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Of social scientists, the great Irish-born scientist, John Desmond Bernal, is reputed once to have said, when they “run out of things to say, they talk about method.”[1]  A pioneer in such sciences as X-ray crystallography and molecular biology and a dedicated Marxist, Bernal saw discussions of method as the trivialization of science, which he equated with rational thought and credited with the power to set civilization on its proper course.  Thus he wrote in The Origin of Life (1967) that “We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us.  Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.”  Bernal’s contempt for the trivialization of social science did not signal opposition to philosophic questions.  To the contrary, he insisted upon the inseparability of science, history, and philosophy—and the impossibility of divorcing productive intellectual work from a world view, which for him was necessarily Marxist.  A prolific writer, his numerous publications in science, philosophy, and social questions included a four-volume work on Science in History. 

Bernal belonged to a group of distinguished British Marxist intellectuals who bore the imprint of the 1930s.  Politically dedicated to the triumph of socialism, intellectually they were—sometimes more than they recognized—heirs to the Scottish Historical School and even to its offspring, the Whig interpretation of history.  In emphasizing the imperative of understanding nature in contrast simply to observing it, Bernal was implicitly, if not intentionally, criticizing Rankean empiricism and aligning himself with the propagators of grand encompassing theories of history.  At the same time, he remained an uncompromising materialist, who never questioned the material reality of the nature theory was to understand.  Although Bernal per se does not figure in the pages of this issue, the political and intellectual preoccupations he shared with many of the leading members of his generation do. 

In Britain and the United States, intellectual enthusiasm for Marxism crested during the 1930s and thereafter came under growing suspicion, although, for many Western intellectuals, the fire bell in the night came with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947.  Thereafter, disaffection proceeded apace, spurred by the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956 and culminating in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  By then, with a few prominent exceptions, British and American academic Marxism was slipping into an increasingly romantic form of social history.  The crushing of the “Prague Spring” combined with ’68 student demonstrations throughout the Western world dealt the final blow to what overnight became known as the “Old Left.”  The New Left that replaced it moved rapidly to discredit the intellectual assumptions of previous generations, dismissing those of Marxists together with those of the bourgeois establishment.

New Left intellectuals did not immediately find their theoretical sea legs, although from the start they vehemently opposed what they condemned as the authoritarian elitism of previous historical theories and schools and insisted that intellectual work prove its “relevance” to the present concerns of individuals.  Intent upon recapturing the voices and experiences of the “people” over whom previous scholarship had ridden roughshod, they especially focused on the unmediated history of working people, African Americans, and women, adding other social, cultural, and sexual groups as they staked their distinct claims.  Eventually, even the most committed practitioners of this new history-from-the-bottom-up began to notice the limitations inherent in their project, notably an empiricism and attention to the microcosm—frequently called the “community”—that permitted less than satisfactory interpretations of their findings.  Few outsiders took advantage of that opportunity, either out of lack of interest in the topics or out of a justifiable fear of being condemned for one of a growing list of sins, beginning with “racism” and “sexism.”  In the measure that debates over interpretation did arise, they left no doubt that the foundational premise of the new work was autobiographical.  Each had an inalienable right to tell his or her own story in the “voice” and for the purposes he or she wished.

The results were more than occasionally bizarre, and one of the more bizarre—which may stand as an example of others—must be the determination of some feminist historians to reclaim the writing of history for women by changing the name to “herstory.”  Obviously, they reasoned, there was no escaping the intrinsic patriarchalism of a subject that unabashedly advertised its maleness in the pronoun embedded in its name.  Had their command of language matched the passion of their ideology, they might have had an argument.  The argument might not have been strong and might not have prevailed, but it would have been grounded in a recognizable complaint.  In the event, their intellectual shortcomings decisively undermined their political case, although many of their followers have yet to recognize the problem: History never has meant “his story.”  The word derives from the Latin “historia,” which has persisted in various Romance languages, as in the familiar French “histoire,” which, tellingly, translates as both history and story.

The French includes not even the illusion of an embedded pronoun, and in any case, the noun is feminine.  The original reasons for the noun’s gender are obscure, but the link between history and story may be more interesting and considerably easier to explain.  History was narrative long before it was “scientific”—if indeed it ever has attained the basic criterion of scientific rigor that materialists like Bernal claimed for it, namely verifiable and replicable experiments.  The idea of history as a story, or cluster of stories, offers considerable comfort to feminist and other contemporary critics of what they like to dismiss as “official” history and which they readily charge with a variety of biases, notably claims to objectivity.

