1. On The Teaching & Writing of History is a booklet including
some interviews with Bernard Bailyn, one of the most important
figures of the past two decades in early American History. Bailyn's answers
cover a wide range of methodological and theoretical issues about history
"craft", to put it in his words, beginning with some observations
concerning teaching and educational problems and then extending gradually
to relevant topics about historical research and its recent development,
new methodologies and quantitative studies, aims, means and limits of
historical writing.
2. Studying history makes sense if it is a way of experiencing beyond
our cultural boundaries and of recovering the slow movements of the past
towards the present. Therefore teaching and writing history are linked
together by the purpose of showing the patterns of transition from past
to present, in order to understand the passages and critical turning points
of the shaping of our world. This does not necessarily imply a sense of
an inevitable and necessary progress to a fixed outcome. From this point
of view, the trend towards overspecialization and narrow parochialism
in undergraduate and graduate courses of studies - a pathology not peculiar
to the American academic world - is accompanied by an actual incapacity
of historical research to reconstruct large narratives and comprehensive
accounts, after the recent technical and detailed studies have undermined
the main guidelines and the framework of large-scale interpretations.
Therefore in Bailyn's opinion, historical teaching should focus on interpretative
and framing issues, and present basic fields of history as "a coherent
account of major passages of human experience", formulating questions
and offering frameworks of general ideas. History teachers should direct
their efforts to stir up students' interest through real and engaging
questions and to mobilize what they study in order to answer them.
3. But the greater interest of the book lies in its concern for the constant
risk of anachronism. Bailyn explains his "contextualist" concept
of history drawing on his own experience in writing books like The
Ideological Origins of American Revolution or The Ordeal of Thomas
Hutchinson, but also on his personal observations: for instance the
comparison between the raw materials of the historical profession and
the chaos of individual lives perceived through the viewing of a popular
U.S. Tv program such as Hill Street Blues, is quite striking. For
Bailyn, in fact, historians are viewers, analysts and interpreters seeking
for obtaining a clearer understanding of past lives and experiences than
most of the contemporaries of the events narrated could have had. All
that requires the creative and imaginative capacity that constitutes the
essence of historical writing as a "craft". History, however,
is not fiction, because the historical imagination is and must be in a
"straight jacket", within the short boundaries of documentation
and survived evidence.
In another but related sense history should "recapture reality",
that is, it should concern and penetrate "states of mind, mental
maps of the world", attitudes very broadly shared, patterns of ideas,
beliefs, fears and aspirations that shaped past men's perception of the
world and their responses to events. This is a purpose which implies a
constant attention to the fact that the past is a distant and different
reality and that men who lived in those times had no idea of what the
outcome would be. Contextualism is, in this sense, defined by that relationship
between historical imagination and substantial knowledge, which allows
us to recapture reality, and to cast a sympathetic glance at the losers,
which helps us to remember the uncertainty of the outcome and to prevent
anachronism.
4. The hard problem with this kind of "contextualist" approach, says Bailyn, lies in the difficulty of giving account of static structures like "mental maps" without overwhelming dynamic elements, motives for change, disequilibrating forces, always "by definition" subordinated to the stable, i. e. dominant, elements. But, while it gives a fascinating account of the historian's "craft" and of his necessary personal but not ideological involvement with his subject, Bailyn's concept of history as a "retrospective" and "imaginative" construction gives rise to another question. It doesn't seem to admit a valuable contemporary history, a real engagement of the historian with his present times: what is the sense of our living, of the contemporary events now - and Bailyn is speaking on the night of bombs over Baghdad in 1991 - only future historians will be able to say. Uncertainty of the present is an "unrecoverable reality"; historical reality, even if free from anachronism, always by definition begins with the knowledge of outcome, it is essentially an highly retrospective imaginative narrative.