History’s postmodern fates Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021

As the twenty-½rst century begins, his- in the mid-1980s to almost one thousand tory occupies a unique, but not an envi- now. But the vision of a rise in the num- able, position among the humanistic dis- ber of tenure-track jobs that William ciplines in the United States. Every time Bowen and others evoked, and that lured Clio examines her reflection in the mag- many young men and women into grad- ic mirror of public opinion, more voices uate school in the 1990s, has never mate- ring out, shouting that she is the ugliest rialized in history. The market, accord- Muse of all. High school students rate ingly, seems out of joint–almost as bad- history their most boring subject. Un- ly so as in the years around 1970, when dergraduates have fled the ½eld with production of Ph.D.s ½rst reached one the enthusiasm of rats leaving a sinking thousand or more per year just as univer- ship. Thirty years ago, some 5 percent sities and colleges went into economic of all undergraduates majored in histo- crisis. Many unemployed holders of doc- ry. Nowadays, around 2 percent do so. torates in history hold their teachers and Numbers of new Ph.D.s have risen, from universities responsible for years of op- a low of just under ½ve hundred per year pression, misery, and wasted effort that cannot be usefully reapplied in other careers.1 Anthony Grafton, a Fellow of the American Acad- Those who succeed in obtaining ten- emy since 2002, is Henry Putnam University Pro- ure-track positions, moreover, may still fessor of History at and ½nd themselves walking a stony path. chair of the Council of the Humanities. He is the ’ salaries, like most of those author of eleven books, including “Defenders of in the humanities, are low. So, more sur- the Text” (1991), “Commerce with the Classics” prisingly, are history book sales–except (1997), and “Bring Out Your Dead” (2001). in some favored ½elds, like Holocaust Grafton has received numerous honors, among studies. Some university presses have cut them the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the back in ½elds of history vital not only to Balzan Prize for History of Humanities, and the scholarship but also to American nation- Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement 1 Thomas Bender, Philip Katz, and Colin Palm- Award. er, The Education of Historians for the Twenty- First Century (Urbana and Chicago: Published © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts for the American Historical Association by the & Sciences University of Illinois Press, 2004).

54 Dædalus Spring 2006 al interests–the history of Latin Ameri- times, and they have elaborated a set History’s ca, for example–because even the best of narratives that more or less explains postmodern fates monographs sell barely a hundred copies the general conditions I have described. and thus fail to cover their costs. Very Professional history in America, they strong books, it seems, still ½nd publish- say, came into being in the late nine- ers even when sales will be low. But the teenth century under the zodiacal sign general picture is dark. of Leopold von Ranke, as historians like Even our annual convention is cele- Herbert Baxter Adams and Frederick brated only for its dullness. At an Amer- Jackson Turner appropriated his meth- ican Historical Association opening ses- ods of archival scholarship and source sion in January 2004 devoted to “War criticism in order to situate the United Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 in a Democratic Age,” renowned histori- States in world history. They established ans rose in Washington to discuss “may- seminars: not classes, originally, but hem, mass destruction, and total anni- special classrooms equipped with cata- hilation.” These subjects of undoubted logs, collections of primary sources, and contemporary relevance have played a journals. Here students could learn to central role in the historical tradition wield the tools of their trade–to estab- in the West from the days of Herodotus lish bibliographies, work through pri- and Thucydides to those of the History mary and secondary sources, and com- Channel. Yet neither the big questions pose reports, which they read aloud to nor the deep thinkers who addressed their teachers and colleagues. At the them proved capable of touching off same time, the Masters of this new dis- intense discussions. Instead, the audi- ciplinary universe devised elaborate, ence “evaporated” as speaker after powerful courses, organized around speaker offered “a classic academic clear theses. History excavated the ori- combination of insight and obscurity, gins of American freedom–depending thoughtful analysis and mind-numbing on whether one listened to Adams or delivery, and by the time the question Turner–in the traditions of self-govern- period ½nally rolled around, even the ment nourished deep in the Germanic aha’s president, James McPherson, forests or in the geographical openness was ready to head for the door.” “I can and rich resources of the North Ameri- see,” cracked Charles Maier of Harvard, can continent. Students often found it “we’ve conducted a war of attrition.” dif½cult to see the connection between It all seems very sad: Clio’s grand disci- the narrowly de½ned exercises they car- pline, for millennia the school of poli- ried out and the grand syntheses that tics, has transformed itself into a science their teachers presented in their lectures so dismal that even its practitioners do and textbooks. But the new professional not want to hear about it.2 history proved attractive to many young men and the smaller number of young Historians share the obsession with women who gained access to it. Its prod- navel gazing that has infected a number ucts ½lled the history departments that of the humanistic disciplines in recent took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, as an elective system replaced the uniform curriculum of the old col- 2 Bob Thompson, “Lessons We May Be Doomed To Repeat: American Historians Talk leges and a historical narrative of the About War, But Is Anyone Listening?” Wash- winning of freedoms, rooted in the ington Post, January 11, 2004, D01. Magna Carta and the rise of the British

