The domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains of history and science.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, History as Literature and Other Essays (1913)
At its best, historical scholarship respects religion, reconciles with philosophy, and embraces social science, permitting faith, reason, and science to join in historical judgment. But as Francis Bacon understood, there are always blanks and spaces in the evidence that the historian’s wit and artistry must fill. Writing history is a literary act. Can and should the canons of fine literature and literary criticism inform the historian’s powers of observation and reportage? Is history an art form? To be sure, historians of art will remind us that different cultures and different time periods had different definitions of a work of art. What seemed elegant in one era may seem overly decorative or plain to a later observer. This is called relativism, and a relativistic view of historical truth has plenty of room for literary imagination. But whatever literary fashions might be at any given time, history and literature cannot live apart from each other.
As John Clive, a historian of historians and an exquisite writer himself, reminded his readers, “There is surely no need to stress the readability of the great historians: all one has to do is to open their books.” His point was deceptively simple: We know artistry in history when we read it. For example, follow Frederic William Maitland, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century English legal historian, to the period before King Edward I and the royal judge’s yearbooks, as Maitland seeks evidence of the wholeness of English law:
Beyond … there lie six other centuries that are but partially and fitfully lit, and in one of them a great catastrophe, the Norman Conquest, befell England and the law of England. However, we never quite lose the thread of the story. Along one path or another we can trace back the footprints, which have their starting-place in some settlement of wild Germans who are invading the soil of Roman provinces, and coming in contact with the civilization of the old world. Here the trail stops, the dim twilight becomes darkness; we pass from an age in which men seldom write their laws, to one in which they cannot write at all.
Or open The Education of Henry Adams and find the turn-of-the-twen-tieth-century American historian of medieval art just back from England, reveling in New York City’s energy: “A traveler in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come, or how it was to act. The two thousand years failure of Christianity roared up from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.” I am tempted to reduce this chapter to a string of such quotes, conceding how inadequate my own prose is to convey this artistry. As the prize-winning historian James Goodman explained in his call for submissions to Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, the best history was “history written by writers who, whether composing the most complex theory or the simplest narrative, are attentive to the ways that form and style shape substance, content, and meaning.”1
Modern academic historical writing, striving for the plaudits of fellow academics, sometimes mistakes pedantic jargon for prose. For example, consider this apology for jargon written in jargon: “[A]s with other disciplines, art history has developed meta-languages, special ways of communicating with other people in the group. Within such meta-languages certain points cannot be made or can only be made in a roundabout or lengthy way. There are dangers that any specialized terminology may be inaccessible to a reader who has not learned it stage by stage.” I lost my way trying to follow the dividing path of the points “that cannot be made or could be made.” Which was it, I thought. Rest assured, the authors continued, “yesterday’s academic obscurities are tomorrow’s by-words.” If only I knew what by-words to welcome into our already overstuffed vocabulary. Or this elegantly obscure approach to historical criticism through literary criticism: “[T]he heightened ambiguity of literary uses of language itself testifies to to the position of man in the world as a being who comprehends what he does not fully or conceptually know.” How like the historian!2
It is almost painful to compare the most egregious modern professional historians’ jargon to the prose of the best-loved and -read of Victorian-era historians like Francis Parkman of Massachusetts and Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Briton. Parkman was Boston born and bred and Harvard educated and, though sickly much of his life, reveled in the strenuous pursuits of his New England forebears. He was very much a product of his place and time, believing in the superiority of New England Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon blood, and American patriotism.
For his multi-volume masterwork on the contest between the French and the English for control of North America, Parkman traveled the paths through the woods that his subjects traversed, trying to see the world as they saw it. In his later years, his eyes damaged from an injury he incurred at Harvard College, often confined to his Boston drawing room with the heavy draperies excluding the sunlight, Parkman hired a secretary to read to him the documents that his friends in Europe hand copied and sent him.3
The last of the seven tomes, published as two volumes in 1884, retold the final conflict. Parkman, by then all but blind, had not lost his ability to envision the meaning of the primary sources. Much of these came from the personal archives of the Marquis de Montcalm, France’s premier commander in the French and Indian War. Of Montcalm’s letters home, Parkman wrote, “No translation can give an idea of the rapid, abrupt, elliptical style of this familiar correspondence, where the meaning is sometimes suggested by a single word, unintelligible to any but those for whom it was written.” Though this might seem the very definition of jargon, Parkman’s description of Montcalm’s prose was anything but jargon. And how typical this is of our letters to loved ones, for the code that bonds husband to wife and brother to brother, and father to child needs little elucidation and offers none to strangers. Note how Parkman captured the elusive style by matching it with his own, departing here from the ornate longwinded prose of most (including his own) Victorian histories. In a single passage, a work of art in itself, he captured the essential character of one of military history’s most enigmatic figures.4
Where Parkman’s sense of fairness failed, his pen did not. Consider his account of the Canadian Huron Indians.
