The Importance of Being Uncertain―or What I Learned From Writing History With Rumors

Abstract

Rumors are a challenging kind of archival material for historical research. They provide vague, unreliable and obscure information—far from the reliable source material required to write history “as it really happened.” In this article I will, however, show how the uncertainty that is characteristic for rumors opens up a chance to understand knowledge-in-the making. By looking at reports of slave revolts in the U.S. South I try to find out how people at the time grappled with contradictory information and tried to evaluate the credibility of their sources. In a moment of crisis, rumor-mongering for nineteenth-century southerners functioned as a narrative way to come to terms with their collective fear and to performatively reestablish order. In the end, rumors became collective stories that help us, as historians, to understand the ambiguous character of uncertainty that can both challenge and stabilize power structures. In that, the focus on rumors also allows us to embrace uncertainty, fuzziness and speechlessness as constitutive elements in our own writing.