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9 1 It Would Be Logical to Assume . . . Historians feel safe when dealing with the facts. We talk about “the hard facts” and “the cold facts,” about “not being able to get around the facts,” and about the necessity of basing our narrative on a “sound foundation of fact.” . . . But the simple fact turns out to be not a simple fact at all [but] . . . a simple generalization of a thousand and one facts . . . a statement . . . an affirmation . . . an argument. —Carl Becker (1926) “Just the facts,” Los Angeles police detective sergeant Joe Friday told witnesses. But witnesses left out key observations, mistook faces, and gave fleeting impressions the weight of truth. The detectives had to sort out the bits and pieces and assemble them into a viable case. Dragnet was fiction, for in it the police always got the right man. Would that historians were as fortunate, for we too are detectives, but our clues have a way of vanishing before our eyes. For what is a historical fact? As Barbara J. Shapiro reveals in her Culture of Fact: England, 1550−1720 (2003), the notion of “historical fact,” a true statement about the past worthy of belief, is itself a historical development . Only gradually did early modern historical writers denounce romance, myth, antiquarianism, and rhetoric and champion impartiality, the weighing of evidence, and scholarly expertise. At the close of the nineteenth century, historians could be proud of their discipline and their achievements because they were the master of the irreducible fact. As James Ford Rhodes told the AHA in 1899: “Was there ever so propitious a time for writing history as in the last forty years? There has been a general acquisition of the historic sense. The methods of teaching history have so improved that they may be called scientific. Even as the chemist and physicist, we talk of practice in the laboratory.” Men 10 It Would Be Logical to Assume . . . like Rhodes regarded the facts in their accounts as the irreducible unquestionable truths with which any account of the past began. Documents, letters , diaries, artifacts, newspapers, and other survivals from the past were the source of these facts, and from their assembly historians built their narratives. Rhodes again: “The qualities necessary for an historian are diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality, the thorough digestion of his materials by careful selection and long meditating.” If there were such irrefutable facts, from them historians could construct perfect accounts. They would always get the culprit right. History would be not only possible but easy. But even as this first generation founded its professional associations, sought funding to preserve documentary collections, and offered graduate instruction and Ph.D.s to a new generation of historians, the very notion of the irreducibility of historical facts was coming under fire. Younger scholars, enamored of the very social sciences that were emerging alongside the discipline of history, were asking: Could a mastery of individual facts fully explain the spirit of an age? Could the historian include enough facts to cover all the variety of actions and actors? They agreed that facts were not bricks or other ready-to-hand building materials, because one could always ask of the sources whether they were honest, truthful, and reliable. James Harvey Robinson related this progress away from certainty to an audience at the AHA annual meeting in 1929: At the outset of the century , “We had made a very essential discovery, the distinction between the primary and secondary sources of historical knowledge. We inhaled the delicious odor of first hand accounts, of the ‘original document,’ of the ‘official report.’ We had at last got to the bottom of things. . . . [But] as we look back thirty years we find historians perhaps rather pedantic and defensive . They are humble enough now.” Interpretation instead of narration became the major preoccupation of historians. History itself played a role in spurring the historians’ growing skepticism about facts. During the First World War, leading American historians joined forces in the Committee on Public Information to bend and shape the past to fit our participation in the war against Germany. The chairman of that committee, newspaperman George Creel recalled in 1920 that its purpose had been to instill “a passionate belief in the justice of America ’s cause that would weld the American people into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” After the war, disgruntled historians wondered if they had been duped [18.218.38.125] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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