The Study of History

An event enters "history" when it is recorded.  But there may be multiple, and competing, histories; as there are multiple. and competing, eyewitness accounts.

Joyce Carol Oates  The Accursed

          And -

The historian is not so puzzled, for this is commonplace in history, that afterward, witnesses disagreed about what had happened, or what they had believed happened             p. 625

p. 455 footnote
It is not the historian's strategy to keep his reader in any sort of cheap suspense, for history is past; so I see no reason not to reveal to the reader... the outcome.




I'm reading an abridgment of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History by D.C. Somervell.  This work uses definitions and identifies its methodologies, and some suppositions.  How nice it would be if every book would start out by presenting the author's suppositions.  Authors don't generally want to admit that they have them, and the ones they know of tend to be a very small percentage of the ones they have.... but I digress.

On page 45-46, it's mentioned that the only difference between the genres of History, Science, and Fiction is that fiction can be drawn from innumerable data.  I love this admission.  History and science include everything that's happened!  Well, we can't write that, much less read that.  Other than that, the techniques are the same whether someone admits it or knows that.  The author decides what to write about, and what to include in that tale.  And it is a tale.  Some authors know what the story is, and some ramble, but maybe the difference between science and history can be seen as the difference between the book and its movie.

It struck me recently that science needs to be repeatable.  But despite all the fiction and physics about time being fluid, isn't it the one thing that isn't repeatable therefore nothing is?  What I mean, is the variables in an experiment can all be repeated in a laboratory, but they really aren't repeated to the last detail.  But time is a huge detail, and the first time the apple fell on Newton can only happen once.