Dædalus Spring 2006 55 Anthony House of Commons, became a central veau fresco of the Masque of History– Grafton curriculum subject.3 one in which clothed and digni½ed Eu- on the humanities By the early decades of the twentieth ropeans brought sweetness, light, and century, however, professional histori- civilization to the nude and grateful ans inhabited more than one mansion. inhabitants of the Americas and oth- The New History that James Harvey er peripheral continents–was slowly Robinson, Carl Becker, and others de- whitewashed and replaced by a mod- veloped after World War I challenged ernist panorama with more varied par- the founders’ emphasis on politics and ticipants. Even the most technically dif- institutions, and insisted on the central ½cult ½elds, like Chinese history, began importance of ideas. The revisionism of to attract a few young scholars, some of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Charles Beard, who deconstructed ideal- them the children of missionaries. istic accounts of the Founding Fathers Diversi½cation led to struggle. Ugly and World War I, also attracted some flowers of discord began to pop up, here younger scholars. The great regional and there, as historians sharply debated and historical diversity of the American the theses of skeptics and revisionists universities encouraged the emergence and even more sharply debated which of new sub½elds–½elds that the found- pieces of historical turf deserved more ing generation, for whom Europe was intensive cultivation by students and still the biggest thing in America, saw faculty. On the whole, however, histo- as lying outside true history. When the rians–so the usual story goes–retained young Elizabeth Wallace asked the re- a considerable degree of comity. All cently arrived head professor of histo- agreed that those who occupied the pin- ry at Chicago, Hermann von Holst, for nacle of the ½eld were the great political guidance in Latin American history, he historians, especially those at Harvard– exploded: “Vy did you come to me? I the department that, until World War know notings von tose countries. For II, boasted an unmatched array of star me tey do not exist. Tey are tead!” Yet historians, from Turner and Roger Mer- William Rainey Harper, the university’s riman, author of a massive study of the president, encouraged Wallace to devel- Spanish Empire, to Arthur Schlesinger, op a course of her own in the ½eld.4 At the great of the Age of Jackson. Wisconsin and Berkeley in the same All agreed that Harvard and a few oth- years, the history of Latin America and er schools–Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the American borderlands became popu- Cornell, Chicago, and Wisconsin–of- lar subjects for courses and for research. fered the best graduate programs. Al- The great, Politically Incorrect art nou- most all agreed, ½nally, that historians everywhere had two primary tasks: car- rying out their own research and offer- 3 John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship ing civic education for young men and in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1983); and, above all, Peter Novick, women, especially in the form of sur- That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and veys of Western civilization and Amer- the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: ican history. Some of the prestige that Cambridge University Press, 1988). had invested the universities, and his- tory in particular, in the Age of Reform 4 Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, De- cline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago (Ur- had worn away, and salaries had never bana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, risen much, or even fallen, since the 1995), 4. heady 1890s, when salaries as high as

56 Dædalus Spring 2006 $7,500 placed the incumbents of the ture and the arts became largely critical, History’s most lucrative chairs ½rmly among the rather than historical, erudite and artic- postmodern fates local gentry.5 Still history clearly owned ulate European scholars like Erwin Pa- a stable place in the intellectual and po- nofsky and Paul Oskar Kristeller, and litical cosmos. brilliant natives like Richard Hofstader No wonder, then, that the crisis of and C. Vann Woodward, became pre- World War II radically transformed eminent among humanistic writers and the ½eld, boosting its numbers and its teachers. The curriculum continued to national prominence. Many policymak- accord a central role to interdisciplina- ers agreed with scholars that historians ry surveys of Western and American could shed light, not only on the causes civilization. Inexpensive travel, the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 of the war, but also on its likely course. strong dollar, and new fellowship pro- Students, readers, and government of- grams like the , the ½cers competed to gain access to them. Fulbright-Hays, and the Danforth en- Historians found positions with the Of- abled young scholars to master the lan- ½ce of Strategic Studies or the Of½ce of guages of countries around the world War Information, where many of them and to reach local archives from Califor- had the opportunity to extend their edu- nia to Kamchatka. Government money cations by working with émigré experts directed students into newly prominent on Germany like Franz Neumann and ½elds like Russian, Asian, and African Felix Gilbert. After the war, historians history. By the 1960s, more students played a major role in organizing what than ever before or after were majoring became the cia, and the distinguished and doing graduate work in history. In- diplomatic historian George Kennan fluential teachers like Woodward and determined the course of American re- Lawrence Stone occupied a peak of in- lations with Russia–though the history fluence, inside their universities and in he made was not exactly the history he the larger world of letters. Both regular- wanted to make. History, after all, could ly addressed a large public in the newly shed light on Germany’s failure to em- founded New York Review of Books, which brace democracy in Weimar, Russia’s gave a great deal of space to professional failure to embrace democracy in 1917, history, much of it quite technical. By and the likely future histories of Afri- 1970 historians were training over one can and Asian countries in the long re- thousand new Ph.D.s a year, and the ex- cessional of European empire that was panding university system found room clearly impending. When peace broke for most of them in tenure-track posi- out, history was ready to explode. tions. The next ½fteen years saw the disci- pline reach something like its zenith. And yet–so the standard stories go Even as professional discourse on litera- –just as history reached its zenith, it shattered and collapsed. The rise of so- 5 See Frank Stricker, “American Professors cial history, largely fueled by the politi- in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, cal inspiration of the New Left, brought and Professionalism,” Journal of Interdisciplin- with it a new rhetoric and set of stan- ary History 19 (1988): 231–257; W. Bruce Les- dards. History, some now claimed, must lie, Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Commu- nity in the ‘Age of the University,’ 1865–1917 (Uni- abandon its high, straightforward narra- versity Park: Pennsylvania State University tive of great events and allow new voices Press, 1992). to be heard–the voices, in the ½rst in-

