In the last column I described
the enthusiasm for teaching history through primary sources that seized
parts of the educational world between the 1890s and the 1920s. This
column revisits this early enthusiasm for teaching history through
primary sources, using as its basis a 1907 collection of documents
on medieval history compiled by Frederic Austin Ogg, a professor of
political science at the University of Wisconsin, who before attending
Harvard had taught briefly in the Indianapolis high school system.
Though he taught in a
department of political science, Ogg was a historian by training and
by trade, completing a doctorate in American history at Harvard in
1908, though from the 1920s until his retirement in 1948 he became
one of the pillars of academic political science in the United States.
It was fairly common in the early years of the twentieth century,
when political science was only beginning to establish itself as a
distinct academic discipline, for it and history to be combined in
one university department. I stumbled on Ogg's book by accident when
browsing in the stacks of the University of Manitoba library and was
so taken with it that I decided to make it the subject of this column
(all the page references in what follows are to Ogg's A Source
Book of Mediaeval History, New York: American Book Company, 1907).
Among its many attractions is a short general introduction on the
nature and use of sources in which Ogg sets out his conception of
history teaching and which serves to illustrate the debates that took
place a century ago on the use of sources in the history classroom.
Though he was introducing
a collection of documents on the history of medieval Europe, Ogg began
by examining how a historian might write a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
In other words, he began not by talking about how to read history,
but how to write it. His purpose in choosing Lincoln as his example
was, presumably, to couch his defence of sources in terms that his
American students would find familiar, while also eroding the remoteness
of medieval Europe by choosing a familiar topic from the recent past.
Pedagogically, his point was to get students thinking about how history
came to be written, about how a textbook or any other secondary source
came to say the things it did. It would be easily possible, he began,
to write a biography of Lincoln by drawing on the many biographies
and histories then in print. Such a book, he grudgingly conceded,
"might conceivably be worth while." (p.5) However, anyone
reading it might well wonder just how reliable or accurate it was.
Such readers would find either that their book's author simply ignored
such questions, or referred to other writers, or perhaps explained
that such-and-such a statement was to be found in Lincoln's letters
or speeches or other first-hand documents. In any of these cases,
said Ogg, a reader "might well wonder why, instead of using and
referring only to books of other later authors like himself, he did
not go directly to Lincoln's own works, get his facts from them, and
give authority for his statements at first hand." (p.6) Moreover,
during this process of interrogation, readers might also come to realize
that not all secondary descriptions of Lincoln are trustworthy and
that an author who used them might well repeat their errors. The result
would be that "you would begin to distrust him because he had
failed to go to the "sources" for his materials, or at least
for a verification of them." (p.6)
How, then, asked Ogg,
should history be written so as to ensure its accuracy? The first
priority was to get information from sources which are as "direct
and immediate as possible" while placing "larger" (note
that Ogg did not say "complete") trust in them than in "more
recent accounts which have been played upon by the imagination of
their authors and perhaps rendered wholly misleading by errors consciously
or unconsciously injected into them." (p.6) The second priority
was to cultivate a critical spirit. In Ogg's words, "The writer
of history must completely divest himself of the notion that a thing
is true simply because he finds it in print." (p.6) Third, historians
must saturate themselves in every possible piece of information relevant
to their subject. In the case of Lincoln this would mean reading everything
spoken or written by or to Lincoln for which records exist: the writings,
speeches, and letters of all the leading individuals of Lincoln's
day; the principal periodicals and newspapers; the official records
of all levels of government; and so on. Historians could certainly
benefit from reading secondary studies, but no historian, Ogg insisted,
should write a history "unless he is willing to toil patiently
through all these first-hand, contemporary materials and get some
warrant from them, as being nearest the events themselves, for everything
of importance he proposes to say." (p.7)
Ogg did not address one
difficulty raised by his account of historical research. It is obvious,
for example, that even the most diligent historians cannot immerse
themselves in their sources to the extent that Ogg recommended. Sooner
or later, they have to stop researching and start writing if they
are not to become like George Eliot's Dr. Casaubon, who was so deluged
by his material, and even more by his awareness that he could never
master all of it, that he was totally unable to write anything, becoming
not a historian but an antiquarian. As the noted American historian,
Walter Prescott Webb, later observed: "The writing of a book
is an act of resolution. At some stage the author must say: 'No more
research. I will not be lured away by new material. I will write this
damned thing now.'" (Webb, 1969: 15-16) It is not difficult to
see that the sources that bear on Lincoln's life and career are so
voluminous and so multifarious that studying them to the depth advocated
by Ogg would take a life-time, leaving no time whatsoever for writing.
