Historical Imagination [1 ed.] 1138689386, 9781138689381

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HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

Historical Imagination examines the threshold between what historians consider to be proper, imagination-free history and the malpractice of excessive imagination, asking where the boundary between the two sits and the limits of permitted imagination for the historian. We use “imagination” to refer to a mental skill that encompasses two different tasks: the reconstruction of previously experienced parts of the world and the creation of new objects and experiences with no direct connection to the actual world. In history, imagination means using the mind’s eye to picture both the actual and inactual at the same time. All historical works employ at least some creative imagination, but an excess is considered “too much.” Under what circumstances are historians permitted to cross this boundary into creative imagination, and how far can they go? Supporting theory with relatable examples, Staley shows how historical works are a complex combination of mimetic and creative imagination and offers a heuristic for assessing this ratio in any work of history. Setting out complex theoretical concepts in an accessible and understandable manner and encouraging the reader to consider both the nature and limits of historical imagination, this is an ideal volume for students and scholars of the philosophy of history. David J. Staley is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University. His previous books in historical theory include Computers, Visualization and History and History and Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future.

HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

David J. Staley

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 David J. Staley The right of David J. Staley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-68938-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-68939-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12710-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my mother

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgments Introduction: imagination in history

viii ix 1

1

Imagination in the archives

19

2

Insertions

39

3

The modal mood in historical writing

59

4

The historian’s fancy

84

5

What if?

117

Conclusion

134

Glossary Bibliography Index

138 141 146

FIGURES

0.1 1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination When Drawing Inferences from Documents Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in Concepts and Periodizations Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in The Return of Martin Guerre Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in “Intuitive Imagination” Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in Dutch Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in The Unredeemed Captive Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in Wolf Hall Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in Counterfactuals

12 27 56 67 68 92 99 112 132

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fifteen years or so ago I was having lunch with a colleague from the Department of English, the rhetorician David Kimmel, who asked me, “How much imagination are historians permitted?” I’m afraid I responded to his query too quickly and too simplistically. “None!” I shouted. “Unlike you English types, we are not allowed to make up anything!” David was working on a study of the rhetoric of academic history. He was working with a set of documents describing a horrific lynching in Indiana at the beginning of the twentieth century. He wanted to write two versions of the same event: one in the form of a history that one might publish in a history journal, and the other as a short story as one might see in a collection of fictional short stories. How would these two accounts – both drawn from the same evidentiary base – be different? How “creative” could one be over the other? As I considered Dave’s question further, it was clear I had been too hasty – historians do indeed “make things up,” although in ways different from fiction writers. I have been working on the question Dave asked me during that lunchtime conversation ever since, for which I am grateful. James Schul twice invited me to conduct workshops with K–12 teachers on the subject of historical thinking and historical imagination. The Paul Siple documents I mention in the book were centerpieces of these exercises to instruct teachers in how historians read, interpret and ultimately write representations of the past. Using these documents, I also worked with the teachers on identifying the limits of the (creative) imagination. A number of the arguments in this book were honed in these workshops, and I thank Jim for his enthusiastic support of this endeavor. I have over the years taught three different versions of a senior seminar on the topic “Historical Imagination,” and each time the class filled to capacity quickly with curious and perceptive students. My thanks go to these students for helping me define the contours of the diagram that features prominently in this book.

x Acknowledgments

I also wish to thank my colleagues in the Ohio State Department of History for their participation in a symposium on historical imagination and for helping me to frame the questions that animate this book. I especially wish to thank Ying Zhang, John Brooke, Daniel Rivers and Greg Anderson for their questions, observations and collegiality.

INTRODUCTION Imagination in history

“As a historian, I couldn’t take the story past the facts.” John Sedgwick was describing the internal conf lict he felt tracing the history of Harriet Gold, a nineteenth-century distant relative from Connecticut. “But as Gold’s relative, I felt I could hear her brother’s shrieks and imagine what she must have felt while f leeing Cornwall and entering a strange new land full of rising tensions. The whole lot of it.” Sedgwick was musing on the differences between history and genealogy, and how he was precariously balanced between the two approaches to the past when excavating the history of his ancestor. “For a historian, such a leap of imagination amounts to malpractice” – that is, his imagining Gold’s feelings. “But it delivered a more felt connection to the story than straight historiography had been able to provide.”1 Part of what it means to be an historian, it would seem, is having to limit the imagination. “Every statement about the past is, necessarily, a hypothesis,” writes the historian of Rome T.P. Wiseman. To be of any value it must be based on evidence and argument. If a hypothesis seems unchallengeable, and the evidence for it overwhelming, we call it a fact. . . . We extend our understanding of the past by forming new hypotheses and testing them by appeal to evidence and argument.2 Wiseman engaged in such hypothesis generation in his book Catullus and His World, but reviewers felt that some of his hypotheses were not warranted. “Much of Wiseman’s argument, however, is highly speculative. Occasionally it seems tendentious,”3 wrote one reviewer, a sentiment echoed by another reviewer who wrote, “My only reservation concerns Wiseman’s arguments, found mostly in the fifth chapter . . . here alone I felt there was special pleading in the attempt to extract meaning from the sequences of polymetrics and elegiacs.”4 Another

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Introduction

reviewer warned that “Wiseman indulges in some surprising speculation that will undoubtedly generate much heated debate in scholarly circles.”5 In his defense, Wiseman remarked, Forming a hypothesis, making an inference from evidence, is in its small way a creative act. A few years ago, a reviewer commented on “the very great element of fantasy” in [Catullus and His World]. He liked much of the book, but on certain points he could only regret that I had not “restrained my imagination.” What he meant, I think, is that some of the hypotheses I offered seemed improbable to him, and not others. But all of them were dependent on imagination. “Fantasy” is as pejorative a term as “mere speculation”; but imagination, controlled by evidence and argument, is the first necessity if our understanding of the past is ever to be improved.6 Each reviewer in his or her own way had accused Wiseman of excessive imagination, whether that was called speculation or pleading or tendentiousness. But Wiseman asserted that the imagination was an integral part of the historical method, more than implying that all historians use their imaginations. As these two instances suggest, historians appear to have an aversion to the imagination and are at pains to keep imagination at bay in their narratives. Both of these accounts suggest that in historical writing there exists a boundary, a threshold between proper, imagination-free history and the malpractice of excessive imagination. Where, exactly, is this boundary? What are the limits of the historian’s imagination? How do we know when we have crossed this threshold, and how do historians enforce this limit? These will be the guiding questions of this essay.

Imagination as mimesis What do historians mean by “imagination” when they admonish others to constrain it? There are two connotations of the word “imagination,” and historians employ both in their work. One connotation of imagination refers to the mental faculty whereby we conjure images in our mind’s eye. “Simply defined,” write Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown, “imagination is the power or capacity of humans to form internal images of objects and situations.” 7 Eva Brann notes that this meaning of imagination derives from Latin: “Thus the imagination is originally the faculty for having or making images. .  .  . The term is, furthermore, cognate with the Latin word imitatio. Thus, the mimetic or copying aspect of the imagination . . . has etymological support.”8 Imagination in this mimetic sense refers to our ability to visualize something that is not currently present to our senses but that has been present at one time. “There is an imagination; it is a faculty or a power,” says Brann, “specifically it is a faculty for internal representations; these representations are image-like; therefore they

Introduction

3

share a certain character with external images; in particular, like material images, they represent absent objects as present; they do so by means of resemblance.”9 Imagination is the ability to picture that which is (at the moment) absent. For instance, I might ask you to picture the house in which you live. Even when one is not standing next to one’s house, most of us can readily imagine the physical features of our dwelling. “In philosophy,” writes Brann, “the core-definition of the imagination is that it is a power mediating between the senses and the reason by virtue of representing perceptual objects without their presence.”10 This connotation of imagination draws from Aristotle, who saw imagination “as an important mediator between sensation and thought.”11 While imagination in this mimetic sense is a common feature of human cognition, there are those who lack this ability to picture what is absent. We might learn something about how the mimetic features of imagination actually function from this cohort. Congenital aphantasia is a condition where a person cannot form mental images. “Anecdotal reports from our aphantasic participants indicate that while they are able to remember things from their past, they don’t experience these memories in the same way as someone with strong imagery,” write Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson, two researchers who have studied this condition. “[People with aphantasia] often describe them as a conceptual list of things that occurred rather than a movie reel playing in their mind.” Understanding more about aphantasia, understanding what keeps some people from being able to use their imaginations in this mimetic sense, might allow us to gain insight into the mental processes of those who are able to form such mental images. Current theories propose that when we imagine something, we try to reactivate the same pattern of activity in our brain as when we saw the image before. And the better we are able to do this, the stronger our visual imagery is. It might be that aphantasic individuals are not able to reactivate these traces enough to experience visual imagery, or that they use a completely different network when they try to complete tasks that involve visual imagery. The researchers suggest that not being able to form mental images may, in fact, be a coping mechanism for some. Overactive visual imagery is thought to play a role in addiction and cravings, as well as the development of anxiety disorders such as PTSD. It may be that the inability to visualise might anchor people in the present and allow them to live more fully in the moment. (emphasis mine) It is interesting to note that an inability to visualize in the mind’s eye is associated with anchoring in the present, rather than in the past. This would almost

4

Introduction

suggest that thinking about the past requires an ability to form mental images, to employ the imagination. “Understanding why some people are unable to create these images in mind might allow us to increase their ability to imagine, and also possibly help us to tone down imagery in those for whom it has become overactive.”12 It is possible, therefore, that there may be a condition of “too much imagination” in this mimetic, re-creative sense. However, I do not believe that this is what Sedgwick had in mind when he worried about his unwarranted leap of imagination. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio contends that we all rely upon “banked images” when engaging the mental faculty of the imagination. We have experiences in the world, recall these experiences in our memories and then call upon a mental image of these experiences later. (We also combine and recombine these banked images in novel ways, a point to which we will return when considering the second connotation of imagination.) These banked images arrive to us “‘from the world outside or from the inside world’ and rely on an exchange between the two . . . [but] real world experiences seed rich images banks for the imagination to draw from.”13 Do historians similarly rely on “banked images” when they are reading and interpreting documents? If so, is this where our experiences of the past come from? The historian John Lewis Gaddis describes history as a thought experiment enacted in the mind. Like other scientific disciplines that cannot reproduce results because they cannot conduct laboratory experiments – such as geology and astrophysics and paleontology – “historians must use logic and imagination to overcome the resulting difficulties, their own equivalent of thought experiments, if you will.”14 In this sense, the imagination serves as a kind of “staging ground” where we reconstruct the past in the mind’s eye before committing these mental images to writing or other kinds of representation. History is a discipline that is enacted in the imagination (in the mimetic sense). By this I mean that historians assemble evidence from the past, these fragments of what was. In reading and otherwise interpreting these sources, the historian creates a mental image. History, it might be said, is a discipline that is enacted in the imagination, imagination in this sense of a mental faculty to recall images of absent things. But how exactly does this work for historians, who rarely have the opportunity to directly experience the past? We have established that this connotation of imagination refers to the ability to form mental images of actual objects and states of the world that are not currently present to be directly experienced. This definition assumes that the one so imagining has had a prior experience of those objects and situations. But except in exceptional cases, historians rarely have such direct experiences of the past. So, what does it mean to perceive or visualize an entity we have never directly experienced before? Say you have never attended a professional football game. Would this mean you would not have the ability to visualize such an event in your mind’s eye? It is very likely that you could, given that you have at least an

Introduction

5

understanding of what a football stadium looks like or how the players might move around the field or the sounds that might swirl there. I have never played professional football, but I can most certainly imagine what it must feel like to be hit hard by a linebacker. Of course, the actual experience would in no way equate to my mental image of the event. But that is not in question: our mental images might resemble the actual occurrence but will be ontologically poorer. That caveat aside, I am still able to use my imagination so as to reconstruct such an occurrence even if I lack direct experience. I would contend that imagining an event or occurrence even in the absence of direct experience is the kind of thought process that all historians engage in. We imagine events and occurrences from the past as part of our vocation, occurrences that have never been present to our senses. “No doubt, historical thought is in one way like perception,” says R.G. Collingwood. Each has for its proper object something individual. What I perceive in this room, this table, this paper. What the historian thinks about is Elizabeth or Marlborough, the Peloponnesian War or the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella. But what we perceive is always the this, the here, the now. Even when we hear a distant explosion or see a stellar conflagration long after it has happened, there is still a moment at which it is here and now perceptible, when it is this explosion, this new star. Historical thought is of something which can never be a this, because it is never a here and now. Its objects are events which have finished happening, and conditions no longer in existence. Only when they are no longer perceptible do they become objects for historical thought.15 This is true, of course, but only up to a point. The Peloponnesian War is an event we can no longer directly perceive; that is true. But we do perceive, in the present, the remnants of that event. Like an exploding star, we sometimes perceive the after-effects of events from the past. Because we work with documents, sources, fragments left over from the past, we gain an “experience” of these, forming mental images as if we were experiencing these firsthand. When reading documents, we cannot help but to form mental images, images of what these documents evoke in the mind’s eye. The historical imagination in this sense is of a special variety, distinct from our everyday imagination. “In another way,” argued Collingwood, history resembles science: for in each of them knowledge is inferential or reasoned. But whereas science lives in a world of abstract universals . . . the things about which the historian reasons are not abstract but concrete, not universal but individual, not indifferent to space and time but having a where and a when of their own, though the where need not be here and the when cannot be now.16

6

Introduction

That is, the past, historical phenomena are indeed concrete, but they can only be indirectly perceived. “But just as history is neither sensation nor noesis (perceptions of the mind),” Collingwood continues, so it is not a combination of the two. It is a third thing, having some of the characteristics of each, but combining them in a way impossible to either. It is not partly acquaintance with transient situations and partly reasoned knowledge of abstract entities. It is wholly a reasoned knowledge of what is transient and concrete.17 History as a third thing is both sensation and noesis. We cannot physically sense what is no longer present for our senses to perceive, but our imagination acts as if we can and do perceive what was once present to be sensed. When we employ the imagination in this fashion, the historian is often “filling in gaps” in our perception. These are those facets of the past that can be mimetically visualized and other parts that are “filled in” in an analogous manner to an archeologist using putty to fill in the gaps of a broken and incomplete piece of pottery. That mental “putty” envisions what must have been present but is now inaccessible to our direct perception. To state it another way, using the mimetic imagination in history means visualizing something that we presume was at one time ontologically actual, even if it is no longer present to our direct senses. We experience this now-absent past indirectly, by experiencing the remnants of the past, and filling in that which is absent.

The creative imagination Let’s return once again to the theater of our imagination, about the images we can conjure in the mind’s eye. I had asked you originally to imagine the house you live in. This time I want you to image your house five times its actual size, painted purple and orbiting Jupiter. The kind of imagination you are now employing is not mimetic: that image does not exist anywhere in the world except in your imagination. No one has ever directly experienced such a scene. In this instance we are using our internal image-making process to generate or create novel mental images. Imagination in this sense is associated with creativity and artistic processes. It is a wild faculty where images are “made up.” In another sense, it is associated with novelty, the generation of the new. Combining banked images, like we did earlier, where we take images of actual objects and occurrences and combine them in novel ways, is also a way in which we generate novel images. The result, in either case, is an image that is untethered from the ontologically real world. It is this connotation of the word “imagination” that is likely to be the version that Sedwick and Wiseman were referring to when they were discussing an “excess of imagination.” Brann refers to this as that which is “Imaginary: Here used to characterize images of unreal or inactual originals.”18 This connotation of the word derives

Introduction

7

from Plato, who was distrustful of the imagination, seeing it as “an irrational process and even an act of possession by the daemon.”19 Perhaps this explains why historians are at pains not to use their imaginations, because for a long time, imagination in this creative sense had a low status in Western culture. There are myriad examples of the use of this kind of imagination, most of which would seem to be at some remove from the work and thinking of historians. For example, the literary character Hubertus Bigend is a wholly fictional character, a person made up in the mind of science fiction writer William Gibson. That is to say that Gibson created an image of Bigend in his mind’s eye, but that image does not correspond to anyone who is or was ontologically actual. As an historian, it would indeed be impermissible to include or insert such a fictional person into any historical account, that is, if we wish for such an account to be considered history and not historical fiction. Consider the fantasy world invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, a world of Hobbits and dwarves and ogres, each speaking invented languages. This is clearly imagination in the creative sense, of picturing a wholly invented world. Novelists and other fiction writers, of course, have license to employ their imaginations in this fashion. Historians do not grant themselves such license; this is the kind of “malpractice” Sedgwick was concerned about and that Wiseman’s critics alleged. The reputation of the imagination in Western culture – in this creative sense – was restored during the Romantic period. Romantics theorized that the creative imagination, rejected by Plato as inferior to reason and indeed even dangerous, was in fact the creative force responsible for diverse inventions. For the Romantics and post-Romantics, this productive energy of the imaginative capacity expresses itself in the privileged areas of art in general, of course, and in literature more specifically. Indeed, for the Romantics and their modern heirs, theories of the imagination and theories of art and literary production are so closely intertwined as to be virtually inseparable.20 It was among the German Romantics that the creative imagination was elevated to a privileged position among the mental faculties, and literature in particular was the ultimate expression of this faculty. “Among the German Romantics,” argues Richard T. Gray, Friedrich Schlegel deliberated in particular on the polyvalence of the imaginative faculty, distinguishing a “productive imagination” peculiar to mathematics, a “visual” imagination at home in the representative arts, and what he called “fantasy,” which he aligned with music. For Schlegel, literature comes to be theorized as the supreme human endeavor precisely because it fuses and relies on all three of these imaginative modes, and his position is representative of a general tendency at this time to view literature as the privileged vehicle for imaginative expression.21

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Introduction

One way we might think about the history of the discipline is to suggest that history, at one time a genre of literature, began to situate itself outside of this tradition. Historians came to conclude that the imagination in this creative sense must be tempered in order for the discipline to become more scientific. Perhaps this rejection of the creative imagination is part of the professionalization of the discipline in the nineteenth century, part of the “noble dream” of objectivity pursued by historians. Peter Novick wrote, “The professional historians of the late nineteenth century, in pursuit of the authority of science, consistently distanced themselves from, and disparaged, ‘history as literature,’ ‘history as art.’”22 This meant that as a scientific discipline, history could not include “creation” as part of our professional practices. But as I wish to demonstrate in this book, historians nevertheless retain practices that employ the creative imagination to produce “diverse inventions.” One way to characterize the transition from the Enlightenment ethos to Romanticism was the shift in the definition of the “predominant human faculty” from reason to imagination.23 Gray considers the statement about the creative imagination made by an anonymous group of German Romantics, writing in the nineteenth century. The Romantics were asking, in effect, Can a universal and monolithic form of reason tolerate the play, f lexibility, and unpredictability of imaginative creativity? Turning these questions around: Could the creative imagination, conceived as a kind of absolute freedom of thought and fantasy, view the rules and governing logic of rational thought as anything but shackles and impossible limitations?24 In so framing the question of the creative imagination, historians opted for rational over creative thought. That is, to be scientific and objective, historians must indeed shackle and limit the imagination. As historians conceived of their discipline as more scientific over the course of the nineteenth century, that tension between reason and imagination was played out, the basis of the now age-old argument: is history a science or an art? Gray observes, In his notebooks from 1805 [Goethe] insisted that one of the primary aims of education was to place governors on the unbridled power of the imagination, and he went so far as to attack imagination as the “most powerful enemy” of reason and as a form of primitivism that posed a threat to the entire edifice of human culture.25 This might explain historians’ aversion to imagination in this creative, Platonic sense and why it must be avoided. The retreat from the creative imagination was one way to distinguish history as a separate branch of knowledge distinct from literature. However, that did not mean that the creative imagination could be entirely excised from our practices.

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9

For a time, largely in the 1990s and early 2000s, historians inf luenced by postmodernism challenged some of our central methodological approaches, including the practice of history as objective and scientific. One way to think about the postmodern challenge is to suggest that postmodernists were attempting to push history back to this creative side of imagination. “A major reason the passions aroused by the postmodernist ‘threat’ among historians have been so intense is no doubt that the allegedly sharp line between history and fiction so easily gets blurred,” writes Sarah Maza. “Historians are particularly sensitive to encroachments from the fictional end of the writing spectrum precisely because they are more like novelists than any other group in the scholarly world.” 26 The postmodernists had claimed that history was no different from fiction, and that any historical narrative was a fiction. There were some notable experiments in writing fictional history, like The King of Odessa, Robert Rosenstone’s fictional biography of Isaac Babel and Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations). Postmodernists claimed that all history is a kind of invention; another way of thinking about postmodernism is to say that the postmodernists were simply returning the discipline of history to its literary and creative roots, admitting that history was more like literature than it was science. Maza describes postmodernism as a “threat” in quotation marks, I suspect, because the postmodernists did not really alter the practice of historians. Aside from the works I just mentioned, and apart from much theorizing, there were few actual postmodern historical works actually produced. Agreement reigns in principle that historians are bound by facts and obey a strict embargo on invention. But the historian’s task also consists in assembling scattered sources and connecting the dots between them and superior historical work involves the ability to imagine the past and recreate it in vivid prose. Disagreement often arises, often contentiously, as to which forms of dot-connecting and imagination are licit and which are not.27 Note Maza’s definition of imagination here: she is referring to the mimetic connotation of the word, that historical imagination means re-creating, not inventing. The specter of being labeled as (mere) literature haunts historians; it is the reason historians like Sedgwick fear being accused of “malpractice.” Although he was hardly a postmodernist, R.G. Collingwood nevertheless saw commonalities between the historian and the novelist. The resemblance between the historian and the novelist . . . here reaches its culmination. Each of them makes it his business to construct a picture which is partly a narrative of events, partly a description of situations, exhibition of motives, analysis of characters. Each aims at making his picture a coherent whole, where every character and every situation is so bound up

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Introduction

with the rest that this character in this situation cannot but act this way, and we cannot imagine him as acting otherwise. The novel and history must both of them make sense; nothing is admissible in either except what is necessary, and the judge of this necessity is in both cases the imagination. Both the novel and the history are self-explanatory, self-justifying, the product of an autonomous or self-authorizing activity; and in both cases this activity is the a priori imagination.28 With that said, historians nevertheless place constraints upon their imagination that the novelist does not: Although similar to the novel, Collingwood believed a history to be nevertheless distinct. First, a history must be “localized in time and space.” Second, “all history must be consistent with itself.” And finally “and most important, the historian’s picture stands in a peculiar relation to something called evidence. The only way in which the historian or any one else can judge, even tentatively, of its truth is by considering this relation; and, in practice, what we mean by asking whether an historical statement is true is whether it can be justified by an appeal to the evidence: for a truth unable to be so justified is to the historian a thing of no interest.” 29 “Short of actual fraud, how can any historian know where and how to draw the line between interpretation and distortion?” asks Sarah Maza. “What counts as a legitimate, admirable feat of historical imagination, and at what point does a historian cross the line?”30 Identifying that line will be a major task of this chapter.

Visualizing the imagination in history These two connotations of the word “imagination” are distinguished by their ontological status. That is, imagination in the first instance refers to the visualization of actual objects in the mind’s eye. In the second, imagination refers to the conjuring of ontologically inactual things. If Sedgwick is defining the imagination as something that was not actually present, but added on, made up, created by the historian, and if his claim is that that kind of imagination is impermissible, then I suspect that we need to dig a little bit deeper. Because it turns out that all historians use their imaginations in this latter sense, of creating or inventing something that was not there. It is just that we do so in varying degrees. There is indeed a point, obviously, where the creative imagination goes too far, and we will attempt to locate that point throughout the course of this chapter. But it is incorrect to conclude that historians do not engage in any acts of creative imagination at all. We use the same word – “imagination” – to refer to the same mental faculty that is actually performing two different cognitive tasks. In the one case, we are reconstructing previously experienced parts of the actual world. In

Introduction

11

the second, we are creating new objects and experiences, with no direct connection to the actual world. Imagination means both the picturing of actual and the picturing of inactual objects. Imagination in history, similarly, means using the mind’s eye to picture both actual and inactual occurrences at the same time. Immanuel Kant understood that imagination involves both mimetic and creative mental acts. 31 Imagining inactual entities is not merely the stuff of fantasy and “wild daemons.” Scientists and mathematicians often “invent” inactual entities as a way to engage in reasoning. “Sometimes imagination-terms are applied to quite unimaginable unrealities, such as the imaginary space of Leibniz or the imaginary number expressed by the root of a negative quantity among the mathematicians.”32 This is an example of a special kind of imagination, and historical imagination might be similar. That is, unlike “everyday imagination,” historians on occasion invent inactual entities as a way to conduct our inquiries into the past. Concepts and periodizations, to take two examples, might be understood as inactual entities that historians create in order to reason about the past. This kind of imagination-as-creativity strikes me of a different type than the kind engaged in by fiction writers. I propose the construction of a continuum of the imagination, between the mimetic and the creative. As we have been arguing, there are two connotations of the word “imagination,” and we might think of these two meanings as occupying the two ends of the continuum. I would like to contend that nearly every statement made by an historian can be categorized as falling somewhere between these two poles, these two connotations of the word “imagination.” At one pole is imagination-as-mimesis, which we can label the Aristotelian imagination. At the other pole would be statements that are pure f iction, imagination-as-creation, which we will term “the Platonic imagination.” But historical statements are rarely lined up so tidily at one end of the spectrum or the other. In fact most are located somewhere between the two poles and are complex combinations of both. Statements are at once mostly mimetic with some creativity or are mostly creative with some mimetic grounding. When I say statements, I mean that this analysis can be carried out on historical sentences, paragraphs, indeed whole works. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 3, we can even perform such an analysis on individual words, such as historical concepts. Are these words – like “Renaissance” and “revolution” – mimetic references to actual, but now not-present things? Are they pure creations of the mind of the historian? Or, as is usually the case, are they in fact some complex combination of both kinds of imagination? The analysis we will employ in the remainder of this chapter will be positioning historical statements on this diagram, assessing the ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic imagination. Figure 0.1 visualizes this. This diagram suggests that any historical statement – a sentence, paragraph, even an entire book – might be located somewhere on this diagram between

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Introduction

Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 0.1

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination

pure mimesis and pure creativity. The diagram is drawn such as to suggest different amounts or ratios of both qualities (although this should not be taken to mean that we can precisely measure specific amounts of either). When historians say that we are not permitted too much imagination, I think what we mean is that we do not allow ourselves statements that are located too far on the righthand side of the diagram. But almost every statement we make includes at least some degree of imagination-as-creativity. So, at what point are our statements too creative? At what point on the diagram have we strayed too far and allowed our imagination to get away from us? I will argue that historians do not have a hard-and-fast rule here and that that threshold between the two types of imagination is complex and shifting. Transgressions of that boundary are often context-dependent. I will demonstrate in the chapters that follow that statements that are located on the right of the diagram are frequently permitted to historians of a certain stature and preeminence within our profession; the identical statement might not be permitted to an undergraduate or first-year graduate student. That is what I mean when I say the boundary is shifting: it is allowed to move ever-rightward for some. What is assumed in the previous statement is that the judgment of other historians plays a critical role in determining the admissibility of historical statements and the judgment as to whether or not a statement is too “imaginative.” When Sedwick and Wiseman cautioned against too much imagination, I think what they meant was being called out by other historians as having strayed too far past this complex shifting boundary.

Inference Although he did not employ the same terms I have, the philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood intuited a similar way to think about historical imagination. He makes a number of references to the historian’s “picture” or other kinds of historical constructions.

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The historian’s authorities tell him of this or that phase in a process whose intermediate phases they leave undescribed; he then interpolates these phases for himself. His picture of his subject, though it may consist in part of statements directly drawn from his authorities, consists also, and increasingly with every increase in his competence as an historian, of statements reached inferentially from those according to his own criteria.33 Note here Collingwood’s use of the word “picture,” which I take to mean a mental picture. That picture is made up of statements from authorities – what the imagination reconstructs/perceives – and inferences, creative inventions. When writing history, we rely on documents, sources, evidence. Any statement we make needs to be tied to evidence. But this does not mean that historians simply copy verbatim what the sources say. History is not stenography. Indeed, our evidence says a lot, but there is much that is left unsaid. Our sources convey an incomplete record of the past. When we say we experience the past only indirectly, it is largely because our evidence presents only a fragmentary picture. Historians often “fill in the gaps.” One way we accomplish this is by drawing inferences. To infer means to see more in evidence than what is explicitly stated in that evidence. An inference is additional information not otherwise explicitly stated. I hear the rumble of thunder outside my window, and I infer a thunderstorm even if I have not directly viewed the storm. Or I smell smoke and infer a fire even if I cannot see the fire. Inferences are “insertions,” and when historians make inferences, they are, in effect, inserting a mental image of something that is not directly evident. Does this mean that the historians’ inferences are imaginary (in the Platonic, creative sense)? Collingwood argues that the historian “has it in his power to reject something explicitly told him by his authorities and to substitute something else.”34 What is the nature of this substitution? Substitute with what? Under what circumstances may historians make such substitutions? He makes reference to the historian increasing their competence. This almost would suggest that these historians have more license to insert (the imaginary), to infer and to imagine. If this is true, it might bring us some way to explaining the boundary at which point history becomes “too imaginary.” Historians employ inference anytime they “fill in gaps” and silences in their sources. Collingwood continues: I described constructive history as interpolating, between the statements borrowed from our authorities, other statements implied by them. Thus, our authorities tell us that on one day Caesar was in Rome and on a later day in Gaul; they tell us nothing about his journey from one place to the other, but we interpolate this with perfectly good conscience. 35 Let’s examine this act of interpolation in more detail. In imagining Caesar’s journey – in the absence of direct evidence – are we imagining the journey as an

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act of Aristotelian mimesis? Or is such an act of interpolation a creative, Platonic act? One could argue that while imagining Caesar’s journey, we are “inserting” an image that may or may not correspond to the actuality of the journey. Yet our mental construction supposes that there was at one time such an event. We imagine the journey as if it were actual. “This act of interpolation has two significant characteristics,” says Collingwood. First, it is in no way arbitrary or merely fanciful: it is necessary or, in Kantian Language, a priori. If we filled up the narrative of Caesar’s doings with fanciful detail such as the names of the persons he met on the way, and what he said to them, the construction would be arbitrary: it would be in fact the kind of construction which is done by an historical novelist.36 That is, the historian does not properly invent anything in so imagining the journey. As Collingwood asserts, as historians we do not imagine any specifics about the journey, for to do so would be too inventive, too creative. As long as our imaginations conjure the minimum – a journey – we can do so with a perfectly good conscious. What makes an inference “fanciful”? Any inference assumes at least some measure of creation or invention, in that we are conjuring an image of something that is not present. We nevertheless presume that the image we picture in our mind’s eye is of an entity or a state of affairs that at least at one time was actual. But there are some cases, as we have already indicated, where historians insert imaginative objects that were not necessarily present or actual in the past. Periodization is one such imaginative object. Is a periodization “fanciful”? By what criteria do we judge an imaginative object to be too fanciful or more the province of the novelist? Our statements about the past are complex combinations of evidence and inference. Collingwood states, The historian’s picture of his subject, whether that subject be a sequence of events or a past state of things, thus appears as a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements of his authorities; and if these points are frequent enough and the threads spun from each to the next are constructed with due care, always by the a priori imagination and never by merely arbitrary fancy, the whole picture is constantly verified by appeal to these data, and runs little risk of losing touch with the reality which it represents.37 I am imaging these “fixed points” of evidence as being like pegs. I then take a piece of elastic, place it around one peg and start stretching it. Stretching the elastic in this analogy means making an inference, adding more to the evidence than what is explicitly stated in the evidence. We can stretch those inferences until we reach a point when our inferences reach a breaking point, where we

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have ventured too far from our sources, too much into the “creative imagination” area. How far are we permitted to stretch that elastic before we are in the realm of “arbitrary fancy”? How do we know when we have so ventured past the point at which our a priori imaginative constructions have lost touch with the reality which it represents? Take our peg of evidence and place it to the left of our diagram, at the extreme end of the Aristotelian imagination. Reciting verbatim from the document is an act of pure mimesis. But then we draw inferences from that evidence; we stretch the elastic, moving ever rightward across our diagram. In so stretching the elastic, we move deeper and deeper toward the Platonic side of the spectrum. At what point along the continuum have we stretched our imagination too far to the Platonic? It turns out that there is no immutable boundary defining that point at which historical statements are “too imaginative.” Collingwood does not provide us with a guide or set of concrete standards, and indeed historians do not have explicitly stated guidelines. The rest of this book will be an effort to identify that complex boundary, especially how historians enforce that boundary. We will examine several cases where that boundary is transgressed and the epistemological consequences of those transgressions. One of the key questions driving this chapter is determining where that boundary might lie, or at least how historians identify and negotiate that boundary transition between the Aristotelian and the Platonic.

Plan for this book Each of the subsequent chapters in this book examines a particular practice, particular kinds of historical statements, to determine the ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic imagination employed. Using our conceptual diagram as a guide, we will seek to delineate the boundary separating “legitimate” imagination from “the historians fancy.” In Chapter 1, “Imagination in Archives,” we attempt to look inside the mind of the historian at that initial moment of encounter with the documents in the archive. What do historians picture in their mind’s eye when they first read a document? Are the images so formed mimetic re-creations? Or do historians insert elements that were not actually present in the first place? How much of the historian’s imagination of what they are reading in the documents is a priori imagination? Is there any place for the Platonic imagination in the archives? In Chapter 2, “Insertions,” we examine two classes of “imaginative objects”: concepts and periodization. Are historical concepts – the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – a priori constructions, referring to entities that were historically actual? Or are concepts imaginary, creative constructions of the historian’s mind inserted into the past and coexisting with the ontologically actual. On the page – in our written representations – the difference is not always easy to discern. To what degree is a word or phrase an act of mimesis and what is a creative

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insertion? Similarly, are periodizations, these divisions in the f low of time, actual patterns to which we have affixed language? Or are periodizations artificial, creative entities that we insert into the past in order to carry out our investigations? Where on our diagram do we position concepts and periodization? Chapter 3, “The Modal Mood,” considers a particular class of statements that historians occasionally have recourse to make. The modal mood is often indicated by the verb construction “must have.” The modal mood is not a verb tense per se; it is more of a statement of the degree of certainty a speaker has about a particular state of affairs. Consider the differences between these two sentences: FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. FDR must have known that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. In the first case, the speaker asserts confidently that Roosevelt was forewarned of the immanent attack. In the second, the speaker hedges their bet. The construction must have suggested that the speaker is confident but that that confidence is based as much on assertion as it is on hard evidence. Historians have recourse to modal must have constructions when they lack direct evidence but nevertheless have what they believed to be a sufficient amount of evidence to make the claim. The modal statements are as much creative assertions as they are mimetic certainties. This chapter will consider the most notorious case of the use of modal mood in historical writing: Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre. Did Davis use the modal mood too much? Is an excessive amount of modal statements in an historical work evidence that the work has crossed the frontier toward the Platonic imagination? Chapter 4, “The Historian’s Fancy,” considers the boundary between history and fiction. Fiction writers have the license to invent characters and situations that were not actual in the past. Historians do not permit themselves the conceit of inactual characters, although we will consider the case of Edmund Morris, who did include a fictional character in what purported to be an historical biography of Ronald Reagan. The case of Dutch will be used as a kind of marker helping us to better discern the boundary between the Aristotelian and the Platonic. But other practices of the fiction writer – especially the idea of “looking into the mind” of some historical character – prove to be similar to practices of historians. Historical empathy is a practice many historians engage in, although historians are not of one mind about the permissibility of such psychological investigations. While this chapter does make mention of the work of historical novelists, it is more interested in those instances where historians appear to be thinking and writing like novelists. Chapter 5 is titled “What If ”? and considers those instances where historians engage in speculation. While on the surface speculation would appear to be a completely Platonic act – all creation – it turns out that those historians who do engage in speculation, such as counterfactual historians, nevertheless write in such a way that they remain grounded in evidence. That is, the Aristotelian

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imagination is still present in even the most seemingly speculative of counterfactual representations. Nevertheless, speculative history stands at the far right of our conceptual diagram. Considering counterfactuals and other forms of speculative history assists us in establishing the frontier that separates the Aristotelian from the Platonic imagination in historical thinking.