Dædalus Spring 2006 57 Anthony stance, of the laboring and rebellious shattered not only history’s white male Grafton poor, as heard and interpreted above image but also its coherence as a disci- on the humanities all by European historians like Richard pline. Cobb and George Rudé; but also the Moreover, these new groups compet- voices of American slaves, of women, ed for jobs in a market that declined of ‘peoples without history’ in the Third catastrophically after 1970–a situation World, and of peoples with non-Western that exacerbated anger and distrust on histories in the Middle East, East and all sides. Male historians working in South Asia, and elsewhere. Disagree- traditional ½elds railed that their pros- ment raged–not only about where uni- pects had been sacri½ced to make open- versity historians should set their priori- ings for women and African Americans. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 ties, but also about the extent to which Women and African Americans com- their work should or should not reflect plained that traditionalist male col- political and social commitments.6 leagues treated them with distrust or The reasons for change were multiple. contempt. The political and social crisis Most important, probably, was the rise of the discipline became impossible to of new constituencies for historical ignore. In 1972, when J. Anthony Lukas study. As early as 1961, when Carl Bri- attended the aha convention in New denbaugh of gave his York, he found it anything but boring presidential address to the American to trace the multiple fracture lines that Historical Association, he lamented that separated the old mandarins who ran “many of the younger practitioners of the association from the unemployed our craft, and those who are still appren- and underemployed young, the courtly tices, are products of lower middle-class and condescending senior male histori- or foreign origins, and their emotions ans from their critical female colleagues, not infrequently get in the way of his- and those who wished to keep the disci- torical reconstruction. They ½nd them- pline apolitical from those who insisted selves in a very real sense outsiders on that failing to denounce the war in Viet- our past and feel themselves shut out.”7 nam was itself a political act.8 Jewish and Catholic men–the ½rst out- Even as new groups began to take over sider groups to enter the profession in and dismantle the professional study of large numbers–in fact began by accept- the past, new methods seemed to call ing its values and priorities, though a traditional ones into question. Some good many of them argued passionate- social historians insisted that their work ly for an enlargement of the historical should take the place of other forms of canon. But the large numbers of women, narrative. In the 1980s, many historians African Americans, Asian Americans, made a ‘linguistic turn,’ as they drew openly gay scholars, and others who be- new tools from philosophy and literary came historians in the 1970s and 1980s studies and tried to make their analyses of texts more than mere paraphrases of 6 The best account of these developments is their arguments. A decade later, a ‘mate- Novick, That Noble Dream, chap. 13. rial turn’ followed, as others turned their

7 , “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review 68 (1963): 322–323. 8 J. Anthony Lukas, “Historians’ Conference: Lawrence Stone’s offprint of this address, now The Radical Need for Jobs,” New York Times in my possession, contains some pungent mar- Magazine, March 12, 1972; Novick, That Noble ginalia. Dream, 574–575.

58 Dædalus Spring 2006 attention from texts and other written As specialized courses multiplied, a case History’s documents to the physical environ- study based on Stanford’s department postmodern fates ments, tools, clothing, and material pos- revealed, they often fell in size. No two sessions of the past. Each new swerve products of this or any other history de- became the object of sessions at confer- partment in the ½n-de-siècle graduate ences; produced its own new journals, or undergraduate read the same books volumes of essays, and monographs; and or received training in the same skills.10 provoked both applause and denuncia- By the late 1970s, many informed ob- tions. servers thought the discipline was falling Even developments that most his- apart. Scholars like Oscar Handlin and torians viewed with enthusiasm and Eugene Genovese, who had themselves Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 pride seemingly contributed to the transformed the objects and practices of breakdown of comity. In the middle of history, now bridled as they saw them- the century, most good departments of selves pushed aside and the standards history concentrated, as they had for of inquiry they had established ignored. decades, on Europe and America, with Mandorlas of scholarly flame swallowed some subsidiary interest in Latin Amer- up individual works–Fogel and Enger- ica. Fifty years later, every major depart- man’s Time on the Cross, David Abra- ment boasted specialists in Russian, ham’s The Collapse of the Weimar Repub- Near Eastern, Asian, and African histo- lic: Political Economy and Crisis, Natalie ry. William McNeill of Chicago was not Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, only a pioneering world historian, but Michael Bellisle’s Arming America, and also a pioneering department chair. He many others–and, in some cases, their tried to “develop systematic and linguis- authors’ careers as well. At times–as tically competent investigation of all when the medievalist Norman Cantor the great cultures of the world” during denounced his former colleagues at his six years as head of the Chicago his- Princeton for running a Marxist indoc- tory department. Thirty years later he trination center–the polemics took reflected ruefully: leave of reality.11 At times, however, the traditionalists had a point–as when This was a laudable ambition and one that practitioners of one of the new forms of I still subscribe to, but there was a disas- history began to insist that others had trous byproduct that I never anticipated: not only to accord them space to teach the different subdisciplines, with their and do research, but also to include the regional and linguistic specialties, tended new work in their own teaching and re- to fall apart as the professors of, say, Chi- search. nese and Latin American history ceased Slowly but inevitably parallel scholarly to have any sense of shared enterprise . . . universes took shape. Those interested This meant that we don’t read each oth- in new subjects–such as women’s histo- er’s books, we don’t think in comparable ry–or new methods–such as quantita- terms, and we don’t learn much from each other, or share responsibility in the self- 9 10 Larry Cuban, How Scholars Trumped Teachers government of the department.” (New York: Teachers’ College, 1999); Bender, Katz, and Palmer, The Education of Historians.

9 Speaking of History: Conversations with Histori- 11 Norman Cantor, “The Real Crisis in the Hu- ans, ed. Roger Adelson (East Lansing: Michigan manities Today,” New Criterion 3 (June 1985): State University Press, 1997), 174. 28–38.