True even in Ogg's lifetime, this is even more true today when psychology
and the social sciences have so greatly extended our definitions of
relevance when it comes to deciding which sources are useful for understanding
some aspect of the past. Only the most confined specialists working
on the narrowest of historical topics could today meet Ogg's criteria,
and perhaps not even they would satisfy them completely. For most
historians, there comes a time when, no matter how reluctantly, they
have to extract themselves from their sources and begin to write.
As his precepts also suggest,
Ogg placed a much greater degree of trust in the reliability of sources
than most historians are inclined to do today. In his Introduction,
though not in his subsequent commentaries on specific documents, he
came to close to saying at times that if a primary source said something,
it must be true. Eye-witnesses and participants were to be believed,
or at least given the benefit of the doubt, for they were present
at the events they described and we obviously were not. Ogg allowed
no room for what historians commonly have to do, which is not simply
to read their sources, but to infer from them, to interpret the nuances
of their language, to read between their lines, to make their silences
speak.
In large part, Ogg's insistence
on the value of first-hand, primary accounts derived from his recognition
of a phenomenon which is much discussed in our own post-modernist
times, the distinction between the past and history, between what
actually happened in the past and what we know about it. In Ogg's
words: "History is unlike many other subjects of study in that
our knowledge of it, at best, must come to us almost wholly through
indirect means. That is to say, all our information regarding the
past, and most of it regarding our own day, has to be obtained, in
one form or another, through other people or the remains that they
have left behind them." (p.7) Ogg's insertion of the phrase "at
best" is intriguing. If it is more than a rhetorical flourish,
it implies a degree of scepticism that comes close to anticipating
Barthes' famous dictum that there is nothing outside the text. He
went on to point out that natural scientists do not have to rely on
the words of others in this way. Rather, they can perform experiments
and repeat them indefinitely if they so choose in order to gain direct
experience of the data with which they work. History, by contrast,
cannot get beyond "human testimony." Nothing a historian
can do will ever recreate the past "for by no sort of art can
a Roman legion or a German comitatus or the battle of Hastings be
reproduced before mortal eye." (p.8) This is why Ogg insisted
on the importance of first-hand accounts and records, whose evidence
was to be judged in terms of "the directness with which it comes
to us from the men and the times under consideration." (p.8)
Ogg took a catholic view
of sources, defining them as "any product of human activity or
existence that can be used as direct evidence in the study of man's
past life and institutions." (p.8) Thus, sources include not
only such obvious written documents as annals, chronicles, records,
accounts, letters, and the like, including works of "pure literature"
that can throw light upon the times in which they were written, but
also artifacts and material objects. These latter include weapons,
tools, coins, works of art, vehicles, buildings and other physical
constructions - in fact anything that tells us something about the
past. As Ogg put it: "If, for example, you are studying the life
of the Greeks and in that connection pay a visit to a museum of fine
arts and scrutinize Greek statuary, Greek vases, and Greek coins,
you are very clearly using sources. If your subject is the church
life of the later Middle Ages and you journey to Rheims or Amiens
or Paris to contemplate the splendid cathedrals in these cities, with
their spires and arches and ornamentation, you are, in every proper
sense, using sources." (p.9) The battlefield of Gettysburg and
other such sites were themselves historical sources. However, Ogg
did not discuss the difficulties entailed in "reading" something
like a cathedral or a battlefield as a historical source, difficulties
which pose different demands from those entailed in reading a written
document.
But why, Ogg continued,
does any of this matter? Could not students, especially young students,
get all the historical information they need from textbooks and other
secondary works? Textbooks are better than they have ever been so
why bother with anything else? To answer these questions, Ogg turned
to a distinction that was much used by historians at the time in their
attempts to win for history a secure place in the curriculum. Then
as now, curricula were crowded and existing subjects all had their
defenders. It was obvious that if history was to become part of the
curriculum, something would have to be eliminated to make room for
it, especially at a time when other subjects besides history were
also claiming a place in the curricular sun. History's traditionalist
opponents saw it as a modern upstart that threatened to usurp the
place of such long established subjects as Latin or Greek. Its more
modern critics saw it as threatening to fill curricular space that
would be better devoted to the new sciences. Traditionalists and modernists
alike dismissed it as a subject of little educational value on the
grounds that it was only a branch of literature and, at best, called
for nothing more than memory work. In either case, they argued, it
imposed no intellectual demands on the mind of the student. It possessed
neither the intellectual rigour of Latin and Greek nor the critical
and experimental outlook of the hard sciences. It was, in fact, little
more than a recreational luxury whose only function was to titillate
the imagination.
