and she offered, in revisionist fashion, the opinion that it didn’t really matter to her whether or not so many million Jews left captivity in Egypt or not. I then asked her about the law. Allowing for her view that the law had been collected and edited over centuries rather than dictated to Moses quite as literally as is portrayed in the Pentateuch, I asked her whether or not it mattered that the law was given by God, rather than being a purely human construction. She agreed that it mattered a great deal, and I pressed on, asking her whether or not the scholarly pursuit of when and where certain elements of the law (e.g., the Ten Commandments, the sacrificial laws, Moses’ farewell address) came into being was of any value, and she said yes, it mattered very much. When I asked her if she was prepared to agree with me after all that history does matter, she hesitated, so I went for the jugular. I asked her if it matters whether or not the Jewish people exist. She laughed out loud and said that of course it matters. And does it matter, I playfully demanded, that the Jewish people be understood in historical terms? We both smiled broadly as it was her turn to say, “Okay. History matters.”
I would go so far as to say that history matters to each and every one of us each and every day. I get up in the morning and after breakfast walk to a certain street corner to catch a bus to work. Why do I stand there, and not somewhere else? Because I remember having caught the bus there on previous occasions. Why do I take that bus to a certain destination, and enter a certain building, expecting to be recognized? Because I remember having done so before. We have all seen movies where someone experiences partial or total amnesia (we may have even encountered it directly ourselves or in someone close to us), and we realize just how much of who we are and what we do is dependent on accurate memory of past events. Even on an individual, personal level, history matters—it matters very much.
What Is “History”?
History is the past that matters in the present.
Quantum mechanics and parallel universes aside, philosophers and historians tend to agree that there is such a thing, in this time-line at least, as “the past.” The past is the collection of all mental, verbal, and physical events that have occurred prior to the present. These events all took place in the context of other events, shaping and being shaped by those other events. These events were all in principle observable or relatable by those present at the time, even if a complete description of these events can never, in practice, be reconstructed, because no one has the time or ability—even if they had the inclination—to sort out every possible point of view on any given event. Declaring the past to be real is the same sort of fundamentally metaphysical decision as declaring the world to be real: you may have your doubts, but if you don’t suspend those doubts you won’t find many people willing to talk to you for very long.
“History” is a subset of the past. The existence of “history” is based on a process of selecting, consciously or unconsciously, some events as being highly significant for our appreciation of the present. This selecting is naturally relative to the interests of whoever is doing the selecting. For the most part, because of their relative power to influence economies, armies, and culture, much of what we call “history” has to do with royalty, military commanders, great thinkers, and artists. It is actually mind-boggling to recognize how few people, places, and events of the past have been considered material for the subject of history, whether that history consists of the known chronology of the local cider mill or the collection of widely known facts that might appear on a television game show. History is in fact a miniscule sliver of the past.
In English, there are several more terms that further refine our understanding, all of which are variations on the word “history.” The first is “historical,” which is used to indicate that a purported event did in fact happen—or at least is determined to have happened by the majority of those employing recognized standards of historical writing or historical method (something that I will discuss at length in this book). It’s as if a verdict has been handed down, and some hypothesis, some educated conjecture, of what has happened in the past has been confirmed: that judgment is usually referred to as an event’s historicity. If an event’s historicity is accepted, it can be referred to as a historical fact, meaning that it has been deemed—at least by those involved in the conversation—worthy of being relied on in the attempt to reconstruct what happened in a particular case. Further research, of course, can cast doubt on the historicity of something once thought of as a historical fact: its historicity can be revoked, and it would no longer be eligible to be used as evidence in a historical reconstruction, unless it was flagged as doubtful.
The art of history writing is the art of discovery. Like a detective trying to solve a crime, a historian looks at the evidence at hand, does a little digging to see if there are any more reliable pieces of evidence that might have been previously overlooked, and then creates a hypothesis, a tentative reconstruction, of what happened. The best history writing attempts to take the most solid evidence available, including the reconstructions created by other historians, ask some hard questions about why any of the facts at hand were included, excluded, or thought to be of greater or lesser significance, then adopt a new or adjusted perspective, and finally create a new hypothesis and express it in narrative form. In the case of Mr. Kenney, the allegation that he influenced the bureaucratic process regarding Black’s temporary resident permit is a historical fact: it is well documented and now part of the public record. However, the hypothesis that he actually did anything to influence that process has not yet been proven, at least in the minds of most observers, at least not beyond all reasonable doubt. Without a “smoking gun”—that is, hard evidence that would confirm the allegation was justly made, such as a memo or an email or even the unambiguous and disinterested testimony of the bureaucrat who signed the permit—Kenney’s exertion of influence should not be regarded as a proper historical conclusion; most historians would see this as a violation of sound historical method and therefore poor history writing. Any history writing, any narrative that assumed Kenney’s guilt would be flawed to the extent that it relied on this unproven hypothesis.
Another term we need to keep in view is “historic.” Of the many things in the past that could be regarded as historical, some are more clearly seen to have wide-ranging implications for the way that we interpret the present, and these are often referred to as historic. Historic figures and events are seen as generating history. By way of example, many minor royal figures in Europe died in the first half of the twentieth century—their deaths are historical facts, which are recorded, searchable, and verifiable—but few are cited as frequently as the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, whose death set off a chain-reaction of political and military consequences that resulted in the onset of WWI. His death—perhaps more important than the accomplishments of his life—was not only historical but historic. In the case of Mr. Kenney, the controversy over his alleged use of ministerial power may in fact just fade away, dying a natural death for lack of evidence, or being overshadowed by larger events. His use of influence could prove to be historical, and not historic; on the other hand, if it is widely believed that Kenney acted as he denies, if “perception becomes reality,” the controversy could prove to be historic without their being any historical fact at the heart of it—such is political life!
It should be quite clear that what is considered historical by one generation might be declared as unhistorical by another. For instance, the historical verdict of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting President Kennedy may one day be modified or overturned; less consequentially, an aging Elvis might be discovered eating fried chicken at a roadside diner in Mobile, Alabama, in which case the historical record of his death would have to be expunged. Sometimes the very same data, when viewed through a different lens with modified assumptions, can yield strikingly different results. In this respect historical research can be seen as analogous to medical research: studies using certain assumptions and certain methods yield certain results, but then the implications of the results are subject to interpretation and debate. To write off historical research as merely subjective, however, would be to go too far, just as ignoring the contribution of medical research because of its occasional ambiguity would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the same way that a scientist’s revisiting of the relationship between
