
Some Rules for Historians (1973) - benbreen
http://www.smithtrust.com/htmlpages/advice.html
======
benbreen
For people wondering why this might be relevant to HN - I came across this
piece while reading about the origins of UC Santa Cruz and thought some of the
advice here was insightful and potentially useful to people who write in
general. I like this one for instance:

"Once you have fallen in love with your subject write about it as swiftly as
possible. Passion grows cold or turns readily to dogma. There is, generally
speaking, nothing more disheartening than an historian who has devoted his
whole life to one narrowly conceived subject. It is very largely true that the
best work - if one takes into account its length and scope - has been done in
a remarkably short time."

~~~
lastflowers
Two half-written, heavily researched novels of mine concur. One can never
predict how 'busy' one is in the future, nor judge the desire to return to
previous work.

Perhaps late nights awake during upcoming Christmas vacation will reawaken the
feverish beast. More than likely it will not.

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pattisapu
If you ever have a chance, I strongly recommend David Hackett Fischer's
_Historians' Fallacies_:

[https://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-
Historica...](https://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-Historical-
Thought/dp/0061315451)

What historians have had to figure out, and sometimes learn the hard way --
these are lessons that over the centuries we have found deep-rooted needs to
listen to . . . it's not just about writing history -- it's about thinking . .
.

~~~
urubu
Great tip!

archive.org version here:
[https://archive.org/details/HistoriansFallaciesTowardALogicO...](https://archive.org/details/HistoriansFallaciesTowardALogicOfHistoricalThought)

------
a_bonobo
Would anybody know who he means by the great historians? Is it classic ones
like Herodotus or Thucydides or is it someone more modern?

~~~
arstin
Perhaps some ancient ones, but also more modern historians. When this list was
written almost 50 years ago it seems that tradition was already fading, and
now...as far as I can tell...it's covered in dust. Old histories inevitably
contain aspects we find mistaken (both morally and factually). But I
personally love reading them for the strange perspective, the vigorous
speculation, the calm judgement.

Gibbon was surely intended as a "Great Historian". And Macaulay (whose "Third
Chapter" on the history of the people of England inspired generations of
scholars). Maybe Michelet. Prescott. You can still find these all the time in
battered Modern Library editions in used book stores.

For my money the greatest historian (who was surely meant) was Jacob
Burckhardt, not-quite-incidentally a student of Schopenhauer and friend of
Nietzsche. A modern edition will use footnotes to correct claims that turned
out to be errors, and you're left with an elegant, sweeping vision of human
activity, saturated with all the melancholy and resignation appropriate to the
subject.

Two early twentieth century books I've read that probably fit the mold of
"great historian" intended by this author are Webb's The Great Plains and
Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.

I think what the author means by "old great histories"\---as distinct from the
many old "scientific" histories that are now merely wrong---is that the
historian takes human nature as the primary subject and uses historical fact,
at least as best as can be ascertained, as the concrete medium for both
exploring and shaping it.

~~~
tpeo
What would be some examples of "scientific" historical works?

~~~
benbreen
There are a few ways of interpreting that term. Isaiah Berlin has an article
called "The Concept of Scientific History" that takes a very broad view of
what that could mean:

[http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf](http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf)

But I think in this case he probably has in mind people like the Annales
school (mentioned in another comment here) - not so much Fernand Braudel, who
wasn't particularly scientific although he was dabbled in economic theories
like Kondratiev waves. But more the followers of Braudel who became very
focused on crunching numbers relating to land usage patterns, trade, and other
socioeconomic data from early modern Europe, to the point that they ended up a
bit detached from reality, in much the way that some economists seem to be
working in an ideal world rather than a real one. There's also Lawrence Stone
who as far back as the 1960s was using mainframes and punch cards to figure
out trends relating to the decline of the English aristocracy and the rise of
the middle class.

I figured the HN crowd might be interested in what Stone had to say about
this, so I looked up an old article of his from the 70s on his methods:

"'the 'new' historians have also borrowed from the social scientrists a series
of new techniques...: quantification, conscious theoretical models, explicit
definition of terms, and a willingness to deal in abstract ideal types as well
as in particular realities. The one new tool they have borrowed is the
computer... about 1960 historians suddenly gained free access to this
immensely powerful but very obtuse machine, which can produce enormous
quantities of data at fabulous speed but only if they are presented to it in
limited, often rather artificial, categories, and if the questions are
extremely clearly, precisely, and logically framed. Fifteen years of varied
experience with the machine has led to a greater appreciation among historians
both of its potential uses and its real defects... The computer is a machine
in the elementary use of which most professional research historians should
henceforth be trained -- a six-week course is ample for the purpose -- but it
is one which should only be employed as the choice of last resort. Wherever
possible, quantitative historians are well advised to work with smaller
samples and to use a hand calculator."

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jlebrech
Reminds me of this: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/06/mary-beard-
misogy...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/06/mary-beard-misogynistic-
race-row-bbc-cartoon-us-academic-claimed/)

------
ggambetta
And apparently "if you can't explain the artifact, it was there for ritual
reasons" :)