In response to these charges,
historians insisted that their subject was as intellectually rigorous
as either the ancient languages or the new sciences. This claim was
the subtext of Ogg's dismissal of biographies of Lincoln that were
not based on primary sources. Such books, for Ogg, whatever else they
might be, were simply not history. In defending their subject, historians
turned to Leopold von Ranke and his insistence that the historian's
task was to describe the past as it actually happened through a critical
and disciplined interrogation of sources. They insisted that history
was a distinctive form of intellectual inquiry that not only trained
the mind but also implanted in students qualities that were invaluable
for effective citizenship. In Ogg's words: "If the object of
studying history were solely to acquire facts, it would, generally
speaking, be a waste of time for high school or younger college students
to wander far from text-books." (p.10) History was, however,
far more than this. It should be studied not only for the acquisition
of facts but "for the broadening of culture, and for certain
kinds of mental training" of which the most valuable were a concern
for accuracy, an ability to sift through conflicting interpretations
of events, a habit of tracing things back to their origins, and a
commitment to "fairness and impartiality in judging historical
characters." (p.11) As Ogg put it, "So far as practicable
the student of history, from the age of fourteen and onwards, should
be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament along
with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
In addition, sources simply
made history more interesting. Here Ogg followed the example of James
Harvey Robinson and other early twentieth century champions of teaching
history through primary sources, in arguing that no textbook could
rival the impact of a well-chosen first-hand historical account. Put
simply, sources brought the past to life in ways that no textbook
could rival so that, for example, "Matthew Paris's picture of
the raving and fuming Frederick II at his excommunication by Pope
Gregory ought to bring the reader into a somewhat more intimate appreciation
of the character of the proud German-Sicilian emperor." (pp.10-11)
Interestingly, Ogg elaborated
on this argument for the use of sources in teaching in a way that
comes close to anticipating the advocacy of cultivating "empathy"
in students that attracted attention and considerable hostility almost
a hundred years later. Sources, he suggested, help students gain "an
understanding of the point of view of the men, and the spirit of the
age under consideration." (p.10) They help students escape from
the presuppositions and assumptions of their own time. For Ogg, it
seems, the past truly was a foreign country where people did things
differently and students of history had to be able to enter into the
mindset of the societies or individuals they were studying. In today's
terminology, they had to understand and enter into the otherness of
the past. In Ogg's words: "The ability to dissociate one's self
from his own surroundings and habits of thinking and to put himself
in the company of Caesar, of Frederick Barbarossa, or of Innocent
III, as the occasion may require, is the hardest, but perhaps the
most valuable, thing that the student of history can hope to get."
(p.10) James Harvey Robinson in 1904 had taken this point further,
arguing that historical empathy transferred over to contemporary affairs,
thus making it possible for citizens to view politics more dispassionately:
"By cultivating sympathy and impartiality in dealing with the
past we may hope to reach a point where we can view the present coolly
and temperately. In this way really thoughtful, historical study serves
to develop the very fundamental virtues of sympathy, fairness, and
caution in forming our judgments." (Robinson, 1904, Vol.1: 7)
Ogg did not explain what
made the ability to see the past through the eyes of the people who
inhabited it the "most valuable thing" in historical study,
but it seems clear that he was following in the footsteps of those
of his contemporaries who saw the value of teaching history as consisting
of its ability to teach what they called "historical-mindedness."
This was one of the themes, for example, of an influential report
on history teaching published by the American Historical Association
in 1899. Historical-mindedness was comprised of such elements as the
ability to detach oneself from the preoccupations of the present,
to see things in context and perspective, to think "genetically"
in terms of origins and of rise and decline, to realize that all things
must eventually change, and, not least, to see things through the
eyes of others, past and present. Though Ogg did not explicitly voice
these arguments, they were part of the debates on the teaching of
history that were being vigorously pursued when he wrote, and they
can be read between the lines of his text.
Though Ogg advocated the
use of sources at least as early as "the more advanced years
of the average high school" which he saw as beginning around
the age of fourteen (p.3), he recognized that many sources would be
too difficult for students to handle, whether for technical reasons
of content or because of difficulties of vocabulary. He defended the
translation of sources into language that students could understand
(medieval sources had to be translated into modern English for classroom
use in any event), provided of course that such translation did not
falsify their meaning. He also acknowledged that what he called "narrative"
sources describing personalities and events would be easier and more
interesting for students than "documentary" sources describing
institutions, though he also insisted that some documentary sources
(Magna Carta for example) were too important to be ignored. As the
example of Magna Carta suggests, Ogg rejected the use of snippets
or short excerpts from sources. Within limits, length was not a problem,
he believed, provided that the content was interesting and important.
At the same time, Ogg
disavowed any claim that students could somehow become historians
or even think like them. Such ambitions he dismissed as "impracticable."
