Ken Osborne
Teaching History through Sources: 1907 Style
In the last column I described the enthusiasm for teaching history through primary sources that seized parts of the educational world between the 1890s and the 1920s. This column revisits this early enthusiasm for teaching history through primary sources, using as its basis a 1907 collection of documents on medieval history compiled by Frederic Austin Ogg, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, who before attending Harvard had taught briefly in the Indianapolis high school system.
Though he taught in a department of political science, Ogg was a historian by training and by trade, completing a doctorate in American history at Harvard in 1908, though from the 1920s until his retirement in 1948 he became one of the pillars of academic political science in the United States. It was fairly common in the early years of the twentieth century, when political science was only beginning to establish itself as a distinct academic discipline, for it and history to be combined in one university department. I stumbled on Ogg's book by accident when browsing in the stacks of the University of Manitoba library and was so taken with it that I decided to make it the subject of this column (all the page references in what follows are to Ogg's A Source Book of Mediaeval History, New York: American Book Company, 1907). Among its many attractions is a short general introduction on the nature and use of sources in which Ogg sets out his conception of history teaching and which serves to illustrate the debates that took place a century ago on the use of sources in the history classroom.
Though he was introducing a collection of documents on the history of medieval Europe, Ogg began by examining how a historian might write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. In other words, he began not by talking about how to read history, but how to write it. His purpose in choosing Lincoln as his example was, presumably, to couch his defence of sources in terms that his American students would find familiar, while also eroding the remoteness of medieval Europe by choosing a familiar topic from the recent past. Pedagogically, his point was to get students thinking about how history came to be written, about how a textbook or any other secondary source came to say the things it did. It would be easily possible, he began, to write a biography of Lincoln by drawing on the many biographies and histories then in print. Such a book, he grudgingly conceded, "might conceivably be worth while." (p.5) However, anyone reading it might well wonder just how reliable or accurate it was. Such readers would find either that their book's author simply ignored such questions, or referred to other writers, or perhaps explained that such-and-such a statement was to be found in Lincoln's letters or speeches or other first-hand documents. In any of these cases, said Ogg, a reader "might well wonder why, instead of using and referring only to books of other later authors like himself, he did not go directly to Lincoln's own works, get his facts from them, and give authority for his statements at first hand." (p.6) Moreover, during this process of interrogation, readers might also come to realize that not all secondary descriptions of Lincoln are trustworthy and that an author who used them might well repeat their errors. The result would be that "you would begin to distrust him because he had failed to go to the "sources" for his materials, or at least for a verification of them." (p.6)
How, then, asked Ogg, should history be written so as to ensure its accuracy? The first priority was to get information from sources which are as "direct and immediate as possible" while placing "larger" (note that Ogg did not say "complete") trust in them than in "more recent accounts which have been played upon by the imagination of their authors and perhaps rendered wholly misleading by errors consciously or unconsciously injected into them." (p.6) The second priority was to cultivate a critical spirit. In Ogg's words, "The writer of history must completely divest himself of the notion that a thing is true simply because he finds it in print." (p.6) Third, historians must saturate themselves in every possible piece of information relevant to their subject. In the case of Lincoln this would mean reading everything spoken or written by or to Lincoln for which records exist: the writings, speeches, and letters of all the leading individuals of Lincoln's day; the principal periodicals and newspapers; the official records of all levels of government; and so on. Historians could certainly benefit from reading secondary studies, but no historian, Ogg insisted, should write a history "unless he is willing to toil patiently through all these first-hand, contemporary materials and get some warrant from them, as being nearest the events themselves, for everything of importance he proposes to say." (p.7)
Ogg did not address one difficulty raised by his account of historical research. It is obvious, for example, that even the most diligent historians cannot immerse themselves in their sources to the extent that Ogg recommended. Sooner or later, they have to stop researching and start writing if they are not to become like George Eliot's Dr. Casaubon, who was so deluged by his material, and even more by his awareness that he could never master all of it, that he was totally unable to write anything, becoming not a historian but an antiquarian. As the noted American historian, Walter Prescott Webb, later observed: "The writing of a book is an act of resolution. At some stage the author must say: 'No more research. I will not be lured away by new material. I will write this damned thing now.'" (Webb, 1969: 15-16) It is not difficult to see that the sources that bear on Lincoln's life and career are so voluminous and so multifarious that studying them to the depth advocated by Ogg would take a life-time, leaving no time whatsoever for writing. True even in Ogg's lifetime, this is even more true today when psychology and the social sciences have so greatly extended our definitions of relevance when it comes to deciding which sources are useful for understanding some aspect of the past. Only the most confined specialists working on the narrowest of historical topics could today meet Ogg's criteria, and perhaps not even they would satisfy them completely. For most historians, there comes a time when, no matter how reluctantly, they have to extract themselves from their sources and begin to write.
