Why study history - and how. Harvard professor Handlin discusses
just such difficult and enduring questions in this worthy
collection of essays. Reflecting on his lengthy career and major
achievements (including Boston's Immigrants and The Uprooted),
Handlin expresses dismay at recent trends within the profession. He
contrasts an earlier shared commitment of historians, and a
community among them, to the current careerism and the
politicization of historical thought. With the assurance - and
vengeance - of an Old Testament prophet, he inveighs against "the
erosion of the basic skills, atrophy of familiarity with the
essential procedures," and "dissipation of the core fund of
knowledge." Intolerant of shoddy work, he includes essays on how to
read a word and count a number. The computer is no substitute for
hard thought, Hamlin maintains; flashy social science methods must
not tempt the historian from searching for the truth. He is most
strongly critical not of neophytes but of masters, among them
Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization) and Robert Fogel and
Stanley Engerman (Time on the Cross); and the several topical
essays included provide object lessons on how the job is to be done
- properly. Much importance is ascribed to criticism, "the
lifeblood of science, of literature, of thought itself," but the
dominant theme is that historical research calls for work - and not
just meticulous care with the record but also imagination,
self-understanding, and openness to new perspectives. In "Living in
a Valley," Handlin tells us that there's more than one way to view
a mountain, and even for those living halfway up it's a long way to
the peak. So why bother with the climb? For Handlin the answer is
the truth in history: his and our recognition that "men and women
walked the earth" and that "though it takes a whole world of
knowledge to know them, they are knowable." A precious, hard-won
recognition. (Kirkus Reviews)
Like scholars in other fields, historians have long occupied
themselves in self-justification. In a society which calibrates all
measures by a single standard, the proof of scientific worth became
relevance, which in turn was interpreted as a search not for truth
but for political correctness. In a blistering professional
critique of this tendency in academic scholarship, perhaps the
first of its kind, Oscar Handlin offers an analysis that, if
anything, has grown more pertinent over the past decade.
In seventeen chapters, written with the brilliant assurance of a
master craftsman, Handlin shows why the turn to partisanship and
meaning has undermined the calling of historical research. As his
new introduction makes clear, partisanship has taken the best and
brightest from the field into different callings. Both widely
heralded upon its initial appearance as well as attacked with
vigor, Truth in History emanates from a half-century's experience
of reading, writing, teaching, researching, and publishing in
history and related disciplines. The passage of time has only
confirmed the concerns of Handlin and the accuracy of his
predictions for the field. This book will be valuable for
sociologists, economists, political scientists, and historians. It
is a must read for those who contemplate a life of scholarship in
liberal arts.
General
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