He could hardly do otherwise since to argue that students could become
quasi-historians simply by studying a few preselected documents in
class would by definition undercut historians' claims that their subject
was an intellectually demanding discipline that could not be mastered
except through rigorously specialized training. Like his contemporaries,
in making a case for history's educational value, Ogg had to walk
a fine line between claiming, on the one hand, that students could
understand history and therefore find it educationally profitable
and, on the other, that its study imposed rigorous and distinctive
intellectual demands that, by definition, were likely to beyond the
reach of adolescents. In effect, though without using these words,
he distinguished between consumers and producers of history. Students
could not produce real history but as consumers of the subject they
needed to know something about how it came to be produced if they
were to enjoy its benefits. Genuine historical research was beyond
them, but some acquaintance with sources would both make history more
enjoyable and lay a foundation that might be of "inestimable
advantage subsequently." (p.11) For Ogg, the purpose of teaching
history was not to produce historians but to contribute to "the
broadening of culture" and "certain kinds of mental training."
(p.10)
It is perhaps worth noting
that he made no mention of citizenship. It is well known that the
main reason why policy-makers looked favourably on teaching history
in schools from the 1890s onwards was because they saw it as contributing
to national citizenship, defined largely in terms of patriotism, duty,
and political socialization. Democrats of all political persuasions
also saw knowledge of history as crucial to the cultivation of democratic
citizenship. For the most part historians accepted these arguments,
especially in times of national emergency such as the First World
War. And in countries that saw themselves as facing more or less never-ending
emergencies, such as France and Germany in the years before the First
World War, historians were in the forefront of attempts to create
a sense of national pride and belligerence. Other historians, however,
worried that arguments for citizenship, while superficially attractive,
ran the risk of converting history into a form of civic propaganda
which set country against country and created a readiness and even
a willingness for war. H.G. Wells, for example, attributed the First
World War to the nationalist "poison" distilled by Europe's
history teachers and wrote his best-selling Outline of History in
an attempt to create a world-mindedness that would destroy the attractions
of national history, which, in Wells's view, inevitably became nationalistic
history.
Historians made what use
they could of the claims of citizenship, since such claims certainly
helped strengthen the place of history in school curricula, but they
were inclined, like Ogg, to justify their subject in terms of its
contribution to liberal education, to what Ogg called culture and
mental training. Perhaps this is why Ogg did not frame his arguments
in terms of history's contribution to citizenship. Even though he
was dealing with the history of medieval Europe, which one might have
thought needed a certain justification in the context of early twentieth
century America, he took the value of medieval history for granted.
When he wrote, it was still a staple part of the high school and college
curriculum, though by 1907 it was coming under attack from those who
wanted curricula to make more room for modern history, and he presumably
saw himself as meeting an existing need (and no doubt earning a few
royalties, since he produced the book while still a doctoral student
at Harvard and was a specialist in American, not European, history)
rather than attempting to make a case. The only claim he made for
studying the Middle Ages was to insist that primary sources were as
useful and usable for medieval history as for any other period.
Apart from his introduction
describing the nature and use of sources, Ogg surrounded the sources
he included in his text with commentaries designed to put them in
context, to explain difficult points of detail, and in some cases
to assess their reliability. In his introduction, he came close at
times to implying that if a source was first-hand it was in principle
credible. The value of a source, he argued, lay in its proximity to
the events it described. By contrast, in his explanations of his selected
documents he took a more nuanced view, setting out the reasons why
a particular selection might be more or less credible. To use a modern
word, he demystified history, not only by introducing students to
the sources on which it was based, but also by exposing their limitations.
He made it clear without actually saying so, that historians had not
simply to read their sources, but to question them, to go beyond them,
and to arrive at qualified judgments based on what they revealed.
An examination of his
chapter introductions and explanatory comments shows that Ogg described,
albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, at least six ways in which
sources should not be taken at face-value and in which historical
statements should be regarded as provisional judgements rather than
definitive truths. One, he sometimes raised cautions about the credibility
of the documents he selected or about the limitations of a particular
type of source, such as monastic annals. Two, he sometimes alerted
students to questions of historical interpretation. Three, he occasionally
showed how historians must use a kind of reasoned speculation that
goes beyond anything in the sources at their disposal. Four, he very
occasionally ventured into what we would now call counter-factual
history. Five, he drew attention to the otherness of the past and
emphasized the importance of reading a source in the spirit of the
times in which it was produced. Six, he alerted students to the tentativeness
of historical judgements.