Notes 1 John Sedgwick, “The Historians versus the Genealogists,” New York Times, Apr. 12, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/opinion/sunday/historians-versus-genealogists. html 2 T.P. Wiseman, Historiography and Imagination: Eight Essays on Roman Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), xii. 3 Marilyn B. Skinner, “Review of Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal by T. P. Wiseman,” The Classical Outlook, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Mar.–Apr., 1987), 101–102. 4 James H. Dee, “Review of Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal by T. P. Wiseman,” The Classical World, Vol. 82, No. 6 (Jul.–Aug., 1989), 465–466. 5 P.Y. Forsyth, “Review of Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal by T. P. Wiseman,” Phoenix, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), 220–223. 6 Wiseman, Historiography and Imagination, xiii. 7 Ann Pendelton-Jullian and John Seely Brown, Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 385. 8 Eva T.H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1991), 18. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 Pendelton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound, 390. 12 Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson, “Blind in the Mind: Why Some People Can’t See Pictures in Their Imagination,” The Conversation, Nov. 29, 2017, https://theconversation.com/ blind-in-the-mind-why-some-people-cant-see-pictures-in-their-imagination-86849 13 Pendelton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound, 385–386. 14 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41. 15 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 233. 16 Ibid., 234. 17 Ibid. 18 Brann, The World of the Imagination, 19. 19 Pendelton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound, 389. 20 Richard T. Gray, Nicholas Halmi, Gary J. Handwerk, Michael A. Rosenthal and Klaus Vieweg, eds. Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011), 3–4. 21 Ibid., 5. 22 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 40. See also Leslie Howsam, “Academic Discipline or Literary Genre? The Establishment of Boundaries in Historical Writing,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Sept., 2004), 525–545. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1060150304000646 23 Gray et al., eds. Inventions of the Imagination, 4. 24 Ibid., 5. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Sarah Maza, Thinking about History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 225. 27 Ibid.

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Collingwood, The Idea of History, 245–246. Ibid., 246. Maza, Thinking about History, 229. See Pendelton-Jullian and Brown, Design Unbound, 391 on Kant’s conclusion. Brann, The World of the Imagination, 19. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 237. Ibid. Ibid., 240. Ibid. Ibid., 242.

1 IMAGINATION IN THE ARCHIVES

I once had a student who, upon learning that Karl Marx and his wife had 12 children, told the class, “I pictured Mrs. Marx, trying to keep up with all of those children running around while she wears one of those restrictive Victorian dresses. I wondered what her life must have been like.” The rest of the class chortled at the seeming naiveté of the thought, but I seized upon this as one of those teachable moments. What this student had done is not uncommon, I said. Indeed, as historians, we cannot help but to conjure images in the mind’s eye when we are encountering some new historical fact. Indeed, I recounted to the class a similar experience. I was researching the activities of the political scientist James Pollock during the occupation of Germany after World War II. I was researching specifically how social scientists were involved in democratization efforts, and I was reading Pollock’s “Occupation Diary” for evidence of how Pollock was designing a post-war political system for the Germans that would erase the Gau system imposed by the Nazis. I came upon a passage in the diary where Pollock – who held a commissioned rank – was leaving the officer’s club. Because he had evidently had one too many, he described himself stumbling to his Jeep, a driver to take him back to his quarters. The passage had no real bearing on the research I was conducting, but the image nevertheless stayed with me. I “saw” Pollock in his uniform, swaying to and fro as he approached the jeep. I formed an image of his uniform, if only because I had seen previous images of army-issued uniforms. I had not yet seen a photograph of Pollock and so did not form a specific image of him, only a generic army officer. I had seen Jeeps, of course, and had a clear image in my mind’s eye. That image of the jeep came largely from the one’s I saw on the TV show MASH. From these fragments, I reconstructed the scene in my imagination. I did not do so consciously, or, rather, at that moment I became conscious of a thought process I had probably always engaged in but had never noticed or acknowledged.

20 Imagination in the archives

For a time, I resided in Marietta, Ohio (teaching at the College). Marietta purports to be the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territories. After I had settled into my new apartment, I wandered around the city. It quickly became apparent that Marietta had been settled long before those white settlers appeared in the eighteenth century. A cemetery near the downtown, for example, surrounds a large canonical mound, built by the Adena people who resided there centuries before. More striking to me was the sight of a Mississippian-style rectangular mound that today is mostly used by winter sledders. That mound sits atop a hill that ascends from the Muskingum River; indeed, one can travel up the street that is today called Sacra Via from the river to the park that now surrounds the mound. I subsequently learned that at one time there were earthworks – long since razed by the white settlers – that extended from the river on either side of the modern Sacre Via road up to the site of the mound. I once spent an afternoon walking from the river, up Sacra Via toward the mound. In so doing, I imagined what this walk would have been like – what it would have represented to the original inhabitants of this conf luence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers. Given the structures, given the incline I was walking, this was clearly – in my mind – a ceremonial space. To attempt to get the full effect, I imagined the modern grid of paved streets were not there, the houses removed, the traffic silenced – although I was, of course, aware of the cars as I crossed the street. I imagined the earthworks, imposing them on the scene in front of my eyes, and imagined what I might have been expected to feel as I sojourned up the incline toward the mound. It is my contention here that when we encounter a document in the archives, all historians engage in a process that mentally reconstructs the scene we are reading. In so viewing the scene in our mind’s eye, we imagine with as much fidelity as we can muster. Ours is an attempt at an Aristotelian reconstruction, but that we often “fill in” that picture with images that are “good enough” representations. To take the Pollock case, for example, the Jeep I imagined was not exactly like the one Pollock stumbled in to. But my imagined version was a good-enough stand in, close enough to the original one. The Army uniform was also a good-enough stand in. The officers club, its proximity to the jeep, on the other hand, were completely fabricated in my mind’s eye. These were approximations that came to mind. What do historians see in their mind’s eye when they encounter a document in the archives? What combinations of Aristotelian and Platonic imagination constitute these reconstructions?

What we see when we read The designer Peter Mendelsund asks, What do we see when we read? (Other than words on a page.) What do we picture in our minds? . . . Do we visualize anything when we read? Of course, we must visualize something. . . . Not all reading is merely abstract,

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the interplay of theoretical notions. Some of our mental content seems to be pictorial.1 Mendelsund is asking this question about novels and literature; asking this question about the work of historians is one way to determine what we see in our mind’s eye when we read documents in the archives. “We begin imaging right out of the gate, immediately upon beginning a book,” says Mendelsund.2 One could conclude that such imagining is part of everyone’s cognitive tool kit, that we cannot help but to imagine upon reading a text. This might explain in part the impulse of my student who imagined Mrs. Marx, or indeed my own experience in the archive. We are hardwired to imagine what we read, to conjure images in the mind’s eye and, in so doing, to create a kind of vicarious perception. The question is: is the historian’s imagination of a different type than the everyday kind? That is, once trained, do historians visualize documents differently than non-historians? Thinking about what we imagine at that first point of contact with documents in the archive is not an easy task. “William James describes the impossible attempt to introspectively examine our own consciousness as ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.’”3 In the same way, I am attempting the – perhaps impossible – task of peering into the mind of the historian, an attempt to examine historical consciousness and historical thinking, to introspectively examine our imaginations, especially at the moment we are reading a document for the first time. The psychologist Sam Wineburg attempts something similar through his “think aloud” method.4 Wineburg has subjects read historical documents and vocalize or say aloud whatever they are thinking as they read. The technique aims to bring to consciousness what are often unconscious or at least unarticulated mental thoughts. Wineburg was particularly looking for evidence of “contextual thinking” in these mental thoughts. I will employ a similar technique to uncover the related process of making explicit mental images – imaginings – historians form as they read documents. The Aristotelian/mimetic imagination is that which allows us to picture that which we have already experienced. We also use this faculty when we imagine that which we have not directly experienced. “A thought experiment,” Mendelsund continues: Picture your mother. Now picture your favorite literary character. (Or: Picture your home. Then picture Howard’s End.) The differences between your mother’s afterimage and that of a literary character you love is that the more you concentrate, the more your mother might come into focus. A character will not reveal herself so easily. (The closer you look, the farther away she gets.)5 What Mendelsund describes here is the Aristotelian imagination, that mental faculty that allows us to resurrect an actual experience or a sensation in the mind’s eye. Indeed, I have direct experiences and perceptions of my mother, and so what I am

22 Imagination in the archives

imagining is a version of that actual experience. On the other hand, I do not have such an actual experience of a literary character to so easily imagine. Thus, Mendelsund’s question: absent the actual experience to draw upon, what images do we have of fictional characters? Of what mental substance are any such images formed? We might ask a similar question about our encounter with the past as ref lected in documents. Clearly, one’s relationship to an historical figure does not possess the kind of intimacy, direct perception and experience one would have with one’s mother. Then what does describe the perception of an historical figure? I can conjure up an image of Winston Churchill, for example, fairly readily, drawn from photographs and newsreels. Is this afterimage the same as the one I can conjure of my mother? Does the fourteenth-century Bust of Charlemagne, for example, give us enough of an afterimage such that we can experience Charlemagne the same way we do our mother? What if we lack an image or a photograph of our figure? How, then, do we form an image of the character? Do we in fact do so? My sense is that we can and often do, but in the absence of a photographic image, we rely on composites or other “banked images” to create in our mind’s eye a picture of the historical figure. “It is precisely what the text does not elucidate that becomes an invitation to our imaginations,” says Mendelsund.6 I would contend that something similar is happening when we read historical documents, although I might also suggest that the text itself suggests mental images. But that we also “fill in” that which is not explicitly stated in the text as well. That “filling in” is an inseparable part of what it means to read documents: we engage the Aristotelian, mimetic imagination with just a hint of the Platonic. In that we are creating/inserting mental objects that are not explicitly described in the documents but were more than likely there. This is what Collingwood means by a priori imagination. My images of a Jeep and of Pollock’s uniform are not creative “inventions,” per se. They were no doubt actually present at one time. But I cannot exactly replicate these in my mind’s eye. What I do see is an approximation, a stand-in, as it were. I am not inserting something into the mental scene that was not already described in the documents, but neither is this a faithful representation. One might argue that in so imagining what we read on the page, we are creating a phenomenological experience in our mind’s eye. That is, we are translating the words into a kind of experience. “Novels (and stories) implicitly argue in favor of philosophical versions of the world,” says Mendelsund. They assume, or set forth, an ontology, an epistemology, a metaphysics. . . . Some fictions assume that the world is as it seems; other fictions tease and worry at the threads of the known. But it is in a novel’s phenomenology, the way in which a piece of fiction treats perception (sight, say), that a reader finds a writer’s true philosophy.7 Reading a novel is a phenomenological experience. As I will argue in the following, historians reading documents similarly create such a vicarious experience

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in the mind’s eye. The exercise I developed uncovered the phenomenology of reading historical documents. “When I read, I withdraw from the phenomenal world. I turn my attention ‘inward.’”8 Perhaps Mendelsund should say, “this phenomenal world,” because we could make the claim that when we read historical documents, we are entering into a phenomenal world that is no longer present, that we encounter this world “inwardly,” through our perceptions and our imagination. I will argue that in reading documents, historians (re-)create the phenomenological world of the past, or at least we imagine that picture in the mind’s eye as if it were phenomenologically real. Our mental images are like sketches: a rough likeness of some original. A sketch may be judged according to how closely it cleaves to its subject, or it might be judged according to its relative degree of fantasy. But the quality of a sketch will depend most of all upon the skill of the draftsman. Is this true of the images our imaginations construct from narratives as well – our mental sketches? Do some readers have more vivid imaginations than others? Or is the reading imagination a resource with which we are universally, uniformly endowed? I think of imagination as being like sight – a faculty most people possess. Though, of course, not everyone who is sighted sees with the same visual acuity.9 Note that Mendelsund’s characterization of these sketches is based on their degree of verisimilitude rather than fantasy, that is, the degree of Aristotelian rather than Platonic imagination. As to the second point, I think that among historians the more one reads, the more experience the historian has, the more vivid the imagination. Like my student, we all possess a kind of native imagination/ mental sketching ability that can be honed/sharpened the more we read, the more context we accumulate.

Peering inside the mind of the historian I ask a similar question as Mendelsund: what is it that historians see in their mind’s eye when they are reading documents? I convened a symposium to explore this question, assembling a group of historians of varying experience: from full faculty, graduate students and undergraduate apprentices. I gave them a document to read, and I asked them to record what they were seeing in their mind’s eye. My approach here is a variation on the technique used by the psychologist Sam Wineburg to understand something about what historians think. The “think-aloud method” has a subject read a document and talk aloud what is going on in their heads as they do so. “In my research,” Wineburg writes, I employ a methodology called “thinking aloud,” a main-stay in the toolbox of the cognitive psychologist. In a think-aloud session, subjects

24 Imagination in the archives

articulate their thoughts as they solve a problem or read a text, making audible as much as they can of what normally remains invisible.10 Wineburg is particularly interested in knowing how historians read and especially the way in which they form inferences as they read, in how historians are placing what is read into a larger context. Indeed, it was the historians’ “contextual thinking” that particularly interested Wineburg. In this case, I wanted to use something like the think-aloud method to attempt to uncover the mental images historians form when they first encounter a document. What kind of imagination do historians engage at this earliest stage of the process of producing history? Rather than have symposium participants speak aloud their thoughts, I had them write them down for later analysis. The document was from the memoir of Count Franz von Harrach, a witness to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914: As the car quickly reversed, a thin stream of blood spurted from His Highness’s mouth onto my right cheek. As I was pulling out my handkerchief to wipe blood away from his mouth, the Duchess cried out to him, “For God’s sake! What has happened to you?” At that she slid off the seat and lay on the f loor of the car, with her face between his knees. I had no idea that she too was hit and thought she had simply fainted with fright. Then I heard His Imperial Highness say, “Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Stay alive for the children!” At that, I seized the Archduke by the collar of his uniform, to stop his head dropping forward and asked him if he was in great pain. He answered me quite distinctly, “It is nothing!” His face began to twist somewhat but he went on repeating, six or seven times, ever more faintly as he gradually lost consciousness, “It’s nothing!” Then came a brief pause followed by a convulsive rattle in his throat, caused by a loss of blood. This ceased on arrival at the governor’s residence. The two unconscious bodies were carried in the building where their death was soon established.11 Some caveats about the symposium. First, the document I selected was one that was action-packed. That is, in describing the events around Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, I chose a document that would certainly easily elicit vivid mental images, as opposed to a document, say, that listed a table of numbers or an analytic description of some process. I suspect these latter documents would also elicit mental images, but of a different type. For instance, I was recently looking at a letter from the 1950s addressed to the president of my university from an international student seeking a leave of absence in order to help complete his dissertation. The letter was otherwise formal and legalistic. The first image in my mind’s eye was of the president – whose photograph I had previously seen – and

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an ill-defined image of him reading the letter. I found that as I continued to read the letter, my mind began to conjure an image of a non-descript Indian student – the letter indicated the student was from India – and images about his circumstances. For instance, I had a brief image of his living arrangements. That is, I do not think it is only those documents that describe actions that elicit such mental images. It is possible – and the symposium was an attempt to demonstrate this – that mental image formation is a natural reaction when reading any such document. The question is: are the historian’s mental images of a different type or formed in a different way by virtue of our being trained as historians than the kinds of mental images anyone forms when reading any kind of document? Is historical imagination distinct from everyday imagination? Second, I chose a document from a common-enough historical event that it would be recognizable to any history student. None of the participants on the symposium was a specialist in early-twentieth-century Europe (although one participant was a military historian), and thus they would not necessarily have a familiarity with this specific document. The goal here was to uncover the mental images historians form when encountering a document for the first time. Third caveat: when working in the archives, historians do not read only a single document. That is, we situate any document we encounter within the context of the other documents we are reading. The mental images we form when looking at those documents help to shape the images we form when reading a new document. “Context – not just semantic but narrative context – accumulates only as one reads deeper and deeper into a text.”12 Again, Mendelsund is describing the reading of a novel, but something similar happens as we read more and more documents, as we extend a semantic net around our documents, revealing more detailed mental pictures, but also revealing silences that we must fill in. I asked the participants in my seminar to look at only one document, decontextualized from any other document, because I wanted to try and capture that initial moment, that first activation of the imagination when it confronts a document. It is an artificial constraint to so isolate one document from the context of other documents, but I did so for purposes of this symposium experiment. The fourth caveat is that I chose a document that was not terribly long for a participant to read. In preparing for the symposium, I had brief ly considered giving the participants all or at least some of “What is the Third Estate?” Reading that document would have taken several minutes, and I worried about the dexterity of the participants to simultaneously read, conjure a mental image and describe that image in writing for a sustained period of time. The von Harrach’s fragment had the advantage of being complete enough a description of events, but not so long that the participants would fatigue of making visible what are often unconscious, invisible thoughts. I was concerned that had the process extended beyond the five minutes or so that most participants used that recollections after a half and hour, say, would be less vivid and complete than thoughts formed immediately upon reading the document. And, thus, I chose a document of only 200 words.

26 Imagination in the archives

The final caveat is that the sample size – 16 participants – is clearly too small for this to be any kind of definitive statement of the imaginative faculty of historians. I present this only as suggestive, as one data point in what should be a larger and more sustained examination of the historian’s mental process. With those caveats in mind, the symposium did produce some interesting results. One interesting outcome was the number of participants who “heard” sounds in their mind’s eye (ear?) even though there was no such description of sounds. A faculty member recounted “grinding gears,” presumably from the car as it sped away. Another faculty member heard people or onlookers “gasping in shock at the sudden sound of gunfire.” The participant heard “mass scenes of wailing.” An undergraduate participant said, “I almost hear a comic-book like ‘splurt’ when he says blood hit his cheek.” “Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell,” says Mendelsund. “And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.”13 And, indeed, one participant in the symposium imagined “the smell of blood.” How might smell have been evoked? This person, we must assume, has smelled blood before and “inserted” this sensation into the scene. It is another example of a “banked image” historians often employ. How might we think about the sounds (and the smell)? Clearly, none of these were explicitly described in the passage by von Harrach. That is, they were inserted into the scene in the mind of the historian. But by the same token, there is every reason to expect that there were actual screams or grinding gears during the actual moment of the event. The mind’s eye, the imagination is “filling in” what, perhaps, cannot help but to be there. Collingwood spoke of the a priori imagination, and this is what we are seeing and hearing and smelling in this instance. It is the kind of inference-making that is a part of all historical thinking. Inference means seeing more than what is explicitly stated in a document, not simply repeating what is stated. Recall the think-aloud exercise that Wineburg uses and that I have done with my students. I had them read the beginning of the Port Huron Statement. As they are thinking aloud what they are reading, students visualize “anger” in the document (and not just an allusion to the Declaration of Independence). Seeing anger is an inference, seeing something not explicitly stated in the document. When historians picture or imagine what they are reading in a document, they are simultaneously reconstructing what the document describes but also adding what is absent from that description, adding what they feel must have been there. Seeing more than what is explicitly stated in the document at least gestures in the direction of Platonic creativity, which is why I might draw the diagram depicting the ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic imagination as being slightly removed from the far left side (see Figure 1.1). An unexpected result of this exercise was the number of references to pointof-view. That is, several participants described the vantage point from which they were “seeing” the event. Let me say first that I was not expecting pointof-view to be an element of this exercise. I thought participants would simply

Imagination in the archives

Aristotelian imagination

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Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination When Drawing Inferences from Documents

FIGURE 1.1

describe actions. If I thought about it at all, I would have assumed that the imaginative vantage point would have been from inside the car, as von Harrach saw events, though his eyes, as it were. And indeed, there were many instances of this particular vantage point. It is as if some participants, as a condition for reading the document, had to first mentally establish their location in space and time. They seemed to be asking, “From where do I see the events?” In so situating themselves in space, they were once again attempting to evoke an experience of the past: that reading historical documents is made into a phenomenological experience. One participant recalled seeing “his mouth (Franz Ferdinand) showing pain by changing its shape.” This suggests that the point-of-view is within the car, indeed a “close-up” of events. Another graduate student wrote “I see from his (Franz Ferdinand’s) perspective the world slowly fading. Voice sounding far away ‘It’s nothing.’ Then darkness.” Von Harrach describes these scenes, but the graduate student sees them in their mind’s eye from the vantage point of Ferdinand. Participant 11, an undergraduate, writes, “I don’t picture any of the people in crowds who were watching the scene. I know they were there, but they don’t show up in the mental image. I see only the inside of the car where they are sitting” (emphasis mine). This was the perspective I was assuming as a kind of default, as von Harrach’s description occurs inside the car. But other participants viewed events from outside the car. One participant – an undergraduate political science/journalism major, not a history major – describes their vantage point as “more from a bird’s eye view to that of one in the crowd.” That is interesting enough, that the presumption is that the point-of-view is supposed to be from the crowd. But then this participant’s point-of-view shifts. “Position now moves

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to inside the vehicle. Watching Harrach hold Ferdinand by collar.” The vantage point now appears to be inside the vehicle, but not from von Harrach’s point-ofview. I cannot determine if this impulse to shift point-of-view is a result of the student’s major, that they are not trained as an historian? Participant 13, an undergraduate creative writing and history of art major, also described their mental point-of-view as “bird’s eye.” I wonder if such a bird’s eye view (or what we might also call an “observer’s view”) is a kind of default for historians. We are taught to write history from a third-person, omniscient narrator point-of-view. I wonder if this inf luences how we imagine the events we read when we first encounter documents in the archives? Participant 15 (an undergraduate) writes of being “inside of horse drawn carriage.” The student clearly did not know that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were in an automobile, as it is not directly mentioned in the source. Thus, unless they already knew that, already had that image in mind, they would not have pictured it. What is notable is the point-of-view: that they see/imagine the events from within the vehicle, from von Harrach’s perspective. Participant 16, an undergraduate history major, saw a distinct point-of-view in time as well as space. They wrote that “von Harrach sits @ [sic] a writing desk with bifocals and a proper suit with pocketwatch ref lecting on some past experiences – arms crossed.” The student understood that this was a memoir, not an eyewitness, as-it-happens account of events, and so placed von Harrach in a setting at some temporal and spatial distance from June 28 in Sarajevo. Some of the participants imagined the scene from the point-of-view of von Harrach himself, in effect, seeing through his eyes. Participant 11 (the undergraduate who said they only saw inside the car) wrote that “Harrach is frightened, panicking, but he thinks he’s the only one reacting like this.” The point-of-view is from the eyes of von Harrach, but instead of looking outward on the scene of the assassination, this student looks inward, into the mind and emotions of von Harrach. The student describes feelings – fright, panic, self-awareness of his actions. We should note that none of these emotions are directly described by von Harrach, nor are they easily determined from the tone of his writing. That is, the student has inserted – imagined – these feelings, inferred them from the description. This is an instance, perhaps, of the Platonic imagination – creative rather than mimetic – finding its way into the mind’s eye of the student. As we will detail in Chapter 4, historical fiction writers frequently claim to be seeing the world through the eyes of their historical subject. I would contend that historians as well try to see the world through our subject’s eyes, a practice of historical empathy that may exhibit Platonic features. One student’s point-of-view included that of Franz Ferdinand himself. Participant 14 wrote that “(Ferdinand) knows he is probably going to die, but he wants to make sure his wife survives.” This is no doubt inferred from the quotation “Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Stay alive for the children!” but extends the public utterance into the motivations of the speaker. The student who imagined

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the scene from the vantage point of von Harrach writing long after the event was most explicit about seeing the mind of the memoirist: •

In von Harrach’s mind’s eye: • • • • • • •

His friend/boss, boss’s wife + he are speeding through cobblestone streets Von Harrach is imagining (?) the situation A driver is panicked The Archduke is scared + in denial but quickly moves to gibberish (?) Thinking of family It is cold, daytime, winter without snow Von Harrach is in shock but (undecipherable) himself into action. Helpless but he must remember

Some of the participants visualized the event through the lens of modern media. That is, the scene in the mind’s eye was composed and organized as though it were a movie or a graphic novel (and not just young people . . . consider the faculty member who saw a photo). One faculty member noted that the “image in my mind (was) shaped by photo and by Kennedy in Dallas November 22, 63.” Another faculty member saw “a white cloud and black letters ‘It’s nothing,’ almost as if it were a graphic novel.” A graduate student said, “I am picturing this graphically as if it were a movie.” Another graduate student saw “a black and white newsreel (showing) people coming and going from the car.” One undergraduate described the overall scene as being “like a dramatic end to a film.” The creative writing/history of art undergraduate said, “I imagine this as if each (paragraph) were a new panel in a graphic novel.” Recall the faculty member who saw a white cloud with black letters, suggesting that imagining the scene as a graphic novel is not just a “young person’s” perspective. Six seminar participants composed the scene in their mind’s eye through the lens or metaphor of contemporary media. I wonder if their mental images have been inf luenced – even determined – by the contemporary media images in which they are embedded. To what extent do the images we see every day condition the way we create images about the past in our mind’s eye? In filling in the mental scene, the participants often visualized anachronisms. Mendelsund recounts: A friend grew up in suburban Albany. He’s always been an avid reader, even as a child, and whenever he read, he tells me, he mentally situated the stories in the backyards and side streets of his native blocks, because he had no other frame of reference. . . . We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with. . . . We transpose works of nonfiction to similar effect. When I read a book on the battle of Stalingrad, in my imagination the bombardment,

30 Imagination in the archives

occupation, encirclement, and liberation all took place in Manhattan. . . . And however my personalizing of the scene helps me identify with the victims of this outsized drama .  .  . the act of visual substitution seems somehow disrespectful, wrong.14 It may ref lect a kind of mental default, but it appears that we anachronistically draw upon the known or familiar image when reconstructing in the mind’s eye. I am reminded of medieval and Renaissance biblical images set in Renaissance Italian towns or with medieval clothing. Are historians similarly anachronistic in their mental sketches? There is some indication of this: the one respondent, for example, who envisioned the Kennedy assassination or the respondent who envisioned a Model T as the automobile Franz Ferdinand was riding in. But my sense is that as we read more and more documents, such anachronisms fall by the wayside. It was striking the number of seminar participants who made references to the colors they perceived in their imagination: “Archduke in uniform, blood, red.” The aforementioned white cloud and black letters. A graduate student wrote, “I think of a blue car with an open top. . . . why blue? No idea why.” The student continues, “I picture the ‘governor’s residence’ to be white. Perhaps because many state houses are white?” Participant 9, a graduate student, describes, “Franz Ferdinand has a white moustache . . . the duchess wearing white.” An undergraduate imagines that “Harrach is near the archduke, clad in blue. . . . Color in the entire scene is like an old magazine illustration. Not quite pastel, but none of the colors are too bold, stylized.” Indeed, the creative writing major saw “sepia tone scenes.” There are no explicit indications of color in von Harrach’s description, and yet references to the colors the seminar participants saw run throughout these accounts. The graduate student’s question is a valid one: why did they see blue, or indeed any of the other colors mentioned? We might look upon color as an “insertion” into the scene, a gap-filling operation. The colors the participants saw were entirely reasonable: there is every reason to believe the car could have been blue or Sophie’s dress white. But this insertion or inference gestures toward the Platonic and creative (additive), based nevertheless on a priori imaginary assumptions. Mendelsund draws attention to what he terms “load-bearing words,”15 which I take to mean words that are particularly evocative, that activate the imagination more than others, words that a mental image must especially rely upon. “Blood” is surely one of those load-bearing words in the passage I gave the seminar participants. Several participants described the feelings or sensations the document provoked. Participant 6 described “depressing dead bodies.” Participant 5, a faculty member, described “mass scenes of wailing and trauma ensue as the opened car hurriedly reverses out of the picture, the once ordered cavalcade now in chaos”; another participant – the same one who smelled blood – similarly saw “a sense of chaos.” Another faculty member sees “masculinity, stoicism,” a description of a sensation or feeling more than an image. The political science

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and journalism undergraduate was “envisioning mass hysteria.” Participant 15, an undergraduate, in describing the scene from the point-of-view of von Harrach imagined a “balancing of manners against fear.” One undergraduate noted that “a driver is panicked,” feeling the emotions of an inferred figure in the scene. One student wrote, “I also get a sense of grief with the last line because he gives very few details; just ‘their death was soon established.’ That line seems very sad to me.” All of these – establishing point-of-view, seeing colors and hearing sounds, feeling emotions – signal a phenomenological dimension. It is as if the participants were seeking to experience the scene, as if they were actually present, recreating the experience in the imagination. I wondered whether, given their greater experience and training, the faculty would have different perceptions than the graduate students and undergraduates. One distinguishing feature of the faculty’s imagination was their evocation of “banked images.” A professor of US history imagined a car, “long and elegant and expensive a Duesenberg or something like that.” A professor of ancient Greece saw “an avenue on Sarajevo, a kind of semi-European/semi-Ottoman cityscape.” A professor of American history was the one who saw the scene as like the photo of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Faculty were not exclusive in drawing upon banked images, but it was a feature of each of their responses. Indeed, a graduate student could “picture an old car like a larger model T with a rear compartment like a limousine,” the same as another graduate student who saw “one of those open-top old Ford T-models, though I know that is very inaccurate.” The student goes on that “the image of the assassination is one pulled from an old middle-school textbook about the event. Even the faces and clothing are taken from that image.”

Conclusion None of the participants in the seminar recalled ever being asked to consciously recall their often unconscious or unexamined mental images when encountering documents in the archives. It is possible that asking them to examine the unexamined had the effect of implanting or suggesting images that they might not otherwise have had. Indeed, it is possible that such images do not in fact spring up when reading documents and that the seminar setting created a fiction. Nevertheless, I am working on the assumption that the mental images we form when reading – as explored by Mendelsund – are similar to those that historians form when reading documents and that, like any reader, historians cannot help but to imagine them. The larger purpose here was to demonstrate that the historical imagination is already operating at the first encounter with documents, that our impulse is to reconstruct in the mind’s eye what we are reading with as much fidelity and verisimilitude as we are able to produce. In so doing, we are creating an image of the past that we can “experience” as if it were a real experience. Mimetic imagination often draws on reconstructing images from

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previous experience. Because we have almost no direct experience of the past, historians resort to mimetic imagination as a way to vicariously conjure up such experiences. At the same time, the historian’s mind does “wander” as well, wandering away from an attempt at pure mimesis and toward the Platonic imagination, as when we fill in details of these mental images with “insertions” that may – or may not? – have actually been present. In order to fill out the scene in our mind’s eye, to enhance the experience we are creating, historians will hear sounds that were not described in the source, see colors not in evidence and will view the scene from a particular vantage point, again, not suggested by the documents. When reading documents, it seems that historians cannot help but to situate themselves within the scene, one way to evoke a kind of vicarious experience of the past. Seeing images in the mind’s eye is our way of translating what we read into a phenomenological experience. Indeed, inserting that which was not originally present is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 7, 246. 2 Ibid., 52. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 See Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 5 Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, 26. 6 Ibid., 30. 7 Ibid., 270. 8 Ibid., 58. 9 Ibid., 186. 10 Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 121. 11 Memoir of Count Franz von Harrach, www.firstworldwar.com/source/harrachmemoir. htm 12 Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, 91. 13 Ibid., 39. 14 Ibid., 208, 211, 212 15 Ibid., 153.

APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTIONS OF SEMINAR ON IMAGINATION IN THE ARCHIVES

Participant 1 Field: American (faculty) Shots/assassin [indecipherable] Buildings Grinding gears Blood on [indecipherable] and Uniforms Family [indecipherable] (image in my mind shaped by photo and by Kennedy in Dallas Nov. 22, 63)

Participant 2 Field: early American/public history (staff) Car, open to the elements Four passengers, well-dressed for a summer evening A sense of chaos The smell of blood Eyes f luttering Car speeding through the streets

Participant 3 Field: US history (faculty) The car – long and elegant and expensive a Duesenberg or something like that the blood splattered across the windshield the bonnet? – no that’s a word for the hood, the uniforms, sad-despair militaristic, the moment years spoke

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of slouching toward Bethlehem, the death rattle, audible, her body slumped over – the marque stay alive for the children – the family; masculinity; stoicism

Participant 4 Field: early modern China (faculty) Streams of blood in a web shape (Why do I also see rain?) His mouth, showing pain by changing its shape Cold-look house two-three stone stairs People who helped carried the bodies A white cloud and black letters “It’s nothing”

Participant 5 Field: ancient Greece (faculty) I picture an avenue on Sarajevo, a kind of semi-European/semi-Ottoman cityscape. The avenue is lined with people now gasping in shock at sudden sound of gunfire + the sight of the two imperial figures collapsing. Mass scenes of wailing and trauma ensue as the imperial car hurriedly reverses out of the picture, the once ordered cavalcade now in chaos.

Participant 6 Field (none) staff Archduke in uniform, blood, red, rich duchess, jewels, furs Dramatic speech, pleading don’t die Strong male figure, “it is nothing” Death, rattle in throat, graphic, gross image, bloody Depressing, dead bodies

Participant 7 Field: ancient (grad) Picture an old car like a larger Model T with a rear compartment like a limousine. There are two attendants, the Count von Horrach and perhaps a manservant, both of them dressed elaborately. Franz Ferdinand is dressed as he is in his portraits, and his face is scrunched in pain; his voice weakens every time he speaks. The Duchess is wearing fancy furs and she is somewhere between extreme panic, pain, and worry. The two attendants’ hearts are pounding in their throats, and they are stricken with disbelief and shock. I am picturing this graphically as if it were a movie.

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Participant 8 Field: modern US/women and gender (grad) I think of a blue car with an open top → why blue? No idea why. And it’s one of those open-top old Ford T-models, though I know that is very inaccurate. The image of the assassination is one pulled from an old middle-school textbook about the event. Even the faces and clothing are taken from that image. I thought the Archduke’s remarks to his wife “Stay alive for the children!” was intriguing. It humanized him, made him out to be a family man. I picture the “governor’s residence” to be white. Perhaps because many state houses are white?

Participant 9 Field: East Asian studies (grad . . . MA program) Franz Ferdinand has a white moustache. Head rolling, onto the shoulder of the count, blood drooling onto the count’s pristine military jacket. The duchess is wearing white, plump. As she falls she is already dead. Her hair is curled and white. The archduke’s head is leaning back, with eyes closed. More blood each time he talks. Then leans forward the count grabs him and pulls him back up. When the archduke talks, I see from his perspective the world slowly fading. Voice sounding far away “It’s nothing.” Then darkness. The death rattle sounds like a rattle one would give to a child. The car pulls to a stop in silence. They are both already dead. Silence. A black and white newsreel shows people coming and going from the car.

Participant 10 Field: military history (undergraduate) Old style car (open air), Franz Ferdinand leaning to the side, head resting on side of car. Man in front seat turned around facing him and Sophie. Sophie falls away to floor. Man in front turns on his knees to reach the back of the car and reaches for the Archduke. Both slip into a slump, man in front is left with awed look on face.

Participant 11 Field: modern central and Eastern European history (undergraduate) It’s sunny out. Harrach (?) is sitting near the archduke, clad in blue. Harrach’s handkerchief is in his hand as Sophie falls. Harrach is frightened, panicking, but he thinks he’s the only one reacting like this. (There is a line drawn through this section.)

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Color in the entire scene is like an old magazine illustration. Not quite pastel, but none of the colors are too bold, stylized. Everyone in the scene is real – not a cartoon. I don’t picture any of the people in crowds who were watching the scene. I know they were there, but they don’t show up in the mental image. I see only the inside of the car where they are sitting and the building in Sarajevo – in the K.U.K. style.

