Telling the Truth about History |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
"A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."—Booklist .
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Customer Reviews:
• Closet Conservatives Pretending They're Liberals
07 March, 2010
I'm willing to bet every person applauding this book isn't a historian. Historians check facts; that's why history books have to document their sources.
As readers, you may want to know who wrote the book. The three authors of "Telling the Truth about History" are all devout Christians. Not only are they devout Christians, but they're intelligent designers. They believe that science affirms the existence of God, but only Newtonian science (so Darwin doesn't count).
They begin the book by claiming their book is not a polemic against postmodernism. In fact, that's exactly what this book is, and it's not only an attack on postmodernism, it's an attack on social progress in general.
They are horribly flawed with a number of their arguments. Here's a few of their main claims and why they're wrong:
1) "Darwin's theory of natural selection led to racism in Europe." There were a number of other racists writing around the time of European imperialism and the rise of nationalism. Racism was alive and well in Europe long before Darwin. As historians and historiographers, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob should know about this. They should also know that much of European racism, especially antisemitism, has its roots in Catholic traditions -- not scientific ones. Just read Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" if you need some examples of pre-Darwinian racism.
2) "Nietzsche was an antisemite." The quote of his they use on p. 209 is from "Genealogy of Morals." Had they actually read Nietzsche's book that they pulled this quote from, they would know that Nietzsche was not claiming any of the antisemitic lines that were written. He himself was narrating a story where a herdish fanboy of his work was incorrectly regurgitating Nietzsche's philosophy back at Nietzsche. In other words, Nietzsche was saying anyone who was claiming the Jews were in any way inferior to Europeans was a moron. This is history at its worst: Not only did the authors incorrectly cite Nietzsche, they did it in such a way as to distort his image historically. *This underhanded tactic is exactly what the authors claim they are writing against.*
3) "Science claims absolute knowledge." Western scientists haven't made this claim since the turn of 20th century. (Mid-Eastern and Far-Eastern scientists never made this claim to begin with.) During the early 1900's, physicists were already aware that there were major problems with the Newtonian conception of classical mechanics. After the quantum and relativity revolutions, scientists no longer made claims to absolute knowledge because they knew they could never mathematically demonstrate that events occurred deterministically. Science can only claim what's most probable according to what is already known and documented. Again, as historians, the authors should be acutely aware of these well-known facts.
So, in short, read this book with caution. This is not a scholarly text. This is pop-history masquerading as the intellectual middle-ground; in actuality it is right-wing progpaganda at its "finest."
- Amazon Customer Review
• Is History Bunk?
22 July, 2008
This book is interesting from a couple of perspectives. First, it was written by three outstanding historians (including Joyce Appleby, a leading colonial historian, and Margaret Jacob, the virtual guru of scientific history) in the late 1990's to repudiate what they saw as a postmodern attack on the integrity of history as a discipline. So there is much disparaging discussion of post-modernism, multi-culturalism, absolurte truth, social history, relativism, cultural history, deconstruction, textualism, etc. I agree with Gordon Wood in his excellent "Purpose of the Past" that from today's perspective, this dimension of the book comes across as somewhat "overanxious and somewhat dated." History as a discipline continues to flourish and explore new areas. This section is really designed for professional historians and those interested in history from the standpoint of epistemology, since it can become somewhat technical, though of substantial value.
The second facet of the book, written as background but occuping about 1/3 of the total text of 309 pages, which I found of greater interest is a fascinating recounting of the development of scientific inquiry, from Bacon and Newton on. Probably due to the involvement of Margaret Jacob, this discussion moves into the linkage of science to history in the cultural wars involving the Enlightenment and the Counter-Reformation. Eventually, the narrative discusses the role of "Protestant science" in American universities; national identity history in the hands of Hegel; and scientific history in the west with Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The competing approaches of Beard and the Progressive historians then enters the stage, leading to social history and the rise of multi-culturalism. In turn, science itself comes under attack and the argument that there is no absolute truth, only relativism, emerges and we are into post-modernism. History becomes a target with allegations that historians have subconscious prejudices, face problems with their methods and very language, and that narrative is destructive as a technique ("history is the western myth"). This obviously is a lot of ground to cover in a couple hundred pages, but the authors do an outstanding job, although this section is really designed to educate the reader for the key discussion to follow, namely historical inquiry remains viable if not perfect.
So the most valuable section of the book may not be that was the focus of the authors' concerns, but that which is preliminary. Nonetheless, a book chock full of interesting insights and ideas, although somewhat dated by today's standards. Unfortunately, it lacks a bibliography, but does have some helpful footnotes as sources for further investigation.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Some Of The Truth, Anyway.
16 January, 2007
Telling the Truth About History is a passionate and insightful tract about the meaning and value of history as it relates in particular to American democracy. The authors, historians at UCLA who have written on American history and on the Enlightenment, argue for a pragmatic and empirical approach to studying the past, against the "absolutisms" of a reified, capitalized, and "heroic" Science, Cold War ideologies, strong post-modernism, and "traditionalism." Against all that they make the case that history is study of an objective and to some extent knowable past, which should serve democratic values by telling a story that embraces multiple narratives.
