Of Voles and Men

David Meskill

Can the study of voles—meadow mice or field mice (genus Microtus)—prepare one to produce valuable insights into human history? Peter Turchin thinks so. With Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, the theoretical ecologist joins Jared Diamond, Peter Richerson, and a growing number of other biological scientists who have recently turned their sights on human history. Turchin believes his work on the dynamics of vole and other animal populations has given him the basic tools not only to illuminate a particular topic in history—the rise and fall of agrarian empires—but even more ambitiously, to advance history as a discipline.

In Historical Dynamics, Turchin develops and compares several theories in order to explain the dynamics of empires during the long agrarian phase of recorded human history. Early on he introduces a basic and very helpful distinction from population ecology, that between three “orders” of dynamic change or growth: 1) linear or exponential; 2) asymptotic or logistic; and 3) oscillatory. The first kind, limitless growth, almost never occurs, not only because growth requires resources and almost all resources are limited, but also because growth triggers debilitating feed-back mechanisms. For example, in the classic predator-prey situation, the growth of prey populations inevitably allows predators to run wild. This leaves the asymptotic/logistic dynamic, in which growth (whether of a linear or exponential kind) slows until it stabilized around an equilibrium, and the oscillatory dynamic, in which there is either a boom and bust or repeated ups and downs. In both the asymptotic/logistic and the oscillatory patterns, the nature of the feed-back mechanisms plays the decisive role. The key difference between the two—something not at first self-evident, but then readily grasped—is that the former can occur only if the feed-back is immediate and singular, whereas oscillations occur either if there is a lagged feed-back or if more than one feed-back is in operation. To explain the rise and fall of states, Turchin thus argues, we need to look for lagged or multiple feed-back mechanisms.

Turchin considers four processes that may contribute to the rise or fall of states. These are 1) the logistics of expansion, 2) ethnic assimilation, 3) ethnic frontiers as sources of internal cohesion, and 4) the interactions between population growth and political stability. For the first process, Turchin draws on and elaborates Randall Collins’ work on the geopolitics of expansion (which is similar to Paul Kennedy’s theory of imperial overreach). This theory focuses on the gains of expansion, such as increased resources and people to exploit, as well as the drawbacks, such as longer borders to defend and longer routes between core and periphery. Because these negative feedbacks should act fairly quickly, Turchin argues, Collins’ theory accounts at most for asymptotic dynamics: it may explain why states reach a point where they stop expanding, but it can’t explain why they eventually collapse. The second process—ethnic assimilation or lack thereof—also isn’t the main focus of Turchin’s book. It’s not rejected as a possible explanation for the fall of states, as geopolitics was, but rather it is not developed fully enough to address the central question adequately. Even so, Turchin’s brief treatment of processes of assimilation is fascinating and demonstrates the power of mathematical models to reveal surprising patterns. Relying, for example, on Rodney Stark’s argument and data about the social networks that were crucial in the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Turchin shows that the “threshold” or “take-off” arguments that have often been proposed to explain Christianity’s “sudden” popularity in the third century are simply superfluous. The explanations they offer lead to a dead-end. The same exponential rate of growth (which Stark explains in terms of social networks) can account for both the increase of Christians from, say, .0017% of the Roman Empire’s population in 40 CE to still less than 1% in 200 CE, as well as the apparent “take-off” from 1.9% in 250 CE to 10.5% in 300 CE and 56.5% in 350 CE. An understanding of exponential growth takes the mystery out of something like Christianity’s only apparently explosive development in the third century—and thereby redirects our search for causes.

Turchin’s book is most valuable for two other explanations of the rise and fall of empires. His most original contribution relates to the role of what he calls “meta-ethnic frontiers.” Symptomatic of the breadth and productive eclecticism of his thought, Turchin begins here with an idea borrowed from the medieval Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun, who is sometimes called the world’s first sociologist. Ibn Khaldun, in trying to explain the cyclical rise and fall of Arab states in North Africa, pointed to the key role of asabiya, the internal cohesion and moral strength of a group. The originally high asabiya of mountain tribesmen allowed them to conquer effete low-lying cities, but after some time the allures of urban life would reduce their own collective fortitude—opening the way for the cycle to begin all over again. To explain where asabiya comes from in the first place, Turchin points to Frederick Barth’s seminal study of tribal identity in Afghanistan: group identity is always highest in conflict with another group. When things like religion, language, and way of life (agricultural vs. pastoral) are radically different, the people on each side of the border—which Turchin refers to as a meta-ethnic boundary—will develop a fierce sense of loyalty to their own people.