He who entered [a Huron Indian longhouse] on a winter night beheld a strange spectacle. [The Hurons would not have found it strange at all—for them it was home, and a more sensitive historian would have realized this.] The bronzed groups … eating, gambling, or amusing themselves with badinage: shriveled squaws, hideous with threescore years of hardship; grisly old warriors, scarred with Iroquois war-clubs … damsels gay with ochre and wampum; restless children pellmell with restless dogs. Now a tongue of resinous flame painted each wild figure in vivid light; now the fitful gleam expired, and the group vanished from sight, as their nation has vanished from history.
He thought that the Hurons were superior to other Algonquians because of “the size … of their brains” (Parkman subscribed to the emerging pseudo-science of phrenology), but they were incapable of intellectual abstraction. Indian religion, for example, was “a chaos of degrading, ridiculous and incoherent superstitions.” Finally, Indian character was morally deficient: “That well known self control, which, originating in a form of pride, covered the savage nature of the man with a veil, opaque, though thin. … Though vain, arrogant, boastful, and vindictive, the Indian bore abuse and sarcasm with an astonishing patience.” No one who studies Native Americans today would subscribe to this racially bigoted assessment, but it is hard to deny the literary coup that Parkman achieved.5
Parkman carried on in the tradition created by the English Whig historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay was as public a figure as Parkman was private, helping to frame and pass the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832, lift the civil impediments against Jews, and serve in the House of Commons. In India, as a member of the British Supreme Council, he crafted a penal code that remains a part of India’s laws. But the two men shared a love of words, the structure of their histories matching the subject matter. They would “embellish it with all the charms of the novel: lively narration, glowing description, that element of the dramatic—the sayings of the characters, and exposition … [proving that] the perfect historian should be an artist.”6
Macaulay’s great work, like Parkman’s, was a multi-volume history of a critical period, England from the accession of James II in 1685 to the middle of the eighteenth century. At the center of the story was the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. Then, Protestants and Catholics, parliamentary forces and King James II vied for the crown and the soul of England. King James knew that his Lords were plotting against him and came to believe that his only safety lay in the appointment of Catholic allies to key posts, particularly in Ireland. When members of his government protested his plans, “[t]he reply of James was dry and cold. He declared that he had no intention of depriving English colonists [in Ireland] of their land, but that as he regarded a large portion of them as his enemies, and that since he consented to leave so much property in the hands of his enemies, it was the more necessary that the civil and military administration should be in the hands of his friends.” In a nutshell, Macaulay revealed the personality of a man given to passionate suspicions and strong-willed policies.7
Throughout his account of that critical episode, “Macaulay’s habit of constructing his paragraphs by rounding off a tattoo of short, breathless sentences with a resounding period is more than … a trick of oratory, the surging and subsidence of thought in the orator’s mind. Does not this stylistically reiterated sequence of tension and crisis leading to a climactic resolution reflect the critical and tense sequence of events” that Macaulay recounted? In fact, it did. “The relationship between style and content” elevated his work, as it did Parkman’s, to the level of fine literature matching the novels of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Trollope in England and Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper in America.8
The tradition of writing sweeping and elegant narrative prose for popular audiences is alive and well—alas, generally outside academe. One can find it on the history shelves at mass-market bookstores (while they survive) and on e-books. Popular history caters to popular interests. It tends to be upbeat—celebrating achievements, finding heroes, seeing in history the upward movement of civilization and the defeat of evil. Foremost among the profferers of this kind of history in the United States are Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. Ambrose, a military historian and presidential biographer, and McCullough, best known for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, are superb stylists. They tell stories about great events and great men. Their books sell in the millions of copies.