Dædalus Spring 2006 59 Anthony tive history–found that they had a great mentation that characterizes the profes- Grafton deal in common with their fellow spe- sion, they claim, has transformed the on the humanities cialists, little or nothing with their im- mores of scholars, mostly for the worse. mediate colleagues. “There was no king Prominent historians nowadays choose in Israel”–so Peter Novick summed their research subjects not for their in- some of these matters up in his elegant trinsic importance but in order to pro- and influential study of the effort to mote their own careers. Worse, they of- obtain objectivity in historical writing, ten pursue their research agendas irre- That Noble Dream. Instead, a sullen truce sponsibly. They bend the evidence to came into effect, intermittently broken support their theses, which are often po- by ambushes and counterattacks of a litically motivated, and they pooh-pooh Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 viciousness not seen before–a vicious- the worst mistakes of those with whom ness that reflected the fact that scholars they share a political cause. Many of now seemed to have few principles or them, ½nally, do not con½ne themselves assumptions in common. So goes a stan- to their own ½elds, but try to act as ‘pub- dard narrative–one told in different lic intellectuals,’ writing for a wide audi- keys, from the varied denunciations ence about subjects on which they can- offered by opponents of the new histo- not claim expert knowledge. Not sur- ries like Richard Evans and Keith Wind- prisingly, teaching has little appeal for schuttle to the narratives of pluralism these academic butterflies. They lure triumphant found on many departmen- bright undergraduates to go to graduate tal web pages.12 school and then abandon them to floun- der in the desolate wastes of the job mar- Rather as grandparents and grandchil- ket, declaring that the invisible hand dren combine to denounce the genera- assigns positions to those who deserve tion between them, elder statesmen them. agree with marginal writers like Invisible Indictments like these ring true, but Adjunct, the young scholar whose web they are certainly not new. Readers of page served as a popular virtual rallying Lucky Jim will remember that the young point for underemployed historians and medieval historian who is that inspired other critics of the existing order until novel’s antihero began his article with she closed it down and changed careers the already hackneyed phrase “This in 2004.13 Their indictments always run strangely neglected subject”–only to on surprisingly similar lines, given the ½nd himself the object of his own sav- different presuppositions and positions age, satirical wit. In the 1960s and 1970s, from which their authors start. The frag- new method after new method was rolled out at seminars and conferences to the accompaniment of flatulent out- 12 Richard Evans, In Defence of History (Lon- pourings of self-praise, derision for all don: Granta, 1997; New York: Norton, 1999); Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How those who refused to see that quanti½ca- a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics tion or an emphasis on the public sphere and Social Theorists (Paddington, nsw, Austra- would make the heavens roll back like lia: Macleay, 1994; 2d ed., San Francisco: En- a scroll. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was counter, 1996). only one of many who assured readers 13 As of February 13, 2006, the archive of this that “a history that is not quantitative web site was still available at http://www. cannot claim to be scienti½c”–only to invisibleadjunct.com. refute his own prophecy decisively in

60 Dædalus Spring 2006 less than a decade, as he turned away partial validity, exaggerate the coher- History’s from quantitative history and all its ence of American in the postmodern fates works.14 past. Only a few of what are now seen In fact, promises and manifestos– as the new subjects of the 1960s and af- and the posturing of public intellectu- ter–women’s history, the history of als–have shaped the writing of histo- slavery, the history of American Indians ry in America since the very days, not and the West–were really new. Most long after the Civil War, when the ½eld of them, as Ellen Fitzpatrick has shown, ½rst became professional. The process were systematically discussed in sub- began as part of America’s rush to attain stantial, deeply researched books, which and pro½t from technical expertise in were in turn reviewed in detail in the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 the Age of Reform. Historians believed professional journals.16 Many of what that those who wanted to professional- have been hailed as radically innovative ize the civil service, the courts, and the historical methods–for example, the planning of cities were their natural al- emphasis on objects, crafts, and the ba- lies. They were still few in number, sic materials of life, now often referred moreover, and had few outlets for their to as ‘the material turn’–are in fact re- technical writing. Accordingly, many vivals of earlier efforts. The great Vassar of them regularly wrote for this larger historian Lucy Maynard Salmon led her public. In 1906, when Wendell Garrison pupils into the material turn in the 1910s announced his retirement from the edi- and 1920s, writing articles that still daz- torship of Nation, a young historian at zle for their deft use of a vast range of the University of Kansas, Carl Becker, materials as historical evidence–and be- wrote to congratulate him for having came famous for doing so.17 Two gener- fought so well “the enemies of the Re- ations later, John Demos traced many of public.” Becker, who had as yet no doc- the same threads, inspired by working at torate and had published no books, had Plymouth Plantation, where every cura- written some thirty-½ve reviews for the tor had expert knowledge of crafts and magazine since 1903–and would con- household objects.18 Most general nar- tinue to address a wide public, outside ratives offered by both progressive and as well as inside the profession, until conservative critics of the existing his- the end of his career, when he devoted torical order are ‘disciplinary histories’ much effort to ½nding authors for the Yale Review, taking advantage of a circle ed Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900–1945, ed. Mi- of acquaintances that included journal- 15 chael Kammen (Ithaca and London: Cornell ists as well as academics. University Press, 1973), 8–9. For the Yale Re- More generally, simple tales of degen- view see Becker’s letters to Max Lerner, April eration or fragmentation, for all their 1937, ibid., 256–257.

16 Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing 14 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: the Historian, trans. B. Reynolds and S. Reynolds Press, 2002). (Hassocks, Eng.: Harvester, 1979), 15, quoted by Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: 17 See Lucy Maynard Salmon, History and the Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Texture of Modern Life: Selected Essays, ed. Nich- Present 85 (1979): 5. olas Adams and Bonnie G. Smith (Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 15 Carl Becker to Wendell Garrison, July 1, 1906, in “What is the Good of History?” Select- 18 Adelson, ed., Speaking of History, 72.