After developing his model of the waxing of asabiya along meta-ethnic frontiers and its waning in the imperial interior, Turchin tests the theory in considerable detail against the history of state formation and decline in Europe from the Roman Empire to 1900 C.E. (sweeps of this kind are frequent in the book). He does so by dividing Europe into more than 50 regions and coding each of them in century-long intervals for the elements forming a meta-ethnic frontier (religious conflict, etc.), together yielding more than 2000 data points. He then plots these results against the later emergence of states above a certain threshold size. Meta-ethnic frontiers, he finds, explain most—though not all—subsequent instances of later formation of large states. The unexplained exceptions remain a problem, Turchin readily admits, and he explicitly solicits improvements to his theory. For now, however, he argues, what is crucial is that the meta-ethnic frontiers theory has much greater relative explanatory power than its main rival, Collins’ geopolitical approach. (A possible criticism at this point is that Turchin’s test of his theory may have involved some ad hoc adjustments. Already knowing the outcome to be explained [in this case, where states did, in fact, form] Turchin may have tweaked his parameters [for example, the choice of the boundaries of the sub-regions] in such a way as to confirm his theory. Such adjustments, often unintentional, are hard to avoid. Thus, other tests, in which the parameters are chosen without knowledge of the outcomes, would be desirable. Turchin, ever aware of methodological matters and modest in his claims, would almost certainly agree and, indeed, himself repeatedly encourages improvements on and challenges to his theories.)

If asabiya-generation on the frontier accounts mainly for the expansion of states up to a certain equilibrium, excessive population growth largely accounts for states’ subsequent collapse. Here Turchin borrows from and modifies Jack Goldstone’s demographic-structural account of the collapse of early modern states. Goldstone’s theory revolves around the indirect effects of Malthusian growth. I.e. a growing population doesn’t lead directly to starvation, but to a strain on state capacity, inflation, and both more intense elite exploitation of non-elites and greater intra-elite competition.

In the end, Turchin admits that he hasn’t been able to synthesize the various strands into a single unified account. This may be disappointing, but it also fits well with his refreshing modesty and, more than that, with his broader intellectual agenda. Turchin wants to bring to history the mind-set of the scientist. Theories are not (or are only rarely) complete or simply “right”; rather, we usually only have the choice between better and worse theories, those that explain more or less. Hence, in order to make progress, Turchin argues, it is crucial that we frame our arguments in as explicit a way as possible so that we can compare their explanatory power. Constructing mathematical models, he believes, is invaluable for these purposes of testing and comparison. Furthermore, history needs math because its dynamics often involve non-linear, lagged feedbacks—as demonstrated in the rise and fall of agrarian states. The underlying mechanisms of these oscillations are usually too complex to be captured by merely verbal models, and can only be grasped with the aid of explicit mathematical ones.

While becoming a leading ecologist, Turchin has somehow also found the time and energy to acquire vast erudition not only in historical, but also sociological, anthropological, and economic, literatures. This natural scientist doesn't simply or crudely apply lessons drawn from his studies of voles and other animals to human populations; rather, he attempts to combine some of those insights into dynamics with an awareness of factors that make human history even more complex. While he advocates a bold methodological position, the modesty with which he makes his case should absolve him of the charge of “intellectual imperialism” often thrown at earlier generations of social and natural scientists, who encroached on the turf of historians. Turchin goes to considerable lengths to explain his models in ways that are generally comprehensible (though one may have to dust off little-used knowledge from high school or college math). Historians who focus on the many fields from which Turchin draws his case studies (France, Russia, China, Islam, Christianity, Egypt, England) may, or may not, find his explanations convincing. Regardless, he will surely welcome the scrutiny and debate.

September Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Historically Speaking will soon be mailed out to subscribers. Not long after that, it will appear on Project Muse. The September issue includes a variety of essays, interviews, and an extended forum on the current state of intellectual history. Senior editor Donald Yerxa introduces the forum as follows:

The sense that the discipline of history was marginalizing traditional fields like diplomatic, economic, military, constitutional, and intellectual history—fields that critics charge focus far too much on elite decision makers—was a major concern of the founders of the Historical Society. As the Society enters its second decade, it is appropriate to revisit this matter, especially when the status of traditional historical fields is still debated, most recently in the pages of the New York Times (Patricia Cohen, “Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?” June 10, 2009). [See this earlier post on the matter here.] Historically Speaking has received a generous grant from the Earhart Foundation to publish a series of forums examining the state of four traditional fields that some believe are being neglected in today’s academy. Intellectual history is the focus of our first forum. We asked Daniel Wickberg, a cogent observer of historiographical trends, to write the lead essay. Three distinguished intellectual historians—David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClay—respond, followed by Wickberg’s rejoinder.

In his lead essay, Daniel Wickberg writes:

What the transformations wrought by both the linguistic and cultural turns point to is just how much the methods, approaches, and theoretical concerns that have characterized intellectual history have become central to mainstream historical practice. A generation ago, intellectual history was in crisis. Today there is evidence everywhere that intellectual history speaks to the dominant historiography of our day; its insights and methods have become part of the common coin of the most significant work currently being done. And yet there is a lingering sense that intellectual history as intellectual history is a field safely ignored by most historians, that the old arguments for its dismissal still retain life, that intellectual historians sit on the margin of the history department where more mainstream historians are free to characterize them as not quite historians. So the contemporary condition of intellectual history is somewhat paradoxical.

Table of Contents, Historically Speaking, September 2009

A Superficial Evocation of Our Times
Joseph Amato

Becoming Historians: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Pillars of World Christianity: A Review Essay
Robert Eric Frykenberg

Securing Possession: A New Way of Understanding the Past
David Day

Last Rites: A Conversation with John Lukacs
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

A Forum on the Current State of Intellectual History

Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?
Daniel Wickberg

Thinking is as American as Apple Pie
David A. Hollinger

Reply to Daniel Wickberg
Sarah E. Igo

Response to Daniel Wickberg
Wilfred M. McClay

Rejoinder to Hollinger, Igo, and McClay
Daniel Wickberg

America in the Jacksonian Era: An Interview with David S. Reynolds
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

Dual Discovery, Dual Dialogue: Reflections on the Global Modernization of Historical Writing
Q. Edward Wang

Peaceable Kingdom Lost
Kevin Kenny

Lincoln and His Admirals: An Interview with Craig L. Symonds
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Who’s Counting?
Derek Wilson

The History of Race on Trial in America
Ariela J. Gross

Spiritual, Yes; But Religious? A Review of Edward J. Blum's W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet
Kevin M. Schultz

Letters

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIIb: Tips for Taking College Essay Exams

Heather Cox Richardson

Taking the Exam:

Unless you have very badly misjudged the themes of the class, some of the questions on the exam should look familiar. They will never, however, look exactly like the ones you studied. This is not cause for panic. Just as when you discuss a question, you will often need to rephrase or slightly jockey an exam question to make it one you’re comfortable answering.

For example, say you prepared for the question (from the previous post): “In their drive to protect the political power of their region, Northerners and Southerners both accused the opposite section of trying to take over the national government,” and decided you would answer it by citing, among other things, John Brown’s raid and the attack on Sumner.

The exam question, though, is: “Were Northerners’ fears of the Slave Power legitimate?” You could develop an exam answer here that argued something to the effect of, “Well, yes, the Slave Power was trying to take over the government, but so were Northerners,” or “No, while each side cited plenty of examples of the other side trying to take over the government, these examples were largely propaganda. . . .” In either of these answers, you could easily use the same details and arguments you had developed in your practice answer to your own question. Do, though, nod to the actual exam question in your introductory paragraph, with something that acknowledges it. “While Northerners complained vociferously about the Slave Power, in fact both sections of the Union bore the responsibility for the coming of the Civil War.” Simply launching into a different essay than the one assigned is a mistake.