His book contains a number
of examples of his cautioning students to think about the credibility
of the documents selected for their use. For example, in introducing
a passage from Caesar's De Bello Gallico, containing Caesar's
account of the German tribes he faced in battle, Ogg pointed out that
"we are not to suppose that Caesar's knowledge of the Germans
was in any sense thorough." (p.20) Caesar had first hand but
limited contact only with those German tribes immediately adjacent
to the Roman frontier and "We maybe sure that many of the more
remote German tribes lived after a fashion quite different from that
which Caesar and his legions had an opportunity to observe on the
Rhine-Danube frontier." (p.20) Even so, concluded Ogg, Caesar's
account should not be rejected, "vague and brief as it is, it
has an importance that can hardly be exaggerated." (p.20) The
Germans left no written records of their own and, if it were not for
Caesar and a few other Roman writers, we should know nothing about
them: "If we bear in mind that the account in the Commentaries
was based upon very keen, though limited, observation, we can get
out of it a good deal of interesting information concerning the early
ancestors of the great Teutonic peoples of the world today."
(p.20)
Setting aside its final
rhetorical flourish linking contemporary Germans to their Teutonic
ancestors, this passage offers a good example of Ogg's attempts to
teach students to approach sources in full awareness of the circumstances
in which they came to be written and of the motives and capabilities
of their authors, without at the same time reducing them to a state
of rejectionist scepticism. Caesar's account might be "vague
and brief" and based on limited evidence, but it was the personal
record of the first-hand experience of a keen and capable observer.
Perhaps the most notable omission from Ogg's commentary is any discussion
of why Caesar might have come to write his account of the German wars
in the first place. Did Caesar see himself as contributing to the
historical record or was he intent on making a political case ("memoirs
with a political purpose" as his account has been described by
one modern commentator) and, either way, how might this affect our
reading of his work? These were questions that Ogg did not raise.
As with Caesar so with
Tacitus, whose description of the German tribes Ogg also included
in his book. In introducing the passage from Tacitus, Ogg stated flatly
that "There is much uncertainty as to the means by which Tacitus
got his knowledge" of the Germans. There is not "a shred
of evidence" that he ever visited the German tribes. Tacitus
said he used Caesar's account but that was written a hundred and fifty
years earlier and "was very meager and could not have been of
much service." (p.23) Thus, Ogg continued, "We are left
to surmise" that Tacitus got his information from other sources
that are now lost. In short, "Tacitus's essay, therefore, while
written with a desire to tell the truth was apparently not based on
first-hand information." "We may suppose," said Ogg,
"that what he really did was to gather up all the stories and
reports regarding the German barbarians which were already known to
Roman traders, travelers, and soldiers, sift the true from the false
as well as he could, and write out in first class Latin the book we
know as the Germania." (p.23)
As with Caesar, Ogg clearly
made no secret of the difficulties of his source. Indeed, reading
Ogg's introduction a sceptic might well wonder why we should trust
Tacitus at all. Moreover, Ogg made clear his own lack of definite
knowledge. Phrases such as "we are left to surmise" and
"we may suppose" are revealing in this regard. History,
it seems, can be as much a matter of informed and reasoned speculation
as it is of discovery of proven fact. In addition, Ogg went onto introduce
an element of historical interpretation, raising and dismissing the
theory that Tacitus was not writing about the Germans at all but was
rather delivering a moral message to the Romans themselves by describing
what they were not but ought to be: "The theory that the work
was intended as a satire, or sermon in morals, for the benefit of
a corrupt Roman people has been quite generally abandoned, and this
for the very good reason that there is nothing in either the treatise's
contents or style to warrant such a belief." (p.23) Leaving aside
the objection that the best satire does not in fact make its intentions
this obvious, Ogg here clearly alerts students to the reality that
history not only involves reasoned speculation but also deals in changing
interpretations.
It is not necessary to
follow Ogg further on this point. Throughout his book, he pointed
out the limitations of his sources. In describing the battle of Adrianople
of 378, he noted that "so far as our information goes, it appears
that the Goths broke out in open revolt ...." (p.37) In presenting
two Roman accounts of the Huns, he observed that "There is no
reason to suppose that either of these authors had ever seen a Hun,
or had his information at first hand" so that "This being
the case, we are not to accept all that they say as the literal truth."