Today, the idea that history originated as stories is frequently taken to confirm that it is preeminently a subjective account that reflects and reinforces the “identity” of the person telling the story.  But that comfortable view mistakes earlier understandings of the nature and function of story as history.  The idea of history as story does point to its roots in oral culture and even to the possibility of its special ties to the informality and comfort of the domestic circle—chat or gossip rather than official pronouncement.  And since traditionally the domestic sphere is that of women, who were often the custodians of their peoples’ stories—often the only ones to attempt to chronicle their history—this view of history permits one to view it as essentially a female project.  Often, but not always.  Edward Yamauchi’s discussion of biblical history in our last issue reveals an unabashedly patriarchal historical tradition that primarily speaks of wars, religious organization, and state-building.  Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey similarly bridge oral and literate culture with the primary purpose of elucidating the public life of peoples and establishing an official record. 

The juxtaposition of history as science and as personal story opens fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable, windows on the practice of what the great French historian, Marc Bloch, called, in the book of that title, “the historian’s craft.” At first blush, we might be tempted to see a radical opposition between the “scientific” and the “narrative” practices of the craft.  But to do so would be uncritically to accede to the intuitive view of the former as “objective” and the latter as “subjective,” whereas neither is rigorously the one or the other.   Critics from both Right and Left have always been quick to charge various forms of purportedly objective history with political or ideological bias: Conservative critics saw as little honest science in Marxist history as Marxist critics saw in Whig and Liberal history.  By the same token, the purportedly “liberating” history of personal stories turns out, on close inspection, to impose its own brand of conformity at least as fiercely as its rivals.

Recent years have spawned a flurry of discussions about the writing of history, most of them focused on “theory,” and many invitations to recast Bernal’s complaint as, “When historians run out of things to say, they talk about theory.”  The temptation should be resisted.  Theory per se is not the problem now any more than it has ever been.  Only the naïve claim that historical accounts, scientific, narrative, or other, are not implicitly or explicitly shaped by theoretical assumptions and influenced by ideological commitments.  But much of the theory that has arisen from the ashes of New Left activism is disquietingly self-referential. 

It would be inaccurate and unfair to say that writing about the writing of history—how we do it and how we should do it—has replaced the actual writing of history, but the former has decisively gained ground on the latter and, perhaps more telling, it increasingly claims pride of place among the most fashionable historians.  No doubt explicit reflection upon the practice of our craft helps us to understand where we have been, where we are, and where we are, or hope to be, going.  But without substantive scholarship against which to measure our theories, we are increasingly drawn into what might, with an apology to Piero Sraffa, be called “the production of theory by means of theory.”  Worse, on the basis of such inadequate theoretical speculation, we risk slipping into “scholarship” designed solely to confirm the theory.  Thus do we lose our grasp on the independent existence of previous societies and systems of belief.  Thus do we subsume all previous human experience to our own biases and purposes.

Previous issues of The Journal have included reviews and articles that criticize the excesses of much contemporary historical work, and we know that our readers take exception to the enforced orthodoxy of what many call “political correctness.”  But we have yet to devote an entire issue, or even the majority of a single issue, to discussions of contemporary historical writing.  In no small part, that reticence testified to our primary commitment, namely the publication of intrinsically significant and diverse historical scholarship as well as a variety of historical genres.  But it also reflected a reluctance to engage battles that too easily degenerate into empty, if nasty, invective.  With battle lines rigidly drawn, the two sides in the “culture wars” are both vulnerable to losing sight of the larger questions.  By now, few of the participants seem deeply engaged in, or even informed about, the longstanding philosophical debates between materialism and idealism, and many might be hard pressed to identify the specific elements that characterize a position as of the Left or the Right—if either term still has any coherent meaning or represents a coherent politics.

Framed by Jim Sleeper’s discussion of George Orwell’s difficulties in securing a publisher for Animal Farm and Anthony d’Agostino’s discussion of the cycles of revisionism in diplomatic history, this issue engages various aspects of contemporary historical practice and theory.  A contemporary of Bernal as well as a onetime political comrade, Orwell rapidly became disillusioned with the Soviet example of socialism, which his Animal Farm bitingly satirized.  Today, when such phrases as “some pigs are more equal than others” have passed into the general culture, it seems implausible that Orwell have had difficulty in finding a publisher for Animal Farm, but he did.  Beginning with Victor Gollancz, London’s leading leftwing publisher and Orwell’s friend, British socialists and communists condemned the book as treasonous to the Left, while liberals and conservatives condemned it for its leftwing sensibility.  Sleeper takes Orwell’s experience as emblematic of the intellectual coercion democratic cultures frequently exercise against those who challenge their pieties.