Dædalus Spring 2006 61 Anthony –stories invented to justify, or criticize, Microhistories have captivated read- Grafton the discipline as it is now, rather than ers, won places on syllabi, been translat- on the humanities sophisticated and subtle investigations ed into many languages—and enraged into history ‘as it really was.’ The ‘con- and delighted their fellow professionals. sensus history’ that they conjure up as How can we explain, and how should the background to the fragmentation we evaluate, their achievement? And of the 1960s existed, for the most part, what does a microhistory of microhis- as a delusion of the self-satis½ed or as a tory tell us about the state of the disci- strawman to be ritually burnt in polem- pline? ics. Standard lists of the historians who have turned their microscopes on the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 It would take the graphic talent and past concentrate on early modern Eu- analytical skill of a Charles Minard to rope and begin with two acknowledged trace the full development of history and much-criticized masterpieces: Mon- over the last century–and even Minard taillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), might not be able to register all the gains by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a distin- and losses incurred by the army of his- guished French practitioner of Annales- torians who have tramped back into the style total history in mid-career; and Il icy wastes of the world’s pasts and re- formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio turned, or failed to do so, bearing booty. del ’500 (1976), by Carlo Ginzburg, an Instead, let’s try something different: a Italian prodigy. look at how one recent episode in mod- Le Roy Ladurie, best known for his ern historiography has played out. brilliant, massive study of the Malthu- Every historian, as Le Roy Ladurie sian trap that crushed the peasants of famously remarked, is either a para- early modern Languedoc, turned away chutist or a truffle hunter: a synthesist in mid-career from the quantitative who hangs high above the landscape of and serial sources on which he had cut the past and surveys it as a whole, or a his scholarly teeth and attacked the In- monographer who presses his or her quisition register of a thirteenth-cen- snout against the sources to examine tury Dominican, Jacques Fournier. In them in microscopic detail. But for the the interrogations of peasants, millers, last three decades, historians engaged Cathar perfecti, and noble ladies, he saw with the whole range of specialties now something like a medieval Herculane- cultivated have played the truffle hunt- um or Pompeii: a lost civilization, per- er in a new way. They have focused in fectly preserved by the eruption that on particular moments and stories, hop- destroyed it. Le Roy Ladurie used the ing to catch, in the nightmare brilliance words of Montaillou’s preternaturally and clarity of a tightly focused scholarly eloquent inhabitants to call those who spotlight, past individuals going about had uttered them back to life, in all the tasks that ranged from harvesting crops strange glory of their tiny mountain to composing cosmologies to killing town, where locals deloused each other cats. Many of these microhistories have and gossiped about cosmology in every investigated mysteries. For mysteries kitchen. attract policemen and inquisitors, who Ginzburg, steeped in both the meth- keep detailed records of ordinary lives ods of the Annales school and those of and record the words of ordinary men the , turned away and women. from the problems about witchcraft and

62 Dædalus Spring 2006 its history that had previously occupied one set of them heterosexual and the History’s postmodern him and turned to the records of two In- other lesbian, though not in any modern fates quisition trials, both with the same de- sense.19 Historians of science applied fendant: a Friulian miller called Domen- the technique in more diverse ways–to ico Scandella, nicknamed Menocchio. Galileo’s encounters with the Inquisi- His words, as well as those of his ac- tion and to the development of labora- quaintances, revealed that he had elab- tory techniques by Boyle and his con- orated a spectacularly vivid and hereti- temporaries.20 cal cosmology, which he insisted on dis- In less than a decade, microhistory cussing even at the risk of his freedom had become an established genre. Sem- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 and his life. In these protocols, in which inars and courses were devoted to the Menocchio portrayed the world as tak- most readable microhistories. Publish- ing shape like a cheese, and the human ers naturally looked for successors to race as the bugs created in it by sponta- these unexpectedly saleable studies of neous generation, Ginzburg heard the the forgotten and bizarre, and scholars rough, materialist voice of a peasant supplied them, branching out into nine- civilization. Normally given no access teenth-century Europe and nineteenth- to the written word and never allowed and twentieth-century America.21 A to speak, peasants were provoked to ar- new form of historiography had some- ticulateness by the impact of printing how taken shape–or so it seemed–in and the Reformation, and then crushed an area already rich with models and by the Counter-Reformation, which set methods. out to eliminate all heresies. Both books immediately found a wide readership Historians have been trying to come in Europe. Soon translated into English, to terms with these new histories since both became the objects of widespread their beginnings. Lawrence Stone wit- and passionate discussion. nessed two of the most influential be- American early modernists soon joined their European colleagues in 19 Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love Clio’s attractive new realm. Natalie and Marriage in Florence (Berkeley: Zemon Davis drew on a vast range of University of California Press, 1986); Judith sources, including published case re- Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun ports, legal and economic documents in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1986). from archives, and contemporary liter- ature, to retell the extraordinary story 20 Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Turin: Ein- of The Return of Martin Guerre (1983). audi, 1983); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, interpreted fairy tales, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and police inspectors’ records, and a strange the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). episode from a printer’s autobiography to shed light on what he identi½ed as 21 Howard Bloch, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Ac- fundamental characteristics of eigh- count of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Com- teenth-century France in The Great Cat merce of the Abbé Migne (Chicago: University Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cul- of Chicago Press, 1994); James Goodman, Sto- ries of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon, 1994); tural History (1984). Two leading histori- Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jew- ans of early modern Italy, Gene Brucker ett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nine- and Judith Brown, drew on legal records teenth-Century New York (New York: Alfred A. to tell the stories of star-crossed lovers, Knopf, 1998).