(p.42) In similar vein he vividly described the limitations of medieval
biographies: "Many biographies, especially the lives of the saints
and other noted Christian leaders, were prepared expressly for the
purpose of giving the world concrete examples of how men ought to
live. Their authors, therefore, were apt to relate only the good deeds
of the persons about whom they wrote, and these were often much exaggerated
for the sake of effect. The people of the time generally were superstitious
and easily appealed to by strange stories and the recital of marvelous
events. They were not critical, and even such of them as were able
to read at all could be made to believe almost anything that the writers
of the books cared to say. And since these writers themselves shared
in the superstition and credulousness of the age, naturally such biographies
as were written abounded in tales which anybody to-day would know
at a glance could not be true." (p.108)
Biographies that avoided
these faults had other defects. Einhard's description of Charlemagne's
wars with the Saxons, while "doubtless" fairly accurate,
was partisan: "A few of the writer's strongest statements regarding
Saxon perfidy should be accepted only with some allowance for Frankish
prejudice." (p.110) Similarly, Joinville's fourteenth century
description of Louis IX of France, though generally reliable, "comprises
largely the reminiscences of an old man, which are never likely to
be entirely accurate or well-balanced." (p.312) Again, Froissart's
chronicle of the Hundred Years War was "quite inaccurate, even
by mediaeval standards." Froissart relied heavily on other people's
accounts and memories and such sources "are never wholly trustworthy
and it must be admitted that our author was not as careful to sift
error from truth as he should have been, his credulity betrayed him
often into accepting what a little investigation would have shown
to be false, and only very rarely did he make any attempt, as a modern
historian would do, to increase and verify his knowledge by a study
of documents." (p. 418)
Such dismissive passages
lead one to wonder whether attentive readers of Ogg's documents might
not reasonably have concluded that history is indeed a pack of lies
that the living inflict on the dead, or, more accurately, that the
dead impose on the living. Having in his introduction emphasized the
value of first-hand sources, without which true history could not
be written, Ogg proceeded in his chapter commentaries to show how
at least some of the documents he selected were either untrustworthy,
partial, ill-informed, or just plain wrong. Having done so, however,
he invariably went on to explain that, despite their faults, such
sources were indispensable. They were the only traces we have of an
otherwise unrecoverable past, and read carefully, could still yield
useful information.
An example of this kind
of judgment, acknowledging the limitations of a source while at the
same time praising its value, can be seen in Ogg's description of
monastic annals. He pointed out that they began as occasional notes
written by monks in the margins of charts that were used to calculate
the date of Easter and, as a result, contained an assortment of miscellaneous
information, some first-hand, some hearsay, some significant, some
trivial, and all put down in no particular order of importance. As
Ogg put it: "Many mistakes were possible, especially as the writer
often had only his memory, or perhaps mere hearsay, to rely upon.
And when, as frequently happened, these scattered Easter tables were
brought together in some monastery and there revised, fitted together,
and written out in one continuous chronicle, there were chances at
every turn for serious errors to creep in. The compilers were sometimes
guilty of wilful misrepresentation, but more often their fault was
only their ignorance, credulity, and lack of critical discernment."
(p.157) In short, medieval chronicles were not "history as we
now understand it; that is, the chroniclers did not undertake to work
out the causes and results and relations of things." (p.157)
Nonetheless, despite their many faults, chronicles were valuable historical
sources that "have been used by modern historians with the greatest
profit, and but for them we should know less than we do about the
Middle Ages...." (p.158)
We see a similar process
at work in Ogg's examination of the fourteenth century writer, Jean
Froissart. Having excoriated Froissart for his failings as a historian,
Ogg went on to say that, with all its faults, Froissart's Chronicles
"constitute an invaluable history of the period they cover. The
facts they record, the events they explain, the vivid descriptions
they contain, and the side-lights they throw upon the life and manners
of an interesting age unite to give them a place of peculiar importance
among works of their kind." (p.418) There is at least a superficial
contradiction here between Ogg's cautionary words about Froissart's
reliability and this endorsement of his historical value, but, here
as elsewhere, he did not explore it.
It is sometimes difficult
to avoid the impression that Ogg shrank from the sceptical, even nihilistic,
implications of the limitations he exposed in the sources he used.
Or perhaps he was caught up in the dilemma of trying to resolve the
contradiction between making history interesting and even exciting
to students while also trying to introduce them to the rigours of
historical method. It is as though two opposing impulses were at work.
One was to use sources to make history interesting by highlighting
the more dramatic or exotic episodes of the past, thereby adopting
what James Harvey Robinson, in his The New History, published
in 1912, disparagingly called the "police gazette" view
of history, in which attention is directed to the exotic and unusual,
to the dramatic event rather than to the structural forces underlying
it. The other was to use sources to foster in students a critical
outlook, an understanding of what it meant to think historically.
Like other advocates of the source method, Ogg never reconciled these
two contradictory approaches to the use of sources, perhaps because
they are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Part of the explanation
for this inconsistency lies in Ogg's conviction that the value of
sources lay in large part in their ability to lay bare the otherness
of the past. As he said in his general introduction, one of the important
benefits of studying history was its development of "the ability
to disassociate oneself from his own surroundings and habits of thinking....."
