“A Fetishism of Documents”? The Salience of Source-based History

Abstract

A year or so ago, solid piles of Norman Davies’s splendid history of Poland, God’s Playground,¹ suddenly invaded the central London bookshops: demand was rising, too, for histories of other East European countries. As ethnic violence erupted in parts of Soviet Asia most of us had scarcely heard of, we repaired desperately to the “Russian history” shelves of our college and public libraries. Quite possibly some obscure young man, grittily pursuing his Ph.D., with a dissertation on “Population Movements and Social Change in Old Tajikistan,” found himself famous overnight. Long before the freeing of Nelson Mandela we knew that we had to supplement and revise our reading in the older, white-oriented histories with the work of the recent generation of black African historians. Wherever the glorious events, wherever the crises, wherever the killings, the circumstances giving rise to them he in the past: inevitably, in trying to comprehend them, we turn to the historians and their histories. Even when we take time off, clambering over the stones of Ephesus or sidling along the shaded side of the narrow streets of San Gimignano, we earnestly consult the guide book. Whence comes the distilled, or, more likely, distorted, information for the opening “background” chapter? Why, from, at whatever remove, the history of the professional historians. We need reflect only for moments to realize: first, that we not only crave knowledge of the past, we need such knowledge (to the question, “what is the use of history?” the only answer required is, “try to imagine what it would be like living in a society in which no one knew any history at all”); and, second, what an astonishing amount of historical knowledge exists on a staggering range of periods, countries, and topics.²