November 7, 2006
Historians and the Use of Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon, who is lots of things, but never a particularly gracious colleague, asserts: “Mr. Zeitz and I do indeed live on different planets. I think evidence should be presented when making serious charges. He, apparently, believes that anything that favors his politics and disfavors the politics of anyone with the lese majesty to disagree with him is, ipso facto, the truth.” I’m not going to play who’s-the-more-responsible-historian with Mr. Gordon, other than to say that I really don’t need a lecture from him on proper historical methodology. Rather, I’ll use his cheap shot to open up a thread on how historians document their arguments. Academic historians are often justly accused of loving historiography more than history, an occupational hazard that leads us to weigh our books down with dense footnotes and endnotes that sometimes detract from the flow of the larger argument or narrative. While I’m sensitive to this aesthetic danger, having been trained as a professional historian I see the merit in documenting my analysis. At last count, my forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, has about 500 endnotes, most of which cite multiple sources. I have no idea how many book pages these endnotes will fill, as I have not yet seen the galleys. But to give some perspective, the total manuscript is about 115,000 words, of which 95,000 words are text and 25,000 words are notes. In effect, about 17 percent of the book is taken up by source citations. While I’m pretty certain that my friends and family will never give these endnotes a moment’s attention, my colleagues in the academy will, so I’ve taken great care in making sure they line up. When I write for the popular market, as was the case with my book on the 1920s flapper, I’m more sparing in my use of endnotes. General readers are less interested in analytical debates between historians and more interested in story and synthesis. That manuscript came in at about 96,000 words, of which 9,000 (or 9 percent) were in the endnotes. As a mass circulation magazine, American Heritage—and its companion website, AmericanHeritage.com—does not use endnotes or footnotes. But the magazine does subject all of its articles, including daily web features, to a rigorous fact-checking process. Authors are asked to provide source notes for their articles, and fact-checkers and editors then work through every last word of each article to make certain that the content checks out. I’ve been part of the process and can vouch for its integrity. Of course, implicit in this arrangement is trust. Readers have to trust American Heritage to get it right. On the other hand, when I cite a document in one of my books, readers have to trust that I’m citing it faithfully. A few years ago, Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University who won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Culture, got into hot water when many of his citations proved inaccurate or false. He claimed to have looked at 11,000 probate records from the early Republic, but many of his footnotes led to cold trails. This was undoubtedly an extreme case of academic fraud, but it demonstrates the limited use of endnotes. It’s one thing to cite a document. But most readers are nowhere within proximity of the relevant archives and therefore cannot assess how accurately the author has cited and interpreted the document. All of this bedevils those of us who write and teach history for a living. I remember the first time I reflexively flipped to the back of a novel in search of the endnotes. It was a Philip Roth novel (American Pastoral, I think). That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
|