Participant 12 Field: political science/journalism (undergraduate) Tumultuous scene. Panic. Ferdinand (no real image, generic man) in slumped position in car. The Dutchess (sic) (generic woman in lavish dress) in utter shock. Her body crumbles. More from a bird’s eye view to that of one in the crowd. Position now moves to inside the vehicle. Watching Harrach hold Ferdinand by collar. Muted scene overall, like a dramatic end to a film. Envisioning mass hisreria (sic) and close in on Ferdinand. Imagine the guttural sound. Two bodies carried out in a hearse (?)

Participant 13 Field: creative writing and history of art (undergraduate) I imagine this as if each (symbol for paragraph) were a new panel in a graphic novel, or something of the sort. I am an artist, and so I immediately thought of how I would compose the scene into a concrete image I think of design elements like composition + and where people are sitting. My initial thoughts are these renderings of my mental images (draws a scene). Immediately after seeing the title of the source I am brought to the scene of the assassination that I have had since whenever I first learned it – 9th grade? It is a bird’s eye of a windy sort of sepia tone scenes.

Participant 14 Field: history (undergraduate) As I read this, I imagine the Archduchess in her fine gown and pearls suddenly falling to the ground. The Archduke is covered in blood and seems both shocked and angry. He knows he is probably going to die, but he wants to make sure his wife survives. There are screams in the background as the crowd tries to figure out what has happened. The driver is young and does not have the experience to know what is going on and what he should do. The bodies are

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carried into the building by a group of men instead of a gurney and all of them are crying. This is her response when asked in my class before: Again, as I read this I imagine the writer. I imagine his panic and I imagine how gross it would be to have someone’s blood splattered on my cheek. I almost hear a comic-book like “splurt” when he says the blood hit his cheek. I can also imagine him standing in fright when the Duchess faints and then coming to his senses in order to try to help the Archduke. I also get a sense of grief with the last line because he gives very few details; just “their death was soon established.” That line seems very sad to me.

Participant 15 Field: history (undergraduate) • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Blood from the mouth – he’s going to die Balancing of manners against fear Panic, terror Flight trough the city Taxi driver Inside of horse-drawn carriage How to respect royalty when injured/desperate Von Harrach pestering Their children have no idea what is happening; how will they be raised? Assassin is set upon by a herd of people while the driver steps on it Men in military formal wear, medals, groomed, white pants Duchess in long dress Not present at death

Participant 16 Field: history (undergraduate) • •

Von Harrach sits @ a writing desk with bifocals and a proper suit w/ pocketwatch ref lecting on some past experiences – arms crossed In von Harrach’s mind’s eye: • • • • • • •

His friend/boss, boss’s wife + he are speeding through cobblestone streets Von Harrach is imagining (?) the situation A driver is panicked The Archduke is scared + in denial but quickly moves to gibberish (?) Thinking of family It is cold, daytime, winter without snow Von Harrach is in shock but (undecipherable) himself into action. Helpless but he must remember

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• • • • •

Von Harrach is messy, blood spatter on his face his hair is tossed Monocle? Moustache Lie a doctor after losing a patient. ER Return to humanity (?)

2 INSERTIONS

One of the reasons the movie Forest Gump delighted audiences was the way in which the moviemakers inserted actor Tom Hanks into a number of historical scenes. Forest Gump was, of course, a fictional character, conjured from the imagination of the screenwriter. The delight the film evokes is the absurdity of the juxtaposition of Gump within real historical events, Tom Hanks anachronistically added to the tableau of a real historical scene. This is the way historical fiction often works: a fictional character is placed within a real historical moment and walks around, lives, acts and exists as if it were real. Because this is a depiction via the visual medium of film, it is easy to spot that there is something not quite right about Forest Gump shaking hands with President Kennedy. Gump does not “belong” there, the anachronism being quite obvious. The insertion seems implausible only because we understand that Forest Gump does not stand in or represent something that we presume was actually there at some stage. We will discuss historical fiction in more detail in Chapter 4, but for now I want to explore the idea that historians make similar kinds of “insertions” into the past all the time, and historians accord some imaginative objects more legitimacy, more reality, more actuality than others. We insert “imaginative objects” as a regular feature of the writing of history. The philosopher Frank Ankersmit talks of historians creating “narrative substance,” that our written representations are ontologically real things.1 Are our historical concepts similarly a kind of narrative substance, a thing/object conjured from language that we impose into (not onto) the past? Similarly, periodization is a kind of insertion into the past. That is, there are happenings from the past that we order together around the linguistic object called a periodization. Because we can so segment the past in a number of ways (and note how historians debate periodization), we might see periodizations as a creative/imaginative construct, an imaginative thing that is not ontologically real in the way other such things from the past are/were real.

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Insertions

What is the nature of this imposition? Is an historical concept or a periodization like a fictional character? We write about and act as if concepts and periodization “belong” to the historical period in question. But these might be better understood as “imaginary objects” that historians insert into the past.

Concepts Historical concepts are kinds of “imaginative objects” historians regularly insert into the past. Consider the following thought experiment: Imagine a diagram that has a series of dots arrayed across it. The dots represent actual occurrences from the past (as best we are able to tell). Now imagine I draw a circle around some cluster of these dots, with the effect of segmenting and separating them from the rest of the array. I give the circle a name, like “Industrial Revolution,” and claim that this entity describes a feature of the past. Is the concept “Industrial Revolution” a product of my creative imagination? That is, does the concept “Industrial Revolution” refer to something in the past that I presume was actually there at one time? Or, like Forest Gump, is this a fictional entity that I have anachronistically inserted into the past, something that coexists with the actual past but behaves as if it were historically and ontologically real? The name Industrial Revolution is a linguistic construct, not an actual occurrence from the past. But even if it is an imagined object we insert into the past – and we will debate that point below – the concept is nevertheless grounded in actual happenings. While the concept Industrial Revolution may be an invention, it nevertheless refers to something that was ontologically real. Where does this linguistic construct belong on our continuum? In what ratio is the imaginative object of a concept more mimetic or creative? The historian Mary Fulbrook sees concepts as inventions of the historian’s mind, a product of the imagination that does not directly refer to any specific phenomenon from the past. This stands in contrast to the sciences. In the natural sciences, categories of description are of course analytic constructs which serve . . . to account for observed phenomena: the chemical elements, atoms, neutrons, quarks, and so on, are still constructs imposed on, rather than given in, observed “reality.” But, as far as scientists at any given time are aware, these observed realities exist irrespective of our attempts to name them, and act in the same way under the same conditions whatever we choose to call them. What we notice about the social and cultural, or human sciences, is that there is precious little agreement among observers about conceptual categories.2 Fulbrook’s implication here is that, because they are the subject of continued debate, the historians’ categories are fictions, products of the creative imagination. Because historians cannot unanimously agree on whether a conceptual category is warranted, there is reason to suspect that concepts do not align with or

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map onto actual phenomena. A quark or an atom is an actual phenomenon, our concepts making reference to something with an ontology independent of our name for it. Fulbrook assumes that there is no such phenomenon in the human world, until our concepts organize them as such. She asserts that “concepts such as ‘the Renaissance,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘dictatorship,’ are categories for imposing order on disparate and complex historical events, patterns of development, political structures.”3 That is to suggest that there is no pattern to the past unless and until the historian so constructs such a pattern and that pattern meets with the general acceptance by historians. Historical concepts, these “entirely innocent labels or phrases,” contain “a multitude of assumptions about periodization, about the importance of particular aspects or clusters of development, about the selection and shaping of material and the exploration of particular themes.”4 These are choices made by the historian, choices then imposed or otherwise inserted into the past. “Part of the problem,” concludes Fulbrook, “relates to the degree to which we are prepared to see categories as describing what the world is ‘really’ like, or as mere ‘constructs’ for the purpose of inquiry.”5 Fulbrook describes some of these concepts as “anachronistic”: “impositions across cultures, not recognized by participants in a different (even if chronologically simultaneous) cultural community.”6 One way of thinking about this is to say that historical concepts are anachronistic because they are created by historians in the present and then inserted backward into the past. “A simple Google Scholar search for ‘Atlantic World’ suggest how quickly this framework took off,” observes Karin Wulf, referring to the historiographic category, describing “those places that were navigable via the Atlantic in the early modern period.” The emergence of the Atlantic World as a conceptual category dates to the 1990s. Indeed, the Google Scholar search Wulf mentioned shows that Atlantic World appeared in article titles more than three times as often in the 1990s as the 1980s, and more than five times as often in the 2000s as the previous decade. There is now a robust, thriving scholarly literature on Atlantic history. . . . That said, it should be kept in mind that, as historian Ian Steele remarked, “no one ever lived, prayed, or died for the Atlantic World.” Still, the Atlantic World is more than an academically useful construct.7 Atlantic World is a concept, imagined by historians and inserted into the past as a way to organize and make sense of the lived experiences of those of the early modern period. But, as Steele suggests, no one living at the time would have used the term. The ontology of the concept – and the ratio between what it describes as historically actual and real versus conjured in the mind of the historian – is complex; it is “more than a useful construct,” nodding to the fact that it is an imaginary object but one that is ontologically grounded nevertheless. Historians differ as to whether they feel their task is to reconstitute the past “in its own terms” – or at least in terms which contemporaries would have

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understood, using concepts which guided their behavior at the time – or whether it is to explain it in terms which historians believe to be more revealing than those used by contemporaries.8 Contemporaries might not have used a term like “Atlantic World,” but we can use the term nevertheless to explain or better understand a pattern or constellation of events in the past. Drawing together events from the past, grouping them into a pattern is a process C. Behan McCullagh calls “colligation,” and it is a common-enough activity among historians. Indeed, the act of historical representation would be that much more difficult without colligation. “W.H. Walsh was the first to apply the word ‘colligation’ to history, when he pointed out that historians often make actions and other events intelligible by showing them to be part of a pattern.”9 Those patterns are grounded in ontologically actual events, and those patterns may or may not ref lect actual patterns. Historians often find patterns in the past, or more strictly, in the information about the past they have acquired after studying the available evidence. These are patterns formed by actions and events, and often represent changes of a certain kind.10 It is appropriate here that McCullagh observes that historians work with evidence, traces of the past rather than the actual past itself. The patterns that we locate, therefore, are patterns in evidence rather than in the actual past itself (which has disappeared from our direct experience). Further, warranted colligated words and concepts must be grounded in evidence and must be “necessitated by the evidence.” While products of the creative imagination, they are by necessity mimetically grounded, pegged to the evidence, as it were. “The word ‘colligation’ is derived from the Latin word colligere, meaning to bring things together,” observes McCullagh. Some colligatory words and phrases name unique patterns, in the same way as proper names refer to unique people or places; and some colligatory words name common patterns, just as common nouns can refer to many things. . . . The phrase “the French Revolution” refers to just one pattern of events, whereas the word “revolution” is a common noun, which can be used to refer to a whole range of revolutions.11 “Bringing together” is a creative act, in that the historian takes what is already in place, what already exists, and joins together. Events by themselves are not so joined together until the historian acts upon those events (or, rather, the evidence of those events). The act of arranging means to add a structure that was not already present. The implication here is that events do not always arrange

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themselves into patterns. Pattern-recognition/pattern-creation is an action performed by the historian. Frequently, the words that historians use to represent the past are often acts of colligation. These are cases in which a variety of activities can be colligated under the concept of a movement which has not got a particular goal, but shares particular ideas and values. The movements Walsh mentions are “the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, the age of reform in nineteenth-century England, [and] the rise of monopoly capitalism.” Once again, events gathered under these names can all be related to a common set of ideas, which is why the pattern is rational. . . . Another group of patterns which historians often detect are patterns of change, named by words such as “growth” and “decline,” “evolution” and “revolution,” “polarization” and “conf lict.”12 Historical representations are littered with concepts – constructions, creations of the mind that are inserted into the past – that they often escape our notice. To emphasize that these patterns are often constructed artifacts of the historian’s creative imagination, McCullagh notes, echoing Fulbrook, “Once a colligatory word or phrase has been accepted, historians often disagree as to what it really refers to, and whether its use in reference to a particular pattern of historians change is warranted or not.” He cites the work of Joel Mokyr in assessing the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr asks was there really an Industrial Revolution? He is asking, in effect, is this concept warranted to refer to a particular pattern of events? “Mokyr points out that historians have in fact referred to quite different patterns of change in the British economy during this period as constituting the Industrial Revolution.” For his part, Mokyr questions the use of the concept of industrial revolution Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a revolution took place in parts of the British economy during this period, and not characterize the whole economy as undergoing such a revolution. As Mokyr said: “What took place was a series of events, in a certain span of time, in known localities, which subsequent historians found convenient to bless with a name.” Return to our dots-as-events thought experiment: I draw a circle around some of the dots and announce a name for this collection. Another historian might draw a different circle around another configuration of dots, including some of my dots but others not included in my pattern. “Narratives can be structured to present a colligatory pattern,” says McCullagh. If the pattern is referred to by a colligatory term, then the term describes it credibly if the conditions which warrant its application were present. To

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know what those conditions had to be, the historian must define the term as clearly as possible.13 The debates historians hold are often debates about whether or not the actual historical conditions warrant the application of the colligatory word. Is my circle, my configuration of events more or less warranted than another circle-aroundevents? That is, what is being debated is not the actuality of the events but the legitimate arrangement of those events into a colligated pattern. It is the collection, the pattern, that is in dispute, which again raises the questions: Are those patterns ontologically actual, in that they were actual patterns from the past? Or are these patterns creations of the historian’s mind, which are then inserted into our representations of the past? I am drawn to the work of the archeologist Ian Hodder, especially for the way in which he draws attention to his own process of concept formation, how he conjures and creates the concept. I believe historians engage in a similar sort of concept-creation as Hodder, although few are so open and transparent about the process. In his book The Domestication of Europe, Hodder developed the concept of domus to describe the pattern of settlement in Neolithic southern Europe. He defined domus as more than “house,” more than a physical dwelling. For the Neolothic cultures he was examining, domus entails the activities within the house – cooking, weaving, etc. – objects within the dwelling, such as pottery, ovens, chairs and tables; and the symbolic functions performed therein: the domus was the site for figurines, for example. The domus was distinct from “the outside,” the agrios, which is the wild and undomesticated space of animals, hunting, exchange and tool production. The domus is that space for domestication, associated especially with the feminine, in opposition to the masculine agrios. There is a boundary between the two he called the fortis, the site of child burial and animal figurines. While he does not use the term, Hodder’s domus is colligatory in that he has argued that a cluster of traits . . . defined a broad and loose concept that I have termed the domus. . . . Indeed I have blatantly oversimplified a complex picture in arguing for the cluster of attributes associated with the domus.14 (emphasis mine) Hodder draws attention to the constructed nature of the colligatory term domus. “As I wrote this book,” he recounts, I gradually came to realize what I meant by the term domus. .  .  . My definition of the term came about through my haphazard experience of the data. I gradually accommodated my own preconceptions derived for example from my visit to the Nuba and from my understanding of English and Latin, to my re-examination of the regional prehistoric sequences and contextual information.15

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The concept is an invention but nevertheless tied to evidence. “The domus and the agrios are ideas which have some external statistical basis but which are also created by me, using the linguistic structures of my thought, in order to have some internal coherence.”16 Hodder is no exception in his creation and use of a concept but is perhaps unusually open and transparent about his thought process in so creating the concept. Note how he views the term very much as a construction, born from his creative imagination, but nevertheless grounded in the actual, the data, the evidence. Hodder recognizes the question we have been asking all along, about the relationship between the name and the actual occurrence from the past. “But of course I cannot know if there is a direct link between those linguistic and archeological data, between the present words and the Neolithic experience.” In describing the concept of the domus as a “present word,” Hodder draws attention to its anachronistic nature. Indeed my main reason for using terms such as domus is that they allow a sleight of hand. On the one side, it is as if I am using a linguistic tie to the distant past in order to think the archeological data in “their” terms, using words with common Indo-European roots, perhaps spoken by “them,” or at least closer to words spoken by “them.” The use of possibly common terms makes it seem as if I am getting closer to the past, closer to the general archeological ideal of getting back to the past. Or to put it another way, it appears as if I am thinking about the past (and the present) in the past’s terms.17 Hodder chose the term domus in part because of its rich associations with other Indo-European root words that describe something very similar, such as domesticate. By playing on, punning with, terms such as domination, domestication, focus, forest, and agriculture I hope to draw attention to the fact that we think the past through language which is both constructed in the present and constructed in the past.18 The term domus becomes a present imaginative object inserted into the past, all the while masquerading as an actual thing from the past. Hodder’s work was controversial – in that it was influenced by postmodernism – but I find it instructive nevertheless in describing one way in which concepts are formed. That they are acts of creation, imaginary objects that we insert into the past, but because they refer to actual objects or events from the past, they are nevertheless ontologically grounded. Historical representations – at least those preferred by professional historians – are built from language. Language disguises the actually of what that language represents. If historical concepts are imaginative objects created by historians

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and inserted into the past as a way to bring order to events, and if these are contrasted with language that mimetically represent the events and occurrences of the past, then when reading a typical account, the difference between the two can be difficult to spot. Unlike Forest Gump, who is very clearly an anachronism or an insertion, historical concepts are not always easy to identify. Consider this example from Peter Stearn’s The Industrial Revolution in World History. As you read the following account, mark or otherwise identify the words that describe the occurrences and events of the past and those words that represent concepts that have been inserted by the historian into the tableau of the past: Britain’s industrial revolution consisted until about 1840 primarily of changes in the cotton industry, with its massive results in terms of expanding production and world outreach, but other developments were vital as well. Mechanization of wool spinning and weaving was well under way by 1800, impeded only by the higher cost and greater fragility of wool fiber. New machines and procedures were introduced into beer brewing; the big factories established included the great Guinness brewery in Dublin. Pottery manufacturing concentrated important developments in industrial chemistry during the late eighteenth century, while new methods reduced the work required in processes such as glazing and cutting. Several of these innovations created major health hazards for the workers involved – new grinding methods, for example, “hath proved very destructive to mankind, occasioned by the dust suckled into the body which .  .  . fixes so closely upon the lungs that nothing can remove it” – but productivity per worker expanded immensely, to the benefit of new pottery magnates such as Josiah Wedgewood. In the 1830s new printing presses were developed that could be powered by steam engines, which greatly expanded production in such fields as daily newspapers. A few commercial bakeries also introduced important new methods.19 This paragraph, selected at random, is bathed in historical concepts. First consider the proper name Josiah Wedgwood, not a cluster of traits or a concept but rather a reference to an actual historical figure. There is also a direct quote from a contemporary source, which points to the use of language to represent the past. But then there are terms such as “cotton industry,” “pottery manufacturing” and “industrial chemistry.” These are not contemporary terms but are rather anachronistic words inserted into the textual field. These words were no doubt conjured by a thought process not dissimilar to the one Hodder described. However, I doubt that historians would take the time or trouble to debate whether these terms are warranted. Consider Fulbrook and McCullagh discussed earlier: that historians frequently debate whether or not a concept can in fact be tied to an actual pattern or cluster of events. In describing a “cotton industry” in England, for example, few historians would seriously wonder whether that concept really did refer to a cluster of traits in the British economy at that time. This suggests

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that some concepts, at least, do in fact map onto actual patterns, that colligation is not simply a matter of inventing a pattern that was not actually present in the past. Then there are concepts such as “changes” and “developments” that describe patterns of change. Then there are concepts such as “innovations.” This is a concept that might be challenged by some historians. In a manner similar to Mokyr, an historian might debate the meaning of the term “innovation” and wonder whether it should be applied to a particular cluster of events. How much of that concept is a mimetic representation of an actual pattern, and how much of that concept is instead the interpretive creation of the historian? It would be hard to imagine an historian inserting a concept into a textual field representing the past that had no connection at all to the evidence, to the events and occurrence of the past, at least if they wanted the passage to be considered a history at all. I could add to the previous paragraph above the words “Britain’s automobile industry,” but that concept, that insertion would not be warranted. We assume that a concept at least refers to, stands in or represents something that we can demonstrate was actually present at one time. That is, a concept, although a product of the creative imagination of the historian, must nevertheless be grounded in or pegged to evidence from the past. In that regard, concepts belong at a central point – although still leaning toward the left hand side – on our chart of the historical imagination.

Periodization Let’s return to our original thought experiment and alter the conditions slightly: what if the dots are colored differently such that there is a field of blue dots, then a field of red dots next to a field of black dots? This array of dots suggests patterns, that the field is not so undifferentiated as not to contain any patterns at all. So when we now draw a circle around the blue dots and around the black and red dots as well, we are assuming that the dots-as-events have some kind of underlying pattern such that our imposition of a circle seems less constructed and imaginary. Like an atom or quark, there seems to be an actuality to our arrangement of the dots. We might assign a name to these patterns, but there is at least the presumption of an actual pattern connecting the events, not simply our own “constructs for purposes of inquiry.” In this instance, are we still engaging in a creative insertion into the past? Or is our imagination here of the reconstructive/ mimetic type? That is, does a periodization map on to an actual temporal reality, or is it an imaginative construction of the historian? “Calendars made it possible to organize the moments of daily life. Periodization satisfied the same purpose, but over a longer term.” Jacques LeGoff then asks, “The question arises whether this human invention, if it is to have lasting value, has to correspond to some objective reality.”20 Periodization – the breaking up of time into units – is implicit in just about everything an historian writes. Sometimes those periodizations are made clear, as in the title of a book or article. These are rarely grand periodizations, covering

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great historical epochs, but are instead created on a much smaller scale. One need only look at the voluminous book reviews in the back of any American Historical Review issue to find such periodizations in the titles of many works. These “every day” periodizations identify a segment in time, the unit of analysis that will be undertaken in the study. In a sense, the historian who so breaks off this segment of time is suggesting that everything that happens between the beginning and the end of the periodization coheres in some meaningful way. Think of the periodizations graduate students employ in their dissertations – although such periodization appears in the titles of many historical works. Consider this brief list of dissertation titles from Yale University: The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–34 Borderland Cartographies: Mapping the Lands Between France and Germany, 1860–1940 Damned Nation? The Concept of Hell in American Life, 1775–1865 “No Depression in Heaven:” Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, 1929–41 Guardians of Order: Police and Society in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1907–30 Race and Childhood in Fascist Italy, 1923–40 “Almost Revolutionary”: The Constitution’s Strange Career in the Workplace, 1935–8021 Choosing the period 1921–34, for example, or 1923–1940 suggests that all that occurs between these two markers are tied together in some sort of meaningful relationship. Identifying a beginning and end point along the time line has the same effect as drawing a circle around dots in our thought experiment above. All of the dots are configured together as a temporal colligatory pattern. When a segment of time is so identified, it strongly suggests that the resulting period is an actual pattern in the past. But historians occasionally realign periodizations, suggesting that a periodization is an imaginative construction of the historian. In Germany: A New History, for example, Hagen Schulze makes a dramatic historiographic move. Schulze divided time in this fashion: Unification and the Dream of World Power 1890–1914 The Great War and It Aftermath 1914–1923 Weimar: Brief Glory and Decline 1924–1933 German Megalomania 1933–1942 The End of the Third Reich and a New Beginning 1942–1949 A Divided Nation 1949–199022 It has been commonplace for historians to treat the post-war occupation of Germany as a separate period, from 1945 to 1949 (or until 1955, in some cases). Schulze, in contrast, includes the occupation of Germany as part of the larger

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history of World War II, indeed viewing it as the culmination of the War. “What lay ahead [after the unconditional surrender] was living with the consequences of the war that had now ended.”23 Schulze was thus conceptualizing the occupation as part of the war, not as a separate temporal experience. Was Schulze simply correcting our historical view, and that historians had been laboring under a temporal falsehood? Or does this episode suggest that a periodization is an analytic convenience that is the creation of the historian’s mind? It remains to be determined the ontological nature of these temporal patterns. In debating the nature of periodization, historians tend to fall into two camps: one, that a periodization ref lects or maps onto real temporal structures from the past. We may debate which structures to emphasize more or to assert that one temporal pattern was more important or significant, but the periodization nevertheless maps precisely onto actual temporal realities. The other camp maintains that a periodization is the invention of the historian, a temporal structure imposed on the past, perhaps one that all historians agree to abide by (until they do not) but an imposition nevertheless. Do people experience time phenomenologically, and if so, is there an actual sequence of patterns that we can identify and name as different historical periods? I can recall when my son was still a toddler, my wife and I would take strolls in the park near our condominium. The park was always active with joggers, pick-up soccer games, bikers, fellow strollers. Then the attacks of 9/11 occurred. We stayed inside for about a week after the events and then cautiously made our way back to the park to stroll with our son. There were fewer people in the park; most seemed wary but were nevertheless game enough to attempt to reestablish our afternoon routines. But – and I understand this is a subjective perspective – the world felt different, as if we had passed through a threshold, and transition: “before 9/11” and “after 9/11.” The world did change after 9/11: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the long lines and invasive security at the airport, the mistrust, open hostility and fear of those who looked different. There had certainly felt as if there had been a change in the state of the world. Thus, we might be justified in listing 9/11 as a transition between two periods. If this is the case, then any periodization we would announce would therefore be a mimetic representation of an ontologically real pattern. Reinhart Koselleck argued that there are indeed historical temporalities, that the experience of the modern could be felt by those in the eighteenth century, for example.24 In this formulation, such a phenomenological experience of time is analogous to the state of matter. Physicists identify four such states: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. The properties of matter can change (as when water is heated or cooled), but physicists also point to the “phase transitions” between these different states. The various states of water, for example, might be mapped onto a phase diagram, with temperature on one axis and pressure on the other. The diagram shows the state of water and the phase transition between each state of matter as temperature and pressure are changed. Does history work via a similar process? That is, are there various states of the world that can be altered

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by analogous forces such that we can identify different states and the transitions between them? If these do exist, then our periodizations are simply the names we give to these ontologically actual patterns. William A. Green uses the term “period frontiers” to describe the kinds of transitions or thresholds between periods. He identifies two general types: The coincidental approach identifies the convergence of numerous important developments at a single moment in history. The circa 1500 C.E. watershed in Western tripartite periodization [for instance] rests largely on this type of observation. In the decades around 1500 numerous important events converged: the Ptolemaic perception of the universe was challenged, printing and gunpowder achieved importance, Columbus reached America and DeGama sailed to India, Constantinople fell to the Turks, Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, and the monarchies of England, France and Spain were consolidated. Taken together, these happenings . . . dissolved old continuities and gave rise to a new epoch in Western history. In contrast, the “leading-sector approach concentrates on one overwhelming source of change that exercises decisive pulling power on all others.”25 These transitions, these temporal moments between periods, possess their own characteristics; we might define these as having in-between features. Jacques LeGoff observes: [Periodization] contains also the idea of transition, of one thing turning into another; indeed, when change is sufficiently far-reaching in its effects, a new period represents a repudiation of the entire social order of the one preceding it. It is for this reason that periods have a very special meaning: in their very succession, in both the temporal continuity this succession embodies and the rupture of temporal continuity that it brings about, they constitute an inescapable object of inquiry for the historian.26 LeGoff sees these transitions as gradual: From all of this, it seems to me, one critical implication emerges concerning the periodization of history. True discontinuities are rare. Ruptures in the strict sense, clean breaks with what went before, are seldom observed. The usual case is the more or less long, the more or less profound transformation: the turning point, the internal renaissance.27 The historian Stephen Toulmin identifies the Renaissance not as a separate period. The Renaissance was evidently a transitional period, in which the seeds of Modernity germinated and grew. . . . Many of the leading figures of late

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Renaissance culture, from Leonardo (1452–1519) up to Shakespeare (1564– 1616), worked in situations that retained much of their medieval character, without having fully developed the marks of Modernity proper.28 Any periodization an historian might identify must account for the complex process that transform one “state of matter” into another. Charles Maier observes: Two different questions tend to overlap here: first, the question of when it makes sense to talk of a new historical era (how much change has accumulated?), and second, the question of whether such a new era ordinarily begins with a historical rupture or “saltation,” that is, with nonlinear change . . . events can be interpreted as themselves constituting or catalyzing “deeper” transitions, which means even profound change can take place suddenly.29 Maier is talking here about transition between different historical “states,” like states of matter. There are instances, of course, where change is profound, sudden and disruptive: World War I would be such an example, I would contend. My sense is that changes between one historical state and the next rather extend through transition phases that can be of some length. To return to our dot metaphor, there may be an array of mostly black dots, but then these might give way to a region where there are blue and black dots in equal number before we finally move to an area where there are mostly blue dots. That transitional area between states might extend for some time, rather than there being a rupture. All of this presumes, of course, that those patterns, those historical states, are real, actual entities. Other historians argue that, while there may be actual temporal patterns, our periodizations are nevertheless creations and useful fictions that we impose upon the past. Perhaps there are temporal patterns, but our periodizations ref lect our preference for a specific pattern that has greater meaning and explanatory power. Thus, historians will debate the precise definition and temporal boundaries of great historical epochs such as “modernity.” Charles Maier wrote an article that argued for and justified a new kind of periodization for twentieth-century history, a long century that begins in the 1860s and extends to the late 1960s. Maier based his new periodization on the centrality of “territoriality,” which he defines as “the properties, including power, provided by the control of bordered political space, which until recently at least created the framework for national and often ethnic identity.”30 There are and have been other frameworks for periodizing modern history, the rise of nationalism, industrialization and the clash of ideologies. “Why privilege territoriality as a key for periodizing modern history?” he asks. He appropriately justifies his choice, noting that, only when “the spatially anchored structures for politics and economics” began to break down in the early 1970s – part of the

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process of “globalization” – did historians and other observers come to appreciate the importance of territoriality. But all of this suggests that a periodization is centered on some feature, some pattern in the past that provides its organizational structure. Arguments about periodization remain meaningful only because they represent claims as to what constellation of events should be accorded major significance for defined communities of actors. Periods – whether defined by actual units of time (a decade, a century) or by a figurative span that covers some related events (the Renaissance, Late Antiquity) – stipulate the extension across time of developments that seem to have some relationship to each other and as a group contrast with earlier or later sequences. Historians understand that many designations of periods are descriptive, not causal concepts: the Enlightenment as such never caused skepticism about organized religion or the social benefit of torture. Historical periodization is an effort to interpret more than to explain; that is, to assign a meaning to historical phenomena by relating them either to sequential chains of other events or to webs of relationships, including institutions, social groups of one sort or another, or even mentalités that endure across a significant length of time.31 We should be clear here that when Maier says that these are “actual units of time,” decades and centuries are nevertheless human constructions. There is a physical reality to a day, for instance: the Earth spinning once on its axis. There is also a physical reality to a year, one trip of the Earth around the sun. However, a decade is a human construction: there is nothing in the natural world that marks off ten years as a distinct temporal division. (If we lived in a society with a base12 arithmetic, our “decades” might refer to twelve revolutions of the Earth.) The same with centuries, which are features of human-created timekeeping. But Maier’s point is nevertheless well-taken: historians will indeed break up time not on the basis of any particular pattern or feature other than a span of ten years. Thus, we will get histories of the 1960s or “The Roaring Twenties.” Identifying the 1960s as a distinct period represents an example of an insertion into or imposition upon the past, that a periodization is a product of our creative imagination. “To periodize is to dismiss evidence as much as to gather it.”32 If true, this strongly suggests that a periodization is a mental creation. Stephen Toulmin explains the debates and challenges around the periodization of “modernity” or the beginnings of modern history. The challenge is in defining what the modern is. Because there are so many competing definitions, there are an equal number of competing periodizations, exemplified in determining the starting point. Is it 1436 (moveable type printing) or 1520 (Martin Luther) or 1648 (the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War). Each is as legitimate as the other, the choice depending upon which definition of modernity to emphasize.33 But, again, this suggests that a periodization is a creative fiction. It is, perhaps, a colligatory pattern tied to actual events, but a fiction nevertheless.

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World history emerged as an academic field in the early 1980s, and periodization was an important early theoretical issue explored by its first practitioners. In particular, world historians noted that the “tripartite periodization” of ancient, medieval and modern was invented and established by Western historians. World historians found this temporal ordering did not map onto the historical realities they were examining. “Although we may lack an overarching and integrating theoretical framework for periodizing in world history,” wrote William Green in 1995, we still have the practical need, as authors and teachers, to separate six millennia of human experience in chronological compartments having some measure of coherence. For the moment, we are compelled to exercise arbitrary eclectic judgments on global periodization, not unlike the writers and teachers, whose judgments about European history gradually produced Western tripartite periodization. This would be regrettable. It is not disastrous. It involves our seeking a practical solution to an inescapable pedagogical problem. Most world historians have personal preferences on periodization. Few of these preferences are lodged in systematic theory, yet many of them are highly similar even though similarities may arise for different reasons.34 (emphasis mine) At the time Green wrote this, world history was still an emerging field, its temporal boundaries not yet established. Green more than implies that any world historical periodization that does emerge is the product of the judgment of the historians; any consensus that emerges is the result of an alignment of these “arbitrary eclectic judgments.” The implication here is that this periodization is an imposition, an insertion into our historical representations. For world historians, one act of historical revision is to reimagine these divisions of time. Green contends that a periodization “ref lects our priorities, our values, and our understanding of the forces of continuity and change.”35 In defining periodization in these terms, Green suggests that historians select a particular pattern out of the polyphony of actual temporal patterns. That selection is itself an act of the creative imagination, like what Maier is doing: identifying a hitherto hidden (from our view) unnoticed pattern. But to be clear, while selection is an act of creation, what is being selected is an ontologically real pattern, not an invention. As Green suggests, periodizations, once selected, assert a powerful inf luence on the historian’s thinking. Even if they are creations – fictions inserted into the past – periodizations nevertheless have an effect on historiography as if they were historically actual. Since [the Italian Renaissance], tripartite periodization has gripped Western academe like a straitjacket, determining how we organize departments of history, train graduate students, form professional societies, and publish many of our best professional journals. It pervades our habits of mind; it

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defines turf; it generates many of the abstractions that sustain professional discourse. It determines how we retain images and how we perceive the beginning, middle, and the ending of things. It is insidious, and it is sustained by powerful vested interests as well as by sheer inertia.36 Periodization, even if it is a fiction, nevertheless becomes an actual “thing,” a conceptual structure that shapes our research, our interpretations, our pedagogy. World historians like Green were especially critical of the Western tripartite division – he calls it insidious! – because such a structure clouds our understanding of the histories of other societies. That periodization must be abandoned before a world history can be written. Jerry Bentley concurred with Green’s assessment. “Historians have long realized that periodization schemes based on the experiences of Western or any other particular civilization do a poor job of explaining the trajectories of other societies. To cite a single notorious example,” writes Bentley, again pointing to the invasive nature of Western periodization, “the categories of ancient, medieval, and modern history, derived from European experience, apply awkwardly at best to the histories of China, India, Africa, the Islamic world, or the Western hemisphere.”37 Periodization, this created artifact, serves as a kind of architectural frame for historiographic activity. Or consider this analogy: a periodization is like the lines of longitude and latitude on the globe. This grid – an invention – has served as an aid to navigation, as a way to colonize the planet, as the basis for GPS technologies. In other words, even if the grids are human inventions rather than natural features of the Earth’s geomorphology, lines of longitude and latitude function as real entities. Periodizations, even if fictional, have effected not only how we train students or conduct our research but, especially, the kinds of assumptions and interpretations we make about the past. Thus, when historians debate when the modern period began or whether or not there was a Renaissance, this means refashioning the very architectural features of a field. It inf luences many things. Green says that “we are compelled to seek reasonable symmetry in our periodizations.”38 Why is this? Why is symmetry needed or a goal of historiographic inquiry? To seek symmetry sounds as much like an aesthetic preference (asymmetry being ugly, although there are many who would contend that the asymmetrical can be beautiful). If symmetry is a desired property of a periodization, then perhaps we are drawing attention to its constructed, created, fictional properties. To seek symmetry is to impose an order on what may in fact be temporally asymmetrical. Bentley was seeking a new periodization appropriate to the history of the world and chose “cross-cultural interaction” as the priority he would emphasize. “It stands to reason,” he said, “that processes of cross-cultural interaction might have some value for purposes of identifying historical periods from a global point of view.” “By focusing on processes of cross-cultural interaction,” he said, “historians might more readily identify patterns of continuity and change that ref lect

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the experiences of many peoples rather than impose on all a periodization derived from the experiences of a privileged few”39 (emphasis mine). The implication that the Western tripartite periodization is an act of colonization is unmistakable in Bentley’s formulation. By saying that the Western periodization was imposed on other cultures more than implies that periodization is a construction, a fiction inserted into or imposed upon the past. That periodization does not ref lect the experiences of other cultures, and so is not based on actual historical processes, untethered, as it were, from an ontologically real pattern. Reinhart Koselleck maintains that historical time, as it is actually experienced, is non-linear, multifaceted; indeed there are many kinds of historical time – each at different rates of speed and in different rhythms – that we experience simultaneously such that any unitary periodization cannot capture this complex reality. Thus the fact that historical time is not linear and homogeneous but complex and multilayered accounts for the futility of all efforts to freeze history in order to delimit and define breaks, discontinuities, time spans, beginnings, and endings. Indeed, it accounts for the futility of periodization itself.40 This conclusion suggests that any periodization is a (faulty) human construction, since it cannot map onto the actual complexities of historical time. The futility of periodization is evidence of its fictional nature. Jacques LeGoff has little doubt that periodizations are fictions. “Periodization, as the work of human minds,” he emphasizes, is at once artificial and provisional. In this respect its usefulness is twofold: it allows us to make better sense of the past, in the light of the most recent research, while at the same time reminding us of the imperfections of this instrument of knowledge we call history.41 It is noteworthy that LeGoff identifies “the invention of the Renaissance as a period”42 (emphasis mine). While a fiction, an imposition into the past, a periodization is nevertheless useful, one way we make sense of the past. Historians accept that periodizations are creations of the mind because it would be difficult to write history otherwise. Note how LeGoff describes periodizations, especially the verbs he associates with periodization: Periodization is not only a way of acting upon time. The very act itself draws our attention to the fact that there is nothing neutral, or innocent, about cutting up time into smaller parts. . . . In thinking about the distant past we can scarcely suppose that any way of grouping events is somehow neutral, or objective, or unaffected by a very personal experience of time and by what was eventually to be called . . . history. Dividing history into periods is

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never – I repeat, never – a neutral or innocent act. The changeable reputation of the Middle Ages over the past two hundred years proves my point. Not only is the image of a historical period liable to vary over time; it always represents a judgment of value with regard to sequences of events that are grouped together in one way rather than another. By means of periodization the historian gives form to a particular conception of time and creates a continuous and comprehensive image of the past. The result is what we are accustomed to call “history.”43 (emphasis mine) When LeGoff says historians “act upon” and “cut up time,” when we “divide history” and “group events,” and, especially, when we “create” and “give form,” he suggests that historians are doing something to the past rather than merely describing a feature of it, or affixing a name. LeGoff ’s verbs are active and generative: giving form, grouping events. A periodization comes across here as a fiction of the historian’s imagination, one that is connected to the actuality of the past but is as much a creation of the historian’s mind as it is a feature of time.

