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· The
value of history: its uses and abuses.
Good history is not fiction
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‘We historians are firmly bound by the
authority of our sources (and by no other authority, human or divine), nor must
we use fiction to fill in the gaps...’ Sir Geoffrey Elton |
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Above all else,
good history is concerned with facts about real events that
actually happened. Events cannot be invented that did not
happen, nor can the chronology of these events be reversed.
There are real limitations to the narratives that can be told
about the past and those limitations are fixed by the facts.
There was a revolution in Cuba before the Cuban Missile Crisis
and a year after the crisis President Kennedy was assassinated. As the
historian G.M Trevelyan once argued ‘...the poetry of history
does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of
imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it.’ |
For any claim historian’s make
about the past they must provide evidential support from the
historical record. And the historian must be open and accurate
about this. The historian must provide clear referencing to
allow the authenticity of the original source to be verified and
to allow their interpretative reading of these sources to be
analysed.
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Student activity – The integrity of the archive:
the strange case of historian Martin Allen
Martin Allen is a British historian who
wrote a series of controversial books beginning
in 2002 with Hidden Agenda, a work that claimed
that the Duke of Windsor, former King Edward
VIII, secretly aided the Nazis during WWII. In
2005 he wrote Himmler’s Secret War which amongst
other things accused Churchill’s government of
assassinating Himmler to stop him revealing that
the British had secretly discussed peace terms
with the Nazis without informing the USA or
USSR.
Then in 2005, following an investigation by
journalists it was found that Allen’s books were
based on 29 forged documents that had been
recently ‘placed’ in the National Archives. The
1945 documents had been created on a
high-resolution laser printer (invented in the
1970s). Signatures were found to be written over
pencil tracings. Handwriting of different
officials was suspiciously similar. Diplomatic
titles and key dates were wrong. The police were
called in and a criminal case was prepared with
Allen as the key suspect, but then the case was
dropped on the grounds that a trial would not be
in the public interest. Allan himself is
reportedly ‘devastated’ by the discovery of the
forgeries and claims he was ‘set up’. The
Internet is awash with conspiracy theories about
the possible reasons why the criminal case was
dropped.
• In response to the decision to drop the
prosecution a group of leading historians sent a
letter to the Financial Times demanding an
official public report of the case. Why do you
think historians were so upset that forgeries
had been found in the archive? What arguments do
you think they used to try to persuade the
government to hold an inquiry?
• Before looking the case up on the Internet,
what sorts of conspiracy theories do you think
might exist about the ‘real’ reasons for
dropping the case against Martin Allen? |
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One of the negative
consequences of the Internet revolution has been decline in
importance of the academic authority that was once more or less
guaranteed by the published book. Now anyone can publish their
views about the past on a website, blog or discussion board,
irrespective of whether they have respected the traditional
requirements of academic historical scholarship or not.
Conspiracy theory websites of variable quality, rank highly in
search results alongside reputable institutional history sites.
Politically motivated sites can promote selective nationalist
history and revisionist sites can deny that the Holocaust ever
happened. In the face of such narratives it is clearly not
enough that there are simply alternative narratives. There must
also be accounts that are founded on the factual record. For
these accounts we depend on history.
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As
Richard J Evans forcefully argues:
‘There is a massive,
carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination
of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, unreal,
or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work
of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever
happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where
evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the
essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It
trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas
chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was
inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a
comedy or a farce.’ |
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