ABSTRACT
Diagrams of history should not attempt to seek ultimate explanatory power, but rather should focus in on a few key relationships that they wish to explain and explore. One of my own designs is a triangle diagram of history, archeology, and journalism (Figure 12.1). The diagram represents how scholars in these three disciplines interact with evidence. A historian wants neither too few nor too many facts. An archeologist stands on the extreme end, with few facts to work with. She might unearth a single pottery shard and write a dissertation about it. A student of contemporary affairs, on the other end, will sift through mountains of data to craft a thesis of comparable length. The archeologist likely expands upon a small set of sources, whereas journalists and modern historians condense a pile of sources to form their arguments. Most historians operate along the spectrum somewhere between archeologists and journalists. The nineteenth century, I would argue, is the “sweet spot” for historians: there are neither too few sources (as in many cases is true for research on the eighteenth century and before), nor too many sources (such as in our data-driven twenty-first century.) In addition, documents from the nineteenth century are still in physical form (as opposed to today’s digital photography, for example), the papers from that era are generally legible, the culture is recognizable, and the struggles of the people quite understandable. Go back another century and there is a greater cultural, political, and linguistic divide separating the past from the present that makes it more like we are studying a foreign people.