Conclusion Inasmuch as they might be intellectual constructs, concepts and periodizations are not complete fictions, meaning that they do not reside on the far right side of our diagram. As colligatory patterns, they exist in the within the complex boundary between Aristotelian mimesis and Platonic invention (see Figure 2.1).

Aristotelian imagination

Platonic imagination

FIGURE 2.1

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in Concepts and Periodizations

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Notes 1 F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983). 2 Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 75. 3 Ibid., 86. 4 Ibid., 77. 5 Ibid., 88–89. 6 Ibid., 82. 7 Karin Wulf, “Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality,” Humanities, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 2019), 28. 8 Fulbrook, Historical Theory, 82. 9 C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Its Place (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 126. 10 Ibid., 125. 11 Ibid., 125–126. 12 Ibid., 126–127. 13 Ibid., 129–130. 14 Ian Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 68–69. 15 Ibid., 44. 16 Ibid., 86. 17 Ibid., 45–46. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Peter Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), 24. 20 Jacques LeGoff and M.B. DeBevoise, trans. Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 114. 21 Yale University History Department, “Dissertations by Year, 2010-present,” https:// history.yale.edu/academics/graduate-program/dissertations-year/dissertations-year2010-2019 22 Hagen Schulze, Germany: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 23 Ibid., 286. 24 Anders Schinkel, “Imagination as a Category of History: An Essay Concerning Koselleck’s Concepts of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont,” History and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), 42–54. 25 William A. Green, “Periodizing World History,” History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 2, (Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics, May, 1995), 102. 26 LeGoff and DeBevoise, trans. Must We Divide History Into Periods, 2. 27 Ibid., 78. 28 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23. 29 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (Jun., 2000), 810. 30 Ibid., 808. 31 Ibid., 809. 32 Ibid., 810. 33 See Toulmin, Cosmopolis. 34 Green, “Periodizing World History,” 110–111. 35 Ibid., 99. 36 Ibid., 99–100. 37 Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Jun., 1996), 749. 38 Green, “Periodizing World History,” 100.

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39 Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” 750. 40 Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory, Vol. 51 (May, 2012), 170. 41 LeGoff and DeBevoise, trans. Must We Divide History into Periods, 17. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 LeGoff and DeBevoise, trans. Must We Divide History into Periods, 2, 7–8, 17, 21.

3 THE MODAL MOOD IN HISTORICAL WRITING

I conduct an exercise with my students to teach them about how historians read and interpret primary sources in order to answer an historical inquiry. Working with the Robert Byrd Polar Archive at Ohio State, I’ve assembled a group of documents regarding Byrd’s 1928 expedition to Antarctica, which featured the first Boy Scout to accompany the expedition. The Boy Scouts conducted a national talent search for the Boy Scout who would be selected to travel with Byrd’s team. Hundreds of Scouts applied, and Paul Siple was eventually selected as the winner. I give the students about a dozen multi-page documents: letters, telegrams, a section of a memoir from Siple, newspaper accounts. I ask the students to answer this question: Why was Siple selected to be the Boy Scout to travel with Byrd? The goal of the assignment is to have students learn to read and evaluate evidence, to see how the different documents “speak” to each other, to establish an interpretive web of such sources. Eventually, the students learn that some sources are more useful in answering the question than others, and judging which sources are more probative is a key part of the exercise. Upon reading the documents, students discover that two sources are particularly useful: one source is the original announcement from the Boy Scouts establishing the criteria upon which the Scout will be judged. A second source is particularly valuable. Six finalists were selected and invited to come to New York for a final series of interviews and demonstrations. The document is an assessment of the six finalists, and Siple clearly stands out from among these six. Students then surmise that Siple met the minimum requirements set out by the Scouts – a certain number of badges, a letter from their scout leader, etc. – but this document revealed qualities not expressed in the original call. These two documents reveal that Siple was head and shoulders above the other candidates, older, more mature, accomplished and physically able. Students answer my original query by saying that Siple was selected because he was the most qualified.

60 The modal mood in historical writing

Other documents in the set include letters and telegrams from inf luential men encouraging Byrd to select this boy or that boy, the scion or relative of these inf luential men. Clearly, being selected for Byrd’s expedition would be a great honor and a public relations bonanza, and there were those who attempted to inf luence the process to their advantage. The evidence is more than suggestive that Byrd and the Boy Scout leaders who would be making the selection were not at all inf luenced by these considerations. Polar exploration was not yet a tourism business: this would be a dangerous journey, and the Boy Scout selected would need to be able to work alongside grown men for 18 months. There was no going back once the expedition began, and so someone selected simply because they were well-connected could not factor into the final decision. Indeed, one of the criteria in Siple’s favor was that he could “take a joke,” could be the subject of teasing, in a manner that the other boys could not. “Taking a joke” was not among the original qualifications the Boy Scouts announced, but it was nevertheless an important consideration in Siple’s selection. The Boy Scout chosen would be expected to contribute fully as a member of the team, not simply be along for publicity for the Scouts and to finance Byrd’s expedition. Thus, letters from inf luential men seeking favoritism for their boy would not be heeded. I raise this last point because, on occasion, a student will make the argument that Siple was selected because an inf luential power broker interceded on his behalf. There is no evidence – either in this collection nor among the documents at the Bryd Archive – that Siple was the beneficiary of such nepotism. Indeed the opposite appears to be the case. But the occasional student will attempt to make the argument that, because so many others were trying to persuade Byrd, someone must have similarly advocated on Siple’s behalf. In effect, these students are saying that since everyone else was doing it, Siple must have been doing it as well. Whenever a student voices such an argument, I use this as a moment to discuss the kinds of inferences that historians draw from evidence and the limits historians place on those inferences. All historians draw inferences, seeing more in the evidence than what is explicitly stated. As Collingwood reminds us, there can be no sophisticated historical thinking without inference. But those inferences must nevertheless be pegged to evidence, and in this case the student has really stretched their inferences to the breaking point. In the absence of evidence implicating Siple or his shadowy benefactor, I say to the student, we cannot support the claim that the decision to select Siple was based on anything other than his qualifications. Because the student lacks direct evidence, he resorts to the verb construction must have, as in Siple must have been aided by a benefactor. Must have is an expression of the modal mood, and while I may discourage apprentice historians from using this construction, it is a kind of statement historians make all the time. What justifies, what warrants the use of the modal mood in historical writing? Why are some historians permitted to make modal arguments whereas students are discouraged from doing so? Where are the boundaries for how far

The modal mood in historical writing 61

historians are permitted to extend inferences, and how are those boundaries established and defended? The return of Martin Guerre If historical records can be bypassed so thoroughly in the service of an inventive blend of intuition and assertion, it is difficult to see what distinguishes the writing of history from that of fiction. As Montaigne observed about assertions being imposed on reality, “What can we not reason about at this rate?” . . . In historical writing, where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?1 Robert Finlay was reviewing The Return of Martin Guerre in an American Historical Review Forum on Natalie Zemon Davis’ 1983 book. Davis had worked as a consultant to a film adaptation of a famous sixteenth-century case. Davis had proffered a radically new interpretation of the case, one Finlay believed was not based on the sources but too much upon Davis’ imagination. The question Findlay asked – where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?– reasserts the question we have been asking throughout this book, and The Return of Martin Guerre provides us with a particular case study of historical imagination via the modal mood. The sixteenth-century case is well-known and has been much commented upon. Martin Guerre, a French peasant, leaves his small village and his recently betrothed wife Bertrande in order to fight in a war. Eight years later, he returns from his travels and resumes his former life. However, it slowly becomes evident that the man who returned was not in fact Martin Guerre but an imposter named Arnaud from the neighboring village of Tihl, who had assumed Guerre’s identity. Arnaud is placed on trial, the transcripts of which form the most important source we have for this entire event. The stakes are particularly high for Bertrande: if the man claiming to be her husband is an imposter, then the couple is guilty of adultery. For her part, Bertrande tells the court that she believes that Arnaud is in fact her husband, and on the strength of this testimony, the judge is about to acquit Arnaud. At the last moment before the judgment, another man enters the court claiming that he is Martin Guerre. Arnaud confesses that he is an imposter, is sentenced to death and Bertrande is acquitted of adultery or any conspiracy. The case of Martin Guerre/Arnaud du Tilh has remained notorious largely because of the figure of Arnaud. He must surely be history’s greatest trickster, for how could it be possible for one man to impersonate another so convincingly that even his wife, who shared his bed, could have been so fooled? Davis, the film consultant, offered a radical reinterpretation of the whole affair. She had assisted in writing the screenplay but also wrote a companion book that spelled out in greater detail the basis for her new interpretation. In Davis’ telling, Bertrande was not duped by Arnaud but in fact was his co-conspirator. “I am thus engaging in the historian’s common practice of conjecturing from

62 The modal mood in historical writing

evidence on the basis of assumption about psychological process,”2 Davis wrote in her defense and in response to Finlay’s accusations. I do not believe it to be too far of a stretch to claim that what Finlay was arguing against was Davis’ overreliance on the modal mood in her book. Modality is not a verb tense in that it does not refer to a specific time. Rather, the modal mood is a statement from the present, one that describes the degree of certainty we have about an historical statement. The kind of modality that most interests us here is what linguists term “epistemic modality.” “Epistemic modality concerns an estimation of the likelihood that (some aspect of ) a certain state of affairs is/has been/will be true (or false) in the context of the possible world under consideration,” says Jan Nuyts. And this estimation of likelihood is situated on a scale [epistemic scale] going from certainty that the state of affairs applies . . . to certainty that it does not apply, with intermediary positions on the positive and negative sides of the scale.3 “Modality differs from tense and aspect in that it does not refer directly to any characteristic of the event, but simply to the status of the proposition,” writes F.R. Palmer.4 “Modal expressions are concerned with the degree of possibility attached to a proposition, and relate to the Leibnizian idea of ‘possible worlds,’ distinguishing the actual from what is possible,” notes Minna Vihla. “In a sense, modal expressions ref lect the way writers see the world: whether it is something that can be known with certainty, or whether the picture they are giving of the outside world is only an approximation.”5 A modal statement is one that serves to take us out of the historical narrative, almost as if the speaker were breaking the fourth wall of a theatre production. A modal statement says to the reader that the speaker does not have direct evidence for this assertion, and so is not describing the world as it actually is (or was). “Modality, indicated by expressions such as may, must and possibly, is a central feature when analyzing language use, as modal expressions are means of conveying the speaker’s attitude concerning, for example, the acceptability of an event or the certainty of knowledge,” says Vihla. Indeed, when analyzing modal expressions in historical writing, the degree of certainty and the manner in which such certainty is warranted play a crucial role in determining the validity of such statements. Modal expressions are related to the interpersonal level of language, and they may ref lect the roles of the participants. In written language, modal expressions can be used to show politeness toward the reader and to indicate that the writer allows the reader to disagree. Modal expressions are of interest when studying language used for specific purposes or when teaching academic writing, as their use may ref lect the conventions of disciplinary genres.6

The modal mood in historical writing 63

Vihla’s work concerns modal expressions in the medical profession, but the questions she raises can be applied to the historical profession as well, specifically in clarifying the relationship between speaker and audience in the reception and affirmation of modal statements. The Return of Martin Guerre is littered with modal constructions. Here are a few of the kinds of statements Davis makes on nearly every page of the book: “The economic link of Artigat with nearby villages and burgs would have been apparent to the Daguerres at once.” “All of this must have appealed to the Daguerres, who had grown up in an area where . . . the seigniorial regime had been weak . . .” “Along with future progeny, goods and exchange of service were surely considerations.” 7 Davis is transparent and unapologetic about this use of the modal mood. Indeed, in the introduction she wonders, “Where was there room in this beautiful and compelling cinematographic recreation of a village for the uncertainties, the ‘perhaps,’ the ‘may-have-beens,’ to which the historian has recourse when the evidence is inadequate or perplexing?”8 – those may-have-beens a specific reference to modal reasoning. She refers to these as her “inventions.” Finlay, on the contrary, is troubled by these inventions. “Davis fails to show that her view of women in peasant society is relevant to the case she is examining. Instead, she imposes her notion of peasant women on Bertrande,” Findlay argued. (Note his use of the word “imposes.”) Davis’s claim . . . is not based on newly discovered material or on examination of surviving records. Instead, it depends on her mere assertion that she has recognized a truth that apparently remained hidden from both the villagers of Artigat and the judges of Toulouse.9 He then quotes what he sees as such a damming passage: What of Bertrande de Rols? Did she know that the new Martin was not the man who had abandoned her eight years before? Perhaps not at the very first, when he arrived with all his “signs” and proofs. But the obstinate and honorable Bertrande does not seem a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like Pansette. By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference; as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking “the touch of the man on the woman.” Either by explicit or tacit agreement, she helped him become her husband.10 (emphasis mine) “This is Davis’s entire basis for claiming that the wife was in league with the imposter,” asserts Finlay, “that is, in sexual relations, Bertrande could not have

64 The modal mood in historical writing

failed to realize that her partner was not her true husband”11 (emphasis mine). Findlay’s construction here is based on the modal mood, mirroring the approach Davis took in her book, only in this case he uses the modal construction as a way to express his incredulity at Davis’ claims. We do not have direct evidence of the couple’s sexual relations, he asserts. All we have is a conjecture. “The assumption, then, that sexual relations must have revealed the imposture to Bertrande is not an interpretation based on the sources; it is, rather, an opinion by a modern historian who apparently believes that unsubstantiated insight can itself be taken as evidence.”12 Finlay, in effect, was accusing Davis of employing too much (Platonic) imagination. “What Davis terms ‘invention,’ the employment of ‘perhaps’ and ‘may-have-beens,’ is, of course, the stock in trade of historians, who are often driven to speculation by inadequate and perplexing evidence,” Finlay concedes. “But speculation, whether founded on intuition or on concepts drawn from anthropology and literary criticism, is supposed to give way before the sovereignty of the sources, the tribunal of the documents.” Davis had engaged in “an excess of invention.”13 Finlay was objecting to Davis’ excessive use of the modal mood. Indeed, “must haves” are a kind of construction that signals to a reader the confidence of the speaker in the statement, despite the lack of direct evidence. “I may not have direct evidence,” the writer in the modal mood is saying, “but I am nevertheless stating with great confidence that such is the state of affairs.” Indeed, note the differences between a speaker using the form “could have” versus “must have.” Compare these two statements: 1 2

Roosevelt could have known that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor Roosevelt must have known that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor

Both statements are constructed in the modal mood, but in the case of (1) this is a very speculative statement. Indeed, the speaker could be accused of a “f light of fancy” in so constructing the statement in this way. “Could have” suggests the theoretical possibility of an occurrence but also suggests doubt lurking in the background of the statement. Not only does the speaker lack direct evidence but the inference one is drawing seems timid and unassured, even conspiratorial. Compare this with statement (2). Here the speaker makes a statement with great confidence, even if that statement is similarly based on inferences not drawn from direct evidence. What is the source of that confidence? What makes such a conjectural statement warranted? Is there a minimum level of evidentiary grounding necessary for such statements to be valid? We have already concluded that historians make use of the modal mood when direct evidence is lacking, when inferences must be drawn from meager evidence. So it seems that it would be difficult to affix a specific amount of evidence to such statements to determine if they are warranted. Perhaps an appeal to the “must have” form of the modal mood is based on reasoning and logic. A modal statement of type (2) relies on abductive reasoning,

The modal mood in historical writing 65

otherwise known as “inference to the best explanation.” Consider the following scenario: You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends again. In the absence of direct evidence – walking up to Tim and Harry and simply asking if they are friends – we instead reason from what we have seen and from what we understand about human relations that the two must be friends again. It does not follow logically that Tim and Harry are friends again from the premises that they had a terrible row which ended their friendship and that they have just been seen jogging together; it does not even follow, we may suppose, from all the information you have about Tim and Harry. Nor do you have any useful statistical data about friendships, terrible rows, and joggers that might warrant an inference from the information that you have about Tim and Harry to the conclusion that they are friends again, or even to the conclusion that, probably (or with a certain probability), they are friends again. What leads you to the conclusion, and what according to a considerable number of philosophers may also warrant this conclusion, is precisely the fact that Tim and Harry’s being friends again would, if true, best explain the fact that they have just been seen jogging together.14 Thus, when an historian employs the form “must have,” as in “Roosevelt must have known that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor,” they are making an abductive argument, an argument to best explanation. Let’s look in more detail at one of these modal statements from Davis: Sometimes [Martin] must have been allowed to play with the village youngsters – their elders complained about the children stealing grapes off the vines – and surely he was teased because of his name, Martin . . . Martin was what the peasants called an animal, an ass, and in local tradition the bear that the shepherds saw up on the mountains.15 Davis has prior knowledge that in that time and place the name Martin would have unpleasant associations, and so she can surmise that Martin was also teased, as would other young people of that time. Even though we lack direct evidence that Martin Guerre was so teased, we can imagine that he was not unlike others of that time who would have been similarly teased. This imaginative reconstruction, then, is not based on make-believe nor is it a fabrication in the sense of inventing something wholly new and anachronistically and improperly inserting it into the past. The likelihood, the probability, that Martin was so teased seems

66 The modal mood in historical writing

very high, and so Davis can state – in the modal mood – that he was probably teased. Here is another statement Davis constructed in the modal mood: Given the tradition of popular curing both in the Labourd and in the county of Foix, the couple must have consulted a local wise woman more than once. Bertrand and Martin were having trouble conceiving, and so Davis again surmises that they would have consulted a wise woman just as other couples had done. Davis relates a common and well-understood social practice of the time and place and therefore imagines that Bertrand and Martin would have been no different than any other couple in a similar circumstance. That is, there is no reason to believe that Bertrand and Martin did not also attend to a wise woman. Thus, Davis can state with some confidence – but still in the modal mood – that Bertrand and Martin did so as well. Again, there is no direct evidence for this, only what we might call indirect evidence: that there is no reason to believe that this couple was in any way exceptional, and so would have engaged in behaviors similar to others. In effect, Davis was reconstructing a scene in her mind’s eye that was based on direct evidence and substituting Bertrand and Martin for the generic couple in the original reconstruction. Returning to our diagram of the imagination, these kinds of modal statements would appear to fall somewhere toward the middle of that diagram. That is, Davis is not inventing something new or that was not present at the time. That a couple would attend to a local wise woman is directly tied to the evidence and would place the statement toward the left of our diagram. But because Bertrand and Martin have been substituted into this imaginative reconstruction – and because we lack direct evidence – we need to the move the needle, so to speak, more to the right to ref lect the creative imagination employed as well. But in terms of the individual experience, and given a lack of direct evidence, we cannot know for certain that Bertrand and Martin did not seek the advice of a wise woman. It is possible, of course, that they were an exceptional couple and did not seek out assistance. So the statement about the encounter also must include an element of the “made up,” which is why we place these statements in the middle of our imagination diagram (Figure 3.1). Davis constructed many of her modal statements by appealing to general knowledge or the general conditions of this section of rural France. That is, we know from evidence how people behaved in general, although Davis then took the step to ascribe such general behavioral traits to individuals in particular. This type of reasoning looks very similar to what C. Behan McCullagh has identified as “intuitive inferences.” “Historians’ use of such general knowledge in drawing inferences about the past is often intuitive,” writes McCullagh. They reach their conclusions without having articulated the premises of their arguments, even to themselves. In this respect . . . expert historians

The modal mood in historical writing 67

Aristotelian imagination

Platonic imagination

FIGURE 3.1

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in The Return of Martin Guerre

resemble expert doctors and engineers who diagnose the probable cause of an illness or of an engine malfunction without being able to state precisely the reasons for their conclusions . . . historians do draw inferences from their general knowledge.16 To be fair to Davis, she was being much more explicit about the source of her general knowledge than what is suggested in McCullagh’s definition. But in her appeal to general knowledge about the behavior of the peasants in this time and region of France, Davis was certainly arguing from a position of general, as opposed to specific, knowledge. Arguing from this intuitive vantage point or by an appeal to general knowledge is certainly an imaginative act and might appear to involve more artifice than mimesis. “It is sometimes thought that explanatory hypotheses are just a product of an historian’s imagination,” says McCullagh, but more often than not it is clear that the imagination which suggests them is an informed imagination, not mere undisciplined fancy. It is almost always possible for an historian to see, once a hypothesis has been produced, that it was logically implied by his general knowledge based upon analogous cases.17 That is, in terms of our diagram of the imagination, statements from intuitive imagination generally fall somewhere to the left-hand side: such statements are more mimesis than fancy (see Figure 3.2). What makes an historian’s imagination “informed”? By what means is it so informed? One could make the argument that an historian with knowledge and experience of a particular field and a deep intimacy with the sources

68 The modal mood in historical writing

Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 3.2

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in “Intuitive Imagination”

would justifiably have their imagination labeled “informed.” As an historian of early modern France, Davis would qualify as one whose imagination was so informed – as opposed to, say, someone like me making such an intuitive inference, as I have no background or experience with this particular period of history. “Is it ever justified,” McCullagh asks, “in believing historians’ intuitive judgment about the past to be true?”18 The answer is yes, it would seem, if the historian had demonstrated deep knowledge and familiarity. We judge modal statements by evaluating the degree to which historians have so immersed themselves in the culture they are studying, immersion here meaning an intimacy and deep knowledge derived from a reading of all the available evidence. McCullagh asserts, An historian’s intuitive interpretation of past behavior is not likely to be inaccurate if he has a professional understanding of the period. Even professional historians should not be trusted, however, when they make intuitive judgments about events which occurred outside their area of expert knowledge.19 When they are made by professionals in their area of expertise . . . and when the professional has a reputation for producing reliable hypothesis in the past, then it is reasonable to believe them true. To refuse to accept them might be to deprive historical scholarship of remarkable insights by learned scholars, and that would be a high price to pay for the right to check all inferences before believing them.20 What makes intuitive inferences and indeed modal mood statements valid, it would seem, is the status of the person making the statement. An evaluation of the historian is inseparable from an evaluation of the statement.

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Still, an historian could be skeptical of another historian’s intuitive judgment. “There is the danger,” writes McCullagh, that intuitive interpretations of actions and artefacts in cultures other than the historian’s will be inaccurate because those things do not have the same significance in the other cultures as they do in the historian’s own. . . . This danger can be averted, however, if the historian immerses himself in the conventions of the society he is studying, learning the significance of its words and actions by studying them in different contexts. This is precisely what professional historians do.21 And there is every reason to conclude that Davis was also so immersed, although part of Finlay’s critique was that she was stepping outside of the culture of sixteenth-century France and instead imposing contemporary values onto the past. “However that may be,” said Finlay, “Davis fails to show that her view of women in peasant society is relevant to the case she is examining. Instead, she imposes her notion of peasant women on Bertrande.”22 In this instance, at least, Finlay appeared to be questioning Davis’ tacit knowledge. In evaluating the validity of statements historians make via intuitive inference and in the modal mood, the standing, status and professional reputation of the historian making the statement seem to be of critical importance. As stated previously, an evaluation of the historian is inseparable from an evaluation of the statement. Thus, when determining whether Natalie Zemon Davis went too far with her conjectures, her historical imagination, we should examine how these statements have been viewed by other historians. We already know Finlay’s verdict, but other historians were far more accepting of Davis’ conjectures. Some reviewers made little to no mention of Davis’ method. Edward Benson’s review in The French Review makes no mention of Davis’ “invention” and “perhapses.”23 A lengthy review in The Harvard Law Review focused most of its attention on the nature of the case itself, rather than in Davis’ retelling or reinterpretation of the case. “The result,” writes the reviewer Leigh Buchanan Bienen, “is a historian’s illumination of a perplexing legal story, one that illustrates both the richness and limitations of the law as historical record.”24 Indeed, her interrogation of the book appears to be more about the nature of sixteenth-century legal proceeding than it is a critique of Davis’ imaginative approach. This suggests that the reviewer had little concern about the multiple uses of the modal mood in recounting the story or that such a use of the historical imagination went unnoticed. A reviewer in the Wilson Quarterly wrote, Davis attempts to broaden her chronicle (evidence for which comes largely from two 1561 accounts of the trial) with excursions into such topics as Protestantism and marriage, rural life, the criminal courts, family roles, and “the significance of identity in the 16th century.” But her treatment of such issues is too sketchy to bear comparison with such recent social

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histories as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1975). For all its interest as a complement to the film, the book promises more than it delivers. Although it is somewhat dismissive of the book, this review did not specifically address the questions of Davis imaginative reading or use of modality and intuitional inferences, suggesting the reviewer either did not notice nor much care one way or the other about her “inventions.”25 Many of the contemporary reviews of The Return of Martin Guerre, on the contrary, praised the book and even singled out the particular way in which Davis interpreted the evidence. E. William Monter in his review for The Sixteenth Century Journal makes mention of Davis’ admission that the book “is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”26 “Not a bad credo,” he remarks, “for the conseiller historique of the best film yet made about sixteenthcentury peasants.”27 This brief mention of Davis’ “invention” suggests that Monter was untroubled by the extensive use of the modal mood, and indeed appears to be a tacit approval. In a review essay written some years later, Joan Scott similarly wrote with approval of Davis’ “invention.”28 Indeed, Donald R. Kelley’s review in the Renaissance Quarterly applauded Davis’ use of the imagination. “Natalie Davis has turned a ‘prodigious tale’ into a critical study of popular culture, but the trappings of scholarship have not spoiled the charm of the original,” he wrote. “Her method is to fill in the interstices of the story with materials from contemporary sources, probable arguments, and plausible speculations.” It is with this act of “filling in” that Davis most clearly employed the historical imagination, which Kelley approved of. Historical reconstruction at best must go beyond vulgar Baconian reasoning upon data; it must include the (also Baconian) category of imagination, and Natalie Davis’ book is a striking example of such imaginative history which is nevertheless solidly based and intelligently argued. It illustrates the growing rapprochement between history and anthropology, which values what Clifford Geertz has called “thick description” and more recently “local knowledge.” With reference to the movie, Kelley noted, however, “Here imagination subverts history at some points to supply clear motives and confrontations – Martin and Pansette are represented as having known each other, for example, and Bertrande appears as more of a victim than she is in Coras’ narrative.”29 It appears as if Kelley’s criticism here is aimed at the filmmakers more than Davis, but it does illustrate that he recognizes a point at which the imagination can go too far, although he does not seem to think that Davis’ book so transgresses that conceptual boundary. Davis is very careful, writes Carlo Ginzburg in 1991,

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in distinguishing truths from possibilities. Instead of concealing within the indicative mood the integrations she made in order to fill up documentary gaps, Davis emphasizes them by using either a conditional mood or expressions like “perhaps” and “may have been.” We can compare her approach to modern art-restoration techniques, like the so-called rigatino, in which the lacunae in the painted surface are emphasized by fine hatches instead of concealed by repainting, as they were in the past. The context, seen as a space of historical possibilities, gives the historian the possibility to integrate the evidence, often consisting only of scattered fragments, about an individual’s life.30 Thus Ginzburg – often compared to Davis for writing a similar “microhistory” – approves of Davis’ use of the modal mood precisely because she is so open and transparent. There were two reviewers who, while otherwise praising the book, nevertheless voiced some concern about the speculation that undergirded the interpretation. David Potter noted in his review in the English Historical Review, “By archival research into the social and economic framework of life in the villages concerned, [Davis] places the story in context,” a reference, perhaps, to her “professional understanding” of the period. But Potter is at least mildly concerned about some of Davis’ speculation: It should be pointed out that Dr Davis acknowledges that guesswork played a part in her reconstruction and conclusions; the evidence certainly lends itself to this. Nevertheless certain questions remain to nag the reader. How did du Tilh get away with it? Davis admits that the wife, Bertrande de Rols, must have realised very rapidly that du Tilh was not her husband. However, he was a better lover and she needed a husband. That he convinced most of his relatives for very long also seems dubious, though for years they acknowledged him. He did not even look very much like the real Martin Guerre and had only his nimble wit in picking up information to rely upon, but we do not know how he acquired all the information. Dr Davis surmises that the family wanted any “Martin” back and that his absence left a gap in family and community. Arnauld du Tilh fitted the role excellently. That would explain family motives, but what of the rest of the village? To none of these questions are definitive answers really possible, though Dr Davis has probably done as much as anyone could to understand them.31 In saying that certain questions remain to nag the reader, Potter does not sound entirely convinced of Davis’ interpretation. This is, it should be noted, a skepticism with her conclusions, not the method by which she arrived at those conclusions. Indeed, he concludes his review by saying that Davis’ approach, while not f lawless, is probably as good as we can hope for in this instance.