Sleeper has had his own experiences with intellectual intolerance—the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his title—which make him especially sensitive to Orwell’s difficulties.  But however disillusioning he finds those particular cases, his main point transcends them.  At issue, as Orwell understood, are two troubling questions.  First, Sleeper asks, may not democracy itself prove “inherently dangerous to freedom”?  Second, is not the most important quality for a political writer the “elusive courage it takes to see and illuminate complicated truths about freedom” that may anger both those on the Left and on the Right, “or worse be taken up opportunistically by both.”  The courage demanded of an honest writer—or any person of moral and political conviction—is the courage to withstand the covert but nonetheless deadening censorship that democracies can impose on those who depart from prevailing orthodoxies.  If “we” all agree about one idea or policy, then how can we tolerate any who would undermine that agreement? 

The problem, Sleeper reminds us, had been clearly foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville, who acerbically dissected it in Democracy in America (1835).  Close study of the French Revolution had taught Tocqueville the naïveté of expecting liberty and equality to be mutually compatible.  In practice, he found a strong tendency for political self-government to become despotic; thus, as a general rule, “The more ‘democratic’ a society in the colloquial ‘we are all equal’ sense, the less freedom its members are actually likely to enjoy.”  Like Orwell, Sleeper has experienced the intellectual isolation and exclusion that befalls those who do not hew to the prevailing line.  But he is not writing out of a wave of self-pity.  To the contrary, he is writing to unmask the danger democracy poses to genuine intellectual freedom.  Today, Sleeper insists, “Left and right are more than occasionally complicit in assaults on civic culture.”  In a world of “chattering” and “gramophone” minds, the liberty we have lost is the liberty Orwell sought to defend: “to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 

It is hardly surprising that the writing of history has fallen prey to many of the tendencies of the larger culture.  It would be surprising if it had not.  But the dominant tendency in historical studies has been partially obscured because it originated as a revolt against what its practitioners called “consensus history.”  From the start, the promoters of the “new” social history have emphasized diversity, the immediacy of personal experience, and the so-called elitism of many historical topics and standards.  But the conflict between what Gertrude Himmelfarb has called the “new” and “old” history was not just another swing of the revisionist pendulum.  The tendency of one generation to revise the conclusions, as well as the questions and methods, of its predecessor had a venerable pedigree that, in one form or another, has prevailed as long as history has been written.  In the measure that history has been the custodian of tradition, which, in the Latin tradition, means the handing on of the old, the writing of history has always been a conversation between generations and has invited revision as central to its stewardship of tradition, for without revision, tradition would whither and die and be lost to subsequent generations.[2]

In literate cultures, revision preserves the integrity of the record, permitting us to observe, evaluate, and reflect upon change—and the interpretation of it.  Oral cultures, in contrast, effectively erase all record of change, because the revised version is always “the way things always have been.”  Oral cultures’ erasure of revision accommodates the tactics of the new history’s emphasis on immediacy, plurality of voices, and, in general, a spurious intellectual democracy.  And, however ironic it may seem, the “theoretical turn” of recent years has contributed to the same result.  The problem, as Orwell and Sleeper discovered, is not so much one of Left versus Right as it is one of imposed conformity and a widening stream of historical amnesia.

Throughout a long and distinguished career, David Landes has never lacked the courage to speak or write as conscience and intellectual integrity have dictated.  Here, in a new departure for The Journal, we publish an interview he gave to Joseph Lucas.  The title, “The West in Perspective,” points to a central strand in Landes’ thought throughout his career, namely the importance of individual initiative.  From the start, he attended closely to the importance of entrepreneurship in economic development, insisting that successes and failures could not adequately be explained by any purported system of historical laws.  With the passage of time, he emerged as one of the few who fought to defend economic history against the pyrotechnics of the economists on the one hand and the subjectivism of the social historians on the other—to preserve, that is, an intelligible and challenging vision of economic history as central to historical understanding as a whole.  His own work, which has especially focused on the rise of capitalism and technology in the West, has unflinchingly insisted upon the unique contributions of the West to economic development throughout the world.