Dædalus Spring 2006 63 Anthony ing born: Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the work, for example, formed part of a larg- Grafton Worms, the ½rst draft of which was writ- er enterprise developed by a number on the humanities ten at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis of contributors to the journal Quaderni Center for Historical Research, and storici, and were designed to ½t the par- Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, parts ticular conditions of Italy, where every- of which were ½rst discussed there. Ev- thing from the land itself to the vast civ- er alert to the condition of history as il and ecclesiastical archives made it pos- a whole, Stone took these innovative sible to recreate particular stories in as studies as symptoms of a wider change. much detail as if they had happened in In what became a famous article, he much more modern times.24 argued that historians had become dis- Stone himself, moreover, pointed out Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 contented with big questions and, even that microhistories had roots in a vari- more, with the big, impersonal theories ety of intellectual traditions. French they had previously used in trying to scholars in the tradition of the Annales answer them. They had rebelled against –starting with the cofounder of that the large-scale quantitative projects of journal, Lucien Febvre–had tried to American Cliometricians and French reconstruct what they termed, with Annalistes. In the place of these large- provocative vagueness, the mentalités scale, systematic reconstructions of past of past societies–the sets of tools with societies and systems, with their em- which they understood the universe, phasis on stability over time, they set a society, and their own place. The influ- newer, nimbler, Energizer Bunny–style ential American anthropologist Clif- of history–one that returned to the an- ford Geertz called for the creation of cient historian’s craft of telling stories.22 detail-rich “thick descriptions” of ritu- Stone’s pointed, witty essay focused als, which could in turn be used to tease attention on the new genre, but also out an alien society’s values, assump- provoked immediate dissent. Eric Hobs- tions, beliefs, and practices. Ginzburg bawm, who knew the continental was visibly inspired by Febvre, even if world from which the ½rst microhisto- he used archival records to do what Feb- ries emerged even better than Stone vre had done by reading literary and did, noted almost immediately that for philosophical texts. Davis and Darnton all their narrative flair, these writers had were as visibly inspired by Geertz, with hardly abandoned the analytical inten- whom they regularly exchanged ideas. tions of their predecessors. If Ginzburg Both insisted for a time on calling them- focused on Menocchio, for example, selves anthropologists as well as, or in- he did so because he saw a microscopic stead of, historians. study as the most pro½table alembic in Many observers, however, identi½ed which to raise questions about and to one feature of microhistory as far more analyze the relations between popular striking than the rest, and as one that and learned, oral and written cultures.23 connected it to other ½elds of innova- Others noted that all kinds of micro- tive, ‘postmodern’ history: its propen- history were not identical. Ginzburg’s sity to spark ferocious argument from

22 Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” 3–24. 24 Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of 23 , “The Revival of Narrative: Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, Some Reflections,” Past and Present 86 (1980): trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 3–8. University Press, 1991).

64 Dædalus Spring 2006 scholars who insisted that the micro- re, they were soon followed by direct History’s postmodern historians violated basic canons of his- attacks against almost all of the Amer- fates torical research. Every one of the early ican microhistorians. All of these attack- modern microhistories generated at ers argued that the microhistorians had least one massive effort at refutation. gone wrong, at least in part, by import- Leonard Boyle, the great specialist in ing alien ideas into or putting alien ques- medieval documents who eventually tions to their materials. Robert Darnton became Vatican Librarian, argued with found himself under ½re for reifying the characteristic irony and force that Le French character he believed he had Roy Ladurie had failed to set his materi- found in the tales of peasants and the rit- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 als into their proper content or to do uals of apprenticeships and imposing on justice to the nuances of his inquisitor’s the past a grid of anachronisms drawn language.25 A number of senior special- from his own modern concerns. Why, ists in intellectual history insisted that critics asked, insist on the absolute alien- Ginzburg had not taken into account ness of the past–and then insist that it the nearby learned circles from which was characterized by a uniform and du- Menocchio could have derived his here- rable “Frenchness”?28 Roger Chartier sies, and even the richly metaphorical held that anyone looking for the realm language in which he couched them.26 of the symbolic in early modern French And established specialists on the Ro- culture should begin not from the sorts man Inquisition attacked Pietro Redon- of behavior that allured twentieth-cen- di, at the same time, for misclassifying tury historians and anthropologists, but the chief document he used to support from the sorts of words and images that his new interpretation of Galileo’s early modern Frenchmen would have crime.27 recognized as bearing symbolic content. Robert Finlay found equally absurd Da- Though the ½rst volleys struck the vis’s attempt to apply the postmodern European originators of the new gen- notion of “self-fashioning,” as formulat- ed by Stephen Greenblatt, to the behav- 29 25 Leonard Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited: ior of sixteenth-century peasants. Mentalité and Methodology,” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. Ambrose Raftis 28 Roger Chartier, “Texts, Symbols, and (Toronto: Ponti½cal Institute of Mediaeval Frenchness,” Journal of Modern History 57 Studies, 1981), 119–140. (1985): 682–695; Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: 26 For a full bibliography see Domenico Scan- Press, 1985); Dominick LaCapra, “Chartier, della detto Menocchio: i processi dell’inquisizione Darnton and the Great Symbol Massacre,” Jour- (1583–1599), ed. Andrea Del Col (Pordenone: nal of Modern History 60 (1988): 95–112; James Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1990); Domenico Fernandez, “Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Scandella Known as Menocchio: His Trials Before Cats and Gallic Cock½ghts,” Journal of Modern the Inquisition (1583–1599), ed. Andrea Del Col, History 60 (1988): 113–127; Harold Mah, “Sup- trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Bingham- pressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethno- ton: Center for Medieval and Early Renais- graphic History in Darnton’s Great Cat Mas- sance Studies, State University of New York sacre,” History Workshop 31 (1991): 1–20. Cf. at Binghamton, 1996). Robert Darnton, “The Symbolic Element in History,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 27 Vincenzo Ferrone and Massimo Firpo, 218–234. “From Inquisitors to Microhistorians: A Critique of Pietro Redondi’s Galileo eretico,” 29 Robert Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 485–524. Guerre,” American Historical Review 93 (1988):