Three issues in this book particularly interested me: their take on the epistemology of history, conservatives on campus, and how historians with an ax to grind (basically, almost all of us) can support an idea by placing it in a larger historical context.
I noted with interest that the authors, who generally wrote as secularists, found themselves using the words "faith" and "belief" to describe the historical epistemology they found most reasonable: "Belief in the reality of the past and its knowability is essential to a practice of history . . . An openness to the interplay between certainty and doubt keeps faith with the expansive quality of democracy . . . a belief in the reality of the past . . . Such faith helps discipline the understanding by requiring constant reference to something outside of the human mind."
While I am not sure the adjective "scientific" best describes historical epistemology, such comments remind us that uncertainty and knowledge are always in tension, and that this state of affairs is healthy. History is never a matter of certain proof, rather of warranted belief based on good evidence. I have argued that this form of "faith" is very close to what informed Christians have always meant by the word. This is a common sense view of epistemology that finds middle ground between the positivism of a Richard Dawkins and "blind faith."
The authors position themselves towards the middle of contemporary academic American "culture wars." They admit, on the one hand, that some "politically correct" talk goes too far in limiting free speech. I think their somewhat more emphatic criticism of the opposite tendency, what they call "traditionalism," is mostly overstated, though. They picture conservative colleagues as "muscular ideologues." They accuse those who oppose compulsory classes in women's studies or multiculturalism of carrying out an "all-out war on multiculturalism and the democratization of the university," "using the dead hand of the past . . . to muzzle the voices of the present" and creating a "national bogey in the form of political correctness." They position traditionalists as defenders of the "status quo" and de facto opponents of the "effort to democratize the university."
Much of their talk on this subject seems overwrought, and I don't think it accurately reflects the situation on American universities. The "status quo" is anything but conservative or "traditionalist" on American campuses. Making the university more "democratic" would entail participation not just by the assortment of neo-Marxists, radical skeptics, relativists, post-modernists, and "liberals" the authors describe, but also by that huge portion of the American populace that holds to "traditional" values. Forcing students to take politically radical classes, which often prove in practice to be taught by professors hostile towards the tradition in which those students have been brought up, seems by their own lights anti-democratic. The authors equate "the decision by an American university to recruit postmodernist faculty members" with "searching for scholars with a particular expertise," as if choosing ideologues of a particular stripe were the same as choosing people with expertise in a given field of study.
I have been told how an earlier generation of moderately liberal faculty members, in a desire to recruit more widely, elected scholars who were wed to some of the far-left agendas they mention. Unfortunately the new, ideological scholars did not always share an appreciation of philosophical diversity, so the faculty became more illiberal and exclusive. It would be naïve to equate radical stances with "liberality" in the ethical sense.
Towards the end of the book, Appleby, Hunt and Jacob make some interesting comments on the democratic value of historical study.
They point out that history can provide minority groups with a psychologically empowering social solidarity. Historical precedent can lend the oppressed a fellowship with the past: "roots," to use the term Alex Haley used to justify his own search for dignity as an African American descendent of slaves.
As someone who studies the process by which Christian thinkers relate their faith to pre-Christian traditions, I find this interesting. But of course historical precedent is a double-edged sword, because every tradition is diverse. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob open the door to all kinds of "marginal" and "diverse" viewpoints to enter the mainstream, but do not help us judge between them.
The power of alternative historical narratives to strengthen marginal positions is ambivalent. One can find precedent not just for abortion, but infanticide or human sacrifice, in Western history. The Nazis also appealed to a real or imagined pre-Christian past to reinvent slave labor and a virulent form of human sacrifice.
The question, then, is what criterion one will use to decide which parts of the human heritage one should link to. For me, that's Christ. The authors make it clear that they think neither religion nor science provides an adequate criterion. The pragmatic alternative they offer seems fuzzy and open to manipulation. I guess that's the nature of pragmatism. They seem like reasonable people, though, and make many interesting points.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Well Intentioned But Flawed
07 January, 2008
Written by three distinguished historians, this is a well intentioned but only partly successful effort to develop a systematic approach to historical truth. The authors open with a set of historiographic chapters covering the development of history as a discipline since the 18th century. This is a generally concise and nice precis of the importance of the natural sciences as a model of inquiry, the idea of history of a teleological and progressive model of modernity, the development of secular and nationalized professional history in the 19th century, and especially the emergence of a strong and rather distorted triumphalist historical narrative about the USA. This is followed by some good descriptions of how this tradition then began to run into problems. The somewhat "heroic" model of scientific history became its own form of dogma, and with the Progressive era, serious doubts aroase about the 19th century triumphalist model. The authors are also justly and conventionally critical of naive positivist views of historical explanation.
This is generally well done, though the need for concision may have led the authors to some incomplete and inaccurate statements. For example, the authors' facile attribution of late 19th century racism as the inadvertant consequence of Darwin's theory ignores the substantial contribution of influential non-Darwinist thinkers like Gobineau and Agassiz. Similarly, the authors' discussion of 19th century historiography ignores the fact that the greatest 19th century American historian was the disenchanted Boston Brahmin Henry Adams. Adams' work is a sustained and brilliantly written presentation of history as irony.