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A. Lloyd Moote’s review in the American Historical Review, three years prior to Finlay’s critique in the same journal, begins by referring to Davis as “a leading American social historian of early modern France,” thus establishing her credentials for drawing intuitive inferences and thus establishing her speculations as warranted. He notes that The Return of Marin Guerre “brings into bold relief the aspirations, feelings, relationships, and personal maneuverability of female and male peasants from a society whose secrets are rarely unsealed.” He praised the archival research that is packed into the footnotes of the short book. But then, at the end of this brief review, Moote observed, If the author occasionally turns conjecture into reality (“Bertrande dreamed of a husband and a lover who would come back, and be different” [p. 34]) and at times leaves us wondering whether she is following closely the two original contemporary accounts of the Martin Guerre story or drifting into the “perhapses” of her contextual analysis (compressed footnoting may account for much of the confusion), she has surely given us a splendid example of mature social history.32 Moote was drawing attention to the central methodological feature of the book and wondered if at times Davis was straying too far across the “imagination boundary,” a critique central to Finlay’s review. Yet this does not seem to dampen Moote’s overall favorable – indeed glowing – impression of this “splendid example of mature social history.” This last observation suggests Moote had creeping doubts about the validity of some of the statements in the book but was perhaps willing to overlook these in deference to this “leading American social historian of early modern France.” Black Masters When other historians judge the validity of modal statements, appeals to evidence appear to weigh especially great. This is clearly the case with the scholarly reception of Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark’s Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. Unlike the subject of Davis’ book, the story of William Ellison and the Ellison family was not previously well-known and commented upon. Ellison was in many ways a unique figure in the antebellum South: the authors note that he was brown-skinned, not black, and identified himself as a mulatto, a man of color, in a society where such distinctions carried social and legal implications. He was a craftsmen, when many other African-Americans of that era were manual laborers. And he was wealthy, indeed “one of the wealthiest free persons of color in the South and wealthier than nine out of ten whites.”33 But also very important to the story of William Ellison is the story of the documents that provide a glimpse into his life. What we know of Ellison comes from a few letters that were discovered accidently in 1935 by three girls playing under their house. The letters were written by members of the Ellison family,

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and these were entrusted to the South Caroliniana Library in 1979, whereupon Johnson and Roark gained access. These were an important find. “There are still precious few historical documents that record what free Afro-Americans in the antebellum did, much less what they thought, believed, feared, or dreamed,” Johnson and Roark noted.34 While an important find, the Ellison letters are small in number, however. Compared to nearly all other free persons of color, William Ellison left a well-marked trail of documents. Fragments of his experiences are scattered among deeds, wills, estate papers, court records, tax books, census lists, parish registers, ledgers, newspaper advertisements, medical records, the diaries and personal letters of white planters and their wives, reminiscences of white and black acquaintances of the Ellisons and their descendants, and among the tombstones in country graveyards.35 The letters were therefore catalytic in recovering the life of Ellison, but only when placed within the wider context of this other evidence: “when assembled around the Ellison letters,” Johnson and Roark conclude, these other pieces of evidence “allow us to see the antebellum South through the eyes of Ellison, his family, and his free Afro-American friends.”36 The letters and surrounding documents were nevertheless insufficient to fully reconstruct Ellison’s life without recourse to speculation, to historical imagination. “We turned up enough evidence to be certain about many matter,” Johnson and Roark concede, “but the absence of crucial pieces of evidence has forced us to speculate. The only way to avoid speculation was to ignore important questions,” which the authors were not prepared to do. We have chosen to ask questions we cannot fully answer, to consider possibilities, and to imagine what was likely. We have rooted our analysis in what is known about William Ellison and his society, and we have tried to be equally candid about our ignorance and our knowledge. We expect to be held as accountable for our interpretations ventured with meager documentation as for our arguments steadied by a heavier ballast of evidence.37 As one expression of their speculation and imagination, Johnson and Roark make frequent use of the modal mood. Here are a number of examples: As every slave knew, to avoid revolutionary violence did not necessarily mean slavish submission to white power. Ellison struggled to endow his freedom through hard work and careful accommodation. In 1822 he must have had a growing sense of confidence in his strategy.38 Stephen D. Miller’s decision to sell his Stateburg land and home to Ellison must have been based on his estimation of Ellison’s ability to pay and on his

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knowledge of the artisan’s good standing in the community. Ellison’s decision to buy rested on similar economic and social considerations. The price of $1,120 was steep, but by the mid-1830s Ellison could afford it. Still, without confidence that the white people of Stateburg would approve, neither Miller nor Ellison would have entered the agreement. Ellison would never have risked the purchase if Stateburg whites considered it arrogant or presumptuous. Both Miller’s decision to sell and Ellison’s to buy confirmed the ginwright’s economic and social achievement in two decades in the High Hills.39 What kind of man buys himself, his wife, and his eldest child from bondage and then does not hesitate to buy, hold, sell, and exploit others as slaves? It will not do to argue simply that his heart was as callused as his hands. Nor is it sufficient to imagine that he merely shrugged his shoulders and muttered something to the effect that some were just unfortunate in their condition and some were not. We know little about Ellison’s view of himself as a slaveholder, but what little we know suggests that he must have had a rationale, some explanation that was personally satisfying and that allowed him to persist in the course he followed all his life as a free man.40 Life in the Ellison’s household in the 1820s must have been a pinchpenny existence, while the aspiring tradesman scrimped and saved to buy his slaves and land, to build and equip his shop, and to provide a home for his growing family.41 Exactly when Ellison built his first gin in Stateburg is unknown, but his 1817 advertisement suggests he had the necessary equipment within a year after he became free. Having a shop must have made it easier to use his tools and lay in a store of the necessary iron, lumber, leather, bristles, and other materials.42 But the slaves must have done some of the delicate work too, for in the 1820s Ellison claimed that a slave gin maker he owned was worth $2000, far more than the price of a rough carpenter or blacksmith. . . . Another free man of color, Hale Johnson, a cabinetmaker, may have also worked in Ellison’s shop in 1850, since he lived adjacent to the Ellisons.43 Since “Wisdom Hall” [the Ellison family home] stood less than one hundred yards from the road, the Ellisons must have trembled when a detachment of federal troops entered Stateburg on April 13.44 Johnson and Roark are not inventing the Ellisons’ fear. It is defensible for the Ellisons to infer that, since Union troops were nearby, and since they were engaged in a slash and burn offensive, their lives and property were at risk. Thus the strong modal statement of “must have.” Had Johnson and Roark gone on, describing in greater detail the dimensions of the Ellisons’ fear, of scrambles to

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hide or to protect property or to procure weapons for defense, then the authors would have extended far across the mimesis-creative divide. Had they included dialogue – “Father, I’m frightened” or “Hide in the cellar!” – then they would have crossed an imagination threshold. But I wonder how far across that threshold it would actually be? If they were trembling – the word itself asserts a particular kind of fear – then could they not have also assumed a certain level of dialogue? As long as such invented dialogue were appropriately couched in modal language or were otherwise distinguished in the service of transparency, what would prevent Johnson and Roark from so extending the inferences into a more detailed account? Or, as we will explore in Chapter 4, would they have then moved into the realm of fiction? And if that is the case, is the statement “must have trembled” itself a kind of fiction? In addition to the extensive use of the strong modal form “must have,” Johnson and Roark also frequently employed the weaker “may have.” “May have” suggests less confidence in the speaker regarding the validity of the statement, a plausible supposition but with much less of the assurance of the statement “must have.” Again, here are some examples that show the frequency with which Johnson and Roark resorted to the modal mood: Skidding cotton prices may have depressed what Ellison charged for his gins. In 1817 his earliest advertisement offered gins at $3 per saw, and that is the price Mrs. Rebecca Singleton paid Ellison in 1825 for a fifty-saw machine. As early as 1847 and thereafter until the Civil War, Ellison’s advertised price was only $2 per saw. The decline in price may have reflected the slump in cotton prices, as well as lower costs of certain materials, small efficiencies in production, and rising competition. Since his gin shop ledgers have not survived, it is impossible to tell.45 Normally a slave population the size of Ellison’s would have included a sprinkling of light-skinned Negros. Mulattoes made up 5 percent of South Carolina’s slaves in 1860. If Ellison’s slaves had ref lected that proportion, three of them would have been mulattoes. His all-black quarters may have been the result of a conscious decision. A mulatto owning other mulattos as slaves may have been too much of a contradiction for Ellison. Or his dependence on the good opinion of whites may have convinced him that he could not risk having tongues wag about the paternity of mulattoes on his plantation the way they did about the mulattoes who belonged to white masters.46 In less than four years the family suffered six deaths, five of them in only twenty months. Some may have been victims of a terrible epidemic that ravaged the South Carolina upcountry between 1852 and 1854.47 He may have asked his son James to leave Stateburg and return to Charleston to take Charley’s place and ease his own transition to retirement. Or James may have volunteered to come down.48

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Set back from the southwest corner of the intersection of the ColumbiaSumter and Camden-Charleston highways, the house was clearly visible to all who passed. Travelers may have paused and taken notice of the celebrity of its former owner or the color of its new residents but not its architectural elegance.49 (emphasis mine) “With must there is often some indication of the facts on which the inference is based,” says F.R. Palmer. Moreover, it is the notion of deduction or inference from known facts that is the essential feature of must, not just the strength of commitment by the speaker. For must does not have the same kind of meaning as the adverbs certainly, definitely, etc., which are, indeed, indications simply of the speaker’s confidence or commitment. With may, in contrast, there is little sense of inference or reference to known facts, and no very clear distinction between the meanings of may and that of adverbs such as perhaps, which again indicate degree of confidence.50 In several instances, Johnson and Roark make modal statements with much less degree of confidence in the evidentiary base, implying a greater use of the creative imagination. As was illustrated in the case of The Return of Martin Guerre, there may not in fact exist an objective standard for determining whether a work of history is too imaginative in the fanciful sense, that there is no definitive point at which an historian has stretched the inferences drawn from evidence to a distance far enough away to no longer be considered history. That threshold, that point at which inference is now in the territory of fancy, fiction or make-believe, is determined, rather, by the larger community of historians reading the text. If a wide-enough circle of historians so adjudges that an inference has been stretched too far, then that point has been reached. If the reviews of Black Masters are any indication, then the extensive use of the modal voice was not a concern to historians, signaling that while Johnson and Roark were imaginative, they were not too imaginative. Indeed, some reviewers paid no notice to the use of modal sentences and speculative statements. F.N. Boney called the book “an impressive scholarly achievement” but made no mention of speculation or modality, suggesting it did not matter enough to mention.51 Willard Gatewood similarly made no specific mention of speculation or modality, and indeed he was fulsome with his praise: Few, if any, books have contributed so much to the restructuring of the world in which free people of color lived in the antebellum South as this fascinating, highly readable volume. By any criteria, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark have produced an important book with large implications.52

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“Like expert sleuths,” said reviewer Robert Harris, “Johnson and Roark have pieced together the fascinating story of an exceptional family in Black Masters”53 with no particular notice of speculation or an unreasonable stretching of inferences. James Oakes had concerns for particular nomenclature employed by Johnson and Roark. “Johnson and Roark use the term ‘aristocracy’ with such abandon as to strip it of all historical specificity,” he noted. “Johnson and Roark invoke a slippery concept of ‘personalism’ that not only contradicts their evidence but also seems misplaced as a way of understanding social contacts within ‘the anonymity and bustle’ of Charleston.” But in his critique, Oakes makes no references to modality or speculation and indeed praises the authors’ research. For in addition to bringing to light such rare letters, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark have f leshed out their story by digging deeply into newspapers, tax records, legal documents, and archival manuscripts. Thanks to their research, we now have a more vivid picture of the painful contradictions, the daily indignities, and the awesome obstacles that confronted the Ellisons, the Johnsons, and others like them.54 Charles Joiner, writing in the American Historical Review, was the only reviewer who appeared to voice any significant concern with the authors’ use of the modal mood, but even this criticism was muted. “Black Masters – despite exhaustive research in manuscript census returns, court records, deeds, wills, tax returns, parish registers, town ordinances, white correspondence, even tombstone inscriptions – rests on inference to a significantly higher degree than most books,” an observation that might signal Joiner’s disapproval. However, he goes on to say, [The book’s] authors are too honest to try to disguise inference as fact: the characteristic sentence in Black Masters begins, “Ellison may have” or “Ellison must have.” In some cases-notably, in their discussion of Ellison’s apparent practice of selling little girls inference is built on inference. “Sensitive to public opinion,” they write, “he probably did not stray too far from prevailing practices” (p. 136). The inference regarding prevailing practices is built on the inference that Ellison was sensitive to public opinion (because, they infer, he had to be). Although other inferences might be drawn, those of the authors are sensible, judicious, full of stimulating suggestions, and consonant with the known evidence.55 In a similar way as some reviewers did when reviewing Davis’ book, Joiner praises Johnson and Roark’s transparency in using the modal mood to signal their imaginative inferences. Further, Johnson and Roark’s inferences are tied to the evidence, however meager that evidence may be, which is also a way in which such imaginative speculations can be so warranted. Joiner suggests that “other inferences might be drawn,” an indication perhaps that he is not entirely

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convinced by at least some of their conclusions. But, again, the overall imaginative approach is hesitatingly accepted. While the evidence for Ellison’s life may be meager, there is enough surrounding evidence to warrant speculation, a point raised by numerous reviewers. “The authors succeed in making this extraordinary man’s actions understandable, if not any less distasteful,” wrote Paul Cimbala. In the process, they have done some impressive detective work. Granted, much is left to speculation, but Johnson and Roark’s careful conclusions are always well-reasoned. For example, after examining their data and suggesting other explanations, the authors argue convincingly that Ellison supported the growth of his plantation by selling off young slave girls.56 Cimbala refers to the data and to their detective work, an indication that Johnson and Roark’s speculations are nevertheless grounded in an evidentiary base. August Meier similarly drew attention to both the authors’ transparency and their extensive research. The skill and thoroughness of the research is impressive, the sketchy and often elliptic references in the letters being supplemented by the combing of a wide variety of sources from census returns, newspapers, wills, and court decisions, to the surviving papers and account books of the Ellisons’ Sumter district neighbors. In fact one of the most intriguing aspects of Roark and Johnson’s research is the information they have gleaned from the records of that area’s white residents and planters and the skillful use they have made of such data to reconstruct the life and business affairs of the Ellison family. Equally impressive is the way in which the authors avoid dogmatism in their conclusions, constantly sharing with the reader the line of reasoning – almost always persuasive – that led them to their sometimes necessarily speculative conclusions. .  .  . Black Masters in particular is an unprecedented work of scholarship, one that should be as inf luential as Ira Berlin’s Slaves Without Masters, an extraordinary contribution which will be read and studied with profit for years to come.57 Surrounding evidence can help establish a context around a particular case – in this instance, the individual life of William Ellison – even when specific, direct evidence is lacking – a tactic Davis employed as well. “Constantly sharing with the reader the line of reasoning” also seems to be an important rhetorical move to justify modal statements in historical writing. Some reviewers noted that, precisely because there is such a paucity of direct evidence about Ellison, the authors had little choice but to reasonably speculate. Harold Woodman observed:

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The letters found in a box under the house where the Ellisons once lived are enormously valuable, especially in recounting the racial tensions in Charleston on the eve of the Civil War, when workers and their allies tried to drive slaves from trades and re-enslave free blacks. But the collection is incomplete, covering only a portion of Ellison’s life and containing only one side of a correspondence. And business records from the gin-making enterprise and the plantation are sparse, even when supplemented by tax and census records. But the biggest obstacle the historians faced was the Ellisons’ fear of confiding to letters or diaries their innermost opinions and thoughts about their lives and their attitudes toward their white neighbors. Any wrong word, any indiscretion, could mean tragedy for a black family in the slave South, even a wealthy and successful free black family. Often lacking direct evidence, Johnson and Roark must rely on educated guesses and on analogies to assess motivation and attitudes. Careful historians, they consistently warn the reader when evidence cannot conclusively support generalizations and often provide various possible interpretations of the evidence they do have.58 Gary Mills said: Perhaps the major weakness of the work, albeit a minor weakness, is the fact that the reader sometimes loses sight of the Ellisons altogether. Yet, when scant material exists for certain periods of the central story, a shift in focus is understandable; and this digression is more than compensated for by the masterful job of research which Johnson and Roark have done. . . . The work of Professors Roark and Johnson has earned a rightful place atop the literature in the field and should serve as a model for future works. 59 Orville Vernon Burton had disagreements with particular interpretations, and might have drawn different inferences, but he did not fault Johnson and Roark their speculations: Johnson and Roark wrote Black Masters from the collection of letters with very little corroborating evidence, and some historians will look askance at this unexpected departure from the traditional way history has been written. Throughout these books the authors have had to speculate about what happened and about the motivation of the people involved. This does not affect their sound interpretations. Although I cannot agree wholeheartedly with every conclusion (for example, their assertion that William Ellison sold young slave girls), this is, nevertheless, “historian as detective” at its best and makes for exciting reading. Scholars will admire how two historians can parlay scarce data into an important and lengthy work.60

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Leonard Curry concluded, “Though often relying on shrewd hypotheses and inspired interpretation of the data, Johnson and Roark are solidly convincing in their explanation(s).”61 Ed Ayers lauded the speculative method employed by Johnson and Roark, the speculative inferences a strength of the book. “The haunting story of black masters told by Johnson and Roark begins with a box of old letters found under a porch; the narrative continually calls attention to the inferences made from those letters, the things left unsaid in the record.” Ayers even coins a new term to describe the act of calling attention to these inferences via the use of the modal voice: “open narratives.” In some open histories the authors let the reader in on the way the argument is being constructed; rather than presenting history as a self-contained and authoritative argument, these historians openly grapple with problematic sources and presentation. Their narratives suggest that the appearance of coherence and a commanding argument may ultimately be less useful than a reckoning with the limits of our knowledge or understanding. Other open histories ask storytelling and language to do more work. Instead of using the narrative as a means to an analytical end outside the story, these histories attempt to fold the analysis into the story itself. They do not simply relate facts or lay out a chronicle they analyze their topics and make arguments, but not in ways that obviously segregate judgment from storytelling. These open histories may intentionally leave ambiguities unresolved or seek tension and resolution less in professional debate than in evidence, characters, and situations.62 As long as the historian is open and transparent about the “stretchiness” of the inferences they are drawing, as long as they indicate via word choice and other linguistic and rhetorical signals that this is a speculative statement, then an expanse of imagination beyond what is explicitly stated in the documents is warranted. “Black Masters can still stand as a model of what detective work and imagination can do,” concludes Ayers.63 The broad acceptance of the modal approach of Return of Martin Guerre and Black Masters has not been shared in every case. Reviewers do not always appreciate modal statements and indirect inferences. Stephen Grant Meyer stands out as one reviewer who was less than enthusiastic about Douglas Flamming’s Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. “We may forgive Flamming’s occasional fogginess” concerning the complex issues and contradictory evidence the book deals with, “but the book leaves so much to inference that one wonders where to divide a reading from the telling.”64 Peter Kingsley’s Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition was widely lauded by reviewers. But Michael Morgan argued: This is the kernel of Kingsley’s case, but it is not clear that he has made it as decisively as he seems to think. His scrupulous philological arguments

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are suggestive, and they come one after another, a virtual avalanche of evidence and inference. But Kingsley treats them as certain and unquestionable, whereas to most readers they will seem less secure than that. In the end, the reader may see his approach as a reasonable, tantalizing alternative but not by any means an undeniable one.65

Conclusion What conclusions can we draw from these different reviews? One conclusion might be that there is no clearly defined boundary separating a valid amount of Platonic imagination and too much imagination. That boundary is drawn on a case-by-case basis and is determined as much by the status of the historian making the statement as it is on any objective, measurable standard. If the community of historians accept the validity of modal mood statements, then they are deemed valid and not too imaginative.

Notes 1 Robert Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jun., 1988), 569. 2 Natalie Zemon Davis, “On the Lame,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jun., 1988), 597. 3 Jan Nuyts, Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), 21–22. 4 F.R. Palmer, Mood and Modality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. 5 Minna Vihla, Medical Writing: Modality in Focus (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1999), 1. 6 Ibid. 7 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 10, 13, 17. 8 Ibid., viii. 9 Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 557–558. 10 Davis, Return of Martin Guerre, 43–44. 11 Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 558. 12 Ibid., 559. 13 Ibid., 571. 14 “Abduction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ abduction/ 15 Davis, Return of Martin Guerre, 19. 16 C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 71. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 72. 20 Ibid., 73. 21 Ibid., 72. 22 Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 557. 23 Edward Benson, “Review of The Return of Martin Guerre,” The French Review, Vol. 57, No. 5 (Apr., 1984), 753–754.

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24 Leigh Buchanan Bienen, “The Law as Storyteller,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Dec., 1984), 494. 25 The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1 (New Year’s, 1984), 151–152. 26 Davis, Return of Martin Guerre, 5. 27 E. William Monter, “Review of The Return of Martin Guerre,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Winter, 1983), 516. 28 Joan W. Scott, “Storytelling: Forum: Holberg Prize Symposium: Doing Decentered History,” History and Theory, Vol. 50 (May, 2011), 206. 29 Donald R. Kelley, “Review of The Return of Martin Guerre,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), 253–254. 30 Carlo Ginzburg, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), 90. 31 David Potter, “Review of The Return of Martin Guerre,” The English Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 400 (Jul., 1986), 713–714. 32 Lloyd Moote, “Review of The Return of Martin Guerre,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), 943. 33 Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), xii. 34 Ibid., xiii. 35 Ibid., xiv. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 41. 39 Ibid., 93. 40 Ibid., 141. 41 Ibid., 83. 42 Ibid., 70. 43 Ibid., 74–75. 44 Ibid., 309. 45 Ibid., 69. 46 Ibid., 136. 47 Ibid., 122. 48 Ibid., 158. 49 Ibid., 93. 50 Palmer, Mood and Modality, 64. 51 F.N. Boney, “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 591–594. 52 Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Review of Black Masters,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Spring, 1985), 152–153 (151–153). 53 Robert L. Harris Jr., “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), 241–244. 54 James Oakes, “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), 463–464. 55 Charles Joyner, “Review of No Chariot Let Down and Black Masters,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), 1016–1017. 56 Paul A. Cimbala, “Review of Black Masters,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Apr., 1986), 459 (459–460). 57 August Meier, “The Nineteenth-Century Southern Free Colored Elite: New Sources, New Views,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), 223–225 (222–225). 58 Harold D. Woodman, “Review of Black Masters,” The Business History Review, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), 301 (300–301). 59 Gary B. Mills, “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), 86–87 (84–87).

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60 Orville Vernon Burton, “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Mar., 1986), 954 (954–955). 61 Leonard P. Curry, “Review of Black Masters and No Chariot Let Down,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), 91–93. 62 Edward L. Ayers, “Narrating the New South,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), 555–556 (555–566). 63 Edward L. Ayers, “Virginia History as Southern History: The Nineteenth Century,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), 134 (129–136). 64 Stephen Grant Meyer, “Review of Bound for Freedom,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (Oct., 2006), 1205–1206. 65 Michael L. Morgan, “Review of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), 1130.

4 THE HISTORIAN’S FANCY

I began the last chapter with an account of an exercise I carry out with my students on how to read and interpret documents. I ask students to answer the question “Why was Paul Siple selected to be the Boy Scout to accompany Richard Byrd?” and ask them to compose a paragraph response to that question. In reading, considering and interpreting the evidence, in creating an interpretive web around that evidence, I then ask students to convert that thought process into a prose summation. Their paragraph summations are what they read whenever they read an account in a history text. That is, the exercise shows how historians read and interpret primary sources and then translate these into an historical representation. In the Siple case, we know that six finalists were selected to come to New York for a week of assessment. The especially probative document I mentioned previously was an assessment of the six Boy Scouts. In addition to that document, we have a newspaper report of the week-long assessment. What we are lacking is a detailed description of the week’s events; my students say they would love to have a diary or letters home from one of the boys to get a better sense of what transpired that week. It is a sign of sophisticated historical thinking, I tell the students, to identify the silences in the documents and to articulate the kinds of documents they would like to have in order to answer an historical query. We have documents for another boy, Alden Snell, one of the finalists and, unlike Siple, someone who was being championed by inf luential people. Given our lack of evidence on what transpired during that week in New York, I imagined a competition between the two boys. I share with the students the following paragraph that represents my imagined confrontation between Siple and Snell: The six Boy Scouts lined up in front of the selection committee, nervously awaiting the results of the inquiry. All but one shifted uncomfortably: Paul Siple, tall and

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confident, awaited the decision with an air of certainty that one would expect of the oldest and most mature of the finalists. One could not help but notice that the boys did not make eye contact with each other, and when they did, such contact dripped with suspicion and mistrust, the result of the long week spent together in close competitive proximity. When the name of the winner was announced, Siple allowed a large smile and firmly accepted the handshakes of the committee. He nodded a conciliatory congratulation in the direction of the other dejected finalists, which did not sit well with the sneering Alden Snell. We then discuss the acceptability of this statement as an historical representation. “This is too imaginative,” the students correctly conclude. Even though it is plausible – given what evidence we do possess – that such a competition existed, we cannot directly, conclusively and confidently tie the previous paragraph to the available evidence. Here, it seems, we have finally crossed too far across the line into the creative, Platonic imagination, into the realm of fiction. In writing this account of the competition between Siple and Snell, I am taking a step past the modal mood that at least kept a tenuous connection to the evidence. Writing in the modal mood – “Siple and Snell must have disliked each other” – signals to the reader that the statement is speculative, ref lects my suppositions about the evidence and should be taken as such. The paragraph signals no such uncertainty. It reads as if it were an Aristotelian reconstruction. If modality means inserting an imaginary object that we assume with a degree of probability was likely to be actual, then fiction admits to no such uncertainty. The creative, Platonic imagination seeps into historical accounts in instances where there is no direct evidence to ground a statement, gap filling, as it were. With fiction, we are seemingly untethered from the peg of evidence, entering the world of Collingwood’s “fancy.” Further, writing must have is a transparent signal to the reader that the statement is based on the supposition of the writer, of her degree of uncertainty. With fictional statements, that transparency is often lacking, the statement reading as if it were actual. It is this kind of imagination that Sedwick identified as “malpractice.” William Cronon identifies the boundary between history and fiction – or between the Aristotelian imagination of the historian and the Platonic imagination of the fiction writer. The latter have the power to invent scenes and episodes and characters, to put words in people’s mouths and thoughts in their heads, and to present such fabrications as real within the suspended disbelief of their narrative frame. No historian can ever do likewise. For us, the deepest challenge of our discipline – the maddening constraint that is also the wellspring of our creativity – is that we are not permitted to argue or narrate beyond the limits of our evidence [emphasis mine]. We cannot even begin to imagine a story without first having spent enormous amounts of time answering the question that arguably defines our discipline more deeply than any other, a

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question so seemingly simple that few who are not historians recognize its profundity: “What are the documents?” [emphasis in the original] It is our devotion to documents, our awareness that without them the past lies forever beyond the reach of our inquiry, that supplies the epistemological foundation on which all our professional practice is built.1 The writer of historical fiction has restraints as well, but it is the historians’ strict adherence to the documents that distinguishes the two: When we compare our work with that of a creator of historical fiction like John Sayles, we may be tempted simply to say that he makes things up and we do not. But that gets nowhere near the heart of the matter. Anyone who has tried their hand at historical fiction (or fiction of any kind, for that matter) will know that it too has rules of verisimilitude and facticity that are far subtler and much easier to violate than most people realize. Especially when fictions are set in real places and real times and involve real people, and when the authors of those fictions aspire to say something profound and true about the lives they depict, they are hemmed in by history almost as much as we are, albeit in quite different ways because fidelity to the documents is not so high a priority for them as it must be for us.2 (emphasis mine) History’s roots as a literary genre are on display here. Indeed, the discipline of history might be distinguished from literary fiction in one sense by the historian’s confinement of the imagination to what the documents say. Beverly Southgate observes: The relationship between history and fiction has always been close but problematic: as in any relationship, it has sometimes proved difficult to strike a mutually acceptable balance between interdependence and autonomy, and any equilibrium achieved has always proved temporary. In an ongoing attempt at stabilization, a fence has long since been erected between the two, and has been claimed to mark one of the most fundamental of disciplinary boundaries – one that has, especially from the historical side, been most fiercely, passionately, and even desperately, defended.3 (emphasis mine) Perhaps we might define these terms by saying that “history” here might refer to the strict use of the Aristotelian imagination to reconstruct the past, while “fiction” refers to the free use of the Platonic imagination. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, there was a f lurry of fictional works that purported to be or that took on the form of history, much to the consternation of

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historians. What was noteworthy about this period was that, while there were a number of encroachments across the border by fiction writers, there were also a number of historians who stretched the historical imagination toward fiction, those historians who crossed the frontier toward the creative, Platonic imagination. This period also brought forth a number of historians who pushed back against this encroachment, who attempted to affix and police the boundary separating Aristotelian and Platonic imagination. “That emphatic distinction, as insisted upon by earlier historians, has recently become more nuanced, though some continued to write in that vein through the twentieth century,” observed Beverly Southgate. Geoffrey Elton, for instance, is well known for his belief that the proper use of primary evidence “should make possible a history that is indisputably true, not the historian’s invention.” Arthur Marwick, too, was emphatic: “A work of history . . . differs totally from a novel or poem”; for historians, unlike writers of fiction, make “special efforts . . . to separate out unambiguously what is securely established from what is basically speculation.”4 Much depends here on the definition of “invention.” Indeed, as we have demonstrated throughout this book, there are more than ample examples of historians seeing in the documents more than what is explicitly stated in those documents, as when we invent concepts or temporal periodizations. “Indisputably” also needs careful definition. The word means no dispute, insisting that historians agree (among themselves) that something is true. This suggests, again, the important role of the dialogue, the language community to which historians belong as a key part of determining the validity of historical statements and even their tolerance for invention and creative imagination. As with other chapters in this book, we will examine specific works of history/fiction with an eye especially to how other historians received these works, and the boundarycrossing methodologies some historians have employed. Through their larger conversations, historians define and enforce the boundary between Aristotelian and Platonic imagination. My account of the competing Boy Scouts was impermissible as a work of history in part because I filled in the absence of evidence with images composed solely from my mind, imagination in its Platonic sense. This suggests that when historians are imagining the past in the mind’s eye, they are not supposed to insert anything of themselves into the account. Historians – in contrast to fiction writers – are expected to act more like “mediums of the past.” This notion – odd as it sounds on its face – has been articulated by many historians. Rousseau did not so distinguish history and fiction. “Rousseau – well known for his early challenges to contemporary intellectual orthodoxies [–] derived from ‘the Enlightenment,’” Southgate observes, “justifies his virtual assimilation

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of the two genres by explaining that, with their shared origin in the imagination, they are equally unreliable as descriptions of the past” (emphasis mine). As we have noted, history and literary fiction indeed both reside in the imagination, but at opposite ends of a continuum within the mind’s eye. So far as history is concerned, “It is inevitable that the facts described in history should not give an exact picture of what really happened; [for] they are transformed in the brain of the historian, they are moulded by his interests and coloured by his prejudices.” No less than with fictional romances, subjectivity intrudes, so that “Ignorance or partiality disguises everything.”5 (emphasis in the original) But, at least in our self-conception of our discipline, historians often conclude that no such “transformations” actually occur in the historian’s brain. Indeed, we frequently imagine the historian as situated between the sources from the past and our re-creation of the past via those sources. Information about the past moves unobstructed through the mind of the historian. E.P. Thompson said, “‘The material itself has got to speak to [the historian],’ and that ‘If he listens, then the material will begin to speak through him’” (Southgate 2009, p. 13, emphasis in the original). The image here is of the historian as a conduit or medium, without anything else imaginatively added by the historian. This, as I hope has thus far been demonstrated throughout this book, is an ideal type, and indeed may not ref lect the actual workings of the historians’ mind. In Beverley Southgate’s and William Cronon’s formulation, then, history is that practice in which there is limited – even no – transformation in the brain of its practitioners. So that historians act, not as imaginative creators, but as mediums who contrive on others’ behalf to stand between the past and present, and through their own professional techniques and expertise to reveal what had become obscured (but had always nonetheless been there).6 The suggestion is that the historian is merely a conduit through which the past is reconstructed in the mind’s eye. We have argued throughout, however, that “imaginative creation” is also part of the historian’s method and that we rarely simply mimetically re-create the past. The Aristotelian imagination is but one endpoint on our continuum, and historians rarely sit there exclusively without any imaginative creation. “In that respect,” Southgate reports, historians can be seen as resembling spiritualist mediums, who disclaim any involvement in their own productions. The Welsh preacher Evan Roberts explained in 1905 how he was sometimes tempted “to speak my own words;” but that devilish temptation was overcome with the help of God. We have

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there, as historian Rhodri Hayward describes, “a situation in which the narrative of another runs through the body;” and the narrator, whether prophet, novelist, or historians, is inspired, and all the more persuasive, for having devolved responsibility to some higher power – whether God, or Muse, or mere archival evidence.7 This refers in part to the idea that historians seek to remove their voice, their narration from their accounts. “In the case of both history and fiction, too, any appearance of an intrusive personal authorship has regularly been made to disappear, with narratives laying claim to a narrator who somehow narrates ‘from nowhere.’”8 The appearance of the narrator – whether historian or fiction writer, as this argument goes – would be a violation. That violation was at the heart of the problem of a biography of Ronald Reagan.

Dutch reactions In 1999, the writer Edmund Morris published Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. The book purported to be a biography of the 40th US president, but in fact the book was probably better characterized as historical fiction. Indeed, much of the criticism of the book by historians might have subsided had Morris so characterized what he was doing as historical fiction. In the first place, Morris inserted a fictional character: Edmund Morris himself. The account included fictional events and – perhaps more problematic for historians – invented footnotes and references of these fictionalized events. While historians insert imaginative objects into their accounts all the time, Morris’ insertions were deemed illegitimate in the eyes of many historians. I recount here the reactions to the publication of Dutch as a boundary marker. Given the reaction from historians about its publication, we have some sense of how historians define the boundary separating the Aristotelian and the Platonic imagination. Dutch is too Platonic, misidentified as history, and knowing this gives a clearer sense of where and why historians identify the boundary between the two kinds of imagination. For his part, the critic and novelist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt had little difficulty with Morris’ faux memoir. What is the difference between “Dutch” and, say, Oliver Stone’s film “J.F.K.” or Joe McGinniss’ “The Last Brother,” a biography of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy? Why shouldn’t Morris’ memoir be treated as historical fiction? . . . It is difficult to approve the technique in theory; in less skilled hands it will doubtless prove a disaster. But it certainly succeeds in this case. So call “Dutch” a literary work instead of a biography. Indeed, I do not think the historians who critiqued Dutch would argue this point. Dutch is indeed historical fiction, a literary work, but it masquerades as

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biography. The fictional elements are not easily and transparently identifiable. Lehmann-Haupt went on: But as you read on – and such is the force and fascination of Morris’ narrative that you can’t help reading on – you begin to see the benefits of his highly unorthodox “technique,” which turns out to be a conjoining of invention and reality.9 (Lehmann-Haupt 1999, emphasis mine) We could claim that all historical accounts are a conjoining of the historian’s invention with the reality of the evidence. It is the ratio of such invention-toreality that perhaps is of concern here. In the eyes of his critics, Morris’ ratio was far too weighted toward invention. “For as history or as biography, Dutch is above all ludicrous,” proclaimed historian Warren Goldstein. Everything you’ve heard is true, and worse. It’s not only the merging of real characters with invented ones – including the now-infamous “older" Morris who supposedly knew Reagan as a young man – but also the raw emotion of the author (whoever he is), his intrusive narcissism, and the plain silliness of his dramatizations. Here lies the first point of contention among historians: invented characters. Historians insert all kinds of imaginary objects into their accounts of the past. However, invented characters are a step across the frontier into Platonic imagination. Indeed, there is much that is fabricated in Dutch. Dutch’s other narrative techniques, dropped more or less randomly into the text, include quotations from fabricated letters, telegrams, and diary entries, facsimiles of real letters, invented debate, authorial memoir, fabricated reminiscences of non-existent people backed up by fabricated footnotes, and much, much more. The memoirist’s “I” is ever present, repeatedly wondering about his own importance – perhaps because Reagan often seemed to forget who Morris was from one meeting to the next. Only with great care can a reader be pretty sure who’s supposed to be saying what, and based on which authority.10 Whatever Morris had composed, it did not rise to the level of history or biography. “The book, in short, employs a messy agglomeration of techniques to create a fictionalized memoir pretending to be an imaginatively constructed biography.”11 This invention of evidence was a non-starter for most historians. At best, this makes Dutch a work of fiction, and at worst, it is a kind of historical malpractice. Historians can insert many kinds of imaginative objects into an historical

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account, but fabricated evidence is clearly stepping over the line. “Morris played fast and loose with footnotes,” writes Kate Masur. The notes in Dutch refer readers willy-nilly to real archival materials as well as nonexistent documents. For historians, footnotes represent scholarly rigor, hours dedicated to dusty documents, creative links among archives, thoroughness and depth. False footnotes cheapen the real work of writing history. As Kathryn Kish Sklar .  .  . pointed out, “Historians work hard to recover evidence about the past. . . . If the rules governing their craft permitted them to invent evidence, then all their labor would be in vain.”12 (emphasis mine) Some historians insist that the distinction between fiction and history is clear, however. According to Ellis, historians operate on “a tether that ties your imagination to the evidence.” Historians’ speculative leaps are bound by the tether – which represents the ineffable yet crucial standards of the profession – while novelists are free to f ly as far as their imaginations will allow.13 (emphasis mine) Note the use of the word “tether,” similar to my analogy of an elastic stretching from the peg of evidence. Historians might stretch their inferences from the peg of evidence into the region of the Platonic imagination. But historians would never fabricate the peg itself, which remains firmly rooted in the Aristotelian. It was also the lack of imaginative transparency that most seem to trouble historians. Lehmann-Haupt felt that Morris was being no more speculative and fictional than the historian who writes in the modal mood. Since Morris’ partly fictional persona was born only a year later than Reagan and crossed paths with him at various points in their early careers, the author can make use of directly contemporaneous commentary instead of having to resort to speculative “must haves” and “may wells.”14 In this regard, how far removed was Morris’ account from, say, Natalie Zemon Davis’ Return of Martin Guerre? Morris was writing in the same modal mood – or at least the same modal intention – only dispensing with the long-winded verbal constructions. It is true that, when piled up throughout a text, the profusion of must have and may have been constructions is not very readerly and indeed can make for tortured prose. But the modal mood is a signal to a reader about the degree of invention the historian is exercising. Dispensing with the linguistic conventions of the modal mood – even if its intent is not dissimilar to what an historian might attempt – would appear to move us across the frontier into the Platonic imagination (see Figure 4.1).

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Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 4.1

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in Dutch

The fabrications themselves are problematic, even more so if they are not at least clearly identified. Nothing in Dutch reveals Morris’s promiscuous mix of fact and fiction. People who read the book’s dust jacket or glimpse coverage of it on television, radio, print media, or the Internet will know. But given that libraries often discard dust jackets, “How will readers in 10 years learn about the inventions of the author?” Joyce Appleby . . . asked. “Let’s call it biofiction or biofantasy or bioimaginings, but not biography, which has a venerable tradition.”15 “There’s nothing wrong with historical novels. I’d give a lot to have written a book as good – or as popular – as Gore Vidal’s Lincoln or Burr,” concedes Goldstein. “But such books have integrity: They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are. Dutch does.”16 This is one of the main complaints raised by many historians about the book: it is actually historical fiction masquerading as a work of history. By masquerading, I mean that Morris slips in invented or imaginary objects and characters yet passes these off as if they were actual. According to John Demos – who has written on history and narrative form – one of the cardinal rules of unconventional history writing is to “be as clear as possible to your reader about what you’re doing.” Morris and his publisher, Random House, clearly f louted this rule. But Demos was not ready to reject Morris’ approach completely out of hand. “I’m not opposed to crossing the border into fiction or creating material that can’t be documented down to the very last detail” [emphasis mine]. Such

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tactics, he said, are valid if they enable the historians to “tell the story better.” He noted that he had been part of an American Historical Review forum (December 1998) in which three historians and Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood had concurred that the ambiguous border between literature and history was a rich and fruitful domain [emphasis mine]. Note that Demos uses the analogy of border crossing to describe what Morris had done. “Demos, for one, thinks history and fiction exist on ‘a spectrum with all sorts of intermediate positions.’”17 Clearly, I also identify such a continuum, similar to the diagram we’ve evoked throughout this book, albeit with different poles. Without question, the fabricated letters and diary entries mark Morris’ account as fiction: historians do indeed draw the line at fabricated evidence. But what is also evident in Goldstein’s critique is disapproval of the unwarranted assertion of the author – Morris – into the text. Historians usually write narratives from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator. It would be highly unusual for an historical account to be written in the first person. That is, historians do not insert themselves into their accounts, and certainly not a fictionalized narrator. Rosenstone said he wrote himself into Mirror in the Shrine, his biographical study of American encounters with Meiji Japan, because “it seemed the only way of distancing myself was admitting that I was implicated.” Once he had given himself a bit part as the historian creating the work, he said, the book could go forward.18 Interestingly, Rosenstone’s book did not receive the same level of condemnation as did Morris’.