Ambrose was the most popular historian in America for much of the second half of the twentieth century. His biographies, adventure narratives, and World War II books are still staples in the bookstores. He told grand stories in vivid prose. Everyone was brave. For Meriwether Lewis, the expedition to the west with William Clark up the Missouri River, over the Great Divide, to the Pacific had revealed “a brave new world. And he had been the first. Everyone who has ever paddled a canoe on the Missouri or the Columbia, does so in the wake of the Lewis and Clark expedition … the journals of Lewis and Clark provided the introduction and serve as the model for all subsequent writing on the West.” The same courage infused the citizen-soldiers of the D-Day American forces. Indeed, “this was distressingly close to the Duke of Wellington’s sole requirement for his lieutenants, that they be brave.” When it was revealed that much of Ambrose’s work, from his Ph.D. dissertation to his final books, was riven with plagiarism, his public did not care, for Ambrose captured in prose the intense emotions of pride, courage, and idealism that the greatest of Americans shared.9
David McCullough was a writer and editor at American Heritage, a popular history magazine, when he began his career as a historian. He had no advanced degrees, no formal training, no pedigree in historical scholarship, but he proved that one could be a bestselling historian without any of those credentials. In 1968 his first book, The Johnstown Flood, appeared to rave reviews and excellent sales. He told the story of an arrogant elite building a dam for their hunting and fishing lodge and the terrible consequences that the bursting dam caused ordinary people downstream. McCullough had established a formula—the telling anecdote, the personalized vignette that fused good journalism and storytelling. His characters were a little larger than life and he plainly liked them. So did his readers. His subsequent volumes—The Great Bridge, on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; The Path between the Seas, on the Panama Canal; Mornings on Horseback, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt; Brave Companions, a collection of seventeen biographical portraits; Truman; and John Adams, the last two of which earned him Pulitzer Prizes in biography, as well as National Book Awards—were all bestsellers. Typically, of John Adams McCullough wrote, “Dismounted, he stood five feet seven or eight inches tall, about middle size in that day, and though verging on portly he had a straight-up square-shouldered stance, and was, in fact, surprisingly fit and solid. His hands were the hands of a man accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay, splitting his own firewood.” How different from Parkman’s Montcalm and Macaulay’s James II, but the method is the same: a few perfect brush-strokes and the inner character of a man becomes visible. McCullough is the voice of PBS’s “American Experience” documentary series, and one could say that he was the voice of American history to viewers. (Though Civil War aficionados elect Shelby Foote’s talking head on Ken Burns’s “Civil War” documentary to this office.)10
The popular historians were popular in part because of their subject matter. They understood that the stories of great men and women, or the great deeds of ordinary men and women, were especially attractive to lay readers (about which more in the next chapter). But more important was their literary skill. They could make the past come alive. In this, they were joined by two academic historians whose works became popular though they were not originally intended for mass audiences. A public intellectual as well as a much-published scholar, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. hobnobbed with the great and famous, including a stint as the Kennedy administration’s in-house historian. He won an unprecedented three Pulitzer Prizes, two for history and one for biography. His meticulous, balanced, and elegant biographies, political histories, and opinion pieces reflected a liberal worldview. Here he describes John F. Kennedy on the eve of his presidential run: “War had been a hardening experience. Politics hardened him more. Massachusetts Democrats did not exist as a party in the usual sense of the word. They formed rather a collection of rival tongs [Chinese gangs], controlled by local chieftains and presided over by an impotent state committee. Kennedy carved out his own domain and pursued his own goals. He showed himself determined, unrelenting and profane, able to beat the pols on their own ground and in their own language.” There was no question where Schlesinger’s sympathies or admiration lay in this paragraph (or in the rest of A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, for that matter), but re-read the passage and note the similarity to Macaulay: short sentences at the start, each sharp and to the point, followed by a closing sentence, a true resolving period—the whole paragraph capturing the energy of the moment, Kennedy’s as well as Massachusetts’ politics’.11
When he died in 2007, the Los Angeles Times obituary reported that “Schlesinger in the first decade after World War II ‘was … probably one of the two or three most influential historians of any sort’ in the United States.” Who can match Schlesinger’s credentials: Harvard junior fellow in the days when “fair Harvard” shone above all other history programs; personal acquaintanceships with every major political figure of his day; and access to the media at all times? He was truly a successor to Macaulay.12
Schlesinger remained a liberal centrist in politics throughout his career. His great rival Daniel Boorstin moved from the far left to something in the middle of the right in American politics. Unlike Schlesinger, who welcomed the attention that celebrity brought, Boorstin was a private man, closer to Parkman in his inclinations. But Boorstin’s intellectual appetite was enormous, his capacity to synthesize vast bodies of history unparalleled in historical writing. His books included a prize-winning trilogy on American history and wide-ranging surveys of European history, inventions, discoveries, and historical method itself. From his first book to his last, The Seekers, he had a gift for bringing history alive.