As his precepts also suggest, Ogg placed a much greater degree of trust in the reliability of sources than most historians are inclined to do today. In his Introduction, though not in his subsequent commentaries on specific documents, he came to close to saying at times that if a primary source said something, it must be true. Eye-witnesses and participants were to be believed, or at least given the benefit of the doubt, for they were present at the events they described and we obviously were not. Ogg allowed no room for what historians commonly have to do, which is not simply to read their sources, but to infer from them, to interpret the nuances of their language, to read between their lines, to make their silences speak.
In large part, Ogg's insistence on the value of first-hand, primary accounts derived from his recognition of a phenomenon which is much discussed in our own post-modernist times, the distinction between the past and history, between what actually happened in the past and what we know about it. In Ogg's words: "History is unlike many other subjects of study in that our knowledge of it, at best, must come to us almost wholly through indirect means. That is to say, all our information regarding the past, and most of it regarding our own day, has to be obtained, in one form or another, through other people or the remains that they have left behind them." (p.7) Ogg's insertion of the phrase "at best" is intriguing. If it is more than a rhetorical flourish, it implies a degree of scepticism that comes close to anticipating Barthes' famous dictum that there is nothing outside the text. He went on to point out that natural scientists do not have to rely on the words of others in this way. Rather, they can perform experiments and repeat them indefinitely if they so choose in order to gain direct experience of the data with which they work. History, by contrast, cannot get beyond "human testimony." Nothing a historian can do will ever recreate the past "for by no sort of art can a Roman legion or a German comitatus or the battle of Hastings be reproduced before mortal eye." (p.8) This is why Ogg insisted on the importance of first-hand accounts and records, whose evidence was to be judged in terms of "the directness with which it comes to us from the men and the times under consideration." (p.8)
Ogg took a catholic view of sources, defining them as "any product of human activity or existence that can be used as direct evidence in the study of man's past life and institutions." (p.8) Thus, sources include not only such obvious written documents as annals, chronicles, records, accounts, letters, and the like, including works of "pure literature" that can throw light upon the times in which they were written, but also artifacts and material objects. These latter include weapons, tools, coins, works of art, vehicles, buildings and other physical constructions - in fact anything that tells us something about the past. As Ogg put it: "If, for example, you are studying the life of the Greeks and in that connection pay a visit to a museum of fine arts and scrutinize Greek statuary, Greek vases, and Greek coins, you are very clearly using sources. If your subject is the church life of the later Middle Ages and you journey to Rheims or Amiens or Paris to contemplate the splendid cathedrals in these cities, with their spires and arches and ornamentation, you are, in every proper sense, using sources." (p.9) The battlefield of Gettysburg and other such sites were themselves historical sources. However, Ogg did not discuss the difficulties entailed in "reading" something like a cathedral or a battlefield as a historical source, difficulties which pose different demands from those entailed in reading a written document.
But why, Ogg continued, does any of this matter? Could not students, especially young students, get all the historical information they need from textbooks and other secondary works? Textbooks are better than they have ever been so why bother with anything else? To answer these questions, Ogg turned to a distinction that was much used by historians at the time in their attempts to win for history a secure place in the curriculum. Then as now, curricula were crowded and existing subjects all had their defenders. It was obvious that if history was to become part of the curriculum, something would have to be eliminated to make room for it, especially at a time when other subjects besides history were also claiming a place in the curricular sun. History's traditionalist opponents saw it as a modern upstart that threatened to usurp the place of such long established subjects as Latin or Greek. Its more modern critics saw it as threatening to fill curricular space that would be better devoted to the new sciences. Traditionalists and modernists alike dismissed it as a subject of little educational value on the grounds that it was only a branch of literature and, at best, called for nothing more than memory work. In either case, they argued, it imposed no intellectual demands on the mind of the student. It possessed neither the intellectual rigour of Latin and Greek nor the critical and experimental outlook of the hard sciences. It was, in fact, little more than a recreational luxury whose only function was to titillate the imagination.
