On the first day of class my Historiography professor told us to get angry with the material we read throughout the course. He said this rather forcefully. I interpreted it as his way of telling us to not be passive about reading the stuff, to interact with it, to have opinions about it.
We've only had to prepare two readings for tomorrow's class. The first article I was fairly content with. It had to do with one social historian's journey towards writing cultural history, and explaining how one must approach the sources and the research in general. In my own research I tend toward this cultural history or history of mentalités, so the article was easy enough to swallow, and I agreed with most of what she had to say.
The second article had me scribbling furiously. This may have had to do with the large coffee that had finally kicked in, but mostly I was interacting with the thing. This one emphasised the discipline of History as a social science where conclusions can be more or less "proven" through statistical tests. History as explanatory rather than descriptive. History as empirical rather than conjectural or inductive. For the author unverifiable conclusions or conjectures are a part of an "abyss." Historians must learn to begin with a fairly firm theory or hypothesis, framed in such a way that it can be empirically tested. "Out there--beyond the individual--there are mechanisms that ensure stable and predictable results on the average" and it is the historian's job to find these mechanisms which essentially explain what has happened in the past.
She does not ignore the human aspect of the past. She claims that through the primary sources she "becomes" an eighteenth century farmer (he studies New English economic history). She, rather dramatically, writes history "from the tear drop next to a young girl's signature when she was forced to surrender the keepsake her dead young lover left her in a will his parents contested." She calls this "authenticity" and insists that it is elusive. It is not "authenticity" it is "humanity" and it most certainly is not elusive! History is created by human beings. History IS human beings. Even when something seems essentially out of the control of the specific group in question, with the arguable exception of physiological and environmental/meteorological happenings, humans are still the primary agents on the macro and micro level. This is somehow lost in the author's descriptions even though she says that "prices are not a phenomenon of individual decision-making, but are themselves a collective 'fact,' the resultant of a social process" (my italics). But even this statement suggests that the social process has some empirically provable universal "law." Economics, here described as a social process, is not a separate entity independent of human agency. There is no universal or eternal "law" of economics, and certainly not of history, independent of human agency.
So History as a discipline can be, and in some cases must be, approached as a social science. There is no doubt that in fields such as demographic and economic history the historian must try as he/she might to come to an empirically, statistically irrefutable explanation for the given problem. This is not the only way of doing History, and I say again that there is no universal or eternal "law" which can explain the entirety of the past.
This is my understanding anyway. I'm probably way out in left field, missing something, or misinterpreting something. Any "colleagues" of mine, fellow students, wise elders and whatnot who feel that I should be put in my place, please speak up. From what I'm told I'll probably get an ear full from Dr. Curtis tomorrow if this is all bullshit.
Historians I find are often sneaky. They cover all their bases and rarely say anything definitive or radical. There is often some very precise rhetoric to this end. Rarely will you see an historian say "always" or "never" (see, I'm doing it too!). Even if they believe there is an ultimate Truth to be found, these days they usually will not presume to have found it. This is an important aspect of the love-hate relationship of historians, classicists, archaeologists, et cetera with their sources.
See, I'm terrified that I haven't covered all my bases here...
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