understanding history

Harry Smeltzer has a website and blog about Civil War history in general, and the battle of Manassas in particular, called Bull Runnings. The topic of whether history should be presented in narrative format is popular right now and Harry has a good post today about that topic. In the post Harry asks whether “web projects, perhaps, [can] be something more than alternatives to traditional print narratives: can they somehow be more illustrative of the fragmented, chaotic nature of events, military or otherwise, and so provide a better understanding of what happened than traditional narrative?”

I think web projects can be. But even the best web project cannot address the problem of conveying what it was really like to be there.

A web project can go further than the traditional narrative history book in that a web project has at least the potential to be multimedia which in turn appeals to multiple senses; there is also the opportunity to build large archives and collections of different types of descriptions to create a more complete picture of a topic. For example, a website on a battle can include narrative descriptions of the fighting, maps of troop movements, maps depicting topography, photographs of the battlefield past and present. There can be paintings or depictions of art in other form. It can include descriptions from women, old men, children, fighting men, and generals — all each conveying a different part of the experience. Music from the period, the sounds of battle, could also be included. Books cannot convey sound and most are limited in what they can present in the way of photographs and maps. A good website can gather all of these things in one place. Furthermore, there’s more opportunity in a web project to have different authors.

(Not to say books should be replaced by websites. But I do think the electronic medium has a lot of potential to create a more complete version of history.)

But no multimedia presentation and no book no matter how detailed can convey what it was really like. Historians, like it or not, are constrained in part by the medium — the English language can only go so far in it’s descriptiveness. The brain can only absorb and process so much at any given time.

Part of the problem is history is the craft of describing human life and affairs, and life is in and of itself a sensory experience. Words can try to describe things we sense — what a man’s face looks like, what a battlefield smelled like, what a Whitworth projectile heading overhead sounded like, how the ground rises and falls — but unless you experience those things for yourself, you really don’t understand. Further complicating matters is the fact that people perceive things differently. Sure, there is usually a common thread, but reality is different for each of us. Asked to describe the same exact event, we’ll all come up with slightly different ways to do so, maybe even widely divergent ways. How we will describe the event in part is based upon our own past experiences, but probably also has something to do simply with the fact that we’re all biologically wired somewhat differently.

Take the example of chemo for cancer treatment. Most of you out there have not ever experienced first-hand what it is like to do chemo. I can tell you that no matter how much you try to understand what it is like to undergo chemo, you cannot understand unless you’ve been through it yourself. I can try to convey to you what it is like, but my reality and your reality are different. Think of trying to describe to someone who has never heard one what a saxophone sounds like — you have points of reference to use to try and describe it, but until you have experienced it yourself, you cannot say you really know or understand.

I think that is what the chaos of battle is like. We can try to understand it, but really never cannot because we have not experienced it the same way they experienced it. Historians try to describe it, but can only go so far.

The more ways you can sense history — touch it, experience it for yourself — I think the closer you can get. But you never are going to know what it actually was like to be there, unless you were there. Even then, you cannot ever have the full picture.

Since none of us are witnesses, we’re also limited by having to make sense of what we’re given by the historical record. The historical record has it’s problems. Go back to trying to describe the same event and coming up with different stories to describe it. We may sense it differently, but there is more to it than that. Our descriptions also may vary depending on what we’re trying to convey. Do we want sympathy? Do we want someone to believe us and not someone else? Is there something to be gained if our version of what happened is believed over another? This can impact what we emphasize when we tell our own version of what happened. It can lead us to consciously or unconsciously distort the record.

Historians, in the end, are a lot like attorneys, really. I think that’s the reason you find so many lawyers writing history or interested in history. As attorneys, we are given a set of facts — all filtered through the eyes of witnesses with different experiences who may have differing motivations for how they tell the story of what happened. They may all be telling the truth, or at least think they are telling the truth (though of course some will lie and the attorney will have to try and sort fact from fiction which is in and of itself sometimes impossible). An attorney takes these “facts” and then cobbles them together to create a story to be told in a brief, or to the judge, or to the jury. The attorney creates a story to explain reality. In the end, isn’t that really what a historian does — gather evidence and tell a story? Of course, we like to think that historians don’t have reason to give the story a certain “spin,” whereas the lawyer obviously tries to tell the story in a way that most benefits the client. But is there such a thing as a totally unbiased historian? I don’t think there is.

Just some thoughts bouncing in my head, as Harry put it. Although I don’t think there are any answers to some of these problems, I think that mulling over them and understanding that they exist is a good thing.