Having developed practice answers, coming up with your examples and details to answer this essay question should be almost automatic. You may need to rearrange things, but you should not find yourself desperately trying to remember something relevant. You should find it quite easy to put together. Your essay will have a thesis, examples, and details, drawn from a wide range of course material, just as a good essay should.

Be careful not to try to take too large a scope in your essay. If the question focuses on the Civil War, don’t try to start with a history of America from the colonial era. You won’t have time to get to the heart of the essay. Keep focused. Similarly, don’t aim too low, either. If the question asks you to compare America before and after the Civil War, don’t talk only about Reconstruction. You need to demonstrate control over a wide range of course material.

Don’t use throw-away sentences, like: “The Civil War changed America in many ways.” Such an obvious observation is a waste of your time and energy. Be specific: “The Civil War changed America by forcing individuals to confront emerging technologies . . .” leads directly into an essay.

Remember to write history in the past tense.

Do be sure to budget time to conclude your essay. An essay that just stops can never earn a higher grade than a B, at best. Where you end is just as important as where you start, and it’s the final impression you’ll leave on your reader.

Judge your time accurately. If it is a two-hour exam and you finish in 25 minutes, it is unlikely that you have covered enough material to earn a passing grade. If you have two hours to write four short essays, you should budget a half-hour for each. Do not, in that case, spend an hour and a half on one essay.

After You've Mastered the Basics:

A good way to cover extra material in an exam answer is to introduce the opposite argument in your introductory paragraph, and then to dismiss it. “While Southerners pointed to the rise of abolitionism, the North’s dismissal of the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s frightening raid, and Lincoln’s election as proof that Northerners wanted to destroy the South, in fact it was Southerners who were on the offensive in the 1850s. Abolitionists were never more than 1% of the population, the Dred Scott decision was improperly corrupted by politics, John Brown was a maverick, and Lincoln had no intention of harming the South. Southern slave owners, though, systematically attacked the foundations of the American government. . . .” In this way, you’ve essentially given yourself credit for a whole bunch of stuff that can’t fit into your essay, and left the reader with the impression you know the material so well you can talk about anything.

If you’re really feeling elegant, you might want to memorize a short quotation (or an interesting fact) to put into the final paragraph that sums up your understanding of the material, just as icing on the cake. “The triumph of the Union cemented the principles of the Declaration of Independence for, as Lincoln said on the Gettysburg battlefield, ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . . .’”

Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings

Randall Stephens

In "C (for Crisis)" (London Review of Books, 6 Aug 2009) Eric Hobsbawm looks at a significant shift in historical studies. "There is a major difference," he observes "between the traditional scholar’s questions about the past–‘What happened in history, when and why?’–and the question that has, in the last 40 years or so, come to inspire a growing body of historical research: namely, ‘How do or did people feel about it?’"

Hobsbawm uses Richard Overy's The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars to pose some questions about the change in focus: "Though this type of research is fascinating, especially when done with Overy’s inquisitiveness and surprised erudition, it presents the historian with considerable problems. What does it mean to describe an emotion as characteristic of a country or era; what is the significance of a socially widespread emotion, even one plainly related to dramatic historical events? How and how far do we measure its prevalence?"

I hadn't thought of things in these terms. But, on reflection, this change in emphasis to a national emotional experience does seem to be a major trend. Take, for example, the relatively new research on the 1960s and 1970s. Much of it, not surprisingly, focuses on the political and emotional turmoil of those two decades. Three books in particular, all sophisticated works of history, fit that pattern: Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006); Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008); Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (2006). (I used the latter in my modern America course and it worked very well.)