Dædalus Spring 2006 65 Anthony Yet the objections to microhistory European student movement of the Grafton extended beyond the level of interpre- 1960s. on the humanities tation to that of simple fact. When Fin- Just as the microhistorians roiled the lay warned, “The historian should not waters of history by telling stories about make the people of the past say or do new subjects, they also irritated some things that run counter to the most scru- of their professional readers by appeal- pulous respect for the sources,”30 he ing to methods drawn from outside spoke for many of his colleagues in crit- their ½eld–methods that, in the case icism. Harold Mah argued that Darnton of anthropology and literary studies, had, in effect, abridged the text he ana- had come in the course of the 1970s and lyzed in the title article of The Great Cat 1980s to be associated with the academ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Massacre by ignoring the conclusion of ic Left. To some true believers in the the episode, and that by doing so he had centrality of politics and warfare, and changed its meaning. Finlay insisted that even to more up-to-date practitioners Davis had read the documents that de- of quantitative and class-based social scribed the case of Martinguerre in an history, the moral of the story seemed arbitrary way, drawing conclusions that clear. The microhistorians, like earlier they simply did not support. generations of Left revisionists before Microhistory, in other words, turned them, wanted to create a New History into something more than a new form even if doing so required them to ignore of historical writing. It became a cen- the normal canons of historical research. tral, spotlit arena in its own right, one But any effort to argue that micro- in which prominent historians debated history went with a lack of concern the very nature and meaning of their for sources foundered on the case of craft. Taken together, moreover, these one of the new genre’s founders, Carlo debates suggested a reading of the larger Ginzburg. For if Davis and Darnton situation of history itself. A number of drew their favorite tools from the shin- the microhistorians represented histo- iest of the new human sciences, Ginz- ry’s new constituencies–especially the burg found his in the oldest and most large number of women who were trans- respectable of humanistic tool bins, the forming the profession in so many ways. very one that Ranke used when he creat- Most came from one region or another ed the nineteenth century’s New Histo- of the Left, and more than one of them ry: philology. Trained at Italy’s superb explicitly de½ned their task as one of forcing-house for mandarin classicists, restoring voices and characters to past medievalists, and Renaissance scholars, actors whom previous histories had the ½ercely selective Scuola Normale omitted or oversimpli½ed. These writ- Superiore di Pisa, Ginzburg learned the ers made no secret of their sympathies. crafts of historical research in the semi- “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” nars of two uncompromising masters, asked Ginzburg, starting off with a text Delio Cantimori and Augusto Campa- from Brecht in the best manner of the na, and spent much time pondering the work of postwar Italy’s greatest classi- cal scholar, the historian of scholarship 553–571; cf. ’s reply, “On Sebastiano Timpanaro.31 The method the Lame,” ibid., 572–603.

30 Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin 31 The philological roots of Ginzburg’s meth- Guerre,” 571. od are most apparent in two of his essays:

66 Dædalus Spring 2006 he used to unlock the secrets of Menoc- ness and popularity seemed to challenge History’s chio’s confession was the central philo- the whole project of historical synthe- postmodern fates logical tool of textual comparison. It sis–their critics would have said, of co- was by juxtaposing what the miller said herence itself. to what he had read, adjective by adjec- The harsh controversies that attended tive and verb by verb, that Ginzburg the birth of microhistory were far from teased out Menocchio’s peasant herme- unprecedented. From the 1950s through neutics. Similarly, comparisons served the 1970s, many Americans looked to to show that Menocchio could not sim- British historians not only for the sub- ply have drawn his belief that the world stance of their work, but also for models came into existence from chaos like a they could apply to other ½elds. For ex- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 great cheese from any known text or ample, American historians of labor and learned radical. Ginzburg intended his of African American slavery found their work to serve as a model for a Left histo- chief inspiration not in homegrown his- ry of a new kind–but its method grew toriography but in E. P. Thompson’s The organically from deep roots in the dark- Making of the English Working Class (1963). est, richest soil of the historical tradi- British historiography, however, was one tion.32 vast battle zone. Journals like the Economic History Re- Yet for all the traditional qualities and view and Past and Present thrived on long, goals of the microhistories, they did also polemical exchanges, which focused the reflect something new: a feeling that his- attention of historians around the world torians could no longer tell large, sweep- on key issues. Even general periodicals– ing stories of the sort that their profes- the tls, the Observer, the Listener, and, sional predecessors most esteemed. If above all, the Encounter (now remem- microhistorians never became as subjec- bered for the cia money that supported tive in their methods as their sharpest it, but in its day a splendid fusion of Brit- critics claimed, they were fascinated ish and New York Jewish modes of criti- above all by past subjectivities: by expe- cal writing)–took a strong interest in rience as mediated through individual history and encouraged distinguished consciousness. At times, their very vivid- writers to present their debates to a broad, nonspecialist readership. The 1950s and 1960s became, as Ved Mehta “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. reported to readers of the New Yorker John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: in 1962, a golden age of historical argu- John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125, ment without end.33 The guardians of and “High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden history–Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Taylor, and Thompson–spent years at Centuries,” Past and Present 73 (1976): 28–41. a time on patrol in learned journals and For a perceptive description of his early career see Anne Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” The Jour- Grub Street weeklies, armed with sharp nal of Modern History 48 (2) (1976): 296–315. nibs and ready to arrest or cut down any- one who dared to bring a new thesis 32 A copy of the version of Ginzburg’s paper on Menocchio, as discussed at the Shelby Cul- lom Davis Center, is preserved in the Center’s 33 See Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: En- archive. Warm thanks to Warren Boutcher for counters with British Intellectuals (Boston: Little, calling this document to my attention and for Brown, 1962), chaps. 3–4, for a superb evoca- his comments on its signi½cance. tion of the climate of these years.

