895, The Princess Grace Irish Library #10 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995)Google Scholar.

17. Collingwood is of Bloch's generation and Greenblatt's career overlaps with Schorske's. This isn't the place to develop the synchronic and diachronic parallels between the two pairs in terms of the historiographic and modernist issues raised here. But I want to suggest that a comparison might be quite helpful in understanding not only their contributions but also their places in the transformations of historical study from social history to cultural history.

18. Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Histoncism, (New York: Routledge. 1989), 23Google Scholar.

19. Quoted in Iggers, 9.

20. For a philosophical counter to the arguments and assumptions that guide Smith and Rorty, see Haack, Susan, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)Google Scholar. And concerning history, see Ricoeur, Paul, History and Truth, trans. Kelbley, Charles A., (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. Also see Ginzburg, Carlo, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures, (Hanover. New Hampsire: University Press of New England, for Brandeis University Press and the Historical Society of Israel. 1999)Google Scholar.