The Mirror in the Shrine In a manner similar to Morris, the historian Robert Rosenstone inserted himself as a character in Mirror in the Shrine, his history of the encounters of three Americans in Meiji Japan. Unlike the case of Dutch, most reviewers had a positive impression of the book, and especially its unique style of presentation. Even though Rosenstone interjected himself at many points in the account, the historians who reviewed the book generally found this approach acceptable, even laudable. It should be noted that there were those historians who did not appreciate Rosenstone’s approach. Wayne Patterson, for instance, was dismissive of the book, noting that Rosenstone was not a specialist in Japanese history and that the book offered no new interpretation of these three well-known historical figures. Not everyone will like this book, the author informs early on that this is not a standard history, and it is not. Rather, he uses a combination of the memoirs and diaries of the three (quoted in italics in the text) and weaves

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it into a narrative. Yet most of the narrative is the author’s, and this appears as an exercise in creative writing. It is more about the observer (Robert A. Rosenstone) than the observed and, as such, comes very close to the point where style obscures substance.19 Creative writing, it would seem, is the opposite of historical writing, and Patterson here has suggested that Rosenstone’s book has extended toward the Platonic end of the imagination spectrum. P.F. Kornicki offered a terse and dismissive review, observing that “the author makes use of a self-conscious and labored style and of some of the techniques of fiction and the cinema.” Indeed, Rosenstone’s clipped wording and the constant use of the present tense are characteristic of the whole and detract from the historicity of the experiences he describes. It is a fact that we can never experience Meiji Japan and I am not convinced that it is useful to pretend that we can. Kornicki was not convinced by Rosenstone’s speculations. “His preference for psychological speculation verges at times on the prurient,” Kornicki observed. “His approach, in sum, does not help us to understand the intellectual and emotional responses to Japan of Griffis, Morse and Hearn, let alone the whole American encounter with Japan.”20 Fumiko Fujita noted, without comment, that Rosenstone often enters the narrative, almost as another character, and that in this role, Rosenstone frequently “[lamented] the fact that his subjects had left behind insufficient source material.”21 Except there were indeed such sources had Rosenstone the ability to consult them. Although Rosenstone focuses upon the American experience, making no use of Japanese sources, an understanding of Japanese society and people at the time, especially those people close to the subjects, would be helpful to give life to the human landscape in which the Americans lived. Rosenstone instead exercises his imagination.22 This is an indictment of Rosenstone’s approach, and indeed an indication that Rosenstone has employed too much (creative) imagination. Fujita seems to be suggesting that, instead of relying on actual sources, Rosenstone “made things up,” not the fabrication of evidence, as such – which would be unpardonable – but of devising an interpretation that was not grounded in evidence. Regarding Rosenstone’s interpretations, Fujita writes, “To accept these portraits of the three Americans entirely, the reader needs to make a leap of imagination with Rosenstone,” a leap Fujita does not seem willing to make.23 Helen Ballhatchet’s review was seemingly laudatory but disguised some rather significant methodological concerns with Rosenstone’s approach.

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The author, an expert in American history to whom the Japanese-language literature on the three men was clearly not accessible, has nevertheless produced a sensitive and vivid exploration of the complex responses of his subjects to Meiji Japan and the challenge that it presented to nineteenth-century assumptions about progress and the superiority of the West over the East. Fujita had commented on Rosenstone’s lack of available sources; that he did not consult these sources would be a significant problem for many historical works, not only experimental ones like Mirror in the Shrine. As a result, “There are, however, some mistakes, for example, on p. 200, where it is stated that the custom of sword-wearing was revived in 1873. But these do not irritate nearly so much as the style and method of approach of the book itself.” Ballhatchet describes Rosenstone’s style as “self-conscious” and especially noted his “use of the present tense rather than the past, of the second-person form of address (which is confusingly employed to talk both to his subjects and to the reader), and of other techniques associated with the modern novel rather than with academic writing.” Here she distinguishes between the novel and academic history, subtly suggesting that the former is of an inferior quality to the latter. “The total result is to draw attention to the medium rather than the message, to the methodological doubts of the late-twentieth-century academic rather than to the destabilising effect of Japan on the more secure world-view of his nineteenth-century subjects.”24 Jane Hunter begins her review by noting that Rosenstone is a scholar of film and history and that indeed “[t]his volume is not about cinema; it is cinema, complete with verbal fade-ins and fade-outs, many wonderful moments, and many inf lated ones.” She reports, “His strategy is a kind of integrated literary montage-of diary entries, published accounts, fictive re-creation, and authorial speculation.” Nevertheless, “when Rosenstone is less well grounded, his fictionalizing voice becomes breathy and portentous. . . . And his self-conscious metadiscourse – his writing about writing – often seems like mannered wheel spinning rather than profound illumination.” Despite these, rather significant, concerns, Hunter concludes, “The result is intrepid, a risk worth reading.”25 These reviewers were concerned that Rosenstone was not a specialist in Japanese history and thus were concerned that his imaginative insertions lacked credibility. Indeed, Rosenstone’s creative style was irksome to these reviewers. But unlike the reception that Morris’ Dutch received from historians, Mirror in the Shrine was generally applauded by historians. That it was so well received is instructive as to the degree of creative imagination historians are willing to tolerate in an historical work. Jonas Grehlein, for one, noted approvingly that scattered throughout the text the reader find passages that interrupt the mimetic narrative, and that draw attention to the author, as when he considers the lack of sources. . . . In addition to the structure – reminiscent of

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the cuts and changes of scene in films – the narrative technique renders Rosenstone’s form of presentation remarkable. Inserting himself into the narrative – which irritated readers of Dutch – does not concern Grehlein, who observes: The voice of the author is particularly strong at the beginning and the ending of the book when Rosenstone draws parallels between his characters, and his own experiences in Japan. Thus fictionalization in Mirror in the Shrine is not only limited to filling out the picture we gain from the sources, but is also balanced by the marking of the author and his role.26 Sandra Taylor clearly identified the “imaginative” elements of Rosentone’s account and was nevertheless appreciative: It is Rosenstone’s talent to have recreated three lives using the best features of narrative history and borrowing the form of the novel itself. He even interjected himself into the story, for like his subjects, he too taught and studied in Japan. The resulting work may cause problems for those historical purists who insist on the literal word of the documentary evidence, and for whom the author belongs, if at all, in the preface and never in the narrative. Rosenstone succeeds in his endeavour because of his graceful and charming prose, and his imagination. His subjects come to life, along with Meiji Japan. This book is a delight to read, unlike, unfortunately, most histories.27 For Taylor, Rosentone’s imagination – his creative imagination – is a strength of the book; she is apparently not one of the “purists” she decries. And like Taylor, Sam Pickering found the imaginative approach of the book a strength: Rosenstone writes that he wants “to recapture the meaning that these three lives still have for us.” As a result . . . he blends fact with imaginative but considered re-creation. So that the reader can participate in the process of creativity, he exposes the devices of narrative. Rosenstone, who has borrowed some of the methods of fashionable literary critics, at times approaches them in his naiveté: for example he starts a chapter with “How and where to begin?” Such inelegancies are, however, but small faults, for Mirror in the Shrine is a rich book, ref lecting the past onto the present and creating awareness and understanding.28 For Pickering, Rosenstone’s “imaginative” and “creative” work are not problematic but indeed are the strength of the book.

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Andrew Gerstle seemed to have paid no notice to Rosenstone’s unconventional narrative choices: Mirror in the Shrine does what we want historical biography to do: to speak through the sources and bring to life the trials, excitements, disappointments, joys, and ambitions of long past souls. Rosenstone does this much and more: he is suggestive and provocative over and again on the complexity of intercultural encounters. But best of all he has given us a lively, wellconstructed tale of three interesting lives.29 Reading Gerstle’s review, one might get the impression that Mirror in the Shrine is nothing more than an exemplary historical biography and that its imaginative methodology demands no special notice. F.G. Notehelfer said, “This is an intriguing book. It is also a baff ling book. Odd as this may seem, what fascinates me about it is also what troubles me over it.” While he appeared uneasy with some of the stylistic choices, Notehelfer nevertheless commended the book: What we have in this book, then, is a daring experiment. It is to write a new kind of narrative. That is, to tell the story of these men and their experiences, or perhaps it might be better to say to “show the story of these men and their experiences,” for the author argues that the visual image is central to his method, not through the accepted diachronic structure, but through a new vision of synchronic “slices.” Narrative, particularly the narrative of biography, the villain of the nineteenth-century novel paradigm, with its stress on steady movement through time and social space, is to be replaced by a more piercing approach that cuts through the ambiguity of both time and space. This is an ambitious goal and the results are commendably effective.30 And yet, in praising the book, Notehelfer simultaneously described himself as “uneasy” and “troubled” by it. D.L.M. Macfarlane proclaimed, “In many ways and despite some idiosyncrasies this is an excellent, entertaining and informative book.”31 Similarly, John M. Maki described Rosenstone’s approach idiosyncratic, but illuminating nonetheless: “[Rosenstone’s] style, as unorthodox as it may seem, combines with his meticulous scholarship to illuminate both his subjects and the Japan of which they were temporarily a part.”32 Dan McLeod was another reviewer who noted Rosenstone’s unusual narrative techniques but did not reject them or seem particularly troubled by them. Most traditional scholars prefer to deal with the problems associated with their tasks in notes or substantial introductions, but Rosenstone’s seemingly

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casual, self-ref lexive approach to scholarship is engaging. It’s true the result is sometimes a distractingly bumpy or digressive narrative, but the reader’s pleasant sense of intimacy and participation with the writer as he comes to grips with his subjects compensates for the inconvenience. Of course, Rosenstone’s is an awfully self-conscious way to write biography, but it has an honest ring that’s at least as persuasive as the overly confident stance traditional biographers sometimes assume. And why should historical scholarship be cut off from the literary experimentation that has liberated journalism and other non-fictional genres over the last couple of decades? My guess is that we’ll be seeing more of Rosenstone’s kind of work as more historians come to recognize that the masterpieces of their discipline have drawn as much from literary traditions and techniques as they have from the self-effacing methodologies of social science.33 Indeed, McLeod suggests that Rosenstone’s method may in fact become more commonplace among historians (I am not certain this prediction has come to pass). In describing his own process of exploring the boundary between history and fiction, John Demos looked to Rosenstone as an exemplar. By the mid-1980s, I had become an all-out convert to historical novels but was uncertain how to express the change in my scholarly work. I had been drawn, in the meantime, to the study of “Indian captivities” and then to one captivity story in particular. So: should I follow the lead of the novelists I admired and write up my story as (historical) fiction? I considered that possibility and tried for a time to act on it. But writing history and writing fiction, I learned the hard way, are very different things  – requiring different talents and different forms of commitment. Most of us will probably have to settle for doing one or the other, not both. In my own attempts to cross the line, problems of plotting and especially of dialogue proved insuperable.34 As he did when assessing Morris’ Dutch, Demos found Rosenstone’s work the model for how historians might transgress the line between history and fiction. While both Morris and Rosenstone employed an unconventional narrative approach – and, specifically, inserted themselves as “characters” in their histories – the reception among historians was quite different. Indeed, the major difference, it seems, might be in the transparency and openness with which Rosenstone described his stylistic inventions, which Morris decidedly did not. The examples of Dutch and Mirror in the Shrine demonstrate the difficulty in definitively drawing a line between Aristotelian and Platonic imagination in historical writing. Given the different responses, there do not appear to be immutable, fixed rules for where the boundary may be located, but, rather, situationally dependent judgments about its location.

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The Unredeemed Captive It is noteworthy that John Demos’ opinion was sought out in the case of both Dutch and Mirror in the Shrine – as Demos himself wrote an unconventional history that, while careful not to f lout the same rules as Morris did, nevertheless “crossed the border” deep into the Platonic imagination (see Figure 4.2). The book in question was The Unredeemed Captive. The style of Demos’ work comes across as awkward, but that is only to draw attention to the “invented” parts, the fictional/ imaginative insertions into the text. Perhaps Morris might have saved himself some trouble if he had only been more transparent about his fictionalization or had not tried to pass off Dutch as an actual biography. But note: historians rarely draw attention to some of their imaginative objects, such as historical concepts. Do we draw specific attention – marked by compositional style or the use of italics and boldface – to identify the “imaginary objects” we insert into the past? Demos was the author of an earlier book, the Bancroft Prize–winning Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, and thus certainly had license and credibility to engage in controlled speculation. In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos was recounting the story of Eunice Williams, who was taken captive and assimilated into Mohawk society. Even though she made several return trips to visit her former family, and despite efforts by her father to ransom her, she never returned to Massachusetts. Why was this so? There is scant evidence from Eunice Williams, and so any effort to tell her side of the story – were an historian to undertake it – would almost necessitate a kind of imaginative re-creation. This was the task Demos set for himself. “So the historian John Demos has written of how ‘the history/fiction boundary has never looked more interesting,’” recounted Southgate, “and has indeed become not so much a boundary as ‘a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography.’”35

Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 4.2

Captive

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in The Unredeemed

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Indeed, Demos’ reconstruction of Eunice William’s life – specifically, his exploration of his subject’s inner life – is a complex intermixing of Aristotelian and Platonic imagination. I quote at length a passage from The Unredeemed Captive, to allow the reader the opportunity to see how Demos constructed his “fictional” account of Eunice Williams and to provide some insight into what critics were wrestling with in this work: We who read this “memorial” almost three centuries later, can easily understand the feelings of its author. But what about its subject, the unredeemed captive herself? What were her feelings – held tight, though they were behind the “steel in her breast”? Her husband gives us a clue, with reference to her father’s remarriage. And there is as well, a certain logic in her situation. Otherwise we can only speculate – only imagine – but that much, at least, we must try. So the trader would be here, this very afternoon. She had talked with the headman, with the priests, with her family: all had assured her that she would be kept safe. Her husband would be with her the whole time; a priest would see the trader first and explained her position. Her home now was the village; her people were the Kahnawake. She would not go back to her English father, not now, not ever. Her English father. What claim could he possibly make on her anyway? With a clarity born of old bitterness, she remembered the last times she had seen him. She remembered his coming to the village, when she was still a small child – feeling scared and strange, and gripped inside by the ties of her old life. She had begged him then to take her away, but he had failed her utterly. A prayer; some empty words of comfort; a sorrowful good-bye. In her mind’s eye she could still see the back of his bowed head, the heaviness in his step, as he trudged off toward the river. She remembered the long journey through the forest, up from Deerfield. At first, she had clung to him tightly, as a squirrel clings to a tree; but weak as he was, and clumsy on his snowshoes, he could not walk for the two of them. Then a kind, strong man from the village – a man she knew now as our uncle Hatironta – had swept her up and set her a top his own broad shoulders. And in that position she had traveled almost the entire route to Montreal. When, from time to time, she had turned her head for a glimpse to the rear, she had seen her father lurching heavily through the drifts, falling back, gasping, calling out for rest. The Kahnawake had laughed and joked about him. The tall man with the fine clothes and finer words, this great leader of the “Bastonnais,” this favorite of God: how he had been brought low! Her sorrow for him had turned to pity, and finally to shame . . . All that was behind her now, far behind. Yet the trader’s coming had brought it back, like the embers of an old fire stirred to life beneath the ash. The priests

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said she must see him, must give him a hearing. All right: she would see, she would hear. But they couldn’t make her speak. Silence would be her reply; its meaning would be clear enough. Schuyler’s memorial leaves us also with a different question. Who was Eunice’s Indian husband, this man who stood by her – and, at least brief ly, spoke for her – during the meeting in the priest’s residence? Again, no firm answer is possible. But again, there are grounds for speculation.36 Demos makes reference to the accounts and sources we do possess, indicating that his account of Eunice Williams’ life will be grounded in some documentation. But he also refers to the logic of her situation, almost in the way Davis relied on the knowledge of the larger historical context to explain the behavior of a single individual. Demos indicates that his is a speculation, but a warranted speculation nonetheless. Set off in italics, the “imaginative” section, the section where Demos attempts to peer into the inner life of Eunice Williams, is clearly demarcated. There is no need to employ the clumsy, unreaderly must have modal construction. It is as if Demos had started with the form of an historical account and then grew an historical fiction within that rhetorical style and all of its infrastructure. The fictional is visibly inserted within the historically actual. The scholarly reaction to The Unredeemed Captive was markedly different from that of Dutch. Examining this reaction might shed some light on how historians draw and enforce the boundary between Aristotelian and Platonic imagination. Even if Demos crossed that frontier, he apparently did so in a way that generally – although with qualification – satisfied historians. Several reviewers noted Demos’ unusual methodological approach, but they did so in such a way as to suggest that they were untroubled by his crossing the boundary into the Platonic imagination. Thomas E. Burke wrote in his American Historical Review essay that “John Demos combines factual information from family records with an imaginative recreation of events based on ethnohistory insights.”37 Burke made no comment on these re-creations, suggesting he had no concern about their imaginative character. Alan Taylor similarly noted the necessity of speculative imagination if Eunice’s story were to be recovered at all. “At best, Demos can capture occasional, second- and third-hand glimpses of Eunice in the reports of white men who were sent, in vain, to negotiate her return. Her silence in the documents invites Demos to exercise his considerable ingenuity as a researcher and storyteller. He explains, ‘some things we have to imagine.’”38 But Taylor offers no other commentary on the “imaginative” elements. Although he critiques some of the conclusions Demos’ imaginative approach produces, Taylor did not critique his methodological imagination.39 Alden Vaughn also questions some of the conclusions Demos drew, but not the fictional approach to the sources. “Demos f leshes out the documentable story with effective, though arguable, conjecture.” Vaughn does not really describe what these objections are,

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but it seems that his argument is with the conclusions drawn, not with the idea of conjecture itself.40 Julie Roy Jeffrey described the book as “engaging and imaginative,” noting the fictional elements only in passing: The complexity of his analysis is partly obscured by a fast-paced and imaginative narrative and his willingness to cross conventional barriers between history and fiction. While Demos alerts his reader when he moves beyond the strict boundaries of evidence, his bold departure from the usual historical approach and style helps to make this book a compelling reading experience.41 Jeffrey was writing a review essay that examined several books in addition to The Unredeemed Captive. Thus her commentary is largely on the larger historiographic shift the books collectively represent. Her mention of Demos’ unusual methodology seems laudatory. “How did the great detective Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery?” Benjamin Roberts began his review. Presumably by combining a fair amount of evidence, a touch of probability, and a dash of speculation. And seldom did a case go unsolved. Much like Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, the Yale historian John Demos has provided us with a viable solution for the unredemption of the abduction of a six-year-old New England girl by Indians in the 18th century. By using the narrative method and adding speculation where evidence had failed, Demos has possibly solved the case and in doing so has exquisitely told a fascinating story about family life in New England in the 18th century.”42 Roberts notes that Demos drew from a wealth of documents, a gesture toward the book’s evidentiary grounding. These personal documents have been paramount in Demos’ reconstruction of how the Williams family endured the 79 years of unsuccessful attempts for Eunice’s return. However, if the reader is looking for a table of contents, index, or historiography in which the author accounts for the use of sources (and in this case the lack of sources), or unravels the choice of historical approach, he won’t find it. In the Preface Demos simply states: “most of all, I wanted to write a story.” He then notes that, in telling Eunice Williams’ story, there is only one document to draw from. How is he able to tell her story? It is clear that Demos was faced with the classic historian’s problem: sources are not always there when needed. When deprived of sources needed in writing his story Demos has applied a touch of probability and a dash of speculation. However, Demos never abandons his professional ethics in

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regard to facts. He has clearly informed the reader in cursive print what is fact so that there is no uncertainty between fact and fiction. Much as Holmes would have done when lacking evidence, Demos has crept into Eunice’s mind and has given her probable answers to the many unsolved questions.43 Roberts does not indicate for us, however, the conditions under which probability and speculation are warranted, except to say: By crossing the delicate line between fact and fiction without doing injustice to the facts, Demos should be applauded for providing a possible solution to the case of the unredeemed captive, and for writing a spectacular family story. In doing so, Demos has illustrated how one historian has solved his own problem.44 (emphasis mine) Again, we are not entirely clear what would count as an injustice here. We might surmise that Roberts means a continued reliance upon superabundant evidence, within which the historian might carefully and creatively imagine beyond those documents. Janet Buell Rogers identified John Demos himself as a character in The Unredeemed Captive. But clearly, she was not accusing Demos of the kind of abuse committed by Morris. “John Demos, a prominent character in his own book, inhabits it as an idiosyncratic, omnipresent narrator, and he both charms and irritates the reader of his tale.” The irritation, perhaps, comes from the narrative style employed by Demos, one that lays bare his speculations and imaginative reconstructions. She notes, “Rhetorical questions, conjectures such as ‘perhaps’ and ‘must have,’ and fragmentary phrases, along with great quantities of italics, characterize the text.” She describes Demos’ style as “eccentric”: At first annoyed by these stylistic indulgences, we gradually succumb to the sense that, rather than reading a solemn historical study, we are listening to a storyteller. Moreover, his story is well worth hearing. As we adjust to the unconventional style, we grow quite fond of our narrator and guide, who acquaints us with his own personality in the course of illuminating those of 290 years ago.45 Rogers’ fondness for Demos’ personal narrative style has its limits, however. Demos’s pleasure in his narrative pervade the book, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Just as a storyteller’s own zest makes his tale entertaining, the author’s voice here engages his reader deeply in his “Family Story from Early America.” Perhaps next time he will return to a less personal, more detached and critical, approach to writing history, but here he has drawn us further into his

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characters’ lives, their partings and meetings, than he could have done with a conventional study. Moreover, we have gained the added benefit of making the acquaintance of an ebullient, humorous, and compassionate scholar.46 Alden Vaughn also noted the distracting style: Readers are likely to agree that the Williams family’s saga is intrinsically interesting and that the sources from which to tell it are fragmentary but adequate. Consensus is less likely on the book’s narrative style. Some readers may appreciate its breathless prose; others will find seriously distracting its superf luous parentheses, dashes, italics, rhetorical questions, incomplete sentences, and parsing of block quotations.47 Other reviewers noted that the eccentric style was a result of Demos’ identification of what was evidence-based fact and what was his imaginative speculation. Rogers appears to only grudgingly accept this rhetorical move. “Twice Demos takes a more daring step as he creates reports on scenes for which no records exist; he provides plenty of warning that these narratives are imaginary, and he places them in italics.”48 The awkward style of the book indicates that there is a work of fiction emerging out of a narrative history. Demos decided to clearly and transparently mark the distinction between the two narrative forms. As to the speculation itself, Rogers was open, if not entirely convinced. “Demos’s glimpse into women’s lives in the Kahnawake villages is absorbing,” she conceded, “and his conjecture that many captive women chose to stay with the Indians because they possessed considerably greater authority in that setting is intriguing.” As phrased, it is not certain that Rogers was convinced by Demos’ conjecture. She does not suggest that the conjecture itself was unwarranted, only perhaps the conclusions Demos drew. Indeed, Rogers wonders if Demos should have engaged in speculation at all or whether that task should be left to a perceptive reader: Because the writer has provided such a plenteous supply of illuminating factual and descriptive detail about his characters, it might have been fairer if he had allowed his readers to do their own imaginings, to transform the history into fiction themselves.49 This mild rebuke is very interesting. In recognizing that this is a history transforming into fiction, Rogers seems to suggest that such imaginative boundary crossing is not intrinsically wrong. It is only that the historian should refrain from crossing it, leaving that transgression to the reader. That is, fictional speculation is none of the historian’s business. Jeff Hardwick’s review could not have been more laudatory. “Demos achieves magic,” he gushes.

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In writing style, explanations of social circumstances, and portrayal of the immediacy of history, he has fashioned a past both utterly distant and yet provocatively close; the story feels familiar and yet well beyond our experience. All this is combined within a most compelling story. But even Hardwick concludes with a note of caution about fictional speculation in history. In contrast to other works of history that drift into speculative fiction, Demos’ strikes the right balance between readability and transparency. To tell the historical experiences of Eunice, Demos relies on and hones the techniques of narrative history. He has forged a path in this book ranging from imaginative narrative to straight social history. . . . For many historians, combining the rich, narrative style of Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations with the quantitative details of social history would be an outline for an unreadable disaster, yet Demos blends the two with superb dexterity.50 And yet, Hardwick seems somewhat troubled by the imaginative, fictional approach Demos employs: Occasionally, this narrative style of history projects twentieth-century interpretations and categories onto a past that feels illusory. While reading Unredeemed Captive one wonders where the history stops and the story begins. Demos employs creative typographic tricks to convey at what points he is taking imaginative licenses; for instance, italics denote parts that have very little documentary evidence supporting them. In one of the most daring parts, Demos suggests the psychological reasons for Eunice’s decision to remain in Canada. Her actions, according to Demos, were a response to the severed bond she had with her father, her feelings of abandonment: “protector who could not protect, comforter who could not comfort, caretaker who did not care” (p. 109). All the documents reveal, however, is Eunice’s response in Mohawk to the question of her return to New England-“Jaghte oghte,” which translates to “maybe not” (p. 107). Perhaps Eunice’s silence and behavior are more powerful than any historian’s imagined narrative of her underlying motivations.51 Echoing Rogers, Hardwick wonders if the fictional speculations should remain unstated by the historian, to be allowed to linger in ineffability. With that said, Hardwick concludes, “My quibbles with Unredeemed Captive are minor compared with this book’s brilliance, complexity, and accessibility.”52 Reviewers were much more forgiving of Demos than of Morris, at least in part because Demos remained tethered to evidence and was more transparent about his fictional speculations. Perhaps – and this is only speculation on my

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part  – because Demos was Bancroft Prize–winning historian, he was granted more leeway than a run-of-the-mill historian might have been afforded. There was, nevertheless, an undercurrent of unease among the reviewers about these forays into the Platonic realm that is revealing of historians’ attitudes about maintaining the boundary between Aristotelian and Platonic imagination.

Inner life Warren Goldstein wrote of the Dutch affair: Like many other biographers, especially those of us writing about living figures, I agonize over whether I have a bead on my extroverted subject’s “inner life”; over how much my own feelings about class, politics, sex, or religion intrude into my narrative; over whether I am drawing enough larger import from the story of his life.53 Indeed, writers of historical fiction often claim that they are exploring the inner world of historical figures. They identify such an investigation of the interior life as a practice of empathy. But I wonder whether it is only fiction writers who venture into the inner life of real historical figures, or do historians similarly seek to practice empathy? Is the inner life of an historical figure a kind of boundary that can only be traversed via the Platonic imagination, and is this beyond the pale of the historian’s inquiry? The historian Joanne B. Freeman writes approvingly of Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr, for example. “Thus, despite the grumbling of some critics,” she writes, “Burr’s fictional musings on past men and events are entirely in character, and even imaginatively grounded in fact.”54 I suspect that when Freeman says “imaginatively grounded,” she might be referring to a realistic assessment of Burr’s inner life and that the imagination is the means by which we can come to understand an historical figure’s inner life. Which is not to say that Burr offers an objective, dispassionate view of early American politics and politicians. [That is, it is not a history.] Rather, it presents a strikingly convincing Burr’s-eye view of that world, and in so doing, captures something of the essence of Aaron Burr.55 Freeman notes there are errors of fact in Vidal’s historical novel, “[b]ut such factual slips ultimately mean little in the book’s larger scheme. Indeed, their relative unimportance testifies to Vidal’s success at the task he set himself – to re-create Burr’s distinctive vision.”56 The novel succeeds by the imaginative re-creation of the world as Burr saw it. But the novel does contain a problematic “error of fact” involving the motivations Vidal ascribed to Burr for the famous duel with Alexander Hamilton. Vidal imagines that Burr was accused of incest with his daughter, which enrages

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Burr such that he calls out Hamilton. One does not have to imagine a charge as heinous as incest to spark a duel, however. Indeed, to an historian there were any number of such causes that could have sparked Burr’s challenge. Perhaps here is an instance where the creative, Platonic imagination is unnecessary or far too unhinged from evidence. When Freeman says that Vidal could not imagine a suitable cause, this points to the paucity of direct evidence that could explain such motivations. Because we do not have direct evidence for Burr’s specific reasons, we are forced to draw upon the creative imagination, if we allow ourselves to understand those causes. But in this case, at least, it seems Vidal’s imagination was too creative. Freeman is not concerned so much with Vidal resorting to “invention”; the issue here is the unnecessary implausibility of it. There are any number of historically contextualized reasons Burr would have had to challenge Hamilton. As Vidal himself explained to psychobiographer Arnold Rogow, “The incest motif is my invention. I couldn’t think of anything of a ‘despicable’ nature that would drive [Aaron Burr] to so drastic an action.” Vidal’s statement is enormously revealing. Not because he admits to inventing the “incest motif ” – he has admitted this before. Rather, he confesses that he could not imagine a charge serious enough to merit Burr’s challenge. [Ironically, perhaps, an historian, grounded in an understanding of the historical context, would very likely imagine such charges] By [modern] standards, only an unimaginably severe insult would drive Burr to such drastic measures, and incest is as severe an insult as any. However, by eighteenth-century standards, any number of charges could demand a challenge.57 To be clear: I do not believe that Freeman was criticizing Vidal’s “invention.” That is, her objection is not to his effort to see inside the mind of Burr, but rather to the specifics of the conclusion he drew: in other words, he should have imagined another conclusion. It is the interpretation that is in dispute, not the act of “invention.” For his part, Vidal’s justification for the incest charge was that he was relying on his intuition. “The duel. What could have made the unf lappable Burr so angry that he would call out Hamilton? According to my intuition, only a charge of incest, par for the course for someone like Hamilton.”58 Vidal’s statement bears much examination. He is using a definition of “intuition” here in the sense of understanding something by bypassing conscious reasoning. The phenomenon under consideration seems true. Intuition in this sense appears to be a form of reasoning that is divorced from appeals to direct evidence. Perhaps, then, an appeal to intuition is a boundary marker for historians, the point at which we cross over from the Aristotelian to the Platonic imagination? Another conclusion we might draw is that one way to separate the historian from the novelist is that the former does not allow oneself to succumb to intuition?

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Except that historians do have occasion to cross that frontier. “Certainly,” Vidal continues, Theodosia was the only human being, as far as I could tell when I shared his climate that he ever loved. Arnold A. Rogow wrote to ask me where I had come across this true or untrue fact, as Jefferson would say. After a long immersion in the Burr-Hamilton world, I felt that this was the “despicable” business that Hamilton had alluded to.59 (emphasis mine) Vidal here is explaining the source of his intuition, in that he immerses himself in the “world” of his subject. When he says “shared his climate,” Vidal could be referring to empathy. He describes a “feeling,” that he “felt this was the business.” Again, this may ref lect another kind of boundary marker. When one resorts to feelings, are we now too far removed from the peg of evidence? Feeling is not a substitute for direct evidence. And yet, I am reminded of the phrase attributed to the scientist Barbara McClintock, who described her method of scientific inquiry as a “feel for the organism.” Vidal is clearly thinking/feeling in these terms. Do historians allow themselves to have a “feeling for the past”? Elsewhere, Vidal was describing his thought process in composing his Lincoln biography. “Why a novel and not a history or that increasingly lively subgenre biography? History has obvious attractions for an inventive novelist and his reader. He can speculate, up to a point, on motives.”60 This admission is interesting: Vidal senses that speculation and creative imagination can only go so far, almost intuiting the boundary separating Aristotelian and Platonic imagination. “He would be unwise, in my view, to enter the mind of Abraham Lincoln, say, simply as a matter of tact, not to mention caution. There are too many ways of getting it wrong.” This is also an interesting admission, that the minds of some historical figures, including towering figures like Lincoln, are off limits to such intuitive, empathetic imagination, although why this is so is not made entirely clear. But he is . . . well, I felt I was perfectly able to enter the mind of Lincoln’s second secretary, John Hay, and thus observe the president at close hand, based on the diaries and letters of that bright young man (finally being published in a full edition).61 Some minds, it would seem, are more pliable and open for imaginative inquiry. Vidal draws attention to the concept of Einfuhlen, coined by Johann Gottfried von Herder. The word is often translated as “empathy,” but Herder’s use of it has far more reverberations than simply being able to put yourself in someone else’s

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shoes. For one thing, the shoes in question are often in the past and the past is a different country with different air and full of people not like us but like themselves, and though we share, perhaps, the same DNA, the worlds back of them and before them are simply not our quotidian world and so it takes a certain kind of imagination and modesty to walk about in those shoes in a physical and moral landscape so entirely different from ours.62 Empathy, the exploration of the inner life, would seem to be a chief feature of fiction. Southgate observes: It is, then, the “inner” lives of people, in all their complexity, that writers such as [Walter] Scott seek to represent, and it is the “human” interest of historical fiction that still draws a popular response; for it can reveal alternative subjects and perspectives, and invite an enjoyable (as it seems) “empathy” with people from the past.63 But I think that this description of empathy, of Einfuhlen, describes a thought process that historians frequently employ. As Southgate notes: Scott is particularly important here, and is becoming a subject of increasing interest to historical theorists. Claimed by Georg Lukacs (in 1937) as the inventor of the historical novel, Scott in Waverly (1814), as David Harlan has recently described, “broke new ground,” by including “not only the determining conditions of a historical era but how those conditions shaped the mental and emotional lives of the people who lived through them.”64 The novelist Hilary Mantel sits astride both history and fiction, and answering the question “why I became an historical novelist” also shows us her interest in exploring the inner life of historical figures. “I began writing fiction in the 1970s, at the point, paradoxically, where I discovered I wanted to be a historian,” she recounts. I thought that because of my foolishness at the age of 16, not knowing what to put on my university applications, I had missed my chance, and so if I wanted to work with the past, I would have to become a novelist – which of course, any fool can do.65 Both historians and novelists encounter gaps in their sources. Mantel’s decision to become a novelist was in part a reaction to how she would respond to such gaps. I wasn’t after quick results. I was prepared to look at all the material I could find, even though I knew it would take years, but what I wasn’t prepared

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for were the gaps, the erasures, the silences where there should have been evidence.66 One could argue that history and fiction confront the same challenge: the absence of evidence and the need to “fill in” the gaps in the records. Exactly how that is accomplished and the degree of Platonic imagination permitted might be one way we draw a distinction between history and fiction. How Mantel handled the gaps and silences is instructive: These erasures and silences made me into a novelist, but at first I found them simply disconcerting. I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.67 Here she confesses that the inner thoughts of her characters are “made up,” suggesting that they can only be represented through Platonic imagination. But my chief concern is with the interior drama of my characters’ lives. From history, I know what they do, but I can’t with any certainty know what they think or feel. In any novel, once it’s finished, you can’t separate fact from fiction – it’s like trying to return mayonnaise to oil and egg yolk. If you want to know how it was put together line by line, your only hope, I’m afraid, is to ask the author.68 She would seem to extend a definition of Einfuhlen even further beyond Vidal, whose re-creation of the inner life of his characters was at least tethered to an understanding of the “world” that person inhabited. Mantel states that the inner life can only be conjectured. Even if he was a diarist or a confessional writer, [an historical character] might be self-censoring. But the wallpaper – someone, somewhere, might know the pattern and colour, and if I kept on pursuing it I might find out. Then – when my character comes home weary from a 24-hour debate in the National Convention and hurls his dispatch case into a corner, I would be able to look around at the room, through his eyes. When my book eventually came out, after many years, one snide critic – who was putting me in my place, as a woman writing about men doing serious politics – complained there was a lot in it about wallpaper. Believe me, I thought, hand on heart, that there was not nearly enough.69 In “recreating the wallpaper,” Mantel is demonstrating that which is amenable to the Aristotelian imagination, that which she is able to reconstruct through a closer tie to the evidence.

