window—all black—is open, about to receive a pipe.
Historians, too, look at the past from different perspectives,
and sometimes crucial pieces of evidence are missing.
Well into the twentieth century, most historians
believed that their collective labors—more research, more
books—were leading to a composite picture that provided
a fuller and clearer rendering of the past. But some histori-
ans have doubted whether their profession can sharpen the
picture’s focus, or whether a coherent vista
of “the past” even existed. If our own lives
are a jumble of motivations and confu-
sions, how can one paint a portrait of an
entire people?
In an exhaustive study of the
American Historical Association, Peter
Novick (1988) further demonstrated that
while historians have long championed
objectivity in principle, their research has
been riddled with bias. Ignorant of their
cultural blinders, historians grope in search
of historical truths they can never see.
By undercutting their profession’s
claims of “truth,” Novick’s book made his-
torians more susceptible to an idea that
was sweeping through literature depart-
ments. Known as “deconstruction” or
“textualism” and derived from French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, it held that
“there is nothing outside the text.” (Or, to
use the metaphor of the photograph,
there is nothing beyond the reflections.)
No one could reasonably claim to know
what a novelist meant by any novel, or
what any statesman or historical figure
meant by the words he or she spoke or
wrote. By extension, no historian can
explain what any historical record meant
to the people of the times it reflected.
Inspired by such observations, Robert F.
Berkhofer Jr. (1995) repudiated the very
idea of a grand historical narrative, partly
because readers would interpret that nar-
rative in their own ways.
Raising Berkhofer’s contention at the
end of a book that purports to provide just
such a narrative may seem perverse. But
his point contains an obvious truth:
Readers of any work of history, this one
included, will make of it what they will.
Source: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream(1988); Robert
F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story(1995); Jacques
Derrida,Deconstruction in a Nutshell(1997).The Debating the Pastessays in previous chapters have
offered hundreds of interpretations, many of them contradic-
tory. Why, if historians are looking at the same past, do they
see it so differently?
Consider the accompanying photograph. It shows a
cityscape as reflected on the many windows of a new sky-
scraper. Each pane of glass has its own angle of reflection,
imposing unique distortions on the scene; note that one
DEBATING THE PAST
Do Historians Ever Get
It Right?
861