The interview offers a rare picture of how a distinguished historian assesses his own work and a valuable introduction to the influences, including the colleagues, that led him to formulate the questions that have shaped his work.  Landes’ conversation with Lucas reveals a historian who seems not to place ideological and political questions at the center of his work.  While he has had strong extra-academic allegiances, he has balanced them with an equally strong sense of the demands of his craft.  The genre of the interview offers a more personal sense of an historian’s perspective on the guiding principles of his work, although this interview contains none of the “confessional” mode that has gained popularity in some literary and historical circles.  It also contains little explicit discussion of theory, although even a cursory glance at Landes’ work reveals his engagement with theoretical questions and their influence upon both the structure and conclusions of his work.  Reading his work leaves no doubt about his distaste for the encompassing scientific theory favored by Bernal as well as for explosion of self-referential theory in recent decades.  History, in Landes’ hands, represents an unabashed commitment to objectivity in contrast to subjectivity.  What makes his oeuvre as a whole all the more arresting is his ability to command the analysis of objective structures and forces with a deep appreciation of the irreplaceable contribution of the individual.

The claims of the individual—viewed more as public actor than as private psyche—are gaining new recognition among historians, although often for different purposes and audiences, and reflections on the historical study of individuals figures prominently in this issue.  First, however, we must consider another historiographical problem that, in somewhat different form than the one presented here, is garnering new and often unfavorable attention.  Sadly, the problem is that of our basic standards of integrity for our craft.  These days, no teacher can remain innocent of the vast possibilities for cheating afforded by the Internet, which seems to have replaced fraternity files and other repositories of previously-authored papers.  Nor are many of us unaware of the considerable pressures that are driving our students to view education solely through the lens of grades—the purported “port key” to their future success in the world.  But, often to the credit of our more generous instincts, we have been less willing to acknowledge the slow proliferation of similar problems within our own ranks.

In the last few years, a succession of highly publicized “cases” has forcibly opened our eyes, although even with the evidence on the table, some resist condemning the behavior.  From time to time, we hear justifications based in claims about the practice of Baptist preachers, who, working in an essentially oral tradition, were wont to borrow from one another’s sermons without attribution.  Bypassing the insult to the vibrancy of the Baptist tradition, not to mention its deep roots in a venerable oral culture, this attitude also trivializes intellectual work, which it attempts to present as, in some way, common property, while emphasizing the “intertextuality” of all of our efforts and, ultimately, placing a very low premium on standards of academic honesty and intellectual property.  Presumably, the latter are to be opposed for their elitism, although few who argue this line are quite as cavalier about their own intellectual property.  But at least the most notorious cases find their way into the public arena and benefit from public discussion.  The countless pettier cases rarely attract any publicity at all, although they may well pose the greater long-term threat to our profession and craft by imperceptibly eroding the standards that have sustained it.  We are in the world of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who laments, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”

Here, we cannot pretend to solve the larger problem, although Karen Fields’ essay on two recent translations of Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life opens a discussion that others may profitably pursue.  In 1995, Fields published an arresting new translation of Forms in which she introduced significant departures from earlier translations.  But in 2001, an abridged translation by another appeared that seemed more closely to resemble hers than statistical probabilities would suggest.  To put the similarities in perspective, Fields has traced the treatment of key passages through the four translations only to find disconcerting similarities between hers and the 2001 abridgment.  Her discussion includes beautifully nuanced examples of the demands of producing an accurate translation, with special attention to the delicate choices a translator must always make.  Thus, in one instance, Fields chose to translate “ces obscures consciences” as “minds obscure to us” rather than as “obscure minds,” as the 1915 translation had done.  And, in another, she translated Durkheim’s “les religions mêmes les plus inférieures” as “even the simplest religions,” in preference to the “even the most inferior religions” of the 1915 translation.

In both instances, the choice of words is a genuine choice: There is no “right” answer, although most of us would prefer the one Fields settled on.  In both instances the choice turns upon both linguistic and cultural considerations.  It is possible that Durkheim, writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, was closer in sensibility to the 1915 translation than to Fields’.  He was working in an academic and cultural environment that took racial stratification for granted.  But the words he used invite more than one “correct” reading, and a good translator will seek the rendition more faithful to Durkheim’s central intent, which was to lay the foundation for a true comparative study of religion by highlighting the persistence of fundamental religious themes and purposes.  In this perspective, the possible racism of some of his formulations can only detract from a modern reader’s understanding of the larger intent and must, consequently, become a distraction.

Fields draws us into the endlessly complex world of translation—between languages, cultures, and historical epochs—but that discussion itself is intended to open, however delicately, the question of inappropriate “borrowing” from the work of others.  Time after time, the abridged translation of 2001 appears to lift directly and without acknowledgment from Fields’ translation.  After following Fields’ account of the intellectual work embodied in her translation, no reader is likely to doubt the intellectual significance of a thoughtful translation, or to take lightly the act of “borrowing” liberally from it without attribution or acknowledgment.  Great translations have been treated as original works in their own right: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,for example, or the Samuel Putnam translation of Rabelais, or F. Scott Moncrieff’s of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as The Remembrance of Things Past. As Fields reminds us, scholarly, like literary, translation is regularly undervalued, and “the translator’s active work of reconstruction is wrongly imagined as a kind of mediumship that enables the text itself to move seamlessly from one language to another.”  Under these conditions, the elementary norms of academic honesty easily fade away.

