Does History Have a Meaning?
By Mark Malvasi
"Professional historians have no special expertise. In the study of the past, there is no difference between a professional and an amateur historian. If they put their minds to the task, even untutored undergraduates might discover a more profound truth about the past than their learned professor, the limits of their knowledge notwithstanding."
Historians All!
What was Carl Becker thinking? When, on December 29, 1931, Becker delivered the presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, he was already something of a controversial or, perhaps more accurately, an enigmatic, figure.[i] Having studied as an undergraduate with Frederick Jackson Turner at the University of Wisconsin and having completed a doctorate at Columbia under the supervision of James Harvey Robinson, Becker was among the proponents of the “New History.” Some members of his audience undoubtedly regarded him as a skeptic and a relativist who denied the possibility of absolute, objective truth. Others saw him as a populist who extolled the common man and castigated the elite.[ii]
An iconoclast, or at least a nonconformist, Becker rejected the conviction that history was a science. He doubted that historians need only to accumulate and arrange the facts to produce an exact transcript of the past. In his own diverse scholarship, he asked penetrating questions but seemed always to be unsatisfied with the answers. He was never quite sure of anything. “No doubt throughout all past time,” he wrote:
" there actually occurred a series of events which, whether we know it was or not, constitutes history in some ultimate sense. Nevertheless, much the greater part of these events we can know only imperfectly; and even the few events that we think we know for sure we can never be absolutely certain of, since we can never revive them, never observe or test them directly. The event itself once occurred, but as an actual event it has disappeared; so that in dealing with it the only objective reality we can observe or test is some material trace which the event has left–usually a written document.[iii]"
Historians perforce viewed the past only at a distance, their vision at once clarified and obscured by documents that always required interpretation. In his presidential address, Becker thus challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of the history profession, chief among them the belief that objectivity was viable and the confidence that facts spoke for themselves to yield unassailable truth.[iv]
Whatever else he may have been, Becker was also a trickster, a persona never more evident than in “Everyman His Own Historian.” Becker lulls his audience into a comfortable familiarity with a character whom they think they already know: an ordinary man living an ordinary life and doing ordinary things such as paying his debts. Mr. Everyman is troubled by the nagging feeling that he has forgotten a matter of some importance. When memory fails him, he consults his archive of personal records to discover that he must pay for the coal he has purchased to keep his home warm during the winter. It turns out that not only is his memory faulty, but his records are also mistaken. When he arrives at the offices of Mr. Smith to settle the account, Smith informs him that, in fact, Everyman owes Mr. Brown, for Brown had the kind of coal that Everyman wanted. Smith passed the order on to his competitor. Mr. Everyman then goes to Brown’s office to pay what he owes.
.... continued and again well worth reading -