Postscript on practical historical research, and a note on the use of Wikipedia

It seems a worthy occasion, after yesterday’s post and all the research that prepared it, to offer some advice on practical historical research.

By practical I mean aimed at answering a particular question, primarily for the benefit of the researcher. This is a different business from a scholar’s research which aims to produce a peer-reviewed publication or some other contribution to academic literature. I also say ‘practical’ because my advice is meant to help the person whose career is in a field other than historical research and whose time for it is very limited.

Let’s say you are curious about some particular historical event. I’ll take the Persons Case as my illustrative example.

You want to know what really happened, and if the account you’ve heard of it is true. How to find out?

The first thing to say is, You cannot do this by reading modern articles. You just can’t.

Let us say you Google the Persons Case and read six different articles that come up. You will find differences between the articles and how they interpret the case. How do you evaluate which articles are giving you the more truthful account?

You can’t. You have no reliable grounds on which to decide. This problem is peculiarly acute when discussing history, because its subject is the past, which is inaccessible to us. Other sciences—philosophy, ethics, physics, psychology, biology—deal with what is still present today and therefore we have experience with it independent of whatever author we happen to be reading. We have our own contact with the subject and so we can criticize what we read based on how it makes sense of or conflicts with our own experience.

History is not like that. The past is gone. The only past to which we have independent access is our own life. For everything else, we need someone’s testimony or we need surviving evidence. Common sense, moral conviction, philosophy, none of these can tell you what happened—the only way to find out is to go and look at the evidence.

To be sure, there is a place for common sense and probabilistic reasoning in the evaluation of historical claims, but these have to come after one knows what the evidence is.

Go to the sources

Never be satisfied with secondhand information when firsthand is available.

The only thing to do is to go back to the sources. If you want to know the truth for yourself, and not be a gullible rube who can be conned by anyone, this is the way.

Here is the method I propose. Do read one or several articles on the subject. But don’t read them for content or interpretation, read them for sources. Follow the footnotes. So, in the Persons Case, the important information to get from the web articles is this:

Section 24 of British North America Act, 1867

Supreme Court of Canada, 24 April 1928

Edwards v. Attorney General, Privy Council, 18 October 1929

Go and look at these. The Persons Case is especially easy to check for yourself because the legal documents are all online for free. Just Google ‘em. And you don’t have to read every word—even skimming them, reading the beginning and the end, doing a word search, these are all good ways of reading the sources.

Having the sources in front of you puts you in an entirely new position. Now you are the judge. The articles you read, you can now criticize. You are armed and dangerous. There is a limit to how much you can be taken in.

It is not that the modern writers and historians are all liars. Some of them are. But I think more often the problems arise from bad motivation, or laziness, or pressure of time, or any of the other hundred things that can provoke someone to do a bad job.

But there is a particular problem among people writing about history: a kind of credulity or superstition about sources. The Persons Case is a perfect example. So many writers just parrot what Nellie McClung wrote in her autobiography. And this works—they feel justified, and they get away with it—because it is what historians call a ‘primary source,’ it is testimony from someone who knew the event firsthand. Nevermind that, on examination, it is a faulty account. You can cite a primary source, therefore you have done your job. This is the superstition: the things you say come true because they are footnoted.

A similar error is a kind of misplaced humility about authorities. Whatever people say, modern schools and universities are profoundly hostile to independent thought. Anyone who comes through an undergraduate degree in the humanities has learned never, in formal writing, to state his own opinion, but only to repeat and reference the opinions of others. Hence, once an interpretation is made by a scholarly authority, that interpretation will be repeated and propagated.

I am not saying this is taught in universities. On the contrary all of it is explicitly discouraged. But it nevertheless appears to me to be the common result of an education in the humanities today.

All of this means that even a very brief reading of the sources will often leave you better armed than the authors of the modern articles. Certainly this is so with the Persons Case, where many of the authors seem never to have clapped eyes on the court judgments. It is much more fun to read the modern articles in this position. And more fruitful, because you can start to discern who are the truth-tellers and worthy historians.  