Dædalus Spring 2006 67 Anthony onto history’s stage without having scrutiny. Seigel argued that Baron–no Grafton thought hard enough about the evidence microhistorian, but a historian of cul- on the humanities and its meaning. Certain red-flag issues ture trained in the innovative Leipzig –for example, the role of the gentry in school–had misread his sources and what used to be called the Puritan Revo- their authors.35 Baron noted a number lution, the origins of World War II, and of errors in Seigel’s work when he re- any effort to advance large-scale philos- plied.36 But Seigel’s critique unleashed ophies of history–were guaranteed to a debate that has, in the end, revealed provoke these bad-tempered, muscular both how indispensable Baron’s work bulls. is–and how impossible to accept in all By the beginning of the 1960s, these its details.37 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 controversies were starting to cross the As Hexter, Stone, and others natural- Atlantic. Lawrence Stone, who suffered ized the British polemical tradition in harm at Trevor-Roper’s hands at the be- the United States, such detailed com- ginning of his career, brought a more mentaries proliferated. Darnton, whose humane version of the same polemical microhistory became the object of so style with him to the United States. And many extended attacks, began his own J. H. Hexter, after parachuting into the career as a writer with a detailed demo- controversies over the gentry with a lition of ’s attempt to create a brilliantly polemical piece in Encounter, “social history of ideas.” He wittily con- came to specialize in the critical dissec- trasted Gay’s vaguer, traditional method tion of major works of history, not all to the more rigorous, if sometimes idio- of them recent. At the invitation of Wil- syncratic, work of French historians liam McNeill, for example, Hexter sub- of the book.38 Julius Kirshner and Eric jected one of the acknowledged master- Cochrane carried on the same tradition pieces of twentieth-century historiogra- in their own sharp, individual fashion, phy, Braudel’s Mediterranean, to a public when they set out to reduce Frederick autopsy of unparalleled precision, sharp- Lane’s massive and learned history of ness, and wit, cast as both a parody and Venice to a heap of unhistorical rub- a tribute.34 As Americans began to adopt the Brit- 35 Jerrold Seigel, “‘Civic Humanism’ or Cic- ish style of polemic, the key of historical eronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch criticism became unmistakably sharp- and Bruni,” Past and Present 34 (1966): 3–48. er–and its modes of argument more en- 36 Hans Baron, “Leonardo Bruni: ‘Profession- gaged with the details of research. For al Rhetorician’ or ‘Civic Humanist’?” Past and more than a decade after Hans Baron’s Present 36 (1967): 21–37. Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance ap- peared in 1955, it won the assent of most 37 James Hankins, “The ‘Baron Thesis’ after readers, generating a vast amount of re- Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leo- nardo Bruni,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 search by others out to con½rm and ex- (1995): 309–338; Renaissance Civic Humanism: tend its conclusions. In 1966, however, Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins a young historian, Jerrold Seigel, sub- (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer- jected Baron’s arguments to systematic sity Press, 2000).

38 Robert Darnton, “In Search of the Enlight- 34 Jack Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the enment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social monde braudelien,” Journal of Modern History History of Ideas,” Journal of Modern History 43 44 (1972): 480–539. (1971): 113–132.

68 Dædalus Spring 2006 ble.39 No wonder, then, that when Rob- teenth-century ancestors: to produce lit- History’s postmodern ert Fogel and Stanley Engerman set out erary works of art, and to see the world fates their new interpretation of slavery in through the eyes of the dead. Time on the Cross–a book that rested on Yet the story of microhistory has its a vast amount of research, carried out disquieting side. For all the excitement by teams, and that cast its results in a that the genre continues to generate, for quantitative form unfamiliar to most all the new stories that its practitioners historians–they found themselves be- have unearthed, historians have failed set on all sides by critics intent on dis- to make a case to one another, or to the mantling their bright new structure, wider public, that they can reconcile this Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 stone by stone–in one famous case at new way of seeing the past with older, book length. broader ones–or, as became clear at the In other words, the sharp critiques Washington meeting of the aha, that that attended the rise of microhistory synthetic treatments of the past can still –and other innovative forms of histori- engage a professional audience. Critics cal writing, like the New Left’s efforts and recipients of criticism alike, more- to recast the history of the cold war or over, have failed to explain to outsiders the new social history of the 1960s and that harsh debate is an integral part of 1970s–were not simply responses to in- history’s tradition, one that came back novation. They were also exercises in a into widespread practice after World form of invective made popular by the War II, as part of a broad-gauged, suc- most innovative white male historians cessful effort to assert that history has of the 1950s and 1960s, and vital to the real explanatory and critical power. transformation of history in America Intellectually, history is far richer, far into a cosmopolitan and truly critical more charged with excitement, than it discipline. looks from the outside. But senior histo- rians face real problems. They have not Historical practices have certainly mu- explained to the wider public why their tated in the last ½fty years. But our story new methods add up to the elements of also shows that these mutations in au- a liberal education, or demonstrated to thorial and critical practices took place, the young that they can join in current and are still taking place, within limits discussions without either risking per- established long ago. Microhistories, sonal disaster or ½nding themselves like other recent innovations in histo- forced to catch the ½rst bandwagon that riography, have played a major role in passes. Closer and less ideological scru- attracting the large numbers of bright, tiny of history’s own past will help. But well-trained young men and women it will take more intensive self-examina- who apply every year to begin graduate tion–something, perhaps, more like the work in history–numbers far in excess systematic scrutiny to which art histori- of the number of places they can occupy. ans and literary critics have recently sub- Their methods may be novel–yet the jected their own practices–to sort out goals of these students remain essential- these issues with clarity, charity, and ly the same as those set by their eigh- honesty.

39 Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, “Decon- structing Lane’s Venice,” Journal of Modern His- tory 47 (1975): 321–334.

Dædalus Spring 2006 69