(p.10) For this purpose sources that illustrated just how different
the past was from the present were invaluable, even if they did run
the risk of turning history into the sort of carnival sideshow that
James Harvey Robinson so disliked. Ogg took pains to remind his readers
that the past must be studied on its own terms. Writing of Gregory
of Tours, for example, he observed that, "He mixes legend with
fact in the most confusing manner, but with no intention whatever
to deceive. The men of the earlier Middle Ages knew no other way of
writing history and their readers were not as critical as we are today."
(p.48) Similarly, in describing medieval disputes about the papal
claims to supremacy over church and state, he pointed out that whatever
we might think of the arguments underlying the papal claim to supremacy
today, "it is essential that the student of history bear in mind
that the people of the Middle Ages never doubted its complete and
literal authenticity, nor questioned that the authority of the papal
office rested at bottom upon something far more fundamental than a
mere fortunate combination of historical circumstances. Whatever one's
personal opinion on the issues involved, the point to be insisted
upon is that in studying mediaeval church life and organization the
universal acceptance of these beliefs and conclusions be never lost
to view." (p.79)
Besides drawing attention
to the importance of reading sources critically and empathetically,
Ogg also raised the subject of historical interpretation from time
to time. As we have seen, he mentioned, albeit briefly, the interpretation
that Tacitus was not so much describing the Germans as pointing out
the deficiencies of the Romans. Ogg did not dwell on this question,
confining it to a single sentence, but he at least signalled the possibility
that historians could subscribe to differing explanations of the past
and that these explanations could change over time. Similarly, in
describing the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England, Ogg turned
to the theory that the British King Vortigern had invited the Saxons
to his kingdom, only to dismiss it: "Recent writers, as Mr. James
H. Ramsay in his Foundations of England, are inclined to cast
serious doubts upon the story because it seems hardly probable that
any king would have taken so foolish a step as that attributed to
Vortigern." (p.68) In fact, it is not difficult to find examples
of governments through the ages inviting potential enemies to help
them, only to live to regret their initial offer, but the important
point here is not so much what Vortigern did or did not do as that
Ogg alerted his student readers to the existence of historical argument.
He took a similar approach
in his commentary on the documents he selected to illustrate the elements
of feudalism: "At one time it was customary to trace back all
these features of the feudal system to the institutions of Rome. Later,
it became almost as customary to trace them to the institutions of
the early Germans. But recent scholarship shows that it is quite unnecessary,
in fact very misleading, to attempt to ascribe them wholly to either
Roman or German sources, or even to both together. All that we can
say is that in the centuries preceding the ninth these elements all
existed in the society of western Europe and that, while something
very like them ran far back into old Roman and German times, they
existed in sixth and seventh century Europe primarily because conditions
were such as to demand their existence." (p.204) Of particular
interest here is not only Ogg's reference to a debate in which historians'
interpretations changed over time, but also the glimmering o fan approach
to historical interpretation that in effect drew, not on historical
data, but on a generalization drawn from the social sciences, namely
that institutions appear when conditions demand (a word that Ogg italicized)
them. Here, as elsewhere, Ogg was indirectly drawing students' attention
to the nature of history as an interpretative enterprise and showing
them that historical explanation often required going beyond the actual
text of a source.
As with his discussion
of the origins of feudalism, Ogg similarly canvassed a range of theories
regarding the growth of towns in medieval Europe, noting that the
phenomenon "has been variously explained." On this basis,
he then described two theories, noting of one that "the best
authorities now reject this view," and of the other that it described
"at best only one of several forces tending to the growth of
municipal life," before proceeding to offer his own explanation.
(pp.325-6) Other examples of Ogg's venturing into reasoned speculation,
hedged with such cautionary words as "perhaps" and "may
be," can be found in his chapter commentaries. He noted of Tacitus,
for example, that he wrote his Germania because of his general
interest in history and geography "and also, perhaps, because
it afforded him an excellent opportunity to display a literary skill
in which he took no small degree of pride. That it was published separately
instead of in one of his larger histories may have been due to public
interest in the subject during Trajan's wars in the Rhine country
in the years 98 and 99." (p.23)
Ogg took a similar approach
to Einhard's contemporary description of Charlemagne's coronation
as Holy Roman Emperor in which the chronicler claimed that Charlemagne
would have rejected the title and avoided the coronation ceremony
if he had known of them in advance. Ogg's commentary raised other
possibilities: "Despite this statement, however, we are not to
regard the coronation as a genuine surprise to anybody concerned.