How to use Wikipedia

A word on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is much maligned and misunderstood. It is commonly banned from citation in university essays. There is a good reason for this and a bad.

The good reason for not citing Wikipedia is that it is not stable—it could change tomorrow. Since the point of citation is to direct the reader to the source you used, this makes it more or less impossible to cite. But that is not a problem with the source itself, it is only that other people can’t necessarily access it in the same form you did.

The bad reason for the ban is the claim that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for information. This is true, but it is not particularly true of Wikipedia. All kinds of articles which could be cited, like the one on the Persons Case from Library and Archives Canada, are also unreliable. Likewise books picked up off the library shelf. In my experience researching historical matters, Wikipedia is about as likely to offer a reliable account as any other source. For instance, on the Persons Case Wikipedia is remarkably good. Compared to many other, citable articles the Wikipedia article is exemplary. On the other hand, the article on ‘Just Price’ theory, when I checked it a few months back, was badly botched.

The same problems apply to Wikipedia as to any other historical article. It is not essentially different, and not more or less likely to provide good information.

Nevertheless Wikipedia is an extremely useful tool for practical historical research. This is because the articles frequently give links directly to the original sources. The fastest way to find out something for oneself is often to go to the Wikipedia article and scroll directly to the bottom and the list of External Links. Again the Persons Case article is exemplary.

Is practical historical knowledge possible?

The method I propose is exceedingly simple. Go directly to the source. Get firsthand not secondhand information.

But is this really practical? How often can you do this? And although it is easy with the Persons Case, what about for broader questions that can’t be answered with two or three specific, easily accessible sources?

And in light of what I said about the reliability of historical articles—and the general notions about history which we pick up from our culture are far, far worse—is any general historical knowledge possible?

Well first of all I would encourage you to make the attempt because you may be surprised how easy it is to go to the sources. Especially with Wikipedia. And you will save a great deal of time over other research methods. The best way to waste your time would be to start reading the latest books on the subject. Where you might spend an hour reading modern writers and learn nothing, spend five minutes with the sources and you will learn much. And it is exceedingly rewarding because having done it, you know something for yourself and are no longer an innocent pupil.

But frankly I think we should resign ourselves to being stuck with a pretty limited knowledge of history. Of course we know all kinds of things that are perfectly reliable, humanly speaking—names and dates mainly: in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1066 and all that. But the character of past peoples and civilizations, the moral meaning of this or that, what daily life was like in the past, the origin of institutions like marriage or democracy—of these all, most of us can know very little indeed. Not because it is intrinsically impossible, but because there are innumerable unreliable deceptive fables out there, and without going to the sources we lack the evidence to judge between them.

Basically there are very few subjects on which any of us can know much that’s worth more than straw. This is not peculiar to history. But it is acute with history because the past is peculiarly inaccessible. Therefore I would encourage a great deal more skepticism about historical claims than we are used to. I.e. we should resist accepting historical statements as facts unless we have some acqaintance with the evidence for them. And acquaintance with the evidence does not mean having read a book—it means having touched the sources.

However, all that said, let me not end on too pessimistic a note. I believe it is possible to have a wider knowledge of history, but that path runs through the sources. Once you have touched the sources, you can go back to your modern writers and evaluate them. You can test them against what you know, apply your discernment, and see who are the honest ones, who can be relied upon. From there, you can follow them in what they say on other subjects. If they are faithful in small things, you can trust them with large things. And you will find that those writers have their own trusted authorities. Once you have your boat on the river, you can follow it down all different streams, into territories you could never have charted yourself.

For what it is worth, I have found that C.S. Lewis is the most trustworthy of writers on historical subjects. He is not always correct, no one is, but he is always honest, always thorough, and he has a great sensitivity to what he reads.

This is the path I propose to historical knowledge: first the articles (especially Wikipedia), then the sources, then back to the articles and books. If you want to learn something true about the past—and consequently something practical, something real, something useful—this is the best way I know.