In response to these charges, historians insisted that their subject was as intellectually rigorous as either the ancient languages or the new sciences. This claim was the subtext of Ogg's dismissal of biographies of Lincoln that were not based on primary sources. Such books, for Ogg, whatever else they might be, were simply not history. In defending their subject, historians turned to Leopold von Ranke and his insistence that the historian's task was to describe the past as it actually happened through a critical and disciplined interrogation of sources. They insisted that history was a distinctive form of intellectual inquiry that not only trained the mind but also implanted in students qualities that were invaluable for effective citizenship. In Ogg's words: "If the object of studying history were solely to acquire facts, it would, generally speaking, be a waste of time for high school or younger college students to wander far from text-books." (p.10) History was, however, far more than this. It should be studied not only for the acquisition of facts but "for the broadening of culture, and for certain kinds of mental training" of which the most valuable were a concern for accuracy, an ability to sift through conflicting interpretations of events, a habit of tracing things back to their origins, and a commitment to "fairness and impartiality in judging historical characters." (p.11) As Ogg put it, "So far as practicable the student of history, from the age of fourteen and onwards, should be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
In addition, sources simply made history more interesting. Here Ogg followed the example of James Harvey Robinson and other early twentieth century champions of teaching history through primary sources, in arguing that no textbook could rival the impact of a well-chosen first-hand historical account. Put simply, sources brought the past to life in ways that no textbook could rival so that, for example, "Matthew Paris's picture of the raving and fuming Frederick II at his excommunication by Pope Gregory ought to bring the reader into a somewhat more intimate appreciation of the character of the proud German-Sicilian emperor." (pp.10-11)
Interestingly, Ogg elaborated on this argument for the use of sources in teaching in a way that comes close to anticipating the advocacy of cultivating "empathy" in students that attracted attention and considerable hostility almost a hundred years later. Sources, he suggested, help students gain "an understanding of the point of view of the men, and the spirit of the age under consideration." (p.10) They help students escape from the presuppositions and assumptions of their own time. For Ogg, it seems, the past truly was a foreign country where people did things differently and students of history had to be able to enter into the mindset of the societies or individuals they were studying. In today's terminology, they had to understand and enter into the otherness of the past. In Ogg's words: "The ability to dissociate one's self from his own surroundings and habits of thinking and to put himself in the company of Caesar, of Frederick Barbarossa, or of Innocent III, as the occasion may require, is the hardest, but perhaps the most valuable, thing that the student of history can hope to get." (p.10) James Harvey Robinson in 1904 had taken this point further, arguing that historical empathy transferred over to contemporary affairs, thus making it possible for citizens to view politics more dispassionately: "By cultivating sympathy and impartiality in dealing with the past we may hope to reach a point where we can view the present coolly and temperately. In this way really thoughtful, historical study serves to develop the very fundamental virtues of sympathy, fairness, and caution in forming our judgments." (Robinson, 1904, Vol.1: 7)
Ogg did not explain what made the ability to see the past through the eyes of the people who inhabited it the "most valuable thing" in historical study, but it seems clear that he was following in the footsteps of those of his contemporaries who saw the value of teaching history as consisting of its ability to teach what they called "historical-mindedness." This was one of the themes, for example, of an influential report on history teaching published by the American Historical Association in 1899. Historical-mindedness was comprised of such elements as the ability to detach oneself from the preoccupations of the present, to see things in context and perspective, to think "genetically" in terms of origins and of rise and decline, to realize that all things must eventually change, and, not least, to see things through the eyes of others, past and present. Though Ogg did not explicitly voice these arguments, they were part of the debates on the teaching of history that were being vigorously pursued when he wrote, and they can be read between the lines of his text.
Though Ogg advocated the use of sources at least as early as "the more advanced years of the average high school" which he saw as beginning around the age of fourteen (p.3), he recognized that many sources would be too difficult for students to handle, whether for technical reasons of content or because of difficulties of vocabulary. He defended the translation of sources into language that students could understand (medieval sources had to be translated into modern English for classroom use in any event), provided of course that such translation did not falsify their meaning. He also acknowledged that what he called "narrative" sources describing personalities and events would be easier and more interesting for students than "documentary" sources describing institutions, though he also insisted that some documentary sources (Magna Carta for example) were too important to be ignored. As the example of Magna Carta suggests, Ogg rejected the use of snippets or short excerpts from sources. Within limits, length was not a problem, he believed, provided that the content was interesting and important.