The specific problem is that translation does not flourish in isolation. Hence a larger problem arises, encouraged by the virtually endless resources of the Internet—namely, how to discourage and even censure academic dishonesty in its myriad guises.  Whether “scholars” invent their references, lift whole passages from the work of others without acknowledgement, or “merely” adopt another scholar’s carefully crafted translation as their own, they are eroding the integrity of the craft of history.  Unfortunately, the shifting sensibility of the craft seems to encourage rather than thwart their anti-social behavior.  The emphasis upon subjectivity has opened the door to countless abuses, including the transformation of the prevailing standard of “how it was” into “how it looks to me.”  Few are so naïve as to cling to the belief that we can necessarily recapture the past, but some still do still cling to the ideal of practicing the craft with integrity and the commitment to meeting standards that can stand the scrutiny of other scholars.  Objectivity may not be what men like Bernal previously took it to be, but its failure to obey iron laws does not justify relinquishing all attempts to see the past as others might have seen it.

Epics, legends, myths, and even ballads provide one of the many—and one of the more important—links between the historical sensibilities of literary and oral cultures.  In two reviews, David Konstan and Fay Yarbrough respectively take up scholarly discussions of heroes.  Reviewing Dean Miller’s The Epic Hero, Konstan praises Miller’s exceptional mastery of diverse literatures and cultures—a mastery that permits Miller to delineate the exceptionally numerous and varied portrayals of heroes.  Drawing upon impressive learning, Miller’s depiction of the hero in his many guises presents a varied and protean figure, who ranges from the chivalric knight to the trickster and beyond.  Perhaps the hero’s protean guises owe something to his origins in an oral culture that preferred strong representatives of good and bad, but the original vision seems not to have survived translation into literate culture, for, as Konstan notes, Miller seems ultimately to conclude, “The hero is not a ruler who nurtures his followers, nor a Weberian charismatic leader, but a figure devoted to death—his own and others’.” 

The John Smith whom Yarbrough distills from David Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation seems to have something more in common with the trickster than the chivalric knight.  Pragmatism and disregard for hierarchy contributed decisively to his ability to coerce and cajole his men into the establishment of Jamestown, although gentler and more traditionally chivalric qualities may have figured in his relations with Pocahontas, and for Price her story “presages the larger story of the European colonization of North America.”  John Smith and Pocahontas represent the very marrow of American mythology of heroism, frequently idealized as an alliance between the colonists and the native born.  But the myths that surround them are subject to confirmation and refutation on the basis of historical records. 

The records have been affording scholars the possibility of increasing our knowledge of the history of American Indians and their interactions with Anglo American colonists.  The long and laborious work of collecting and interpreting treaties and other documents is steadily expanding our knowledge.  The myths nonetheless die hard.  Popular audiences cherish them, if only to infuse some adventure and romance into the early history of the country.  For very different reasons, trendy, “theorizing” historians are also attached to them, although mainly because they offer a way of disembedding historical accounts from the straight-jacket of events.  The mythic dimension of figures like John Smith and Pocahontas open opportunity for endless speculations about the “construction” of the myths and their significance for those who spun them and the subsequent generations who clung to them.  These elaborate theoretical speculations may not contribute much to our historical understanding and rarely find a large following among the general literate public, but they often enjoy considerable prestige in academic circles.

These potential and often actual rifts among the different audiences for history are symptomatic of widespread disagreement about the role of history in the perpetuation and renewal of a national culture.  Biography often offers a way to bypass some of the more heated theoretical debates, and it has the special virtue of potentially appealing to both academic and popular audiences.  But, as Bruce Kuklick points out in a review essay on recent biographies of Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Dewey, biography can do only so much.  Intellectual biography in particular, while telling us about the intellectual development and life of an important figure, can offer us only partial glimpses of the larger world within which the biographer’s subject operated.  Above all, it can tell us little about the real correspondence between the ideas of the intellectual and the world or about his or her impact on it.  To call attention to these limitations is not to denigrate the genre, which remains invaluable for understanding the thought of distinguished minds.  But it remains to disentangle the ties between that thought and the culture of the period, especially the popular culture. 

In an essay on recent treatments of Benjamin Franklin, Allan Kulikoff engages these issues, carefully attending to Walter Isaacson’s biography, also discussed by Kuklick, and Catherine Allen’s long documentary on his life.  Kulikoff attempts to place these efforts in context by considering them in relation to other recent documentaries, notably Ken Burns’ various treatments of other giants of the Revolutionary epoch.  Even more than assessing the discrete virtues and failings of these specific works, Kulikoff’s primary interest lies in assessing the contributions of different historical genres to our national culture and historical memory.  In so doing, he maintains an admirable balance between pay overdue respect to the ways in which popular historical works—whether books or films or even the restoration of historic sites and reenactments of events, battles, and everyday life—can make important contributions to historical understanding.

Kulikoff insists that acknowledgment of the value of these efforts does not cancel our responsibility to criticize them, but he does underscore the responsibility of professional historians to criticize them for what they are, not for their failure to be academic history.  The truth is that popular history, including history written for the general educated public that reads the Wall Street Journal, does more than most academic history to secure history’s place in Americans’ sense of themselves as a people.  The challenge for historians is to defend appropriate standards across the spectrum of historical writing and to appreciate the contributions of a variety of genres.  In this issue we do not take up the place of historical fiction, but it, too, can make significant contributions to a broader recognition of the importance of history in the ways in which all Americans think about their country, the world, and political decisions.  The dangers in popularization, Kulikoff reminds us, lie in simplification and even outright distortion, much as even the most “theoretical” academic history is capable of misleading or misrepresenting.  In our current situation, when much academic history is retreating to theory, popular history and biography—to which we might add military history—often emerge as important custodians of the story of our national past.

Anthony D’Agostino moves us back to the European world of Bernal and Orwell—the world of the World Wars that opened the way for the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union even as they dramatically transformed the international balance of world power, undermining Europe’s hegemony and propelling the United States to the status of super power. At the center of these dramatic transformations stands what is often known as the “German problem.”  In what measure was Germany responsible for the origins of the wars?  And what fueled German ambitions?  Analysis and accounts of the origins of the two world wars have provoked waves of revisionism, which have explored a series of complex and politically charged questions.  D’Agostino offers a fascinating account of the successive explanations of these phenomena, elucidating the ways in which those of one generation tend to cluster around a primary explanation—such as, the Peace of Versailles wronged Germany so what could one expect—which the next generation “revises,” charging Germany with a “griff nach die Weltmacht” (a struggle for world power) that preceded World War I rather than resulting from it. 

History offers countless opportunities for speculation about the causes, consequences, and meanings of events, and the recurring attempts to engage the challenges it offers—not least, its bearing upon our ability to rise to those of our own time.  William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”  The same may be said of history, and the recognition of history’s persisting force in the lives of peoples and nations informs the persisting attempts to understand its bearing and significance.  The twentieth century brought such extensive and rapid changes to all aspects of human life that many find it difficult to grasp the significance of the past for current events, which, pace to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, often do seem like something new under the sun.  The omnipresent sense of novelty and the breakneck pace of change—le chic et le choc as it were—have seemingly put the lessons of the past up for grabs and, by the same token, moved struggles over the writing of history to center stage.  The contributors to this issue explore some of the many challenges that confront us and, in so doing, explicitly or implicitly engage the central questions of democracy’s tendency to sacrifice freedom of thought to the comfort of conformity, the protections for intellectual property in an electronic age, the relation between story and analysis—between the telling of an individual life and the meta-analysis of an age—and the relation between academic work and the broader culture.  These questions are unlikely to go away any time soon.

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From Joseph Lucas "The West in Perspective: An Interview with David Landes"

“Lucas: How do you evaluate the future of “literate” economic history, the kind of economic history that can be read and absorbed by an educated person who has not had technical training in economics?

Landes:  This is the kind of question you can ask about any science.  Take physics: There are books that the physicists can read, and then there are books that are intended for the educated layman.  And the second kind of book makes all the difference, because not only does it give the layman a sense of the value of what the physicist is doing, but he also gains a much better sense of the world.  It is the same with economics, which has become a science—not a natural science, but a social science—and as a science it has become more mathematical, more statistical.  It is full of equations and charts and so on, which the ordinary person cannot possibly read….

Consider the whole business I stressed in Atlanta [at the 2002 Conference of The Historical Society] about global change over time.  A thousand years ago, China was in the lead, and the Muslim Middle East was also ahead of Europe, which, in spite of some glorious periods in the past, had lost ground and was seen by some as barbaric and certainly backwards.  Why did everything change, and how did it change, and when did it change?  That stuff is never really going to be satisfactory in mathematical form.  It is the kind of thing where you have to be able to talk to colleagues in the other social sciences, maybe even colleagues in literature.  It will be of interest even to natural scientists, when you talk about the calculation of longitude and latitude and things of this kind, or the role of time and time keeping.  One has to learn to write in such a way that it will be understandable.  There will even be room for style.”
 
 

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From Karen E. Fields "On Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: The Scholarly Translator's Work" 

“Literary translation is often called an undervalued art.  Scholarly translation lives in a similar twilight.  In both, the translator’s active work of reconstruction is wrongly imagined as a kind of mediumship that enables the text itself to move seamlessly from one language to another.  One consequence, in the case of scholarly translation, is that the elementary forms of academic life easily fade and disappear.  Few specific rules guide proper acknowledgement of other translators’ work.  But even if specific rules were many and well-conceived, it is in the nature of things that few readers could know when those rules have been violated.  Thus the predicament of scholarly translation becomes a predicament for scholarly collectivity, because the collectivity must uphold for itself, and inculcate in students, the cardinal principle ‘Do your own work.’”
 

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From David Kronstan "The Projeny of the Warrior: Dean Miller's Epic Heroes" 

“Miller, in a large and intriguing book, takes as his subject not the archetype of the hero, in the reductive manner made popular by Joseph Campbell (in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but rather the hero as he appears in a specific epic tradition, namely that of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English and German, Latin and its romance descendants, Greek, the Slavic tongues, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, and Sanskrit and its modern derivatives, and many others.  Miller's decision to restrict his survey to the literatures of the Indo-European linguistic group is not simply one of convenience.  He seeks to trace the evolution of a specific narrative type from its earliest surviving manifestation in the Homeric epics, composed roughly three thousand years ago, down through its manifold variations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into modern times.  The transformations of the hero figure have responded to the social conditions of the poets and their audiences, and Miller's sensitivity to the interplay between epic narrative and history makes his book of interest to historians:  The code of chivalry shaped one inflection of the epic hero; the Reformation, with its "recovery of certain scriptural images of God-justified 'heroic' violence" (15), another; and the discovery of the New World followed by the advent of Romanticism shaped yet another.  But certain features of the hero persist, according to Miller, and retain even today the stamp of institutions and beliefs that go back to the earliest phases of Indo-European society.”
 
 

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From Fay A. Yarbrough "Speaking of Books: Love and Hate in Jamestown" 

“David Price has written an engagingly readable account of the early English efforts to establish the settlement of Jamestown.  Price gives particular insight into the character of John Smith—his origins, his personality, and the experiences that shaped his reactions to the New World and its indigenous populations.  In the published accounts of Smith and his fellow colonists, Smith’s pragmatism and disregard for hierarchy, his ingenuity and quick-thinking, often saved the colonists.  For Price, John Smith becomes the prototypical American, embodying all of the qualities, good and bad, of the emerging new nation.  Price also explores the role of the indigenous woman Pocahontas in Jamestown’s success.  For Price, the story of Pocahontas presages the larger story of the European colonization of North America. 

Price’s sources highlight the experiences of the colonists, which may leave some readers disappointed by the comparative lack of analysis of American Indians’ perspectives of the interactions between the colonists and the native population.  Price’s prologue and chapter on the first Africans at Jamestown also provoke questions about the development of the concept of race in American history.  Yet overall, Price offers a detailed description of the sometimes courageous, and sometimes comically miserable, founding of Jamestown.”
 

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From Alan Kulikoff "Electric Ben: Franklin and Popular History" 

“Understanding the goals of popular biography and assessing their success in meeting those goals decisively helps comprehension of historical memory.  But that does not relieve historians of the task of judging popular work.  We should not require biographers and directors to become professional historians.  We can pass over factual lapses, but not repeated howlers and distortions that lead readers or viewers to misunderstand the historical context of the protagonist’s life.  If the stories they tell and the fictions they present preserve the subject’s integrity, viewers gain historical understanding.  In such cases, critics need to avoid carping on inaccurate but inconsequential details.  Occasional errors notwithstanding, neither Issacson’s biography nor Allan’s documentary misrepresent their subject. 

Rather than emphasize inaccuracies, historians should examine the arguments and pinpoint the themes of popular biographies but refrain from challenging the goal of biographers and directors to connect to the lived experience of their readers and viewers.  If excessively pedantic, criticism could seem to demand that popularizers do academic history.  By raising concerns, professional historians can advance the educational goals biographers like Isaacson and documentary-makers like Allan share with them.  One ought to judge written biography on the basis of its presentation of each issue.  Filmed biographies, in contrast, require a double analysis, both of the script and scenes that illustrate it.  We should thus hold Isaacson’s biography to a higher analytical standard but Alllan’s documentary to a greater visual and evocative one.

Franklin’s life raises five issues of concern both to historians and to the public.  His evocation of middle-class identity, the grand theme of his life, has been a subject of controversy for more than a century.  An urban man in a rural world, his ideas were shaped by the city environments in which he lived.  His practicality and politics invite examination of Franklin as a provincial man of the empire, as a consummate imperial politician, and as a scientist and thinker.”

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From Bruce Kuklick "Biography and American Intellectual History" 

“As a collectivity, these books express the deep conservatism of the genre of historical biography, and they go a little way to explaining why some historians consider biography an enemy of critical thinking…. None of the authors escapes making a hero of his subject, and it is this aspect of biography, at least in American intellectual history, that is most problematic.  The biographical exercise seems designed to provide models of human excellence for reflective people and to reveal history’s uses as a pep-talk for life instead of as a repository of cultural knowledge, which would pose less of a problem if biographers were only to find models in people whom they imagine to be like themselves.  Marsden’s faith commitments barely damage his treatment of Edwards, and Isaacson’s treatment of Franklin proceeds with an ideological moderation that does much justice to Franklin himself and raises few objections.  But Buell’s Emerson proves more problematic, for the hero one gets is but the lengthened shadow of the values of the biographer, and one hopes that Buell and Emerson were not much alike.

These volumes illustrate another defect in intellectual biography: biographers are often ill-equipped to grapple with the ideas that have made their protagonists suitable objects of study in the first place.  Biographers often invoke some fuzzy distinction between the history of ideas and the biographical enterprise, with the latter allowed to distance itself from examination of thought.  Isaacson, who does not do much with Franklin’s philosophical ideas, employs such a strategy with some success.  It is disastrous for Martin, who is philosophically illiterate and overmatched by Dewey’s thought.  Marsden does not need the distinction, for he effectively mastered eighteenth-century thought to write his Jonathan Edwards.

Looking at the books as a group, I am struck by the ways in which American intellectual history focuses, or distorts, our vision of American history.  These volumes make little room for what I might call the benign insights of cultural studies.  Attention to the lives of these successful men of mind does not permit us to see how the bedrock assumptions of the social order were shaped; the ways in which the subjects unthinkingly shared these assumptions; or how they participated in the dominant structures of power and prestige.”

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From Anthony D'Agostino "The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History" 

“Revisionist historians added greatly to knowledge of the climate and background of British decision making.  As Fay and the moderate revisionists of the twenties showed, one could be educated by revisionism even if one was not entirely convinced.  Revisionism opened the flood gates before a greater torrent—once the nuances of Chamberlain’s position were reconsidered, the next question to ask was whether he, as opposed to Churchill, had not been right all along.  Perhaps it would have been prudent to seek a greater Germany as a barrier against Soviet Russia; perhaps Churchill and Eden had erred by their enthusiasm for a Grand Alliance…. 

Is it fair, then, to say that revisionism has been the dominant intellectual trend in European diplomatic history, and has the cause of those who took us into the two world wars and the Cold War not proved in the end to be meritorious in the eyes of the historians?  The interpretation of World War One as an accident, in keeping with the revisionism of the twenties, has not lost its hold on the non-professional reader, and this interpretation has continued to co-exist with a Churchillian interpretation of World War II.  The two models were sometimes set against each other as alternative warnings, as for John F. Kennedy in 1961-62.  Is it useful to compare the origins of the two world wars?  When AJP Taylor wrote his Origins, he meant exactly such a comparison, which may have seemed to be a vindication of “hack diplomatic history.”  Watt, whose defense of the Origins did much to bring about its eventual vindication, concluded only that the parallels were closer than are admitted by orthodoxy, but less than the revisionists like Taylor would claim. 

Unkind critics suggest the truly horrifying possibility that historians, as a kind of deformation professionelle, tend to strive unreasonably after originality, which may result in their overselling their analyses.  Historians may be too ready to discard work that is “superceded,” even when no new knowledge or sources have been discovered to enlighten them….It is useful for historians to resist the pull of fashion and the allure of current “definitive” accounts to try to appreciate how the story was once told.  Such resistance broadens perspectives and encourages sympathy for the intelligent educated general reader, who refuses to embrace all of the latest professional innovations.”

 
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