Hobsbawm gives good background on the development of the "how-did-people-feel?" genre. "The pioneer, he says is, "Jean Delumeau’s history of fear in Western Europe from the 14th to the early 18th century, La Peur en Occident (1978), describes and analyses a civilisation ‘ill at ease’ within ‘a landscape of fear’ peopled by ‘morbid fantasies’, dangers and eschatological fears." In the end, Hobsbawm criticizes Overy's The Morbid Age for not doing what it set out to do. "Overy’s book, however acute in observation, innovative and monumental in its exploration of archives, demonstrates the necessary oversimplifications of a history built around feelings. Looking for a central ‘mood’ as the keynote of an era does not get us closer to reconstructing the past than ‘national character’ or ‘Christian/Islamic/Confucian values.'"

Hobsbawm's review made me wonder about other books that might fit into the genre. And it made me question the strengths and weaknesses of tracking national "feelings" or "moods."

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VII: Tips for Taking College Essay Exams

Heather Cox Richardson

College history exams are different than high school exams. In high school, often you are asked simply to master a relatively small body of material and then to regurgitate it back to prove you memorized it. History at the college level is very different than this. You are asked to read and think about a huge body of material, and then are asked not to dump specific answers onto a page, but rather to think about the material and to answer questions by making an argument for which you marshal evidence from the large body of course material. These different exams require very different approaches to studying and to exam taking.

Studying:

Don’t make the mistake of simply reading your notes over again and again, hoping that the information will spring into some sort of order when you’re confronted with an exam question. Instead, read your notes over to get you thinking about the course. What are the themes of the course? What did the professor and the readings emphasize?

Now think. If you were writing an exam for the course, what would you ask? Put your ideas into the form of questions. “Something about politics,” is not a question. “How did the quest for political power affect the coming of the American Civil War?” is.

Once you have a number of questions, start to answer them, with your notes and books before you. Brainstorm to see what points are relevant to the topic, and jot them down. When you have a list, think about how you would answer the question, drawing on material from sections as well as readings and lectures. What do YOU think about this topic? Why? What have you learned in the course? An exam is where you get to have your own say about what you’ve learned. You’re part of a larger academic discussion when you take an exam and, yes, we listen to what you have to say. You should have fun putting your ideas together, and enjoy sharing them with us. Remember, there is no right answer. What we want to see is that you can think critically, and that you can weigh evidence to come up with your own ideas. “Wrong” answers are ones that are not based on factual evidence, but so long as you can back up your ideas with legitimate evidence, you can argue whatever you want.

As you fill in your topic sentences, each with at least three specific factual examples, you will need to refer back to your notes to make sure you know the details about those examples. Say, for example, you decide to answer the question above by saying: “In their drive to protect the political power of their region, Northerners and Southerners both accused the opposite section of trying to take over the national government.” You could come up with a number of different examples of occasions on which this happened: John Brown’s Raid, the attack on Charles Sumner, and so on. You’ll want to look up those events so that you really know about them. You may want to go ahead and jot down a skeleton answer to your questions, along with the details of the events you’re discussing, so you can study by them.

The idea here is to put the information in the class into some kind of order that makes sense to you. You will note that you are not trying to learn every single thing covered in class. That would be impossible. What you are trying to do is have control over the material, and develop your own ideas about it. This means that you will probably learn a great deal about some events and very little about others. (I know a great deal about the militarily unimportant Battle of Stone’s River because it was important politically, for example, but know only enough about military maneuvers to be able to figure out larger patterns of change). That’s okay. When you answer a question, the detail you put in about a few events stands for your overall knowledge. (This is called “post holing,” by the way). Do draw from all different kinds of material presented in the class, rather than focusing only on lecture notes, for example.

It doesn’t hurt, either, to talk to your classmates about class material. This doesn’t mean quizzing each other over terminology, but rather having discussions about larger themes. Do you think the roots of the Civil War were in economics? Then marshal your arguments and debate with someone who blames everything on Westward expansion. This type of thought does not necessarily have to be done at a desk, by the way. This can be accomplished over dinner, while biking, running, and so on; rather than talking about the latest episode of Lost or True Blood, try arguing about course themes.