Great seekers never become obsolete. Their answers may be displaced, but the questions they posed remain. We inherit and are enriched by their ways of asking. The Hebrew prophets and the ancient Greek philosophers remain alive to challenge us. Their voices resound across the millennia with a power far out of proportion to their brief lives or the small communities in which they lived. Christianity brought together their appeal to the God above and the reason within—into churches, monasteries, and universities that long survived their founders. These would guide, solace, and confine Seekers for the Western centuries.
The description could just as easily be applied to Boorstin himself. In the course of his long career, he won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Park-man prizes.13
Near the end of his teaching career, Boorstin was named Librarian of Congress, a position that, like the Archivist of the United States, carries great prestige. When Boorstin passed away in 2004, the New York Times accorded him a major obituary:
As the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, Dr. Boorstin literally brought drafts of fresh air into a stodgy, forbidding institution whose 550 miles of shelves and 19 reading rooms were all but terra incognita to the public and even to many scholars. He ordered the majestic bronze doors of the world’s largest library kept open, installed picnic tables and benches out front, established a center to encourage reading and arranged midday concerts and multimedia events for all. Recalling his directive to keep the doors open, he remarked, “They said it would create a draft, and I replied, ‘Great idea; that’s just what we need.’” Dr. Boorstin, a man of prodigious energy who wrote almost every day, almost all the time, ran into a slight hitch at his Senate confirmation hearings. Several senators demanded that he not write while serving as the Congressional librarian. He refused to stop writing but promised to do it on his own time. And he did on weekends, in the evenings and on weekdays from 4 A.M. to 9 A.M. Witty, informal, a politically conservative thinker who favored bow ties and unconventional ideas, Dr. Boorstin provided America four decades ago with a glimpse of its reality-show and photo-op future, introducing the notion of the “pseudo-event” to describe occurrences, like news conferences and television debates, that are staged to get news coverage and shape public perceptions.14
Popular history rivals historical fiction in sales and accolades, but of course history is not fiction. I am always taken aback when my students refer to works of history as “novels,” not recognizing that the novel is a work of fiction. It all started with the novelist/historian Irving Stone. About his smash hit historical novelization of the biography of Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life, Stone would write,
The dialogue had to be imagined; there is an occasional stretch of pure fiction, such as the Maya scene, which the reader will have readily recognized; in one or two instances, I have portrayed a minor incident where I was convinced of its probability even though I could not document it, for example the brief meeting between Cézanne and Van Gogh in Paris; I have utilized a few devices for the sake of facility, such as the use of the franc as the unit of exchange … and I have omitted several unimportant fragments of the complete story. Aside from these technical liberties, the book is entirely true.
