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It is not important, however, whether all historians agree with us in our notion of what history is. There is a great deal of history of the kind we are discussing, and you will want to or have to read at least some of it. We will try to aid you in that task.

The Elusiveness of H istorical Facts

Probably you have been a member of a jury, listening to the testimony about a simple matter of fact, such as an automobile accident. Or you may have been on a blue ribbon jury, and have had to decide whether one person killed another or not. If you have done either, you know how difficult it is to reconstruct the past, even a single event in the past, from the memories of persons who actually saw it happen.

A court concerns itself with events that have happened fairly recently and in the presence of living witnesses. In addition, there are stringent rules of evidence. A witness cannot suppose anything, he cannot guess or hypothecate or estimate 236 HOW TO READ A BOOK

( except under very carefully controlled conditions ) . And of course he is not supposed to lie.

With all the careful rules of evidence, and cross-examination besides, have you ever been absolutely sure, as a member of a jury, that you really knew what happened?

The law dssumes that you will not be absolutely sure. It assumes that there will always be some doubt in a juror's mind.

As a matter of practice, in order that trials may be decided one way or the other, it says that the doubt must be "reasonable" if it is to be allowed to affect your judgment. The doubt must be, in other words, sufficient to trouble your conscience.

A historian is concerned with events that occurred, most of them, a long time ago. All the witnesses to the events are usually dead. What evidence they give is not given in a courtroom-that is, it is not governed by stringent and careful rules.

Such witnesses as there are often guess, hypothecate, estimate, assume, and suppose. We cannot see their faces in order to judge whether they are lying ( if we ever really can know that about anybody ). They are not cross-examined. And there is no guarantee whatever that they know what they are talking about.

If, then, it is �ifficult to be sure that one knows about the truth of a relatively simple matter, such as is decided by a jury in a court of law, how much more difficult it is to know what really happened in history. A historical fact, though we may have a feeling of trust and solidity about the word, is one of the most elusive things in the world.

Of course, about some kinds of historical fact we can be pretty certain. America was involved in a Civil War that began with the firing on Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861, and ended with the surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, on April 9, 1865. Everyone agrees about those dates. It is not likely ( though it is not totally impossible ) that every American calendar was incorrect at that time.

But how much have we learned if we know exactly when How to Read History 237

the Civil War started and when it ended? Indeed, those dates have been disputed-not o� the grounds that the calendars were wrong, but that the war really started with the election of Lincoln in the fall of 1860 and ended with his assassination five days after Lee's surrender. Others have claimed that the war started even earlier-as much as five or ten or twenty years before 1861-and we know that it was still actually being fought in outlying parts of the United States, to which word had not yet come of the Northern triumph, as late as May, June, and July, 1865. And there are those, too, who feel that the Civil War is not over yet, that it will never be over until black Americans are completely free and equal, or until the South manages to secede from the Union, or until the right of the federal government to control all the states is finally established and accepted by every American everywhere.

At least we do know, one might say, that whether or not the firing on Fort Sumter started the Civil