Make sure you get a good night’s sleep for the two nights before an exam. Staying up all night to study is a terrible idea, since fatigue actually slows your ability to think. It’s more important to have a functioning brain than to have a few extra facts crammed into your head.

The Mechanics of Taking an Exam:

READ THE DIRECTIONS! In every single class, there is at least one student who forgets to take part of the exam, or who answers every question rather than picking one of two, or makes some similarly wasteful mistake. Don’t let that person be you!

Write legibly. It’s worth going a tad slower than you’re used to simply to make sure that we can read your writing.

Write your name and that of your professor and TA on the cover of the exam. Make sure you get the names of the professor and your TA right. Incorrectly identifying either suggests that you have neither come to class nor looked at the syllabus.

History on the Air

This will come as no news to many, but a relatively new radio show features the talents of three prominent historians.

What a terrific way to get the larger public to think historically. The summary from the website runs:

BackStory is a brand-new public radio program that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today. Together, they drill down to colonial times and earlier, revealing the connections (and disconnections) between past and present. With its passionate, intelligent, and irreverent approach, BackStory is fun and essential listening no matter who you are.

See also this interesting piece on the History Guys that appeared in the Chronicle, Jeffrey R. Young, Drive-Time History, With a Dry Sense of Humor, 20 July 2009.

Don't Know Much about History and the Film Chalk

Randall Stephens

Believe it or not, the first day of class fast approaches. Soon, if you teach that is, you'll be standing in front of 20-30 college or high school students, mouths agape, eyes starring blankly, heads wearing baseball caps.

A few years back my cousin, Janelle Schremmer and her husband Troy Schremmer, starred in the film Chalk (2006), a Waiting for Guffman-esque mocumentary about the sometimes harrowing, sometimes exciting world of high school teachers. (Picked up by Morgan Spurlock's company, it's now airing on the Sundance channel.)

The movie is a scream for those who've endured some bad moments in front of a chalk or white board. Like other mocumentaries, Chalk relies on well-timed silences and awkward interactions. One particularly excruciating plotline involves a history teacher whose angling for a teaching award. His politicking and pandering is tough to watch, though, hilarious.

The film gets at the difficulty of engaging students in subjects that are foreign to them, history being a prime example. See the youtube clip here of Troy, playing Mr. Lowrey, who asks students on the first day of class: "What comes to your mind with 'history'"? Students gaze into nothingness, blank faces, disinterest, maybe disgust.

Bad first-day questions aside, ain't it hard to get the average student to think historically? In Sam Weinberg's words:

Historical thinking is unnatural. It goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think. We are psychologically conditioned to see unity between past and present. A colleague of mine teaches at Queens University in Belfast. He gives his undergraduates a 16th-century quote from Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) where she refers to the Irish as “mere Irish,” at which point the Catholic kids take umbrage. But when you go to the Oxford English Dictionary and look at 16th-century references for “mere,” it means “pure, unadulterated”—it’s a compliment, not an insult. It is an impossible psychological challenge to check every word, to read documents from the past and constantly ask, “Does this word mean the same thing that I think it means now?” (From an Joe Lucas's interview with Weinberg in Historically Speaking, Jan/Feb 2006.)

So, how can the history teacher or prof get students even vaguely into the subject? More than that, though, how can the history instructor facilitate historical thinking in the classroom? One step in the right direction is to set the tone on the first day of class. That involves something more than asking students "What comes to mind when you think of the word history?" Here are a few things I've done in the past, some more successful than others.
.

• Have students name their favorite dead person. (I ask them to exclude grandmas and grandpas. Too easy, too boring.) Follow up with a discussion of how history helps us understand the words and deeds of the dead. Is history a kind of necromancy?
• Have the student identify the most significant national incident to have taken place in his/her life. Ask them why they think that is important and what it might tell us.
• Ask students what it means to be an "American"? See if they can think of how history has shaped our national identity.
• See if students can name several ways that life today differs from life in the 19th century. (That might be tricky, I know, if they have no idea how the 19th century is unlike today.)
• Ask students the broad question of whether history has a direction. Is the world better or worse in 2009 than it was in 1700? Why?