Aside from these liberties? If the historian has license to invent dialogue, embellish setting, and fabricate plot like the novelist, why should anyone trust the wisdom of historians? But surely does not the historian who has exhaustedly traveled all avenues of research have license to imagine what might have been in the blanks and spaces of the documentary record? I think so, if he or she clearly labels the filler.15
For some practitioners, the boundary between history and historical fiction is a semi-permeable membrane. As Eric Foner told the Key West Literary Seminar in 2009, “[T]he line between historical scholarship and historical fiction is not as hard and fast as we sometimes might think.” Perhaps he had in mind John Demos’s multiple-prize-winning book The Unredeemed Captive (1994). In it, Demos imaginatively recaptured conversations that must have taken place in some form or another but were not recorded. In the dramatic centerpiece of the book, a New England family is attempting to ransom a child back from the Indians who had captured her. In one passage, the girl’s brother and she speak to each other through interpreters, she having forgotten her English, in a smoke-filled Canadian longhouse. “Perhaps it went something like this. … Smoke from the firepit stings their eyes. Voices float indistinctly toward them from the far walls. Human forms, a dozen or more, loom in the murk: squatting, lounging, bent to one or another little task. Slowly, one of the forms—no, two—move forward: a woman, slightly ahead, then a man. The woman draws very near, her eyes searching the three strange faces in front of her.”16
We know from historical records that the meeting did take place, but its details are lost to us. Using the techniques of the novelist, Demos has filled in the empty spaces in the canvas. He admitted that he had taken liberties with the records, inventing dialogue for example, but argued that the historian, borrowing from the historical novelist, could fill in the missing evidence with educated guesses. From novels, as he reported in a 1998 essay for the American Historical Review, he learned the “strategies, the techniques, the ‘moves’” to re-create a full-bodied past from fragments that survived. These enabled the historian to peer over if not cross the “boundary” between fact-based scholarship and fiction. The trick was to combine an almost excessive concern with those details that could be verified with a sense of the human condition—the ties that bound us to people in the past.17
Demos’s attempt to use novelistic techniques to fill in gaps is useful when historians want to write about ordinary people. Most people do not leave much of a paper trail behind. In the past, when literacy was hardly universal and writing took time, effort, and the money to pay for paper, pen, and ink, ordinary people simply passed from view without a documented record of their lives other than birth, marriage, and death. But historians have found ways, artificial but effective, to bring these men and women back to life. Such pieces of exhaustively researched and engagingly written essays are called microhistories. The first of them was the Italian social historian Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980). Part detective, part sympathetic narrator, Ginzburg recovered from legal records the story of Domenico Scandella, nicknamed Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller and local politician whose unorthodox views ended with his death at the stake. “‘He is always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing—even with the priest,’” one witness told the Inquisition. Another reported, “‘He will argue with anyone, and when he started to debate with me, I said to him, ‘I am a shoemaker, and you are a miller, and you are not an educated man, so what’s the sense of talking about it?’” Ginzburg allowed us to listen as Menocchio’s neighbors describe him, just as if we were there, a literary alchemy turning the flat pages of the old documents into lively conversation.18
Novelistic history (to coin a term) not only has the pedigree of the nineteenth-century men of letters, but it is drawn from a tried and true novelistic technique. In Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne recounted the fictional life story of the title character, beginning with the events leading up to his conception. Periodically, he addressed the reader directly, commenting upon his own tale. Novelistic historians deploy the same literary device, pausing their histories to tell us how they were constructed. In his tale of the many histories of East Hampton, Long Island, Timothy Breen revealed, “I observe myself going about the business of interpreting the past out of a concern to let the reader know where I stand. … [H]istorians have a responsibility to converse openly with their readers.” Breen was more than a chronicler in this story; he was a participant of sorts in the town’s attempt to rediscover a lost past, but his reflections apply to all of us. In his remarkable survey of life among the woodlands Indians, Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel Richter did not cite Breen, but he assayed the same answer to history’s impossibility. “So the chapters that follow are as much about how we might develop eastward-facing stories of the [Native American] past as about the stories themselves.” He opened his book with three vignettes of encounters between Indians and European explorers, all from the now irretrievably lost Indian point of view. Hence, “these scenes are imagined.” The more liberties the novelistic historian takes with the existing sources, the greater the need to “converse openly” with the reader.19
A final example of this literary method is somewhat awkwardly called “experimental history.” All history is experimental in the sense that the historian cannot know her subject precisely; no history is experimental in the sense that a chemical laboratory procedure is experimental. No matter: To its exponents, experimental history “offered scholars new ways to develop argument and to convey complexity.” It expanded the boundaries by empowering historians to tell a story from different perspectives at the same time, much as a novelist would. The attention to small details to make a scene come alive and engage the reader is not new, or even experimental, but the idea that history is a “conversation” that the historian and the reader overhear is also a borrowing from the novel. At the edge of experimental history lies the invented dialogue, based on what we do know and what we can surmise. We know that the dialogue took place, and we supply the words.20
