Information about the Past is not History

This afternoon I’ll be teaching the second session of my current Osher Class, “Interpreting the Past,” so I’m thinking a lot about how we study and teach history.  Today’s topic is “The Importance of Theory,” focusing on how historians choose what parts of the past to write about and how to turn information into historical narrative.

Because that’s what historians do.  They are not simply conveyors of information about the past to a present audience.  That’s what some people apparently want historians to do – to be robotic transmitters of data. But history is not a set of agreed-upon facts; history is a verb.  History is action.  History is a way of thinking.

Here are the “Five C’s” of historical thinking:

1. Change over time.  Does an event represent things going on as they have been?  Or is it a breakpoint, a crucible, an inflection, or a peak?

   1. Historians don’t look at information in the abstract – they are constantly comparing and theorizing

2. Context.  History is about telling stories, which requires context.

   1. In French, the word for “story” is histoire

   2. In Spanish, it’s historia

   3. In Italian, it’s storia

   4. In Russian, it’s история (pronounced istoriya)

   5. In Norwegian, it’s historie

   6. In Greek, it’s ιστορία (istoria)

3. Causality.  Historians want to know if one event caused another event.

   1. Requires interpretation of partial primary sources that frequently offer multiple explanations for a single event.

4. Complexity. Historians are dubious of simple explanations and want to address deep layers and broad tendrils

5. Contingency. 

   1. Historians don’t believe that outcomes or chains of events are predetermined by those other C’s, but that there is always an element of chance.

Through these five habits of mind, historians query the past.  They don’t just observe it. When confronted with something that contradicts what they “knew” about a past event, historians questions both what they “knew” and what the new fact (or idea, or sequence of events) tells them.  A historian is in constant dialogue with the past.

Here’s an example of the difference between a historical fact and the art of history.

This is a snip from the 1900 United States Federal Census for Bear Creek, Logan, Oklahoma

This, in itself, is not history.  It is the raw material of history — the beginning of the process of constructing a plausible narrative about the past, which is history. Let’s start to dig into this document.

The people in this column are my great-grandparents, Thomas C. and Mary E. Workman, and eight of their children.  My grandfather, Thomas C., is the last name on the list.  He was two years old at the time this census was taken.

This is the third column from the right on the original table. It notes where the individuals on this list were born.  Tom Sr. was born in Tennessee and Mary was born in Illinois.  Four of their children were born in Nebraska and four were born in Oklahoma, including my grandfather Tom Jr.

These are the last two columns on the right.  They indicate where the parents of each individual were born.  The parents of Tom Sr. and Mary were all born in Tennessee, as were the parents of the first two children on the list, James A. and Jamima.  The parents of the rest of the children were born in Tennessee and Illinois. 

Thus far, all we’ve done is observe the past.  But history requires that we query the past.  So what questions do we ask?

1. Why do the mothers of the children show different birth locations?

2. Why did this family move from Tennessee to Illinois?

3. Why did they move from Illinois to Nebraska?

4. Why did they move from Nebraska to Oklahoma?

Now we’re beginning to “do” history.  The first question is easy to answer – records show that Etta (Eddie), the first wife of Tom, Sr., died in Nebraska after having several children. She had been born in Tennessee.  Tom married Mary (who had been born in Illinois) about six months after Eddie died, and they had two children before moving to Oklahoma, where they had more children.

Answering the next three questions – why did they move from place to place? – requires the assistance of historical theory.  Here’s what I mean:

The “push-pull” theory of immigration is probably familiar to everyone.  It’s one way to turn this census data into history

To understand the pushes and pulls that led this family to move around so often, you have to understand context — both the broad trends in American history in the time period and the specifics of land policy at the same time.

• This family’s movement from Tennessee to Illinois was driven by Reconstruction after the Civil War.  James Workman, the father of Tom Sr., was a public official in Overton County, Tennessee, under the Reconstruction government in that state.  He had been publicly sympathetic to the Union cause during this war (and had in fact moved back and forth between Tennessee and Illinois a couple of times in the decades before the war).  He was chased out of Tennessee by the emerging Ku Klux Klan and moved the entire family to Illinois in the late 1860s.

• So why did they move again?  This is where land policy creates a “pull” that encourages them to go to Nebraska.  The 1862 Homestead Act made it possible for settlers to obtain free land in the western territories of the United States.  The only requirement was that they “improve” their land by cultivating the land or building a house on it within five years. I know that Tom Sr. moved to Nebraska with his uncle, John B. Workman.  Here’s a picture of the home that John Butler Workman built in Nebraska in 1873.

• The next question is, why did they move from Nebraska to Oklahoma? Again, the “pull” factor of government land policy played a role.  Tom Sr. participated in the first Oklahoma Land run in 1889, claiming his 160 acres of land in Guthrie, Oklahoma. 

Here’s the land record for this event. It’s signed by President Grover Cleveland.

This is the record of the fact that he improved his land and became the legal owner of it in 1895.

• This family’s movement didn’t stop in Guthrie.  In 1915, they moved again.  I can’t find any land giveaways that explain this move, but I can speculate that they moved for economic reasons.  Here’s a newspaper ad that shows you what I mean.

  

  It looks like free land is not a guarantee of economic success.  This newspaper ad reveals a family that was not prospering economically, and that may have been “pushed” to move once again.

  Now, THIS is history.  And it requires theory.