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There is much dialogue in Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, about the life and experiences of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell. Unless there exists a transcription of conversations held between Cromwell and others, we cannot but view these as inventions, products of the Platonic imagination of Mantel. But consider the following description from the novel: Ah, Christ, he thinks, at least I’ll never have to give her to anyone else. She’s dead and I’ll no have to sign her away to some purse-mouthed petty gent who wants her dowry. Grace would have wanted a title. She would have thought because she was lovely he should buy her one: Lady Grace. I wish my daughter Anne were here, he thinks, I wish Anne were here and promised to Rafe Sadler. If Anne were older. If Rafe were younger. If Anne were still alive. Once more he bends his head over the cardinal’s letters. Wolsey is writing to the rulers of Europe, to ask them to support him, vindicate him, fight his cause. He, Thomas Cromwell, wishes the cardinal would not, or if he must, could the encryption be more tricky? Is it not treasonable for Wolsey to urge them to obstruct the king’s purpose? Henry would deem it is. The cardinal is not asking them to make war on Henry, on his behalf: he’s merely asking them to withdraw their approval of a king who very much likes to be liked. He sits back in his chair, hands over his mouth, as if to disguise his opinion of himself. He thinks, I am glad I love my lord cardinal, because if I did not, and I were his enemy – let us say I am Suffolk, let us say I am Norfolk, let us say I am the king – I would be putting him on trial next week.70 Here is an example of the novelist peering into the mind, the inner life, of her subject. What was he thinking? These are all very plausible conjectures as to what Cromwell might have been thinking, given what we know of the situation, his own biography, the context of the time, etc. This is an example of the empathy described by Vidal, of the imagining the interior lives of characters described by Mantel. But at this stage we could observe that Mantel has stretched the imagination far beyond what is stated in the available evidence. I suspect that most historians would find the previous description far too imaginative. Correct and defensible, perhaps, but excessively imaginative nevertheless. The Platonic imagination in the service of understanding the inner life of an historical character signals a boundary: that we have crossed over the line set by historians about what constitutes “too much imagination.” Mantel understands this contours of this boundary: If we want added value – to imagine not just how the past was, but what it felt like, from the inside – we pick up a novel. The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail. The novelist does that too, and then performs another act, puts the past back into process, into action, frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade.71 (emphasis mine)

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Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 4.3

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian and Platonic Imagination in Wolf Hall

The historical novelist uses the documents from the archive, just as the historian does, and then goes one step further beyond what the documents say, performing another act that is the exercise of pure Platonic imagination. If we are talking about re-creating an inner monologue of some historical figure, then yes, the novelist’s representation is very likely “made up” and an example of the Platonic imagination. But exploring the inner life of an historical figure in itself is not uncommon among historians. Indeed, historians practice empathy at least as much as novelists. Mary Fulbrook writes that “the historian should use ‘empathy’ as a neutral tool – what Weber called ‘interpretive understanding’ – to try to ‘get inside’ the mentalities of key protagonists in the historical situation.” 72 The historian John Lewis Gaddis describes the process in ways that mirror Vidal’s method. Getting inside other people’s minds requires that your own mind be open to their impressions – their hopes and fears, their beliefs and dreams, their sense of right and wrong, their perceptions of the world and where they fit within it. . . . The resulting impression will never be the same as your own. Some of them may enchant you; others may horrify you. Still, you’ve got to reconstruct them, for that’s the only way you can understand the reasons your subject had for behaving as he or she did. And surely even in a biography of Caligula you’d want to allow that much autonomy.73 When I am teaching history to students, I elevate historical empathy to a very high position; indeed, I refer to it as one of the chief skills of the historian and one of the hardest to master. Empathy requires seeing the world through the eyes of the historical figure and at the same time forgetting the world as you see it through your own experiences today.

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Where the novel set in history often goes wrong is when the author can’t visualize any time but his own and so imposes his own present on a different place. Also, such a novelist, as well as a clear majority of historians, arrives on the scene with a series of unquestioned prejudices and so is unable to begin to empathize with those of a different persuasion, not to mention country, the past into which one must feel one’s way.74 Vidal’s charge that a clear majority of historians lack empathy is outrageous; being an historian often means practicing historical empathy. Vidal evokes the term “feeling” when describing the sensations he experiences when engaged in empathy. “Feeling” might sound too imprecise and nonrigorous for the historian’s comfort. However, “[Paul] Bloom distinguishes . . . between emotional empathy, ‘feeling what others feel and, in particular, feeling their pain,’ and cognitive empathy, or ‘the capacity to understand what’s going on in other people’s heads.’” 75 It is cognitive empathy that historians practice. Empathy is for [the historian Dominick] LaCapra “virtual but not vicarious,” requiring the historian to “put him- or herself in the other’s position without taking the other’s place or becoming a substitute or surrogate for the other.” Empathy thus becomes a process of working through, an attempt to understand, one that the historian acknowledges will only ever be partially successful, and will never be completed.76 Historical empathy requires, even demands, imagination, and especially of the creative variety. Absent direct evidence, how else do we enter the mind of an historical figure? Or, do we stop at the gates of what is written in diaries, letters, the external manifestations of thought? Is the consideration of the inner life of an historical figure a boundary separating the Aristotelian from the Platonic imagination? Are there limits on empathy? How do historians draw that line?

Conclusion Historians draw that line quite emphatically, if we are to accept William Cronon’s judgment. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, Cronon drew an unmistakable boundary at the inner life of any historical subject: To name just one of the most important differences between historians and those who create fictions about the past, our rules of evidence build a high wall between us and the inner emotional lives of the human beings about whom we write. Perhaps partly for this reason, the questions we ask are biased toward people in groups as opposed to people as individuals. Even when we do concentrate our attention on a single human being, our disciplinary conventions permit us to talk only about those actions and feelings of the person that

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have somehow been recorded in documents. This creates a bias toward public as opposed to private life that is still present in our discipline despite decades of creative work by scholars seeking to give the history of private life its proper due. For the novelist or the filmmaker, the historian’s definition of “private life” is still not private enough, since the one aspect of human reality for which our documents are most limited – the inner stream-of-consciousness that we each experience uniquely inside ourselves in ways we can never fully render for anyone else – is often what the fiction-maker is most eager to tell stories about. The narrative representations of a person’s innermost thoughts that are among the greatest achievements of the modernist novel by authors such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and Faulkner are not available for us to emulate. Even when historians are lucky enough to work on individuals who left behind copious letters and diaries, these are still ultimately public representations of an inner life that we can never quite touch or recover. When even the most basic of human experiences fail to register in the sources available to us, our disciplinary conventions leave us little choice but to follow the famous final admonition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 77 (emphasis mine) That last sentence is as direct and stark a statement of the kinds of limits historians place around the Platonic imagination as I have encountered. A few historians might venture across that boundary separating Aristotelian and Platonic imagination, but only haltingly and not without consequence. Rather than running the risk of engaging in too much imagination, of being accused of being too fanciful, the historian might instead choose to say nothing at all.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

William Cronon, “Storytelling,”The American Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 1 (Feb., 2013), 10. Ibid. Beverley Southgate, History Meets Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 1. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 29 Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 19. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “‘Dutch’: A Guy Who Wasn’t There Meets the Guy Who Was,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1999, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/09/26/ daily/093099morris-book-review.html Warren Goldstein, “‘Dutch’: An Object Lesson for History and Biography,” The Chronicle Review, Oct. 15, 1999, www.chronicle.com/article/Dutch-an-Object-Lesson-for/25642 Ibid. Kate Masur, “Edmund Morris’s Dutch: Reconstructing Reagan or Deconstructing History,” AHA Perspectives on History, Dec. 1, 1999, www.historians.org/publications-anddirector ies/perspectives-on-history/december-1999/edmund-morr iss-dutchreconstruction-reagan-or-deconstructing-history Ibid.

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Lehmann-Haupt, “‘Dutch’: A Guy Who Wasn’t There Meets the Guy Who Was.” Masur, “Edmund Morris’s Dutch.” Goldstein, “‘Dutch’: An Object Lesson for History and Biography.” Masur, “Edmund Morris’s Dutch.” Ibid. Wayne Patterson, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Mar., 1991), 1373. P.F. Kornicki, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 53, No. 2 (1990), 404–405. Fumiko Fujita, “Americans Abroad,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), 620. Ibid., 621. Ibid., 622. Helen Ballhatchet, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), 130–131. Jane Hunter, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), 601–602. Jonas Grethlein, “Experientiality and ‘Narrative Reference,’ with Thanks to Thucydides,” History and Theory, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Oct., 2010), 315–335 (which pages???). Sandra G. Taylor, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The International History Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May, 1990), 375–377 (which page??). Sam Pickering, “Voyages and the Indulgent Self,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), 300–301. Andrew Gerstle, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), 876–877. F.G. Notehelfer, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), 519–520. D.L.M. Macfarlane, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1 (1990), 215–216. John M. Maki, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), 127. Dan McLeod, “Review of Mirror in the Shrine,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), 595. John Demos, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels . . .,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Dec., 1998), 1528. Southgate, History Meets Fiction, 174. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 108–110. Thomas E. Burke, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), 1290. Alan Taylor, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), 518. Ibid. Alden T. Vaughn, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Jun., 1995), 198. Julie Roy Jeffrey, “In Search of the New American West,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), 1060. Benjamin Roberts, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), 401. Ibid., 402. Ibid., 403. Janet Buell Rogers, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), 483–484. Ibid., 486–487. Vaughn, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” 198.

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48 Rogers, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” 485. 49 Ibid., 485–486. 50 Jeff Hardwick, “Review of The Unredeemed Captive,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 30, No. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn, 1995), 181. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 182. 53 Goldstein, “‘Dutch’: An Object Lesson for History and Biography.” 54 Joanne B. Freeman, “History Told by the Devil Incarnate: Gore Vidal’s Burr,” in Mark C. Carnes, ed., Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 33. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 38. 57 Ibid., 36–37. 58 Gore Vidal, “Burr: The Historical Novel,” in Mark C. Carnes, ed., Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 42. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 40. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Southgate, History Meets Fiction, 6. 64 Ibid., 5. 65 Hilary Mantel, “Why I Became a Historical Novelist,” The Guardian, Jun. 3, 2017, www. theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historicalnovelist 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 20019), 163–164. 71 Mantel, “Why I Became a Historical Novelist.” 72 Fulbrook, Historical Theory, 167. 73 Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 124. 74 Vidal, “Burr: The Historical Novel,” 41. 75 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 64. 76 Ibid., 67. 77 Cronon, “Storytelling,” 11–12.

5 WHAT IF?

One could argue that Natalie Zemon Davis and other historians who resort to the modal mood are engaging in a kind of speculation: that the modal construction must have is a ref lection of the historian’s speculation about a state of affairs. I note that the verb “to speculate” in English means “[t]o observe or view mentally; to consider, examine, or ref lect upon with close attention; to contemplate; to theorize upon.” In this sense, speculation is tied to imagination: if one connotation of imagination means “viewing mentally,” then speculation is a kind of Aristotelian exercise of the imagination. Another connotation of the word “to speculate” means [t]o engage in the buying and selling of commodities or effects in order to profit by a rise or fall in their market value; to undertake, to take part or invest in, a business enterprise or transaction of a risky nature in the expectation of considerable gain. Also with on or in and in figurative context. Speculation in this sense means taking an action in the face of uncertainty. The implication here is that there is risk in speculation, even of the contemplative kind. To speculate also connotes “[t]o engage in thought or ref lection, esp. of a conjectural or theoretical nature, on or upon a subject.” Especially in historical discourse, speculation is frequently tied to conjecture. And recall that conjecture means “[t]o conclude, infer, or judge, from appearances or probabilities . . . [t]o form an opinion or supposition as to facts on grounds admittedly insufficient; to guess, surmise; to propose as a conjecture in textual or historical criticism, etc.” Speculation involves making a judgment based on uncertainty, uncertainty stemming from a relative lack of evidence. Beyond must have, the speculative mood is the realm of might have. Under what circumstances do historians engage in speculation? Frederic Gleach introduces us to the idea of “controlled speculation” as an approach to

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reading and interpreting documents. The Pocahontas story is a well-known part of American lore, no doubt in part because of the Disney version of the story released in 1995. The story goes that Jamestown settler John Smith was taken prisoner by a group of Powhatan Indians, dragged through a series of tests, brought before the chief and is about to be beheaded only to be saved by the intercession of Pocahontas. The lore goes that Pocahontas took pity upon Smith, perhaps even fell in love with him, thus explaining her saving his life. At least this is how Smith recounts the incident in his journals. Historians have long dismissed Smith’s retelling of the events, not that he did not endure them but that he misunderstood their meaning. Smith’s life was never in danger, and indeed Pocahontas’ “intercession” was not an attempt to save his life. Scholars generally surmise that “Pocahontas [was] acting a part in a ritual, perhaps to adopt Smith.”1 Gleach’s interpretation is that Smith’s ordeal was indeed a kind of ritual (he was never in actual danger), but that Smith – and, more importantly, the English colony – was being brought into the Powhatan world: The nature of that process cannot be known with certainty, but given the context, it is possible to speculate with some measure of conviction. At the end of his captivity, when Smith was released. He was made chief of a territory for the English to occupy within Tsenacommacah. When he was first captured, however, he and the rest of the English colony were outsiders to the Powhatan world. Some transformation clearly took place. Given the significance of repetition, sacrifice, and symbolic meanings in the Powhatan culture, this ritual may be best understood as a ritual of redefinition, establishing the forms of the relationship between colony and the Powhatans, defining the place of the English in the Powhatan world, and transforming them from outsiders to insiders.2 Gleach arrives at this conclusion via a process he calls “controlled speculation.” Controlled speculation involves the use of comparative material from other cultural or historical situations to infer crucial information that might be missing or obscured in the historical record of a particular situation; the comparative material is selected from contexts that appear most closely analogous. Evidence and techniques from both history and anthropology are used to develop and support speculative inference where information is lacking or obscured in the original sources. These speculative inferences are controlled by being carefully and explicitly grounded in the ethnographic, historical, and/or archeological records.3 (emphasis mine) By looking at cultural practices from within and outside the Powhatan culture, Gleach arrived at his conclusions.

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All historians engage in inference, but Gleach describes a specific kind of inference here, and again this takes us back to our analogy of the elastic band around the peg of evidence. Inferences stretch from the evidence as the band stretches from the peg. But how far may we extend the band before we are too far away from the evidence, when the band snaps, as it were? Gleach concedes that with controlled speculation, we are indeed venturing into the realm of conjecture with our inferences. Nevertheless, even these conjectures must be, in his words, grounded in evidence. Gleach posits four questions that can “help guide and control this process of speculation”: 1

2

3

4

Is there a reason to believe the existence of some practice or institution in the context being studied? This might be based on passing mention or partial description in an historical account, for example Are there other groups who might provide appropriate comparison? Such might be neighboring groups, particularly for questions closely tied to a particular environment or linguistically and/or culturally related groups for questions of cultural meaning. A group that is close in both physical and cultural terms is ideal, but even in such a case, there may be marked differences in specific phenomena Is a similar phenomenon documented in a comparable context? For the controlled speculation to work, there must be at least one case from which comparisons can be drawn. It must be documented in sufficient detail to evaluate whether it supports for contradicts the original evidence Is there contradictory evidence? In the strictest sense any contradiction should refute the comparison, ending the speculation. In practice, such contradictions themselves must be evaluated; they may stem from biased observation in the original documents, rather than from inaccuracies in the comparison.4

“Controlled speculation is inherently subjective,” by which he means that “it depends upon the scholar’s understandings as they develop through experience and knowledge of the situations being studied.”5 Recall in chapter 3 where I discussed the status of the speaker when making modal claims. Speculative inferences also appear to be justified in part by the person making the speculative statement. “Historical interpretation is inherently subjective,” Gleach concludes, “even imaginative.” Given that he is describing speculative inference here as a kind of educated conjecture, we might surmise that Gleach means “imaginative” as the Platonic, creative kind. But that creative imagination must nevertheless retain its ties to the Aristotelian. Like any other historical research, speculation must be grounded wherever possible in documented sources, which must be identified for the reader. When speculating from comparative material, these sources must

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be evaluated not only for their reliability, but also for their relevance to the context to which they are being extended.6 In Gleach’s case, the contexts he is extending here means looking for practices from one context to explain behaviors in another context. In the case of Pocahontas and James Smith, this means looking at comparative examples from cultures proximate to the Powhatan, cultures for whom we have more plentiful evidence and examples and inferring analogous kinds of behavior in the Powhatan context. When partial descriptions from one group seem to match more completely described cultural practices from related or neighboring groups, and particularly when similarities in other related phenomena can be documented, in the absence of contradictory evidence an assumption of similarity between the two cases is justified.7 “They do not prove an inference,” he concludes, “but only demonstrate its plausibility.”8 The speculation being undertaken here is another kind of modal statement. “To conjecture” connotes a judgment based on incomplete information, and as such, historians are always reasoning about the past based on incomplete information. When under conditions of controlled speculation, the historian is arguing for what might have been present, even if it is obscured from our historical vision either by the lack of evidence or, in this case, by evidence that itself is obscuring what actually occurred. Some historians also speculate and conjecture about that for which there is no evidence, since the events being conjectured never actually occurred.

Counterfactuals Imagine a game of chess. Each player sits across a board from each other, looking at the white and black pieces, contemplating their first moves. The player playing White moves first and has a myriad of choices in front of her. She could move a pawn to d4 or e4 or even f4. She might even move her Knight to c3. After White makes her move, the player playing Black now has a number of choices as well. If White plays e4, then Black could move a pawn to c5 or e6, or could move a Knight to f6. If he chooses Nf6, then White might move to e5. If Black plays c6 instead, then White might play d4 or Nc3. The point here is that at each move in a game of chess, there are host of possibilities. After the game ends, a record or report of the game indicates the moves that were actually made, the history of the game, if you will. But lurking behind this game is another realm: the game that did not happen. When White chose to move e4 and Black chose Nf6, they bypassed other moves that each might have made. After ten moves, the game board would look very different had different

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moves, different choices been made. Throughout the game, both players are asking, “What if?” A game of chess is a simple system, and therefore not an ideal analogy for what happens in history. The pieces begin at pre-designated positions – players may not set them up wherever they choose. Each piece is constrained to certain movements – behaviors, if you will – which do not change over the course of a game. The same is true of the rules: a chess player cannot alter the rules on a whim. Nor may new pieces appear over the course of the game. The reason that chess is an imperfect analogy for the actions that occur in history is that human events are rarely governed by static rules. Modal statements and even many statements in historical fiction are about, or presume to be about, an actual (past) reality. That is, in the modal mood we are describing a state of affairs that we assume was actual, even if we lack direct evidence. This is what Collingwood meant by the a priori imagination, in that we imagine a world that we assume was actual even if we lack direct experience or evidence of its actuality. When we say that Bertrand must have known that Arnaud was an imposter, we are conjecturing a state of affairs that we are claiming must have actually existed. The modal mood is a statement of the degree of certainty we have regarding that presumed state of affairs. The chess game I just described includes moves that might have – but did not actually – happened. These moves, the game that was not played, is ontologically inactual. Compare this state of affairs to history and the past: can we examine the events that did not happen, but could have had other decisions been made or other actions have occurred? In doing so, we are moving into a different terrain from the study of the past. We are, indeed, examining a realm that is adjacent to the past: the subjunctive conditional. We cannot presume anything actual about this realm – it never happened, thus it has no actuality. Some historians have, nevertheless, examined this realm as if it did actually happen. We really are within the world of the imagination here, and I do mean in the Platonic sense. Although, in what follows, it will also be clear that even when writing in the counterfactual mode, there remain ties to the Aristotelian actual world. Imagining a world where, for example, Adolph Hitler is killed (like millions of others) in the bunkers of World War I means imagining in a Platonic sense. What is common among those historians who explore counterfactuals is that they have developed strict rules and protocols for doing so. In conjuring an alternative historical reality, these historians nevertheless ground these created worlds within the ontologically real one. Geoffrey Hawthorn evokes the novelist Robert Musil’s idea of “a sense of possibility” as one way to approach counterfactuals. “A sense of the possible ‘might be defined outright as the capacity to think how everything could ‘just as easily’ be, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.”9 Musil views this as a “creative disposition,” implying that the sense of the possible resides toward the Platonic end of our conceptual diagram. Perhaps we

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should rearrange the words: to sense the possible, we must creatively imagine the hidden adjacent world (the chess moves not made but that could have been played), this shadow universe that surrounds the actual. Musil describes those with this sense as “possibilitarians,” those who “live within a finer web, a web of haze, imaginings, fantasy and the subjunctive mood.”10 By subjunctive, we mean a mood that expresses what is imagined or wished for but not actual. Is there a phenomenology of the possible? That is, are we able to experience the space of possibility? Recall the experiment we conducted when we asked historians what they could see in their mind’s eye when they read a document. One conclusion we drew from our experiment is that in imagining what we see when reading a document, the historian creates a kind of mental experience of the past. What do historians “see” when we (re)construct the possible? When engaging with the space of possibility, perhaps we similarly create a kind of mental experience. What is the ontological status of the space of possibilities? Possibilities are not items at any world or in any head on which we can suppose that we or actual agents will cognitively converge, or about which, even if they do, they could be said to be certain, and thus to know. There is no fact of them. . . . It promises that kind of understanding . . . which comes from locating an actual in a space of possibles.11 Another way of thinking about this is to say that what is actual in history was once part of a space of possibilities. The “actuals” rise out of this space: again, think of our chess metaphor: 1. e4 is but a possibility among others, until that moment that White makes the move. The actual emerges from the space of the possible. “I am inclined to the view that the human world consists of contingent particulars,” says Hawthorn.12 This all suggests that we are surrounded by unseen, latent possibilities. In order to apprehend these possibilities, it would seem they are accessible only via the imagination. And by imagination, I mean the Platonic – with a tenuous grounding in the Aristotelian. The subjunctive alternative world of counterfactuals is not the past; however, counterfactuals are built from at least some features of the actual past. We can think and reason about this world, even explore it and make discoveries using the historians’ thought process – albeit, a thought process stretched very far to the right of our conceptual diagram. When imagining alternative possibilities, we are in effect making actual historical figures or structures and systems behave differently than they actually did. Our imaginings of those actual people and systems draw from a similar Aristotelian impulse as the one that sees and perceives the past when reading documents. Manipulating that actual world is a creative act. Indeed, the ratio of creation to mimesis is heavily weighted toward the creative, the Platonic. But at least some Aristotelian reconstruction is present. The historian Catherine Gallagher observes an interesting cultural phenomenon: that at the end of the twentieth century, “across disciplines, in legal and

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policy debates, as well as in popular forms of entertainment, Americans seized on past moments of historical indeterminacy and imagined possible but unrealized alternative consequences that might have resulted”13 (emphasis mine). “As a result, the counterfactual imagination has become a familiar feature of our culture, and the forms of its propagation continue to proliferate.”14 We should say that, especially since the 1990s, there have been more serious attempts by historians to imagine a counterfactual past. However, Gallagher demonstrates that the counterfactual imagination has a long history, dating at least to Leibnitz, thus not a recent postmodern fad. But at the same time, we may wonder the degree to which the propagation of the counterfactual imagination has spread across the discipline of history. Indeed, historians generally agree with E.H. Carr, who famously quipped that counterfactual history is a mere parlor game: “One can always play a parlour-game with the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing . . . to do with history.”15 Might have been is, of course, a kind of modal construction, and it undergirds much counterfactual reasoning. But note the differences between “might have been” and “must have been” that we explored in the modal chapter. The latter is a statement of probability about a world that was ontologically actual, if concealed from direct evidence. The former is a speculation about a world that is ontologically inactual. Ontology is the key difference in these two verbal constructions, and the argument of Carr and others is that historians have no business exploring the world of might have been. Most professional historians would seem to agree: note that there are not any journals devoted to counterfactual history and that such histories that are produced tend to be found only in special collections or issues. Counterfactuals are not a regular part of historical practice. One reason might be that historians think of counterfactuals as being “too imaginative,” in the Platonic sense. Perhaps here, with counterfactuals, the imaginative frontier has finally been crossed? Gallagher offers an excellent definition of a counterfactual, or a “counterfactual-historical hypothesis”: “an explicit or implicit past-tense, hypothetical, conditional conjecture pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact.” She gives as an example the assassination of President Kennedy: “If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 and had lived to be a two-term president, the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968.” This statement is a hypothesis and, like all hypotheses, must be tested. Indeed such a statement would provoke rather intense debate, I suspect: Kennedy’s aggressive Bay of Pigs fiasco might be cited as evidence of a muscular foreign policy that might have accelerated the war in Vietnam had Kennedy lived to accelerate it. On the other hand, that same foreign policy disaster might have tempered Kennedy’s attitudes and indeed tempered his actions in Vietnam. The hypothesis “ventures a probable consequence of the assassination’s non-existence.”16 In the counterfactual mode, the historian engages in a kind of inference, albeit an inference that stretches very far beyond the peg of our evidence. In the above example, making the statement “the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968” is based on an inference of Kennedy’s presumed behavior had he

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lived. Given what we know of Kennedy, we infer what he might have believed, what he might have done. Gallagher observes that the counterfactual-historical mode proportionately enlarges ideas of its “characters.” Indeed, the nature of a “counterfactual character” is one of the mode’s most distinctive features. When a person or a group is detached from what it actually thought, did, and suffered, a space opens up for the attribution of different characteristics to the same entity: different thoughts, actions, and experiences that might plausibly have belonged to it had it faced different conditions. This might at first glance seem like the eradication of what was formerly thought to be the person’s character, but instead it tends to produce an expansion of that category.17 Asking the question “how would this person have acted, behaved, thought given another set of circumstances?” is an act of the creative imagination. Given what we know of this person (i.e., their actual actions, behaviors and thoughts), can we project their responses in a non-actual, imagined situation? We are, in effect, taking characteristics from one domain and inserting them into another, not unlike the way Gleach did when interpreting the experiences of John Smith. Even in this imaginative act, even as we are creating and inventing new responses, there remains a tether to something actual. When Gallagher asks what would JFK do vis-a-vis Vietnam had he not been assassinated, we might project an answer based on what we know of Kennedy’s previous actions. Indeed, as I noted earlier, a case could be made for Kennedy accelerating US involvement in Vietnam based on his aggressive actions during the Bay of Pigs. It is also possible that Kennedy might have learned his lesson at the Bay of Pigs and become more circumspect about the application of American power. We are speculating here, of course, and thus treading aggressively upon a Platonic imaginative plane, all the while being nevertheless constrained by the actuality of Kennedy’s personality and judgment. “No longer f lattened against the outlines of their actual destinies,” concludes Gallagher, “these counterfactual characters have the vitality of the permanently unfinished.”18 This act is similar to the novelist’s efforts to “get inside the mind” of an historical figure. In the counterfactual case, we are extending this mental act to consider what other thoughts an historical figure might have had, what other actions they might have taken. In conducting this kind of counterfactual, Gallagher councils, “we must also probe the degree of allowable divergence, the breaking point beyond which the identity of the character, bending to the arc of a different destination, might be altogether disconnected from the original being.”19 “Allowable divergences” and “breaking point” evoke the terms we have been using in our conceptual diagram. “Divergence” implies a moving away from the Aristotelian actuality of the historical person, a departure from the ontologically real. “Breaking point” suggests that boundary, that frontier, where our imaginations have crossed over into the purely creative, Platonic realm. Where this boundary lies remains uncertain,

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or at least is a complex frontier, not a solid line. We know, we intuit when we are in a new “land,” as it were, but there is no sign identifying or demarking the crossing from one domain to the other. Importantly, Gallagher notes that counterfactual hypotheses are “hinged onto the actual historical record.” That is, they are grounded in the ontologically (historically) actual. A new historical reality is not invented, but, rather, facets of the actual past are imaginatively manipulated to explore alternative outcomes. Indeed, counterfactuals often center on “a juncture that is widely recognized to have been both crucial and underdetermined.”20 This suggests that in the ontologically actual world, there are joints, fissures or other features that are somehow “loose” or malleable, or at least more potentially malleable than more stable features. This is another way of describing historical indeterminacy, that because there are features of the world that are indeterminate, alternative outcomes are possible. The psychologist Ruth M.J. Byrne observes that counterfactuals are a part of everyone’s mental apparatus, not just of some historians. Indeed, “people create a counterfactual alternative to reality by mentally altering or ‘undoing’ some aspects of the facts in their mental representation of reality.”21 She argues that “some aspects of reality seem more ‘mutable’ – that is, more readily changed in a mental simulation of an event – than others.” In her experiments, Byrne asked individuals to all imagine the same situation and then asked them what would have needed to change in order to bring about a different outcome. There turned out to be consistent regularities in those aspects of reality that the individuals changed or altered. “These regularities,” Byrne concludes, “indicate that there are ‘joints’ in reality, junctures that attract everyone’s attention. There are points at which reality is slippable.”22 She also refers to these junctures as “‘fault lines’ of reality.” It is noteworthy that Byrne and Gallagher both use the term “junctures” to describe this phenomenon of locating specific parts of reality that are more indeterminate than other parts. Historians exploring counterfactuals no doubt also home in on these junctures, joints and fault lines. Gallagher observes that counterfactualists tend to vary events while holding historical entities constant between Our Timeline and the Alternate Timeline. Thus they seem to assume that the entities (e.g. persons, governments, institutions, armies, political parties, nations, families, dynasties, empress, races, etc.) remain identical to those in our actual history even though their destinies – the totality of what they think, do, and suffer – are changed . . . what philosophers sometimes call Transworld identity.23 This observation suggests that historical counterfactualists are like any other person who engages in counterfactual reasoning: that some areas of reality are more slippable and malleable than others. Another way of saying this is that some facets of reality are not as slippable and thus a constraint on the degree of creative

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imagination counterfactualists permit themselves. These “less slippable” areas are what we might identify as the peg of the ontologically actual. Gallagher identifies three categories of counterfactuals. The first are what she identifies as the “alternate-history novel,” which is characterized not only by an alternative sequence of events but with the inclusion of fictional characters. Stephen L. Carter’s book The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln would be an example of this genre. It is a work of fiction, and I think it was intended as an entertaining novel, not a serious (counterfactual) historical investigation. However, in an introspective Author’s Note, Carter reveals some of the interesting questions that drove his narrative. These questions are suggestive of the value of counterfactuals. “When I told people I was writing a novel about a hypothetical impeachment trial of Abraham Lincoln, they tended to have two reactions,” Carter recounts. Some assumed that I must believe that Lincoln should have been impeached and removed from office. Others were skeptical that Lincoln could possibly have done anything even colorably impeachable; or assumed that the most likely political attacks would be from the forces favoring slavery. Lincoln has become so large in our imaginations that we might easily forget how envied, mistrusted, and occasionally despised he was by the prominent Abolitionists and intellectuals of his day, including leaders of his own party.24 Should be is a different modal construction from could be or must have. “Should” implies a value judgment, not a statement about uncertainty or ontological probability. Indeed, it is one of the critiques of counterfactual history that its practitioners are replaying history to have outcomes more to their liking, to satisfy some political agenda or need. Carter is not doing that in this instance. While there are fictional characters in Carter’s novel – including the main character – most of the figures are actual and real. They are placed in different circumstances, making different choices, but acting plausibly based on the actual historical context. “As for Lincoln, the accusations set forth in my novel are nearly all matters of historical record,” Carter writes. Lincoln did shut down newspapers he believed were impeding the war effort. He did arrest opposition spokesmen. He did suspend habeas corpus, and ignore court orders demanding the release of prisoners. He did place Northern cities under martial law. He did shut down the Maryland legislature by force.25 Carter then asks, “Are these impeachable offenses?” Like all other kinds of historical inquiry, counterfactual history begins with questions. “The question whether Lincoln, had he survived, would have suffered Andrew Johnson’s fate and faced an impeachment trial is of little interest to

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contemporary historians.” Carter does not suggest reasons for this, although I suspect it is because of the general disinterest historians have in counterfactual inquiries. But scholars avidly debated this proposition a hundred years ago and more – that is, closer in time to the titanic battles between Radical republicans and Andrew Johnson. . . . More recent scholars scoff at the notion that so canny a politician as Lincoln would have seen his presidency wrecked on the treacherous shoals that nearly doomed Johnson, who entirely lacked the talent for persuasion or compromise. And while it is true that Johnson in many instances followed his predecessor’s policies toward the defeated South, and that Congress hated those policies, it is also true that he went a good deal further, committing a series of political blunders that would have been unimaginable from Lincoln.26 (emphasis mine) Carter uses the term “unimaginable” here. I understand he is more than likely using this term as an expression, but it nevertheless bears some analysis. What might this term mean? In a way, it is a nonsensical word in this context, for as stated, Carter’s novel has indeed very cleverly imagined what he states is unimaginable. Perhaps unimaginable in this context means “improbable” or “highly unlikely.” Given what we know of the person who was Abraham Lincoln, given what we know of his personality, his judgment, his outlook on the world, we might conclude that certain counterfactual actions were highly improbable coming from Lincoln, and thus unimaginable to us. What are the conditions that induce us to consider some scenarios or states of the world unimaginable? Perhaps this is a statement of the limitations we place upon ourselves? That is, what we consider to be unimaginable is that state of affairs that we do not permit ourselves to consider. In this formulation, unimaginability refers to the limits we place upon our own cognition: that which we dare not imagine. This suggests a conceptual boundary perhaps beyond what is contained in our diagram. The second category of counterfactuals Gallagher terms “alternative history.” This is a genre “for works that describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record, thereby inventing a long counterfactual narrative with a correspondingly divergent fictional world, while drawing the dramatis personae exclusively from the historical record.”27 Such an alternative history might be one where we were to write a lengthy description of Kennedy’s escalation (or de-escalation) of the Vietnam War, without fictional characters but with actual characters behaving in ways contrary to the historical record. Such an alternative history might include lengthy descriptions of conversations between Kennedy and his advisors, considering the issues they might have debated, the conf licting council offered by Kennedy’s advisors. This would be a rich, deep narrative description of inactual events and happenings.