At the same time, Ogg disavowed any claim that students could somehow become historians or even think like them. Such ambitions he dismissed as "impracticable." He could hardly do otherwise since to argue that students could become quasi-historians simply by studying a few preselected documents in class would by definition undercut historians' claims that their subject was an intellectually demanding discipline that could not be mastered except through rigorously specialized training. Like his contemporaries, in making a case for history's educational value, Ogg had to walk a fine line between claiming, on the one hand, that students could understand history and therefore find it educationally profitable and, on the other, that its study imposed rigorous and distinctive intellectual demands that, by definition, were likely to beyond the reach of adolescents. In effect, though without using these words, he distinguished between consumers and producers of history. Students could not produce real history but as consumers of the subject they needed to know something about how it came to be produced if they were to enjoy its benefits. Genuine historical research was beyond them, but some acquaintance with sources would both make history more enjoyable and lay a foundation that might be of "inestimable advantage subsequently." (p.11) For Ogg, the purpose of teaching history was not to produce historians but to contribute to "the broadening of culture" and "certain kinds of mental training." (p.10)
It is perhaps worth noting that he made no mention of citizenship. It is well known that the main reason why policy-makers looked favourably on teaching history in schools from the 1890s onwards was because they saw it as contributing to national citizenship, defined largely in terms of patriotism, duty, and political socialization. Democrats of all political persuasions also saw knowledge of history as crucial to the cultivation of democratic citizenship. For the most part historians accepted these arguments, especially in times of national emergency such as the First World War. And in countries that saw themselves as facing more or less never-ending emergencies, such as France and Germany in the years before the First World War, historians were in the forefront of attempts to create a sense of national pride and belligerence. Other historians, however, worried that arguments for citizenship, while superficially attractive, ran the risk of converting history into a form of civic propaganda which set country against country and created a readiness and even a willingness for war. H.G. Wells, for example, attributed the First World War to the nationalist "poison" distilled by Europe's history teachers and wrote his best-selling Outline of History in an attempt to create a world-mindedness that would destroy the attractions of national history, which, in Wells's view, inevitably became nationalistic history.
Historians made what use they could of the claims of citizenship, since such claims certainly helped strengthen the place of history in school curricula, but they were inclined, like Ogg, to justify their subject in terms of its contribution to liberal education, to what Ogg called culture and mental training. Perhaps this is why Ogg did not frame his arguments in terms of history's contribution to citizenship. Even though he was dealing with the history of medieval Europe, which one might have thought needed a certain justification in the context of early twentieth century America, he took the value of medieval history for granted. When he wrote, it was still a staple part of the high school and college curriculum, though by 1907 it was coming under attack from those who wanted curricula to make more room for modern history, and he presumably saw himself as meeting an existing need (and no doubt earning a few royalties, since he produced the book while still a doctoral student at Harvard and was a specialist in American, not European, history) rather than attempting to make a case. The only claim he made for studying the Middle Ages was to insist that primary sources were as useful and usable for medieval history as for any other period.
Apart from his introduction describing the nature and use of sources, Ogg surrounded the sources he included in his text with commentaries designed to put them in context, to explain difficult points of detail, and in some cases to assess their reliability. In his introduction, he came close at times to implying that if a source was first-hand it was in principle credible. The value of a source, he argued, lay in its proximity to the events it described. By contrast, in his explanations of his selected documents he took a more nuanced view, setting out the reasons why a particular selection might be more or less credible. To use a modern word, he demystified history, not only by introducing students to the sources on which it was based, but also by exposing their limitations. He made it clear without actually saying so, that historians had not simply to read their sources, but to question them, to go beyond them, and to arrive at qualified judgments based on what they revealed.
An examination of his chapter introductions and explanatory comments shows that Ogg described, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, at least six ways in which sources should not be taken at face-value and in which historical statements should be regarded as provisional judgements rather than definitive truths. One, he sometimes raised cautions about the credibility of the documents he selected or about the limitations of a particular type of source, such as monastic annals. Two, he sometimes alerted students to questions of historical interpretation. Three, he occasionally showed how historians must use a kind of reasoned speculation that goes beyond anything in the sources at their disposal. Four, he very occasionally ventured into what we would now call counter-factual history. Five, he drew attention to the otherness of the past and emphasized the importance of reading a source in the spirit of the times in which it was produced. Six, he alerted students to the tentativeness of historical judgements.
