History or Special Pleading

Legend says that the president of a leading American university once asked the professors in the department of history to define what it was they were teaching. Apparently more astute and knowledgeable than most, they refused to come up with a definition of exactly what they were professing. Perhaps it was just as well for them; history has proved a notoriously difficult concept to define; and the “idea of history” continues to invite abstruse speculations. Nevertheless there remains on the part of the expert and the inexpert alike a solid conviction that the study of history, however the subject is defined, does have some uses. Estimates of that use range all the way from Thucydides’ cautious belief that a knowledge of the past is “an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it” to Lord Acton’s forthright declaration that the use of history is to sharpen our conscience.

Harvey Wish’s The American Historian (Oxford, $7.50) raises the problem to a new level, since now the question becomes, what is the use of a history of historians? Of course the two questions are best taken together, and out of respect to the method of historians, let us begin with a look at the data. The American Historian is substantial and complete; it begins with the unsophisticated and therefore delectable early writers like John Smith and William Bradford and proceeds down to Allan Nevins. All of the great names in between—Bancroft, Parkman, Fiske, McMaster, Adams, Turner, Beard, and others—receive due space if not their due meed of praise. The book moves along like a good historical narrative, notwithstanding some necessary excursions into analysis.

RW

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Richard M. Weaver

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Legend says that the president of a leading American university once asked the professors in the department of history to define what it was they were teaching. Apparently more astute and knowledgeable than most, they refused to come up with a definition of exactly what they were professing. Perhaps it was just as well for them; history has proved a notoriously difficult concept to define; and the “idea of history” continues to invite abstruse speculations. Nevertheless there remains on the part of the expert and the inexpert alike a solid conviction that the study of history, however the subject is defined, does have some uses. Estimates of that use range all the way from Thucydides’ cautious belief that a knowledge of the past is “an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it” to Lord Acton’s forthright declaration that the use of history is to sharpen our conscience.

Harvey Wish’s The American Historian (Oxford, $7.50) raises the problem to a new level, since now the question becomes, what is the use of a history of historians? Of course the two questions are best taken together, and out of respect to the method of historians, let us begin with a look at the data. The American Historian is substantial and complete; it begins with the unsophisticated and therefore delectable early writers like John Smith and William Bradford and proceeds down to Allan Nevins. All of the great names in between—Bancroft, Parkman, Fiske, McMaster, Adams, Turner, Beard, and others—receive due space if not their due meed of praise. The book moves along like a good historical narrative, notwithstanding some necessary excursions into analysis.