The authors really go astray in the middle of the book with their chapter "Discovering the Clay Feet of Science." This is a description of the misleading nature of the "heroic" model of science and how this "discovery" provoked an intellectual crisis. I don't doubt the authors' assertion that this was a major issue in the community of historians, but the authors' implication that this was a general intellectual crisis is fairly silly. As the authors point out, one of the major features of academic life in the last 50 years is the enormous expansion of universities and the democratization of access to a university education. The authors seem to be unaware that the other great change in universities over that last 2 generations is the enormous expansion and investment in the natural sciences. At my large research university, a majority of the faculty are in the natural sciences or related fields like Medicine or Engineering. In terms of funding, the natural sciences are even more dominant. The discoveries the authors that authors see as uncovering the clay feet of science had no effect on natural scientists or the university administrators who hire them. The suggestion that the writings of a few historians of science or literary critics provoked a general intellectual crisis is hyperbole. THe authors make a similar series of inaccurate claims about the Cold War, which they see as producing "distortions" of science. While there were real problems with Cold War administration of science, the fact is that rivalry with the Soviet Union was one of the factors that turned the Federal government into the major patron of American science. The Cold War was partly responsible for the enormous progress made by American science in the last 50 years.
Because the authors exaggerate the effects of historical revision of scientific progression, they similarly exaggerate the importance of post-modernism/deconstructionism. The authors characterize this movement correctly as an intellectual deadend. But the amount of attention and number of pages devoted this is essentially inconsequential movement is wholly out of proportion to its actual importance.
The authors positive contribution is an attempt to define an approach to history they call "practical realism." The authors have a good discussion of the problems with establishing truthfulness and causal relationships in historical analysis. Their recommendation, epistemically based on Peirce's fallibalism, is a modestly realist approach based on careful accumulation of data, constant testing of defined hypotheses, skepticism about data, peer review, and a community of scholars open to alternative interpretations. If this sounds familiar, its because it is. Its essentially a version of the best practices of modern science. This is crashing through an open door with a vengeance. As an aside, the authors contrast their position with the "metaphysical realism" of Karl Popper and his logical positivist "associates." Popper would be surprised to find himself grouped with the Vienna Circle philosophers of whom he was so critical. In fact, Popper's work has a strong fallibalist orientation with strong kinship to Peirce's work.
The authors also get themselves into trouble with some fairly careless statements. For example, "the exclusive dominance of European cultural forms in the United States in now consignable to a specific period,..." This from authors whose recommended approach to historical analysis is a clear mimic of western scientific practices and based on a philosophical approach articulated by a 19th century American man. Fallibalist epistemology is based on the work of several imporant 17th and 18th century European philosophers and has roots in Hellenistic Greece. This is about as European as it gets. I don't see the authors recommending nor would they recommend authentic non-European approaches like Theravada Buddhism or Confucianism.
Finally, the authors would like a form of American national history suitable for a democratic society. What does this mean? The authors are appropriately critical of instrumental uses of history like the triumphalist version of 19th century America and they are cautious about the dangers of making the same types of error in things like 'Afrocentric' history. So what is their solution? They are not completely explicit but it appears they wish a systematic, accurate, unbiased account of the past that is fair to the historical experiences of all relevant actors, a kind of inclusionary multiculturalism. But how is this different from naive positivism?
- Amazon Customer Review
• Brilliant History Of History For Non-historians
13 February, 2009
This is a *popular* historiography of history (i.e., don't expect many footnotes or sources). It reviews the history of historical consciousness since the Enlightenment--its initial emergence as a mimicry of Christian-medieval truth-seeking (as applied to the secular: i.e., power of God is transferred to Nature), the subsequent period of "heroic science" (the rational, "objective", scientific model of history), to the reformers and the birth of social history and the postmodern turn in the 20th century.
Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, outside of giving us an overview of historiography, also attempt here to show how a pragmatic middle ground between a "scientific objectivity" and completely fragmented postmodernism might look as method of doing history. Their thesis: neither extreme works, but both points of views bring valuable contributions to the study of history--and they can and should be used to complement each other. We cannot lose sight of "objectivity" (they don't mean Enlightenment objectivity, they mean the idea that *something* real exists out there, regardless of our interpretations or our problematicizing of our interpretations)--for if we did, we'd lose the "object" of history. But we have to always remember we are essentially subjective (even though our aims in doing history might be).
Appleby, Hunt and Jacob explain they have written this book because it's about time historians explain (to the rest of world) what they do.. As democracy's foundation is the educational enterprise, and as history is integrative of national memory and character, I was struck by this sentiment and theme as a thread through the work.
As an overview of themes for those interested in the historiography of history, this is definitely the book you want to read. For those with some background in historiography, this work is probably not rigorous enough (no sources, only a few pages per major thinker, i.e., if your life is Foucault or Derrida or any of the other people they discuss, you will probably find their discussion on your particular specialty to be lacking, and perhaps question the rest of the work).
- Amazon Customer Review
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