His book contains a number of examples of his cautioning students to think about the credibility of the documents selected for their use. For example, in introducing a passage from Caesar's De Bello Gallico, containing Caesar's account of the German tribes he faced in battle, Ogg pointed out that "we are not to suppose that Caesar's knowledge of the Germans was in any sense thorough." (p.20) Caesar had first hand but limited contact only with those German tribes immediately adjacent to the Roman frontier and "We maybe sure that many of the more remote German tribes lived after a fashion quite different from that which Caesar and his legions had an opportunity to observe on the Rhine-Danube frontier." (p.20) Even so, concluded Ogg, Caesar's account should not be rejected, "vague and brief as it is, it has an importance that can hardly be exaggerated." (p.20) The Germans left no written records of their own and, if it were not for Caesar and a few other Roman writers, we should know nothing about them: "If we bear in mind that the account in the Commentaries was based upon very keen, though limited, observation, we can get out of it a good deal of interesting information concerning the early ancestors of the great Teutonic peoples of the world today." (p.20)
Setting aside its final rhetorical flourish linking contemporary Germans to their Teutonic ancestors, this passage offers a good example of Ogg's attempts to teach students to approach sources in full awareness of the circumstances in which they came to be written and of the motives and capabilities of their authors, without at the same time reducing them to a state of rejectionist scepticism. Caesar's account might be "vague and brief" and based on limited evidence, but it was the personal record of the first-hand experience of a keen and capable observer. Perhaps the most notable omission from Ogg's commentary is any discussion of why Caesar might have come to write his account of the German wars in the first place. Did Caesar see himself as contributing to the historical record or was he intent on making a political case ("memoirs with a political purpose" as his account has been described by one modern commentator) and, either way, how might this affect our reading of his work? These were questions that Ogg did not raise.
As with Caesar so with Tacitus, whose description of the German tribes Ogg also included in his book. In introducing the passage from Tacitus, Ogg stated flatly that "There is much uncertainty as to the means by which Tacitus got his knowledge" of the Germans. There is not "a shred of evidence" that he ever visited the German tribes. Tacitus said he used Caesar's account but that was written a hundred and fifty years earlier and "was very meager and could not have been of much service." (p.23) Thus, Ogg continued, "We are left to surmise" that Tacitus got his information from other sources that are now lost. In short, "Tacitus's essay, therefore, while written with a desire to tell the truth was apparently not based on first-hand information." "We may suppose," said Ogg, "that what he really did was to gather up all the stories and reports regarding the German barbarians which were already known to Roman traders, travelers, and soldiers, sift the true from the false as well as he could, and write out in first class Latin the book we know as the Germania." (p.23)
As with Caesar, Ogg clearly made no secret of the difficulties of his source. Indeed, reading Ogg's introduction a sceptic might well wonder why we should trust Tacitus at all. Moreover, Ogg made clear his own lack of definite knowledge. Phrases such as "we are left to surmise" and "we may suppose" are revealing in this regard. History, it seems, can be as much a matter of informed and reasoned speculation as it is of discovery of proven fact. In addition, Ogg went onto introduce an element of historical interpretation, raising and dismissing the theory that Tacitus was not writing about the Germans at all but was rather delivering a moral message to the Romans themselves by describing what they were not but ought to be: "The theory that the work was intended as a satire, or sermon in morals, for the benefit of a corrupt Roman people has been quite generally abandoned, and this for the very good reason that there is nothing in either the treatise's contents or style to warrant such a belief." (p.23) Leaving aside the objection that the best satire does not in fact make its intentions this obvious, Ogg here clearly alerts students to the reality that history not only involves reasoned speculation but also deals in changing interpretations.