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Gallagher’s final category is counterfactual histories. Those historians who have recently ventured to rescue counterfactual history from the accusation that they are mere parlor games write in this genre. These are often histories of wars, economic crises, or assassinations in which sudden, unexpected changes in the status quo occur. .  .  . The common denominators in this lot, besides their counterfactual-historical hypotheses, are their generally analytical rather than narrative quality and their tendency to indicate multiple possibilities that went unrealized rather than to trace out single historical alternative trajectories in detail.28 Gallagher draws a distinction between the second and third categories of counterfactuals, “between the ‘constrained’ analytic kind of counterfactual and the more ‘exuberant,’ ‘imaginative,’ and extended narrative varieties of alternate history.”29 This kind of classification suggests that, at the far edges of our conceptual diagram, the counterfactual history practiced by historians – as opposed to novelists – is constrained in that it retains its links, however tenuous, to the reality of the actual world, to the Aristotelian imagination. If alternative history is “exuberant” and “imaginative,” it is in that it must be more untethered from that actuality and is more creative and Platonic in its imaginative orientation. Philip Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker assembled a group of historians to engage in such analytic counterfactual thought experiments. The authors asked a variety of counterfactual questions: What difference would a Catholic England have made? Would the world be “modern” if William III’s invasion of England in 1688 had failed? What if Hitler had won in the east but Germany still lost World War II? Tetlock, Lebow and Parker describe their conceptual terrain: alternative realities, imaginary universes, possible worlds, “a logical shadow universe.”30 Their investigations of these shadow worlds are grounded in a specific, rigorous method that has one effect of placing constraints upon the Platonic imagination. The editors’ approach to counterfactuals depends upon three “procedural requests,” constraints that each of the authors were asked to consider in constructing their counterfactuals. Contributors “all respected the minimal-rewrite rule, which excludes what-if scenarios that begin with wild departures from reality (sometimes called ‘miracle’ counterfactuals), and instead launched their inquiries from plausible premises that require tweaking as little of the actual historical record as possible.”31 Next, all contributors were to “address the objection that counterfactual history is hopelessly speculative.” The contributors accomplished this by adopting three criteria for justifying the connecting principles in their counterfactual scenarios: consistency with well-established historical facts and regularities, consistency with well-established statistical generalizations that transcend what is true at a particular time and place, and

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consistency with well-established theoretical laws of cause and effect (from the physical, biological, and even social sciences).32 When describing counterfactuals about the Northern Irish Troubles, for example, the editors note that “the surviving records show that well-placed observers at the time vigorously opposed each of these provocative actions.”33 This again indicates their appeal to documents – to an ontologically actual grounding – when considering counterfactuals. Contributors were reminded that “[t]he deeper [they] try to see into the futures of their counterfactual worlds the frailer their connecting principles become.”34 That is, the authors were not permitted to extend their investigations too far into, what we might term, “the future that wasn’t.” The editors do not place a specific time limit on this – they did not say, “[D]o not go beyond ten years” – but the implications is clear: third- or fourth-order speculations are epistemologically tenuous and should be avoided. Finally, contributors were asked to address the concern that counterfactuals are hopelessly self-serving . . . to be explicit about the distinctive benefits of framing historical questions in counterfactual forms, about which schools of thought are most likely to take umbrage at the conclusions they reached, about what surprised them in working through their thought experiments.35 These procedural questions – this rigorous methodology – are designed to provide an Aristotelian grounding to what is fundamentally a Platonic endeavor. Even with the Aristotelian foundation, with counterfactuals, our creative imagination is stretched far beyond what historians typically permit. Even if historians generally dismiss counterfactuals, Tetlock, Lebow and Parker argue that any historian who establishes a causal or cause-and-effect argument nevertheless must admit to counterfactuals. “Whenever we draw a causeeffect lesson from the past, we commit ourselves to the claim that, if key links in the causal chain were broken, history would have unfolded otherwise.”36 “In all but a thoroughly Leibnizian world,” concurs Geoffrey Hawthorn, “an explanation suggests alternatives.”37 Indeed, The force of an explanation turns on the counterfactual which it implies. If such-and-such a cause or combination of causes had not been present, we imply, or if such-and-such an actor or series of actions had not been taken, things would have been different. If we do not believe they would have been, we should not give the causes or actions the importance that we do.38 In other words, an explanation locates something in actuality, showing its actual connections with other actual things. It success as an answer to the question

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“why?” will turn on the plausibility of the reasoning . . . that we invoke to make the connection. The plausibility of this reasoning will turn on the counterfactual it suggests. And if the counterfactual is itself not plausible, we should not give the explanation the credence we otherwise might. 39 The argument here is that, inasmuch as all historians establish cause-and-effect relationships, they are at the same time engaging in counterfactual history even if they purport not to. It turns out that even E.H. Carr himself, the leading critic of counterfactuals, engaged in counterfactual reasoning. Carr had advocated for appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. When the evils of appeasement had become apparent, however, Carr resorted to historical counterfactuals .  .  . to reduce the cognitive dissonance (and embarrassment) of acknowledging that he had been wrong by arguing that “I was almost right and if only the policy I favored had been properly implemented, things would have worked out so much better”. . . . Carr sought refuge in counterfactual reasoning to explain why events had perversely failed to evolve as he had predicted.40 Tetlock, Lebow and Parker argue that a principal benefit of counterfactual thinking is to guard against “hindsight bias.” At the humanist end of the continuum, we find scholars who use counterfactuals in a far more speculative fashion to infuse lost possibilities with fresh narrative life – to give us some imaginative sense for how different life would have been if, say, the Persians had won at Salamis or the Spanish Armada had prevailed in the English Channel. Their agenda is to save us from the cognitive tyranny of hindsight bias: to prevent the world that did happen from obstructing our view of the panorama of possible worlds that could have sprung into being but for tiny twists of fate, to sharpen our appreciation of how uncertain almost everyone was about what would have happened before they learned what did happen, and to sensitize us to the intricate complexity and probabilistic character of the causal processes that produced the world we happen to inhabit.41 How are they using the word “imaginative” here? They employ this term in other contexts as well, as when they refer to “analytical and imaginative tools.”42 Extending the idea of resisting hindsight bias, they write, “Giving freer rein to our imaginations can stop the real world from occluding our vision of possible worlds that may have ‘almost’ come into being at various junctures in history.”43 Imagination here suggests that a creative faculty is required to conjure nonexistent shadow worlds; imagination here refers more to the Platonic imagination,

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even if such imaginative creativity derives from an Aristotelian actual world. “Factual framing, which takes the real world as its starting point,” they observe, “comes more naturally to most of us than counterfactual framing, which requires constructing alternatives to that world.”44 Note that they use the word “constructing,” which, again, suggests that the counterfactual realm is one that is made up or invented by the historian. In using the word “imagination” in the Platonic sense, the editors more than imply that the counterfactual historian creates or invents this shadow world, although we shall see that the editors believe that imagination must be grounded in an Aristotelian reality. Counterfactual history is not pure invention but nevertheless extends the imagination very deep into the right side of our diagram. Carr and other critics of counterfactual history argue that some counterfactual historians write as if they have carte blanche to project whatever they want into their hypothetical worlds – settling old scores; indulging fantasies; amusing themselves and readers with comic coincidences; and above all, titillating those quintessentially counterfactual emotions of regret . . . and relief . . . Carelessly practiced, counterfactual history quickly becomes a branch of social science fiction.45 That is, counterfactual history can, if poorly practiced, extend too far toward the Platonic imagination. When Tetlock, Lebow and Parker say that counterfactual history depends on our ability “to bring alternative worlds to imaginative life” and of “infusing imaginative life into lost worlds,”46 they might be suggesting that when we venture out of the realm of the actual past, into the subjunctive, it is perhaps unavoidable that we must employ more of the Platonic imagination than historians are comfortable with. Perhaps this reliance on the Platonic is the source of the disdain counterfactual history has long suffered.

Conclusion Counterfactual history might be defined as starting with an Aristotelian reconstruction that the historian then creatively alters in the mind’s eye. These are mental deformations of reality similar to the thought experiment I began the book with. I had asked you to imagine something familiar, like your house. Then I asked you to color it purple. That act of deforming or altering our mental picture of something actual is a move in the direction of the Platonic imagination (even if grounded in the Aristotelian reality of your house). With counterfactual history, we similarly manipulate historical reality, the way a topologist manipulates a shape, deforming it into something else even if the object retains some of its original properties. Counterfactuals do not abandon completely the Aristotelian reality of the past, even though the ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic imagination in a counterfactual leans heavily toward the right of our diagram.

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Aristotelian imagination

FIGURE 5.1

Platonic imagination

Ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic Imagination in Counterfactuals

But like the pale blue dot that is the Earth when seen from the edge of the solar system, a counterfactual is at some great distance from the peg of that Aristotelian world (see Figure 5.1).

Notes 1 Frederic W. Gleach, “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myth: The Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith,” in Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, eds., Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2003), 40. 2 Ibid., 51–52. 3 Ibid., 41–42. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Ibid., 42. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 43. “Another set of assumptions involves the nature of historical evidence. The documentary sources are assumed to reflect real phenomena, although they must be interpreted and biases in observation and transmission must be taken into account. The comparisons made are not between original sources, but between the cultural phenomena represented by the original sources.” p. 44. 8 Ibid., 44. “Historical texts must be read creatively and with imagination; they do not simply speak for themselves and always must be interpreted.” p. 69 9 Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Ibid., 10. 13 Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1. See also Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011). 14 Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 1–2. 15 Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Unmaking the West: “What-If?” Scenarios That Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 28.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 2. Ibid., 12 Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 2. Ruth M.J. Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 3. Ibid. Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 11. Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 657–658. Ibid., 658 Ibid., 659 Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, eds., Unmaking the West, 15, 18. Ibid., 34. Ibid. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid., 17. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds, 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16–17. Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, eds., Unmaking the West, 32–33. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 36.

CONCLUSION

How much imagination are historians permitted? The answer, it turns out, proves complicated. My initial reaction to my colleague’s question was far too hasty and simplistic, in part because I was using the wrong connotation of the word “imagination.” In fact, there are at least two connotations, and both are operating simultaneously when we engage in historical thinking, another nuance I had missed. One form of imagination, we have labeled “Aristotelian,” after Aristotle, who defined imagination in this sense to mean the ability to recall and visualize sense perceptions. Imagination in the Aristotelian sense means the ability to picture in the mind’s eye that which is currently absent, to picture as close to a faithful likeness of something that is currently not present to our senses to perceive. With the Aristotelian imagination, we perceive something as if it were actually present for us to sense. What I have termed the “Platonic” imagination, on the other hand, refers to imagination in the creative sense, which Plato saw as demonic and irrational. Platonic imagination means envisioning that which is unreal or inactual, for which nothing actually exists for us to perceive, save in the mind’s eye. When I exclaimed to my colleague that historians do not use their imaginations, I realize now that I meant it in this Platonic sense: that, unlike, say, fiction writers, we do not “make things up.” But even this conclusion was far too hasty and ill-considered: historians often have occasion to “invent” things. Historians are not in the business of simply copying down verbatim what is written in their documents. If history were nothing more than exactly copying documents, we would be in a realm of pure mimesis. But historians draw inferences from evidence all the time; that is, we see more in our evidence than what is explicitly stated in that evidence. What we “see” when we draw inferences is often a kind of mimetic attempt to see what must have been there but is not directly present to us. R.G. Collingwood identified this as the a priori imagination, to see what could not help but to have

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been there. But occasionally our inferences also tend off toward invention and creation, a Platonic act. Even at the fuzzy front end of our research – when we are encountering documents in the archives – we are simultaneously attempting to mimetically picture what we are reading and, at the same time, creatively inserting visual images that may or may not have been actually present. As we read documents, as we reconstruct the past, historians are building a mental image in the mind’s eye. The imagination in this Aristotelian sense is like a staging area, where we construct a mental image of the past that we then later “translate” into written form, as when we write books and articles about the past. At the same time, we are filling those mental images with inventions and creations that are more Platonic in nature. The historian’s mental image of the past is a complex combination of Aristotelian and Platonic imagination, and any historical work ref lects some ratio of each. Indeed, the reader might take the analytic diagram we have been using throughout this book and apply it to any work of history they might read, in order to make evident this complex ratio. The diagram also works for smaller sections of these works: chapters, paragraphs, sentences, even individual words. Creative invention – the Platonic imagination – is a common part of the way historians engage in their work. When we employ a concept, for example, we are as much inventing a structure and inserting it into the past as we are faithfully reconstructing something that was once present. An historical concept is a linguistic object constructed by an historian to represent a meaningful collection of events, happenings, behaviors and actions in the past. The historian sees a pattern and gives it a name, even if the contemporaries who lived the experience did not so name it. Take the concept of the “Atlantic World,” the system of economic and cultural interactions between people who rimmed the Atlantic Ocean, a concept “invented” in the early 1990s to describe an historical reality of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. People living in Amsterdam or Baltimore would not have used this term, but the lives they lived and the system to which they were a part – the particular grouping of actual happenings from the past – were not a fiction. Historical concepts – invented things that nevertheless represent the ontologically actual – sit right in the middle of our conceptual diagram. Although there is some disagreement among historians, there is a convincing case to be made that a periodization is, likewise, an invention. For the sake of managing the wealth of historical information, if nothing else, historians must break off a segment of time as the focus of our studies. One could argue that such a division of time is arbitrary, done in order to facilitate analysis, and thus an artificial creation of the historian, not the identification of an actual pattern in the past. While perhaps arbitrary, in that it ref lects a choice made by the historian, a periodization must nevertheless refer to something actual about the past. Historians may create and invent but must nevertheless remain tethered to an Aristotelian foundation. At the very least, a periodization is a complex mixture of Aristotelian and Platonic imagination.

136

Conclusion

When historians identify a work as being “too imaginative,” they usually mean one where the ratio of Aristotelian to Platonic skews too far to the right of the diagram. The inf lection point, the phase transition toward too much imagination, lies somewhere in the middle of the diagram, but there is no exact rule for where that boundary is located, about “how far right” is too far. Indeed, we cannot affix a single, solid straight line but must settle for a gray “borderland” between the two, an area of overlap between two entities. Like a sand dune, the borderland shifts location depending on the historical work under consideration. Some moves are clearly too Platonic for historians’ liking. An historian may not creatively imagine – fabricate – evidence, for example, an unforgivable transgression. Murkier, but still troubling for most historians, would be inventing dialogue between two historical figures, even if such dialogue were clearly identified as conjecture or supposition. Historians might dismiss this as merely a trick, a literary embellishment, but outside the bounds of proper history. Historians do seem to have some latitude to speculate, as long as such speculation is transparently identified as such. However, an overabundance of speculation in an historical work might be grounds for a work to be summarily dismissed by historians. Similarly, an overreliance upon the modal mood – saying must have been for example – might signal that a work is too imaginative to be credibly called a history. But even if an historical work crosses over that borderland toward the Platonic imagination, it is not necessarily rejected by other historians as overly imaginative. Indeed, we read many instances of historical works that contained an (over) abundance of Platonic imagery, only to have such works lauded by other historians. And there are also works that, while crossing deep into the Platonic side of the diagram, were subject to widespread censure by historians. “Too much imagination” is not intrinsic to a work of history; it is determined by the context of the larger community of historians who read and pronounce judgment over the work. Historians as readers collectively determine whether a work is too imaginative. Consider Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre. Despite the concerns raised by Robert Finlay, his was a lone voice. The vast majority of readers did not reject Natalie Zemon Davis’ imaginative inventions, and in fact, they were largely laudatory of them. Had more reviewers taken Finlay’s position – that Davis’s interpretation was built from too much conjecture – historians today would reject the work as overly imaginative. There is no consistent rule about how far to the right an historical work might be located and still be considered a work of history, because historians treat each case differently. The identification of the historian writing the work makes a substantial difference in whether the work is judged to be too imaginative. An expert with deep familiarity with a particular period of history and, especially, an understanding of the sources from the period is generally given license to speculate more than a novice would be permitted. If there is a paucity of evidence, an historian will generally be granted wider latitude to speculate, to draw elongated inferences, to imagine more than what is explicitly stated in the meager documents, but, again,

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only if the historian has the experience and standing to pronounce such speculations and if their Platonic imagination is suitably restrained. Indeed, engaging in work that resides on the right of our conceptual diagram is permitted when the historian’s intentions are made clear from the beginning. Writers of counterfactual histories make clear that they are engaging in speculation, but a kind of speculation that is subject to rules and heuristics that nevertheless restrain the Platonic imagination. The outcry among historians of Edmund Morris’ biography of Ronald Reagan was exacerbated by the fact that Morris did not disclose those places where he was exercising Platonic imagination: that his was fiction masquerading as biography. One wonders whether historians would have had a different reaction had Morris been more transparent with his use of Platonic imagination. Historians are tolerant of works that are heavily Platonic but only in cases where the historian announces their intentions clearly and transparently. Historians know they have ventured too far to the right side of the diagram when they are accused of writing historical fiction. Historians want to enforce a clear boundary between the imagination they employ and the kind of imagination fiction writers employ. And yet, historians frequently allow themselves to speculate creatively in ways that look like historical fiction. Writers of historical fiction often claim to be “getting inside the head” of some historical figure, which, according to some historians, is a forbidden terrain for us to traverse. And yet there are other historians who claim that exercising empathy – trying to understand the world as the historical figure saw it, even in the absence of direct evidence – is a common practice among historians. Historians and fiction writers do share similar methods, or at least similar impulses, and thus might have more in common with each other than we might care to admit. How much imagination are historians permitted? Without imagination, there can be no discipline of history.

GLOSSARY

a priori imagination: As defined by philosopher Immanuel Kant, knowledge that is absolutely independent of all experience. In the context of history, visualizing that which, of necessity, must have been present. For example, we might know that a person was at point A one day and point B the next. A priori imagination is that faculty that imagines the journey between the two points. abductive reasoning: Forming a conclusion from the information that is known. alternate-history novel: A counterfactual history which also includes fictional characters. alternative history: A work based on a continuous sequence of departures from the actual historical record. anachronistic concepts: Ideas or imaginative objects imposed on the past that would not have been recognized by contemporaries. Aristotelian imagination (mimetic imagination): The mental faculty which allows one to picture in the mind’s eye that which is currently absent, to imagine a faithful likeness of something that is currently not present to our senses to perceive. cognitive empathy: The capacity to understand what is going on in other people’s heads. colligation: Identifying a pattern in the past, bringing together events into a pattern. A concept is often a colligation of events and happenings from the past. The pattern might reflect an actual structure in the past, or is just as likely a pattern imposed upon the past by the historian. concept: An idea or a framework for organizing ideas, a mental representation of an idea. controlled speculation: The use of comparative material from analogous cultural or historical situations to infer information that might be missing or obscured in the historical record.

Glossary

139

counterfactual history: A conjecture written in the form of an historical narrative based upon the premise that an antecedent condition is contrary to historical fact. emotional empathy: Feeling what others feel. epistemic modality. An estimation of the likelihood that a certain state of affairs is true in the context of a possible world. epistemology: The theory of knowledge, especially regarding what constitutes knowledge. The study of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. imaginative object: A product of the imagination – such as a concept or a periodization – usually constructed in language, that historians will insert into their accounts of the past. inference: Reasoning from evidence, to see more than what is explicitly stated in evidence. inference to the best explanation: The judgment required in choosing the theory or narrative that provides the best account from a set of data. intuitive inferences: Relying upon general knowledge of and expert familiarity with a domain as a way to draw inferences from evidence. mimesis: Representation or imitation of the real world. modal mood: A linguistic form that expresses the degree of confidence a speaker has concerning a state of affairs in the absence of direct evidence. Often identified by constructions such as must have, as when a speaker says, “She must have known we were going to the store.” ontology: The branch of philosophy that considers the nature of being and existence. open narrative: An historical narrative where the historian makes transparent how the narrative is being constructed, including honesty about problematic sources and interpretations. period frontiers: The transitions or thresholds between historical periods. periodization: The division of time into smaller units. The division assumes that the events contained within are structurally or causally related to each other in some way. phenomenology: The branch of philosophy that considers the nature of experience. Platonic imagination (creative imagination): The mental faculty which allows one to envision that which is unreal or inactual. postmodernism: The philosophical position that problematizes the possibility of objective truth in history and that valorizes the subjective perspectives of the historian. It argues that any work of history is but a kind of story constructed by an historian and shaped by that historian’s worldview and ideological presumptions. probative: Especially with regard to historical documents, those having the function of proving or demonstrating something, of affording proof or evidence.

140

Glossary

subjunctive conditional: Describes a situation that might have existed – but does not actually exist – if certain conditions had pertained. For example, “The game would have started on time had it not been raining.” transworld identity: The notion that the same object exists in more than one possible world, especially in counterfactual histories. tripartite periodization: In Western historiography, the grand periodization of the ancient, medieval and modern periods of history.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures on the corresponding page. abductive reasoning 64–65 alternate-history novels 126–127 alternative history 121, 127; see also counterfactuals anachronisms: insertion of 39, 40, 41–42, 45–46; visualized, from archives 29–30 Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Kingsley) 80–81 Ankersmit, Frank 39 aphantasia, congenital 3 Appleby, Joyce 92 a priori imagination 10, 14–15, 22, 26, 30, 121, 134 archives, imagination in 19–38; Aristotelian 15, 21–22, 23, 27, 31–32; auditory imagery in 26; colors in 30; context and 25; document selection to assess 24–26; historians’ experience of 23–38; inferences and 24, 26, 27, 28, 30; insertions in 22, 26, 28, 30; load-bearing words inf luencing 30–31; modern media inf luencing 29; olfactory imagery in 26; overview of 15, 19–20, 31–32; Platonic 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32; summary of study responses for 33–38; think-aloud method for 23–24, 26; vantage point in 26–29, 31; vicarious perception and 21–23; visualized anachronisms in 29–30; visual or mental imagery in 19–32

Aristotelian imagination: in archives 15, 21–22, 23, 27, 31–32; defined 3, 11, 134; in fiction-history boundary 85–89, 91, 98, 100, 101, 106, 108, 110, 113–114; inferences and 14–15; insertions and 56, 135; modal mood and 66, 67; Platonic imagination ratio to 11–12, 12, 27, 56, 67, 68, 92, 99, 112, 132, 135–137; speculation and 16–17, 117, 119–122, 124, 128–129, 131–132; visual or mental imagery with 21–22, 134–135 Atwood, Margaret 93 auditory imagery 26 Ayers, Ed 80 Ballhatchet, Helen 94–95 “banked” images 4, 6, 22, 31 Benson, Edward 69 Bentley, Jerry 54–55 Bienen, Leigh Buchanan 69 Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South ( Johnson & Roark) 72–80 Bloom, Paul 113 Boney, F.N. 76 Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Flamming) 80 Brann, Eva 2–3, 6 Brown, John Seely 2 Burke, Thomas E. 101 Burr (Vidal) 92, 106–109 Burr, Aaron 106–109

Index

Burton, Orville Vernon 79 Byrd, Robert 59–60, 84–85 Byrne, Ruth M.J. 125 Carr, E.H. 123, 130–131 Carter, Stephen L. 126–127 Catullus and His World (Wiseman) 1–2 Cimbala, Paul 78 cognitive empathy 113; see also historical empathy colligation: of historical concepts 42–44, 47; of periods 48, 52 Collingwood, R.G. 5–6, 9–10, 12–15, 22, 26, 60, 85, 121, 134 colors imagined 30 concepts see historical concepts congenital aphantasia 3 controlled speculation 117–120 counterfactuals 120–132, 132, 137 creative imagination 6–10, 11–12, 134–135; see also Platonic imagination Cromwell, Thomas 111–112 Cronon, William 85–86, 88, 113–114 cultural and social practices: modal mood supported by 65–66, 68–69, 77, 79; periodization and 54–55; speculation informed by 118, 120, 128–129 Curry, Leonard 80 Damasio, Antonio 4 Davis, Natalie Zemon 16, 61–72, 76, 91, 101, 117, 135 Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Schama) 9, 105 Demos, John 92–93, 98, 99–106 dialogue 75, 87, 98, 111, 136 Domestication of Europe, The (Hodder) 44–45 Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Morris) 16, 89–93, 92, 98, 99, 106, 137 Einfuhlen concept 108–109, 110; see also historical empathy Ellison, William 72–81 Elton, Geoffrey 87 emotions: archive-based imagination of 26, 28–29, 31; emotional versus cognitive empathy 113; historical empathy for 16, 28, 106, 108–113, 137 Enlightenment period 8, 43, 52, 87 Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Demos) 99 epistemic modality 62; see also modal mood evidence: fabricated 90–91, 93; in fiction-history boundary 84–88,

147

90–91, 93–95, 99, 101–105, 107, 110–111, 113–114; historical concepts from patterns of 42–45, 46–47, 135; historical writing reliance on 10, 13, 14; inferences from 13, 14–15, 134 (see also inferences); modal mood extrapolating 16, 59–60, 62–66, 68–73, 76–81; speculation grounded in 16, 118–120, 125–126, 128–129 Ferdinand, Franz 24, 27–28, 30 fiction-history boundary 84–116; ambiguity of 93; Aristotelian imagination in 85–89, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113–114; in Burr 92, 106–109; continuum of 93; creative imagination and 9–10 (see also Platonic imagination subentry); defined 85–89; dialogue in 87, 98, 111; in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan 16, 89–93, 92, 98, 99, 106, 137; encroachment of 86–87; evidence in 84–88, 90–91, 93–95, 99, 101–105, 107, 110–111, 113–114; fiction masquerading as history 89–90, 92, 99, 137; historical empathy in 16, 106, 108–113; inferences and 14, 91, 107–108; inner life exploration and 106–114; insertions and 89, 90–93, 95–96, 98, 99, 101; intuition in 107–108; invention-to-reality ratio in 90; in The Mirror in the Shrine 93–98; modal mood in 85, 91, 103; narrator in 89, 93–94, 96, 103–104; overview of 16, 84–89, 113–114; Platonic imagination in 85–91, 92, 94, 98–101, 99, 106–108, 110–114, 112, 137; speculation and 85, 87, 94, 99, 101, 102–103, 104–106; in The Unredeemed Captive 99, 99–106; in Wolf Hall 111–112, 112 Finlay, Robert 61–64, 69, 72, 136 Flamming, Douglas 80 Forest Gump (movie)/Forest Gump (character) 39, 40, 46 Freeman, Joanne B. 106–107 Fujita, Fumiko 94–95 Fulbrook, Mary 40–41, 43, 46, 112 Gaddis, John Lewis 4, 112 Gallagher, Catherine 122–128 Gatewood, Willard 76 Geertz, Clifford 70 Germany: A New History (Schulze) 48–49 Gerstle, Andrew 97 Gibson, William 7

148

Index

Ginzburg, Carlo 70–71 Gleach, Frederic 117–120, 124 glossary 138–140 Gold, Harriet 1 Goldstein, Warren 90, 92, 93, 106 Gray, Richard T. 7, 8 Green, William A. 50, 53, 54 Grehlein, Jonas 95–96 Guerre, Martin 16, 61–72 Hamilton, Alexander 106–108 Hanks, Tom 39 Hardwick, Jeff 104–105 Harlan, David 109 Harris, Robert 77 Hawthorn, Geoffrey 121, 122, 129 Hay, John 108 Hayward, Rhodri 89 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 108–109 hindsight bias 130 historical concepts: anachronistic imposition of 40, 41–42, 45–46; colligation of 42–44, 47; identification of 46; as imaginative objects 15–16, 39–47, 135; as linguistic constructs 40–41, 44–46, 135; naming or defining of 43–45, 135; patterns underlying 42–45, 46–47, 135 historical empathy 16, 28, 106, 108–113, 137 historical fiction see fiction-history boundary historical imagination: in archives (see archives, imagination in); boundary of 2, 10, 12, 15, 60–61, 81, 135–137 (see also fiction-history boundary); creative imagination and 6–10, 11–12, 134–135 (see also Platonic imagination); evidence supporting 10, 13, 14; fiction boundary with (see fiction-history boundary); hypothesis generation and 1–2, 123; inferences and (see inferences); insertions with (see insertions); as mimesis 2–6, 11–12, 134–135 (see also Aristotelian imagination); modal mood with (see modal mood); overview of 1–18, 134–137; perception and 5–6, 21–23, 134; speculation and (see speculation); visual or mental imagery and (see visual or mental imagery); see also imagination Hodder, Ian 44–45, 46 Hunter, Jane 95 hypothesis generation 1–2, 123

imagination: a priori 10, 14–15, 22, 26, 30, 121, 134; Aristotelian (see Aristotelian imagination); creative 6–10, 11–12, 134–135 (see also Platonic imagination); definition and connotation 2–7, 9, 10–11; historical (see historical imagination); as mimesis 2–6, 11–12, 134–135 (see also Aristotelian imagination); perception and 5–6, 21–23, 134; Platonic (see Platonic imagination); reason tension with 8; visual or mental imagery and (see visual or mental imagery) imaginative objects: fiction-history boundary and 89, 90–93, 95–96, 98, 99, 101; historical concepts as 15–16, 39–47, 135; periodization as 14, 16, 39–40, 47–56, 135 Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, The (Carter) 126–127 Industrial Revolution in World History, The (Stearn) 46 inferences: abductive reasoning and 64–65; archives prompting 24, 26, 27, 28, 30; defined 13; in fiction-history boundary 14, 91, 107–108; historical imagination, generally, and 12–15, 134–135; intuitive 66–70, 72, 107–108; modal mood ref lecting 60–61, 64–70, 72, 74–77, 79–81; speculation and 117–120, 123–124 insertions 39–58; in archive-based imagination 22, 26, 28, 30; Aristotelian and Platonic imagination ratio of 56, 56, 135; fiction-history boundary and 89, 90–93, 95–96, 98, 99, 101; of historical concepts 15–16, 39–47, 135; overview of 16, 39–40, 56; of periodization 16, 39–40, 47–56, 135 intuitive inferences 66–70, 72, 107–108 James, William 21 Jeffrey, Julie Roy 102 Johnson, Andrew 126–127 Johnson, Michael P. 72–80 Joiner, Charles 77–78 Kant, Immanuel 11 Kelley, Donald R. 70 Kennedy, John F. 29–30, 31, 39, 123–124, 127 Keogh, Rebecca 3 King of Odessa, The (Rosenstone) 9 Kingsley, Peter 80–81 Kornicki, P.F. 94 Koselleck, Reinhart 49, 55

Index

LaCapra, Dominick 113 Lebow, Richard Ned 128–131 LeGoff, Jacques 47, 50, 55–56 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher 89–90, 91 Lincoln (Vidal) 92, 108 Lincoln, Abraham 108, 126–127 load-bearing words 30–31 Lukacs, Georg 109 Macfarlane, D.L.M. 97 Maier, Charles 51, 52, 53 Maki, John M. 97 Mantel, Hilary 109–112 Marietta, Ohio, history of 20 Marwick, Arthur 87 Marx, Mrs. Karl 19, 21 Masur, Kate 91 Maza, Sarah 9, 10 McClintock, Barbara 108 McCullagh, C. Behan 42, 43–44, 46, 66–69 McLeod, Dan 97–98 Meier, August 78 Mendelsund, Peter 20–23, 25, 26, 29–30, 31 mental imagery see visual or mental imagery Meyer, Stephen Grant 80 Mills, Gary 79 mimesis, imagination as 2–6, 11–12, 134–135; see also Aristotelian imagination Mirror in the Shrine, The (Rosenstone) 93–98 modal mood 59–83; abductive reasoning underlying 64–65; in Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic 80–81; Aristotelian imagination and 66, 67; in Black Masters 72–80; in Bound for Freedom 80; confidence or certainty signaled by 62, 64, 66, 75–76, 121; cultural and social practices supporting 65–66, 68–69, 77, 79; defined 62; dialogue couched in 75; epistemic modality 62; evaluation of historians using 68–72, 76–81; evidence extrapolation with 16, 59–60, 62–66, 68–73, 76–81; fiction-history boundary and 85, 91, 103; general knowledge or informed imagination supporting 66–68; inferences ref lected in 60–61, 64–70, 72, 74–77, 79–81; intuitive interpretations and 66–70, 72; open narratives using 80; overview of 16, 59–61, 81; Platonic imagination and 16, 64, 66, 67, 81, 136; in The

149

Return of Martin Guerre 16, 61–72, 76, 91; speaker-audience relationship with 62, 63; speculation with 64, 73, 77–80, 85, 117, 120, 121, 123–124, 126 modernity, period of 50–51, 52, 54 Mokyr, Joel 43, 47 Monter, E. William 70 Moote, Lloyd 72 Morgan, Michael 80–81 Morris, Edmund 16, 89–93, 98, 99, 106, 137 Musil, Robert 121–122 Notehelfer, F.G. 97 novels see alternate-history novels; fiction-history boundary Novick, Peter 8 Nuyts, Jan 62 Oakes, James 77 objectivity 8, 9 olfactory imagery 26 Palmer, F.R. 62, 76 Parker, Geoffrey 128–131 patterns: historical concepts ref lecting 42–45, 46–47, 135; periodization ref lecting 47–49, 51–53; recognition versus creation of 43 Patterson, Wayne 93–94 Pearson, Joel 3 Pendleton-Jullian, Ann 2 perception: mimetic imagination and 5–6, 134; vicarious 21–23 periodization: arbitrary eclectic judgments on 53, 135; colligation of 48, 52; culture and 54–55; defined 47; human-created timekeeping and 52, 55; as imaginative object 14, 16, 39–40, 47–56, 135; naming or defining of 47–48, 51–52, 53; patterns underlying 47–49, 51–53; power and inf luence of 53–54; symmetry in 54; territoriality defining 51–52; transitions or thresholds in 49–51; verbs denoting act of 55–56; world history academia exploring 53; see also specific periods Pickering, Sam 96 Platonic imagination: in archives 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32; Aristotelian imagination ratio to 11–12, 12, 27, 56, 67, 68, 92, 99, 112, 132, 135–137; defined 6–7, 11, 134; in fiction-history boundary 85–91, 94, 98–101, 106–108, 110–114, 137; inferences and 14–15, 26, 27, 135; insertions and 56, 135; modal

150

Index

mood and 16, 64, 66, 67, 81, 136; speculation and 16, 119–124, 128–132, 136–137; visual or mental imagery with 135 Pocahontas 118, 120 point-of-view 26–29, 31 Pollock, James 19, 20, 22 postmodernist period 9, 45 Potter, David 71 reading: auditory and olfactory imagery with 26; visual imagery with 20–23; see also archives, imagination in Reagan, Ronald 16, 89–93, 137 Renaissance period 50–51, 53–54, 55 Return of Martin Guerre, The (Davis) 16, 61–72, 76, 91, 135 Roark, James L. 72–80 Robert Byrd Polar Archive 59, 60 Roberts, Benjamin 102–103 Roberts, Evan 88 Rogers, Janet Buell 103–104 Rogow, Arnold 107 Romantic period 7–8, 43 Rosenstone, Robert 9, 93–98 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 87 Sayles, John 86 Schama, Simon 9, 105 Schlegel, Friedrich 7 Schulze, Hagen 48–49 Scott, Joan 70 Scott, Walter 109 Sedgwick, John 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 85 Siple, Paul 59–60, 84–85 Sklar, Kathryn Kish 91 smells imagined 26 Smith, John 118, 120, 124 Snell, Alden 84–85 social practices see cultural and social practices sounds imagined 26 Southgate, Beverly 86, 87–89, 99, 109 speculation 117–133; Aristotelian imagination and 16–17, 117, 119–122, 124, 128–129, 131–132; cause-and-effect relationship in 129–130; controlled 117–120; counterfactuals and 120–132, 132, 137; cultural and social practices informing 118, 120, 128–129; definition and connotation 117; evaluation of

historian making 119, 136–137; evidence as foundation for 16, 118–120, 125–126, 128–129; fiction-history boundary for 85, 87, 94, 99, 101, 102–103, 104–106; guidelines for 119; inferences and 117–120, 123–124; junctures leading to 125; modal mood in 64, 73, 77–80, 85, 117, 120, 121, 123–124, 126; overview of 16–17, 117–120, 131–132; Platonic imagination and 16, 119–124, 128–132, 136–137; subjunctive mood in 121–122, 131; visual or mental imagery and 117, 122, 131 Stearn, Peter 46 Steele, Ian 41 subjunctive mood 121–122, 131 Taylor, Alan 101 Taylor, Sandra 96 Tetlock, Philip 128–131 think-aloud method 23–24, 26 Thompson, E.P. 88 Tolkien, J.R.R. 7 Toulmin, Stephen 50–51, 52 Unredeemed Captive, The (Demos) 99, 99–106 vantage point 26–29, 31 Vaughn, Alden 101–102, 104 vicarious perception 21–23 Vidal, Gore 92, 106–109, 112–113 Vihla, Minna 62–63 visual or mental imagery: archives prompting 19–32; “banked images” inf luencing 4, 6, 22, 31; colors in 30; inferences and 13; mimetic imagination and 3–5, 134–135; modern media inf luencing 29; reading leading to 20–23; speculation and 117, 122, 131; visualized anachronisms in 29–30 von Harrach, Franz 24–31 Walsh, W.H. 42, 43 Wedgwood, Josiah 46 Williams, Eunice 99–106 Wineburg, Sam 21, 23–24, 26 Wiseman, T.P. 1–2, 6, 7, 12 Wolf Hall (Mantel) 111–112, 112 Woodman, Harold 78–79 Wulf, Karin 41