Remnants of the past, history and the present

Abstract

Facts saturate history. Historians of sport know only too well that English cricketer William Gilbert Grace scored 54,211 first-class runs, that American Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel in 14 hours 30 minutes on 6 August 1926 and that Englishman Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile on 6 May 1954. Facts are the truths that historians recover from what Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob (1994, p. 259) call “the detritus of past living”. However, the great paradox of historical facts is that they are typically trivial and banal and rarely contribute to understanding the past. Reducing the life of one of England’s bestknown Victorians to a set of factual cricket scores, for example, leaves an absurdly shallow picture of Grace as the founding father of modern cricket, a notorious shamateur and wily entrepreneur. Moreover, whatever factual content historians take from these three descriptions of Grace will depend upon their willingness to accept a metaphor (‘father’) and complex concepts (‘modern’, ‘shamateur’, ‘entrepreneur’) reinforced by ideologically-loaded adjectives (‘notorious’ and ‘wily’). It is hardly surprising then that philosophers of history point to the slender relationship between the raw facts of the past and understanding the past. The latter is an act of interpreting fragments from the past and not infrequently these support several points of view (Berkhofer, 1995). Of course, notions of history as an interpretive practice rather than a craft of recovering facts raises the question addressed here: how do historians interpret historical materials, those remnants of past human activity? This question has particular significance at a time when historians are increasingly thinking about historical materials and evidence in radically new ways that are fundamentally changing the nature of history as an academic discipline. In the light of these changes, the first part of the article sketches three different sets of epistemological assumptions that operate in contemporary history; the second applies these assumptions to a more detailed analysis of four pieces of historical material. Reflecting on the analysis in part two, the conclusion discusses the complex relations between the present and the past.