It is not necessary to follow Ogg further on this point. Throughout his book, he pointed out the limitations of his sources. In describing the battle of Adrianople of 378, he noted that "so far as our information goes, it appears that the Goths broke out in open revolt ...." (p.37) In presenting two Roman accounts of the Huns, he observed that "There is no reason to suppose that either of these authors had ever seen a Hun, or had his information at first hand" so that "This being the case, we are not to accept all that they say as the literal truth." (p.42) In similar vein he vividly described the limitations of medieval biographies: "Many biographies, especially the lives of the saints and other noted Christian leaders, were prepared expressly for the purpose of giving the world concrete examples of how men ought to live. Their authors, therefore, were apt to relate only the good deeds of the persons about whom they wrote, and these were often much exaggerated for the sake of effect. The people of the time generally were superstitious and easily appealed to by strange stories and the recital of marvelous events. They were not critical, and even such of them as were able to read at all could be made to believe almost anything that the writers of the books cared to say. And since these writers themselves shared in the superstition and credulousness of the age, naturally such biographies as were written abounded in tales which anybody to-day would know at a glance could not be true." (p.108)
Biographies that avoided these faults had other defects. Einhard's description of Charlemagne's wars with the Saxons, while "doubtless" fairly accurate, was partisan: "A few of the writer's strongest statements regarding Saxon perfidy should be accepted only with some allowance for Frankish prejudice." (p.110) Similarly, Joinville's fourteenth century description of Louis IX of France, though generally reliable, "comprises largely the reminiscences of an old man, which are never likely to be entirely accurate or well-balanced." (p.312) Again, Froissart's chronicle of the Hundred Years War was "quite inaccurate, even by mediaeval standards." Froissart relied heavily on other people's accounts and memories and such sources "are never wholly trustworthy and it must be admitted that our author was not as careful to sift error from truth as he should have been, his credulity betrayed him often into accepting what a little investigation would have shown to be false, and only very rarely did he make any attempt, as a modern historian would do, to increase and verify his knowledge by a study of documents." (p. 418)
Such dismissive passages lead one to wonder whether attentive readers of Ogg's documents might not reasonably have concluded that history is indeed a pack of lies that the living inflict on the dead, or, more accurately, that the dead impose on the living. Having in his introduction emphasized the value of first-hand sources, without which true history could not be written, Ogg proceeded in his chapter commentaries to show how at least some of the documents he selected were either untrustworthy, partial, ill-informed, or just plain wrong. Having done so, however, he invariably went on to explain that, despite their faults, such sources were indispensable. They were the only traces we have of an otherwise unrecoverable past, and read carefully, could still yield useful information.
An example of this kind of judgment, acknowledging the limitations of a source while at the same time praising its value, can be seen in Ogg's description of monastic annals. He pointed out that they began as occasional notes written by monks in the margins of charts that were used to calculate the date of Easter and, as a result, contained an assortment of miscellaneous information, some first-hand, some hearsay, some significant, some trivial, and all put down in no particular order of importance. As Ogg put it: "Many mistakes were possible, especially as the writer often had only his memory, or perhaps mere hearsay, to rely upon. And when, as frequently happened, these scattered Easter tables were brought together in some monastery and there revised, fitted together, and written out in one continuous chronicle, there were chances at every turn for serious errors to creep in. The compilers were sometimes guilty of wilful misrepresentation, but more often their fault was only their ignorance, credulity, and lack of critical discernment." (p.157) In short, medieval chronicles were not "history as we now understand it; that is, the chroniclers did not undertake to work out the causes and results and relations of things." (p.157) Nonetheless, despite their many faults, chronicles were valuable historical sources that "have been used by modern historians with the greatest profit, and but for them we should know less than we do about the Middle Ages...." (p.158)
We see a similar process at work in Ogg's examination of the fourteenth century writer, Jean Froissart. Having excoriated Froissart for his failings as a historian, Ogg went on to say that, with all its faults, Froissart's Chronicles "constitute an invaluable history of the period they cover. The facts they record, the events they explain, the vivid descriptions they contain, and the side-lights they throw upon the life and manners of an interesting age unite to give them a place of peculiar importance among works of their kind." (p.418) There is at least a superficial contradiction here between Ogg's cautionary words about Froissart's reliability and this endorsement of his historical value, but, here as elsewhere, he did not explore it.
