For the Love of Stories

He rarely admitted it, and when he did, only to a close friend or colleague, someone he trusted and thought might understand. Sitting in a coffee shop or walking along a city street, lulled by conversation into confession, he looked around, and then said it, softly, so that no one but his friend would hear.

To everyone else he said that there was no better way to understand the past. No better way to understand other people. No better way to try to reach broader audiences, to write some of the history that does its work in the world. Progressive historians could least afford to underestimate the social power of stories. He said that for the problems he was interested in, the questions he was asking, a story could show readers things about the past that traditional social analysis and cultural interpretation could not.

And all that was true.

Sometime after he settled upon a thesis topic but before he started writing, he had lunch with his thesis adviser. He had proposed to write a history of an event, the Scottsboro Case, from many different points of view. He imagined a modest experiment in historical form, a narrative in which he would answer the question “What happened?” with a story about the conflict among people with different ideas about what happened, the conflict among people with different stories of Scottsboro.

He talked about the research he had done, and then about the shape he thought the thesis would take. But he didn’t have a good sense of the shape; he hadn’t started writing.

“What book do you have in mind as a model?” his adviser asked.

Years later, after he had written the thesis and taken a teaching job, he asked his students some version of that question every time he asked for a term paper or thesis proposal. “What book or essay that we’ve read this term, or that you’ve read in another class, will your essay—the form of your essay, its shape, perspective, tone—remind us of? In what way? Why?”

He came to love the question. But at lunch that day he didn’t have a good answer. He had taken the title of his dissertation proposal, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Scottsboro,” and many good ideas about perspective from Wallace Stevens. But he wasn’t going to write his dissertation in verse. He had read many narrative histories, old and new, since he started graduate school. A few of them were experiments in historical writing. But he did not know of a historian who had written a narrative history from multiple points of view. ¹

“I don’t have a model in history,” he said. “But there are novelists who have done what I would like to do. Faulkner, for one, in the The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.”

Thinking back on that lunch years later, he was grateful his adviser had not advised him to find another adviser. ²

He did not have a model, but he did have the latest round of the debate, among working historians, about narrative. Lawrence Stone started it in 1979. A mere half-century after historians, en masse, had rejected narrative history for scientific history, Stone detected a strong undercurrent sucking many prominent historians back. He defined narrative (it is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with man not circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical) and three forms of scientific history. He discussed four causes of the revival of narrative, two kinds of new, new history, five differences between the old narrative and the new, and four potential problems with narrative. “More and more of the ‘new historians’ are now trying to discover what was going on inside people’s heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative.” ³

Bernard Bailyn did not read Stone’s essay until after he had...