In the turn to novelistic and experimental history, historians have sailed into turbulent waters. There lie the whirlpools and rocks of literary criticism. In the 1980s and 1990s, some intellectual historians took up the challenge of the so-called linguistic turn. They began to read and take seriously post–World War II “deconstructionist” and “postmodern” literary theories. The linguistic turn stressed the inherent complexity and uncertainty of texts, allowing readers to propose varying interpretations. (Perhaps inevitably given the academic origins of the linguistic turn, the adaptation of literary critics’ ideas imposed another layer of jargon on historical writing rather than improve its clarity.) “Deconstruction” disconnected the historians’ primary sources from their context and freed the language in the source from lockstep assignments of meaning. According to this linguistic theory, “All those old organizing frameworks that presupposed the privileging of various centers”—the “-centric” categories historians so love, like “Anglo-centric” and “ethno-centric”—were no longer representations of reality but useful (or harmful) “fictions” that historians manipulated. The intrinsic values or essences these centers supposedly represented (recall “philosophical history”) were to have fallen, along with the certitudes they reinforced. No one belongs to a “ruling race,” for example.21
While this critical program sounds ahistorical, in fact it spurred some historians to regard the words in their sources in a different light. “There is much to be learned from recent discussions of writing … concerning the productive quality of texts, their intertextual references and multiple meanings, their aporias, gaps and contradictions.” Historical source criticism always asks if the source is reliable, biased, partial, or otherwise untrustworthy. Historians of literature, many of them professors of literature rather than historians, have always been especially concerned with structures of language. The postmodern historian joined the literary historian in looking at the internal relationships in the language of their sources, for many authors in the past were actually writing for one another, a kind of virtual conversation. “Conventional distinctions” between intellectual history and literary art were now all up for grabs, as historians asked whether the meaning of the terms in the documents they used had a one-to-one correspondence with some reality out there or were part of a self-contained system of signs whose meaning derived from use within the system. Predictably—after all, literary criticism cannot exist without literature—postmodern literary criticism provided more ammunition for those who claimed history as a branch of literature. This made the scientific quest for truth in history less likely and moved a literary kind of truth to the foreground.22
Despite, or perhaps because of, its close ties with literary theory, a too literal reading of the linguistic turn is highly suspect among professional historians. Joyce Appleby’s admonition is gentle but telling: “After historians made that last turn marked ‘linguistic,’ they ran into same dangerous curves. Scholarly vehicles were totaled; avenues of inquiry left in disrepair. The timid got out their maps to look for alternative routes to the past; diehards demanded that the dividers be repainted.” The irony of Appleby’s caution was intentionally compounded when she chose an extended metaphor to follow the trail of the debate. But that was in 1989, and most historians have quietly moved beyond the extremes of postmodernism and the shrill debate over the linguistic turn, though the bashing of deconstruction and postmodernism in historical works continues.23
Although it may be true that “no one has ever provoked an objection by claiming history is a form of literature,” for some students of the historical profession the attempt to liken history to literature is a form of desecration. That should not be so. Good writing is always in order. It does not free the scholar “to conceive of history as we will, and to adopt any perspective we please.” Instead, it frees the scholar to reach more deeply into the very stuff that makes history a human artform.24
If history is a branch of literature and great historians merit our special attention, how does that reassure us about the historian’s way of knowing? Great literature has the power to elevate our sympathies, enabling us to live lives not our own. It is cathartic, releasing our feelings in synchrony with the fates of the characters. It is a purging, cleansing, and ultimately purifying experience. Histories that bear the character of literature have the same cathartic power. When Montcalm faces his final battle on the Plains of Abraham, beneath the citadel of Quebec, we are there. In his tragic death defending French Canada we share an almost overwhelming sense of loss. When James II desperately plots to retain his throne, we watch in growing horror. Will he plunge his kingdom into civil war and ruin? When John F. Kennedy is struck by the assassin’s fatal bullet, we cry out in anger and shame. Like Boorstin’s seekers, we delight in the very act of human intellection.
History as literature lacks the compelling tone of religious, philosophical, and social science judgments. It does not tell us what or whom to believe or how to behave. Instead, it enables us to come into closer touch with those who have gone before us, to understand from within their virtues and vices. History as literature is a judgment in itself, a command to us to be a little more human. In this, it is the single most important way that the canons of fine writing inform and enliven the historian’s task and make history more trustworthy.