It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that Ogg shrank from the sceptical, even nihilistic, implications of the limitations he exposed in the sources he used. Or perhaps he was caught up in the dilemma of trying to resolve the contradiction between making history interesting and even exciting to students while also trying to introduce them to the rigours of historical method. It is as though two opposing impulses were at work. One was to use sources to make history interesting by highlighting the more dramatic or exotic episodes of the past, thereby adopting what James Harvey Robinson, in his The New History, published in 1912, disparagingly called the "police gazette" view of history, in which attention is directed to the exotic and unusual, to the dramatic event rather than to the structural forces underlying it. The other was to use sources to foster in students a critical outlook, an understanding of what it meant to think historically. Like other advocates of the source method, Ogg never reconciled these two contradictory approaches to the use of sources, perhaps because they are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Part of the explanation for this inconsistency lies in Ogg's conviction that the value of sources lay in large part in their ability to lay bare the otherness of the past. As he said in his general introduction, one of the important benefits of studying history was its development of "the ability to disassociate oneself from his own surroundings and habits of thinking....." (p.10) For this purpose sources that illustrated just how different the past was from the present were invaluable, even if they did run the risk of turning history into the sort of carnival sideshow that James Harvey Robinson so disliked. Ogg took pains to remind his readers that the past must be studied on its own terms. Writing of Gregory of Tours, for example, he observed that, "He mixes legend with fact in the most confusing manner, but with no intention whatever to deceive. The men of the earlier Middle Ages knew no other way of writing history and their readers were not as critical as we are today." (p.48) Similarly, in describing medieval disputes about the papal claims to supremacy over church and state, he pointed out that whatever we might think of the arguments underlying the papal claim to supremacy today, "it is essential that the student of history bear in mind that the people of the Middle Ages never doubted its complete and literal authenticity, nor questioned that the authority of the papal office rested at bottom upon something far more fundamental than a mere fortunate combination of historical circumstances. Whatever one's personal opinion on the issues involved, the point to be insisted upon is that in studying mediaeval church life and organization the universal acceptance of these beliefs and conclusions be never lost to view." (p.79)
Besides drawing attention to the importance of reading sources critically and empathetically, Ogg also raised the subject of historical interpretation from time to time. As we have seen, he mentioned, albeit briefly, the interpretation that Tacitus was not so much describing the Germans as pointing out the deficiencies of the Romans. Ogg did not dwell on this question, confining it to a single sentence, but he at least signalled the possibility that historians could subscribe to differing explanations of the past and that these explanations could change over time. Similarly, in describing the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England, Ogg turned to the theory that the British King Vortigern had invited the Saxons to his kingdom, only to dismiss it: "Recent writers, as Mr. James H. Ramsay in his Foundations of England, are inclined to cast serious doubts upon the story because it seems hardly probable that any king would have taken so foolish a step as that attributed to Vortigern." (p.68) In fact, it is not difficult to find examples of governments through the ages inviting potential enemies to help them, only to live to regret their initial offer, but the important point here is not so much what Vortigern did or did not do as that Ogg alerted his student readers to the existence of historical argument.
He took a similar approach in his commentary on the documents he selected to illustrate the elements of feudalism: "At one time it was customary to trace back all these features of the feudal system to the institutions of Rome. Later, it became almost as customary to trace them to the institutions of the early Germans. But recent scholarship shows that it is quite unnecessary, in fact very misleading, to attempt to ascribe them wholly to either Roman or German sources, or even to both together. All that we can say is that in the centuries preceding the ninth these elements all existed in the society of western Europe and that, while something very like them ran far back into old Roman and German times, they existed in sixth and seventh century Europe primarily because conditions were such as to demand their existence." (p.204) Of particular interest here is not only Ogg's reference to a debate in which historians' interpretations changed over time, but also the glimmering o fan approach to historical interpretation that in effect drew, not on historical data, but on a generalization drawn from the social sciences, namely that institutions appear when conditions demand (a word that Ogg italicized) them. Here, as elsewhere, Ogg was indirectly drawing students' attention to the nature of history as an interpretative enterprise and showing them that historical explanation often required going beyond the actual text of a source.