I'd like to know what other exercises teachers and profs use as a hook on that first day.

Splitting or Lumping—de gustibus non est disputandum?

David Meskill

I don’t read journal articles, especially on cultural and social history, very often. When I do, I frequently find myself not merely disappointed with particular entries, but deeply frustrated with the field of history as a whole. This is because so many historians see it as their task to be splitters, and just splitters. They try to find exceptions to others’ generalizations; they “interrogate”—in the current lingo—“grand” or “meta-narratives” they dislike. This is fine, as far as it goes. It’s the critical work necessary for any advance in knowledge. The problem is that these historians rarely add to the criticism any daring new construction, which is equally necessary for the kind of knowledge we should be producing. They don’t offer new, truer, bolder generalizations and narratives to replace the old, discredited ones. Or perhaps they do, but only by insinuation (see Foucault’s negative Whiggism: everything is getting worse). That is, these historians are not lumpers—creating bigger pictures of reality. They revel in the specificity of their interests.

I am a lumper, an outsider in my own field. So when I recently read some articles in cultural history, articles interrogating, splitting narratives in the history of emotions (it should be acknowledged that cultural history is the home turf of the splitters), I again found myself frustrated with the whole approach. But, I told myself in resignation, this was ultimately a matter of taste. Some people just like to split, others to lump.
Is that the case, however? Between splitting or lumping non est disputandum? Do we just leave it at that?

I now don’t think so. At least a couple of methodological considerations suggest we ought to encourage historians to engage in more lumping and less splitting (or perhaps less splitting merely as an end in itself).

First, the goal of any science or intellectual endeavor should be to discover the simplest possible explanations of the broadest swathe of the world. If explanation A accounts for 99 “facts” about the world and explanation B accounts for the same plus one more, B is an improvement over A. It’s what we should aim for. It may not be possible to explain more than 99 facts in that area, i.e. explanation B may be out of reach. But it would remain a heuristic goal. The same goes for simplicity: if explanations C and D both explain something equally well, but D is simpler than C, we should prefer it over C (Ockham’s Razor). The upshot of this is that, all things being equal, a simple grand narrative is better than small or complex narratives. Now, there may not be any simple grand narratives that are also true. But I have the feeling that many historians, especially cultural historians, are asserting more than this. They are not only saying there aren’t grand narratives; they are saying, or at least suggesting, that we shouldn’t even search for them, we shouldn’t even maintain the simple grand narrative as a heuristic goal. They not only ascertain the ostensible messiness of the world; they appear to revel in it as well. But as far as I can tell, they have never provided, or even attempted to provide, any cogent reasons for abandoning the aim of achieving simple explanations of as much of the world as possible.

The second reason to prefer lumping over splitting has to do with ideas drawn from fractal geometry. This field studies “self-similarity” at different scales, for example the ways in which a cloud, a coastline, or a snowflake has the same shape (puffy, jagged, intricate) regardless of how closely you look at it. Because of this, fractals are said to be infinitely complex. Applied to history, this raises significant problems for the whole splitting project. If you want to split, just where do you stop? Why deconstruct only so far as level X? Why not keep going, to level X-1, X-2, etc. ad infinitum? If the world is infinitely complex (and this is what the splitting approach can sometimes teasingly hint at—in the spirit of Clifford Geertz’ “turtles all the way down” comment) then no real knowledge is possible, and no one should be writing anything. It only makes sense to stop—and to write—if you think the world is not infinitely complex, if you think there are identifiable regularities at some level. But once a splitter admits this, he/she has given up his/her game, or at least the spirit behind it. For if we can generalize about the world, then—see the first point above—we should try to make those generalizations as broad (and elegantly simple) as possible. Then it’s right back up the stack of turtles, as far as we can go.

I’m not suggesting the profession only needs David Christians, William McNeills and Jared Diamonds. We need lots of specialists, too. But what I think we could use less of is the urge only to split without building up, without offering daring grand narratives. Splitting alone, especially when it revels in destruction, is neither intellectually coherent (point 2) nor worthy of our intellectual aims (point 1).

