Why I believe in historians and, more importantly, history

The aforementioned post by Clayton Cramer bugged the hell out of me. I already wrote about my biggest complaint with it, namely that Cramer is just as quick to generalize as the historians he criticizes so vehemently.*

There was something else, though, that got under my skin, something far more important.

After reading this superb comment by Julie Kemp over at Cliopatra, I realized just what it was.

Clayton Cramer is wrong about the professionalism of historians because he has to be wrong. A bold statement, I know. I'll explain.

If Cramer is right, if "the vast majority of historians" consciously fail to adhere to the standards of responsible scholarship, then the entire endeavor of academic history is a sham and a failure. To go even further, if historians reject these standards, there's simply no point to "doing" history. I don't want to believe this is the case, and I don't think it is.

I'm not going to sit here and pine for an objective, disinterested history. For one thing, it's not possible. Historians all have their particular interests and prejudices that are necessarily reflected in the very questions they ask about the past. Second, I don't think we even want a bland presentation of "just the facts." Analysis and interpretation are what make history interesting, invigorating, and worthwhile.

This does not mean, however, that the writing of history is an entirely subjective endeavor either. As I've written about briefly before, historians need evidence. Without evidence, historians become mere storytellers. There's nothing wrong with telling stories, except that history strives to be something more.

The best history, then, is that which skillfully combines probing analysis with a presentation of facts gleaned from sound research.

This isn't easy. It's tough, and it takes a whole lot of time. A quick example gives some indication of the effort involved in the writing of history.

Last fall, I wrote this paper for a seminar. A fairly informal take on Hans Baron's thesis on civic humanism, it's pretty light on documentation. This spring, I revised it as part of Swarthmore's Honors Program (you can read the revised version here (pdf)). I expanded the conclusion a bit, but most of my time was spent on verifying the quotations and fleshing out the documentation. This paper dealt exclusively with secondary sources that I had worked with just months before. Yet it still took me at least four or five hours just to get all the footnotes right.

Now imagine someone reading my paper who wants to check whether I've used those sources accurately. First they'll need to find the relevant books and journals. Then they'll need to read a good portion of them to get a sense of their thesis and argumentation. Finally, they'll need to compare my presentation of the sources to their own perception of them. If all goes well, they come away thinking, "Yes, Danny Loss did a responsible bit of scholarship here." If not, well, then there's a problem.

Now imagine doing the same thing for a book based on primary sources spread out over numerous archives. The process I just described gets a whole lot harder and consumes much more time.

I hope that it's clear by now that it's just not feasible or practical for peer reviewers and editors to check every single footnote of every single book or article they read. There's just not enough time. If historians checked out every footnote, they would have no time for research of their own.

This isn't to say nobody should ever ensure that a given historian's use of their sources, just that this process needs to occur selectively.** Check out the evidence when it doesn't make sense or it challenges received wisdom. This evidently didn't occur with Arming America; it's clear that guidelines like these weren't followed.

But, on the whole, when need to take a historian's word for it when it comes to their use of the sources. If we don't, we'd spent all our time delving into footnotes and the process of new research would grind to a halt. I don't think anybody wants that to happen.

In short, we just need to have trust our fellow historians that they find and use their sources in a responsible manner. If we don't, we're either faced with the prospect of not believing anything historians have to say, or not having any new history written.

It's here that Julie Kemp's comment comes in. It's so good that I'm just going to quote a big chunk of it:

For those of us regularly engaged in an academic life, we arer constantly reminded of the importance of academic honesty. We write about it in our syllabi. We explain it to our students to make sure they understand. We discuss with our colleagues how to detect academic dishonesty and how to deal with it in a fair and ultimately productive manner. In short, it is often a central part of our daily process.

Because most of us consider academic honesty so important (and, right or wrong, there are people who consider it at least as, if not more, important than some of the Ten Commandments), it is a shock when we find that someone of otherwise good repute is accused of crossing over into the "dark side."

Yes. Yes. Yes. We place our faith in the academic honesty of other historians because that honesty helps form the foundation of the field. Without it, history can teach us nothing. To suddenly suspect all historians of dishonest scholarship would be tantamount to suspecting that history itself is a fraud.

Now, maybe Kemp and I are misguided in placing our faith in the integrity of fellow historians. But, lest anyone think this faith is akin to belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, I want to emphasize that it's based on my experience that the vast majority of historians do, in fact, adhere to standards of professionalism that help guarantee sound scholarship. Footnotes check out. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, I simply have no reason to believe otherwise.

Returning to my initial statement about Cramer being wrong because he has to be wrong, I'll clarify a bit in light of the above conclusions.

There's no a priori reason why Clayton Cramer is wrong; in that sense, he doesn't have to be wrong.

But if we're going to continue to view history as a legitimate scholarly endeavor, we're just going to have to trust historians to do the right thing.*** If Clayton Cramer were right, history as we know it would cease to exist. Until Cramer can show me that fradulent scholarship is indeed widespread among historians in the U.S., I'll go on believing in history, thank you very much.

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*Incidentally, Cramer still hasn't responded to Ralph Luker's or my request for a clarification or further evidence, instead bringing up the red herring of the controversy over Michael Belleiles's Arming America. Cramer's latest post is another prime example of misreadings and bad writing. But I promised myself that I'm going to do my best to ignore him.

**I'm a strong believer in rich documentation, just in case you have a reader who does want to follow your trail. I love footnotes.

***Tim Burke addressed this point (and others) almost a year ago in a post entitled On Ellipses and Theses and Archives. Rereading Tim's essay now, I see just how much his thinking has influenced my own.