What I'm Reading--Historians and Fallacies

The Christmas Break for this graduate student is about to come to an end.  Over the break, I had the chance to indulge in some relaxation, albeit away from home.  While I enjoy my grad studies, it's good to take a break and smell the roses every once in a while.  My cross-country drives give the opportunity for relaxation, unless it involves the whiteout that I drove through around Cleveland on I-80 on Tuesday.  While there were no crashes, traffic sped along at a whopping 15 miles per hour for a bit.  I'm glad to be back in Grand Forks and in my own bed for a change.

One of the indulgences that I take while on break is reading.  I know what you're probably thinking, "Doesn't a grad student's life involve lots of reading?"  It does, but it's generally on topics that relate to work, not enjoyment.  For Christmas, I got a copy of Carl Trueman's Histories and Fallacies.  I read through it very quickly, as it is an enjoyable read.  I generally don't enjoy books on historiography, but this one was quite readable and practical (probably because it's not written more for laymen).  I would not have asked for the book if it had not been recommended by one of Trueman's former students, himself not a historian, at Westminster Theological Seminary.  After reading this book, I'm glad I got the recommendation and chose to ignore my general avoidance of all things related to historiography (at least in the theoretical sense).  Trueman, like me, has little love for those who only write about the writing of history, rather than actually writing history themselves. 

One of the things that Trueman clearly points out is the fact that historical writing is based upon interpretation.  He discusses the difference between objectivity and neutrality, arguing that the first is possible, while the second is not.  There are facts.  For example, WWII happened.  This is not disputed.  The impact of various actions during World War II are debated, and differing interpretations can shed light on the subject.  While Trueman has no patience for relativism, he understands that there is no one absolute right interpretation of most historical events.  For an example, he uses the Holocaust.  There are two schools of thought on the Holocaust, the functionalists and the intentionalists--who basically argue whether the Holocaust was planned from the beginning or thought up along the way.  Both are able to find evidence that backs up their claims and both are able to shed light on the German activity in this horrific event.  Neither is necessarily absolutely correct. 

The group that troubles Trueman are the Holocaust Deniers who say that either the event never happened  or that the death tolls were nowhere in the millions.  These are folks who misuse historical evidence and make their websites look slick to spread their propaganda.  Trueman walks his readers through the bad historical method of the deniers.  Both functionalists and intentionalists use the accepted methods of historical inquiry.  For the most part the deniers do not.  The moral quandry of the Holocaust allows Trueman to criticize an extreme relativism that embraces the validity of all texts.  To radical postmodernists, Holocaust deniers should not be a problem.  While multiple perspectives can be accurate, there are perspectives that are completely inaccurate or immoral.  I think that Trueman handled this concept quite well.

Much of the rest of the book goes into discussing certain fallacies that historians are prone to fall into.  Entire chapters are devoted to the idea of metanarratives that explain everything and anachronism, while the final chapter discusses a few.  While Histories and Fallacies includes some of the same ideas as David Hackett Fischer's scathing review (Historians' Fallacies) of the logical fallacies that even the most accomplished historians commit, it did not go into nearly the depth of Fischer's book, nor did it give specific examples with names included.

I rather enjoyed the chapter on overarching interpretations of history.  Trueman chose Marxism, and one of its ablest historians, to take apart.  While I would definitely not describe myself as a Marxist historian, I do recognize (as does Trueman) that this school of historians brought the importance of economic considerations in history to the forefront.  Trueman uses the example of a letter from Pliny the Younger to the Roman emperor Trajan that talks about the Christians and their persecution.  Pliny talks about the return of many to the old gods and the joy of some merchants.  Most readers would ignore the last part, which is almost tacked onto the end of the letter, but it actually indicates that merchants who dealt in idols complained about the Christians cutting their business.  Trueman also uses Christopher Hill's discussion of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress as an example.  All of the merchants and gentlemen in Vanity Fair are described negatively in Bunyan.  Hill ascribes it to economics.  Trueman agrees that this could have been an underlying, and perhaps even unconscious, theme in Bunyan's thought.  Trueman is generally quite complimentary of Hill's work.  I've read some of it, and it is very readable and much of it is convincing.  However, I agree with Trueman that economic factors are not the only factors in history.  Ideas are important, and they are not always related to class as the Marxists would generally argue.  In an interesting note, Trueman pointed out that Marxist historians can sometimes deny problems based upon ideology (I've seen right-leaning people do this as well, so the left does not have a monopoly).  He pointed out an interview in which Hill said that there were no famines under Stalin, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there were.  Frameworks are good, but they cannot be used as absolutes that cannot be falsified.  Marxist history often falls into this trap.

Trueman's book succeeds in bringing the practice of history to a level that laymen can enjoy and understand.  I've studied history for many years, and I must confess that there are books PhD's struggle with.  This is not one of them, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. 

Significance of the Puritans Today

Those silly Puritans, with their funny hats and grim demeanor.  When people think of the Puritans, they tend to think of such things.  As I've mentioned before on this site, much of what you've read about the Puritans is probably not true or at least a caricature of what was true regarding these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious pilgrims (not to be confused with the actual Pilgrims of Plymouth).  As I've also mentioned on this site, I did a historiography of the Pilgrims this semester.  One question that needs asked is what is the significance of the Puritans today.  People such as Perry Miller, Christopher Hill, S. R. Gardiner, and R. H. Tawney wrote extensively regarding the Puritans.  They found them significant--often from the British side of the Atlantic.  What is their significance for American church history?  Here is one interpretation that I gleaned from my reading for this historiography paper:

While these works shed much light on the actual lives of Puritans and the ideas they held, laymen may still wonder about the importance of the Puritans to current life.  George McKenna attempted to answer this question in his 2007 work The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism.  McKenna’s work tied a thread throughout American history that went back into early days of the Puritan experiment in New England.  He used Miller’s errand into the wilderness to show that Americans still believe that they have a certain mission in the world, which is tied to the idea of Americanism.  McKenna argued:

The very definition of America is thus bound up with the biblical paradigm of a people, like the ancient Hebrews, given a holy mission in a new land.  It runs through the rhetoric of America’s presidents, and we can find it almost at random in their speeches, whether it was Lincoln depicting Americans as an “almost chosen people,” Franklin Roosevelt talking about an American generation’s “rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan calling America “a shining city on a hill,” or George W. Bush declaring that “America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.”  We can trace this providentialism directly back to the Puritans of the seventeenth century.  They managed to envisage an America long before there was a United States of America.  America is a work of the imagination as much as it is a juridical entity, and it was their imagination that played the seminal role in creating it.  “The myth of America,” writes Sacvan Bercovitch, “is the creation of the New England Way.”

McKenna then went on to tie this thread together from New England through various reform movements or calls back to American values.  For example, when dealing with the Populists and Progressives, he pointed out that some of the reforms (like prohibition) that these groups encouraged are now considered conservative, while others (such as encouragement of labor reform) fall under the liberal rubric.  McKenna maintained that these reforms were a part of the social gospel, and that the same people supported these progressive reforms with a mainly religious purpose.[1]

McKenna did not only use examples from the Progressive Era.  He looked throughout American history and saw a Puritan thread throughout.  He saw Patriotism and the reform ethos of the Puritans as inextricably linked.  So, whether you agree with the Puritans from a religious standpoint or just think (erroneously) that they wore funny clothes and hated all manner of fun, their goal of a godly reformation has greatly impacted American history.

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[1] George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 7, 218-221.