How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [114]
Let us sum up these two suggestions for reading history.
The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is : read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now.
Questions to Ask of a H istorical Book
Despite the fact that most histories are closer to fiction than to science, they can be read as expository works, and therefore they should be. Hence, we must ask the same questions of a historical book that we ask of any expository book.
Because of the special nature of history, we must ask those questions a little differently and must expect to receive slightly diferent kinds of answers.
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As far as the first question is concerned, every history has a particular and limited subject. It is surprising, then, how often readers do not trouble to find out what this is. In particular, they do not always note carefully what limitations the author sets for himself. A history of the Civil War is not a history of the world in the nineteenth century. It probably wil not be a history of the American West in the 1860's. It could, though perhaps it should not, ignore the state of American education in that decade, or the movement of the American frontier, or the progress of American freedom. Hence, if we are to read a history well, it is necessary to know precisely what it is about and what it is not about. Certainly, if we are to criticize it, we must know the latter. An author cannot be blamed for not doing what he did not try to do.
With regard to the second question, the historian tells a story, and that story, of course, occurred in time. Its general outlines are thus determined, and we do not have to search for them. But there is more than one way to tell a story, and we must know how the historian has chosen to tell his. Does he divide his work into chapters that correspond to years or decades or generations? Or does he divide it according to other rubrics of his own choosing? Does he discuss, in one chapter, the economic history of his period, and cover its wars and religious movements and literary productions in others? Which of these is most important to him? If we discover that, if we can say which aspect of the story he is telling seems to him most fundamental, we can understand him better. We may not agree with his judgment about what is basic, but we can still learn from him.
Criticism of history takes two forms. We can judge-but only, as always, after we understand what is being said-that a historian's work lacks verisimilitude. People just do not act that way, we may feel. Even if the historian documents his statements by giving us access to his sources, and even if to our knowledge they are relevant, we can still feel that he has misunderstood them, that he has judged them in the wrong How to Read History 243
way, perhaps through some deficiency in his grasp of human nature or human affairs. We tend to feel this, for example, about many older historians who do not include much discussion of economic matters in their work. People, we may be inclined to think now, act out of self-interest; too much nobility ascribed to the "hero" of a history may make us suspicious.
On the other hand, we may think, especially if we have some special knowledge of the subject, that the historian has misused his sources. We may be indignant to discover that he has not read a certain book that we have read. And he may be misinformed about the facts of the matter. In that case, he cannot have written a good history of it. We expect a historian to be informed.
The first criticism is, however, more important. A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses