VARIETY
REPORT FROM THE ACADEMY:
HISTORY AS IT IS WRIT
No event in modern historio–
graphy equals the impact which
occurred when the Papal Archives
were thrown open to Leopold Von
Ranke. That this meant the end
of the Poplliar History was over–
looked. Two world wars finished
pff
what Von Ranke had begun,
and perversely enough the historian
virtually returned to his Renais–
sance role, becoming not so much
the chronicler of social structure,
as its accountant. The Academy
was founded.
We move tClday into a narrow,
congested ?lane of action, where–
in synthesis gives way to statistic
and monograph. The fields are
sub-divided, staved into narrow
strips that are scarcely observable
to the naked eye, so that all that
remains is a dim shape reflecting
itself and nothing more. Forced
under the pressure of the Academy
to produce learned little papers,
the modern historian will gather
with his colleagues perhaps once
or twice a year to present his ma–
terial. He dare not expose any
attempt at generalization to the
high-powered battery of specialists
.who sit about, fearful lest he be
caught up on a stray figure, the
unread article which should have
been mentioned, the perpetual roll
of new work in his field which
must constantly be tracked down
and eliminated in footnotes. Like
the Stendhal hero, in the midst of
Waterloo he seeks Waterloo.
Venturing out of the Academy
from the closed circle, he has lit–
tle space to breathe more than the
congested air of the technician, ee–
comes a mechanism aware of the
correct catalogues to approach
under a given subject, a compiler
of index cards. The group of his–
torians working on the story of the
American Air Force in the Euro–
pean Theater compiled tons of
data, but sought little more than
the tabulation of source upon
source. In such a venture thousands
upon thousands of documents are
processed by a dozen different
groups of specialists till the work is
complete, after which it is thrown
upon the doorstep of eventual
MILITARY HISTORY.
It
is a strange
process, where the worker is no
longer alienated from the means
of production, but becomes him–
self a fragment of the thing pro–
duced. Muffling the impact of
saturation bombing with his ma–
terial, the historian eludes the
modern terror, creating for him–
self a set of relatively simple val–
ues, wherein the irrational act be–
comes rational once it is graphed.
Equally alarming is the modern
trend toward individualized busi–
ness history. Such a corporation as