As with his discussion of the origins of feudalism, Ogg similarly canvassed a range of theories regarding the growth of towns in medieval Europe, noting that the phenomenon "has been variously explained." On this basis, he then described two theories, noting of one that "the best authorities now reject this view," and of the other that it described "at best only one of several forces tending to the growth of municipal life," before proceeding to offer his own explanation. (pp.325-6) Other examples of Ogg's venturing into reasoned speculation, hedged with such cautionary words as "perhaps" and "may be," can be found in his chapter commentaries. He noted of Tacitus, for example, that he wrote his Germania because of his general interest in history and geography "and also, perhaps, because it afforded him an excellent opportunity to display a literary skill in which he took no small degree of pride. That it was published separately instead of in one of his larger histories may have been due to public interest in the subject during Trajan's wars in the Rhine country in the years 98 and 99." (p.23)
Ogg took a similar approach to Einhard's contemporary description of Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in which the chronicler claimed that Charlemagne would have rejected the title and avoided the coronation ceremony if he had known of them in advance. Ogg's commentary raised other possibilities: "Despite this statement, however, we are not to regard the coronation as a genuine surprise to anybody concerned. In all probability there had previously been a more or less definite understanding between the king and the Pope that in due time the imperial title should be conferred. It is easy to believe, though, that Charlemagne had no idea that the ceremony was to be performed on this particular occasion and it is likely enough that he had plans of his own as to the proper time and place for it.... It may well be that Charlemagne had decided simply to assume the imperial crown without a papal coronation at all, in order that the whole question of papal supremacy, which threatened to be a troublesome one, might be kept in the background." (p.133) Conspicuous in this passage are such provisional phrases as "in all probability," "it is easy to believe," "it is likely," "it may well be." In other chapter commentaries, we find similar conditional phrases: "there are many reasons for believing" (p.69); "it is by no means an easy task to determine precisely what significance it was thought to have at the time" (p.130); "there is every reason for believing" (p.373); and the like. Any student who read Ogg carefully could not have avoided concluding, despite the positivism that he displayed in his general introduction, that historians often had to go beyond what their sources explicitly told them. Ogg even occasionally ventured into what today we have learned to call counter-factual history, as when he speculated that had it not been for sudden and unexpected demographic pressures from the east Rome might have become Germanic peacefully: "Indeed, if there had occurred no sudden and startling overflows of population from the Germanic countries, such as the Visigothic invasion, it is quite possible that the Roman Empire might yet have fallen completely into the hands of the Germans by the quiet and gradual processes just indicated." (p.33)
At the same time, Ogg was no relativist, and, like most historians, past and present, he took it for granted that there were reliable ways of testing historical accounts for accuracy and credibility. He was obviously well aware that sources contained their own problems, though it is something of a puzzle why he confined his discussion of these problems to his commentaries on the documents rather than exploring them in his general introduction on the nature and use of sources. Whatever his reasons, the result is that his introduction presents a much more simplistic account of historical sources than is to be found in his chapter commentaries.
Even so, students and teachers who used Ogg's book carefully would have learned a good deal about the nature of history as an intellectual discipline and about what is involved in thinking historically. They would, for example, have learned to distinguish between the past and history; they would have gained some understanding of the nature of historical sources and the role they play in undergirding historical accounts; they would have come to see that history is not simply a process of discovering and reciting facts, but rather of selecting and arranging them to form a reasoned interpretation. They would also have learned that historical interpretations can change over time and that interpretations can be evaluated in terms of defensible criteria. In addition they would have acquired a critical outlook that they could deploy not only in the study of history but in life more generally, while also gaining an ability to distance themselves from the assumptions of the present in order to see the past on its own terms and, by extension, to seethe world through others' eyes. And all this, it is worth remembering, Ogg recommended for students as young as fourteen years of age, who "should be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
For a modern reader, perhaps the most obvious omission in Ogg's book is any attempt to teach students how to work with sources. Unlike Fred Morrow Fling's truly remarkable collection of sources for Greek history, also published in 1907, which is to be the subject of my next column, he did not include anything that directed students how to use the sources they read. Today we are likely to teach students how to analyze a document and in some jurisdictions history examinations require students to work with documents they have not previously seen, with the result that analysis of sources has become part of the routine of history teaching (see, for example, John Fines, Reading Historical Documents: A Manual for Students, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988). Ogg, by contrast, intended his sources to be illustrative rather than directly didactic. He saw his collection of documents as supplementing a textbook, not replacing it. He did not want to abandon the acquisition of facts for the development of skills, but to combine them, "to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely acquisitive." (p.11)
His was not the only source book of medieval history that appeared in the early 1900s. Indeed Fred Morrow Fling in 1907 noted that the proliferation of source books indicated that publishers saw a viable market for them and thereby demonstrated that teachers were in fact using sources in their classrooms. However, Ogg was one of the few sourcebook authors who spent any time discussing the use of sources in teaching. Some provided commentaries that mostly dealt with the nature of sources but said little about their implications for teaching; others simply left their readers to find their way as best as they could. Only a few spent anytime dealing with sources as teaching tools and most of these, such as Hart and Robinson, saw sources as a way of adding interest to the story of the past rather than as vehicles for the exercise of critical historical study. Ogg tried to do both, though not to the same extent as his Nebraska contemporary, Fred Morrow Fling. In some ways, he anticipated today's calls for teaching students to think historically. His book provides a sobering reminder of how little we know of the history of our craft.
References
Fling, F. M. A Source Book of Greek History. Boston: Heath, 1907.
Hart, A.B. American History Told by Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, 1896-1901.
Robinson, J.H. Readings in European History. Boston: Ginn, 1904.
Webb, W.P. History as High Adventure. Austin: Pemberton Press, 1969.