Historical Society's 2010 Conference & Religious History

Randall Stephens

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

The Historical Society's 2010 conference will deal with the future of the field of history. Titled "Historical Inquiry in the New Century" (June 3-5, 2010, hosted by Eric Arnesen at George Washington University, Washington, DC) the meeting hopes to attract scholars interested in the shape of the historical enterprise.

Animating questions include:

• What are the current historiographical debates?
• Where do particular fields currently stand?
• What's changed for the good—or the worse—in specific areas?
• What have been the clearest criticisms of the profession?
• What are the truly "big questions" historians face, and are we adequately grappling with them?
• What, in fact, are our aims/goals for the history that we write? What are the audiences for the history we write? Who's reading us?
• What impact, if any, do we have on larger, non-scholarly debates and understandings?
• How important is good writing to the field of history?
  

I hope that we can have several panels on religious history in general and American religious history in particular. Questions similar to those above might be worth considering. In addition, though, participants might look at how the field of religious history has broadened out over the decades from institutional and denominational history to something much larger. In recent years the number of historians who study religion has grown rapidly. Will that help reshape the field of history? Are the arguments about the neglect of religious history—made by George Marsden, John McGreevy, and Jon Butler—still applicable? Other questions to consider: What topics are younger historians studying, and why? What role does theory play in the writing of religious history? Has the job market or the publishing industry begun to reflect the growth in religious history?

A couple of years back James O’Toole wrote an essay in Historically Speaking on “Religious History in the Post-Ahlstrom Era.” His closing paragraph deserves further reflection:

The post-Ahlstrom era is now thirty years old, and no one can predict how long it might last. Historians will have to take account of new forms of religious diversity, particularly outside the West, both on their own terms and for the impact they have on more established groups. Levels of religious practice remain very high in America in comparison to other parts of the West, and history can help us understand this phenomenon. The future of the discipline is unknown, but it is clear that there is much work to do.

Please contact me, or the Historical Society, if you are interested in giving a paper, attending, offering insights, or putting together a session. Proposals (abstract and CV) should be sent to jslucas [at] bu.edu by January 31, 2010. Panel proposals are encouraged.

More on Digitial Books

Randall Stephens

On this blog we have featured posts concerning digital history and the virtues of virtual libraries. A recent review essay in the TLS, now on-line, sheds more light on the matter. Peter Green analyzes Anthony Grafton's Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard, 2009) in "Google Books or Great Books? The Enduring Value of the Republic of Letters, in All Its Forms."

Grafton is well acquainted with the world of digital resources, says Green. Grafton surveys recent developments and looks at the great potential for research and the creation of a new scholarly community. With Google Books, Grafton writes, "you can study many aspects of French thought and literature as deeply in New York as in Paris, and a lot more efficiently."

Though Grafton acknowledges the plus side, he also turns a critical eye on the digital endeavor. Grafton, Green writes, ably points out the glitches and flat footedness of Google Books and other searchable collections. At the same time that Grafton recognizes the inherent promise of digitized texts, he also laudes the dusty, hallowed libraries of the west. In Green's words:

The further one trawls into the past, the clearer it becomes that, as Grafton says, 'whatever happens on screen, the great libraries of the Northern Hemisphere will remain irreplaceable for a long time”, and one of Google’s most excellent services is already as a guide to finding material in them rather than providing that material itself. “The real challenge now”, we learn, in another striking metaphor, “is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.” The conclusion Grafton reaches is that while the recent present will “become overwhelmingly accessible” online, for the past we still need a painstaking hands-on approach in the archives themselves. The transfer of documentary archives – even those of the US or the UK – to the web is still in its infancy, and Grafton makes a strong case for the need to consult originals rather than digitized images: one researcher traced the history of cholera outbreaks by sniffing letters in a 250-year-old archive to see which had been sprinkled with vinegar in the hope of disinfecting them. Yes, the young scholar is told, take every advantage of the new electronic Aladdin’s cave. But – and here Grafton shows a rare moment of deeply felt emotion – these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books. >>>