Some Rules for Historians (1973)

http://www.smithtrust.com/htmlpages/advice.html

by benbreen • 9 years ago

62 14 9 years ago

benbreen2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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.

stareatgoats• 9 years ago

For people who write, or people - period.

I liked this one: "to err is human and there are much worse things than errors: dogmatism, inhumanity, superficiality among them"

pattisapu• 9 years ago

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

https://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-Historica...

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 . . .

zt• 9 years ago

Wholeheartedly concur on this recommendation. A great book that I came to these comments to recommend.

urubu• 9 years ago

Great tip!

archive.org version here: https://archive.org/details/HistoriansFallaciesTowardALogicO...

a_bonobo2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

a_bonobo2• 9 years ago

Great list!

I'd probably add Theodor Mommsen, one of the earliest literature Nobel Prize laureates, for A History Of Rome in 5 books

aibara• 9 years ago

I was trying to figure that out too. These "great historians" are in opposition to what he calls "scientific" historians, which I assumed meant the Annales School (really into sociology and quantitative data).[1] But I don't know all that much about the historiography of the US (and of course things have changed a lot since Smith wrote this in 1973).

My guess is the great historians were those in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who tended toward writing gigantic broad narratives that academic historians love to pick apart and prove wrong. But that's a guess, partially derived from this 1985 interview.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_School [2] https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0702/dpage-f.html

jlebrech• 9 years ago

Reminds me of this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/06/mary-beard-misogy...

ggambetta• 9 years ago

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

Some Rules for Historians (1973)

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