In all probability there had previously been a more or less definite
understanding between the king and the Pope that in due time the imperial
title should be conferred. It is easy to believe, though, that Charlemagne
had no idea that the ceremony was to be performed on this particular
occasion and it is likely enough that he had plans of his own as to
the proper time and place for it.... It may well be that Charlemagne
had decided simply to assume the imperial crown without a papal coronation
at all, in order that the whole question of papal supremacy, which
threatened to be a troublesome one, might be kept in the background."
(p.133) Conspicuous in this passage are such provisional phrases as
"in all probability," "it is easy to believe,"
"it is likely," "it may well be." In other chapter
commentaries, we find similar conditional phrases: "there are
many reasons for believing" (p.69); "it is by no means an
easy task to determine precisely what significance it was thought
to have at the time" (p.130); "there is every reason for
believing" (p.373); and the like. Any student who read Ogg carefully
could not have avoided concluding, despite the positivism that he
displayed in his general introduction, that historians often had to
go beyond what their sources explicitly told them. Ogg even occasionally
ventured into what today we have learned to call counter-factual history,
as when he speculated that had it not been for sudden and unexpected
demographic pressures from the east Rome might have become Germanic
peacefully: "Indeed, if there had occurred no sudden and startling
overflows of population from the Germanic countries, such as the Visigothic
invasion, it is quite possible that the Roman Empire might yet have
fallen completely into the hands of the Germans by the quiet and gradual
processes just indicated." (p.33)
At the same time, Ogg
was no relativist, and, like most historians, past and present, he
took it for granted that there were reliable ways of testing historical
accounts for accuracy and credibility. He was obviously well aware
that sources contained their own problems, though it is something
of a puzzle why he confined his discussion of these problems to his
commentaries on the documents rather than exploring them in his general
introduction on the nature and use of sources. Whatever his reasons,
the result is that his introduction presents a much more simplistic
account of historical sources than is to be found in his chapter commentaries.
Even so, students and
teachers who used Ogg's book carefully would have learned a good deal
about the nature of history as an intellectual discipline and about
what is involved in thinking historically. They would, for example,
have learned to distinguish between the past and history; they would
have gained some understanding of the nature of historical sources
and the role they play in undergirding historical accounts; they would
have come to see that history is not simply a process of discovering
and reciting facts, but rather of selecting and arranging them to
form a reasoned interpretation. They would also have learned that
historical interpretations can change over time and that interpretations
can be evaluated in terms of defensible criteria. In addition they
would have acquired a critical outlook that they could deploy not
only in the study of history but in life more generally, while also
gaining an ability to distance themselves from the assumptions of
the present in order to see the past on its own terms and, by extension,
to seethe world through others' eyes. And all this, it is worth remembering,
Ogg recommended for students as young as fourteen years of age, who
"should be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament
along with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
For a modern reader, perhaps
the most obvious omission in Ogg's book is any attempt to teach students
how to work with sources. Unlike Fred Morrow Fling's truly remarkable
collection of sources for Greek history, also published in 1907, which
is to be the subject of my next column, he did not include anything
that directed students how to use the sources they read. Today we
are likely to teach students how to analyze a document and in some
jurisdictions history examinations require students to work with documents
they have not previously seen, with the result that analysis of sources
has become part of the routine of history teaching (see, for example,
John Fines, Reading Historical Documents: A Manual for Students,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1988). Ogg, by contrast, intended his sources to
be illustrative rather than directly didactic. He saw his collection
of documents as supplementing a textbook, not replacing it. He did
not want to abandon the acquisition of facts for the development of
skills, but to combine them, "to develop the critical or judicial
temperament along with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
His was not the only source
book of medieval history that appeared in the early 1900s. Indeed
Fred Morrow Fling in 1907 noted that the proliferation of source books
indicated that publishers saw a viable market for them and thereby
demonstrated that teachers were in fact using sources in their classrooms.
However, Ogg was one of the few sourcebook authors who spent any time
discussing the use of sources in teaching. Some provided commentaries
that mostly dealt with the nature of sources but said little about
their implications for teaching; others simply left their readers
to find their way as best as they could. Only a few spent anytime
dealing with sources as teaching tools and most of these, such as
Hart and Robinson, saw sources as a way of adding interest to the
story of the past rather than as vehicles for the exercise of critical
historical study. Ogg tried to do both, though not to the same extent
as his Nebraska contemporary, Fred Morrow Fling. In some ways, he
anticipated today's calls for teaching students to think historically.
His book provides a sobering reminder of how little we know of the
history of our craft.
References
Fling, F. M. A Source
Book of Greek History. Boston: Heath, 1907.
Hart, A.B. American
History Told by Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, 1896-1901.
Robinson, J.H. Readings
in European History. Boston: Ginn, 1904.
Webb, W.P. History
as High Adventure. Austin: Pemberton Press, 1969.