In the age of the bit and the byte and the Web, what happens to the hallowed art of writing history?<\/p>\n
A Harvard gathering of five historians took up that question in a discussion called \u201cWriting History Now,\u201d sponsored by the Harvard University Extension School<\/a>. The session was part of a series celebrating the School\u2019s 100th anniversary, the exact date of which is today (Feb. 23).<\/p>\n For those who write history, the Internet has a bright side, some historians said. It has widened interest in the past, created new audiences, given images fresh historical import, and \u2014 through digitizing \u2014 improved access to hidden-away archives.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a new public for history,\u201d said panelist David Hackett Fischer<\/a> of the Internet\u2019s enhanced content and broad reach into literate audiences.<\/p>\n The Brandeis University<\/a> historian\u2019s book on the American Revolution, \u201cWashington\u2019s Crossing,\u201d not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, but has been translated widely and soon will be available in Serbo-Croatian. (There\u2019s already a bootleg copy in Chinese.)<\/p>\n Still, the Harvard panel suggested during the Feb. 19 discussion, the Internet age has a dark side for those whose profession traditionally has included painstaking investigations of letters, diaries, public papers, maps, and other documents. For one thing, that paper trail is disappearing under a hail of electrons that may prove elusive to find and save.<\/p>\n Several panelists sang the praises of traditional archival discovery, which, unlike surfing the Net, requires interacting with artifacts that can bloom with surprise.<\/p>\n Megan Marshall<\/a> \u201977, a biographer and former Radcliffe Fellow who specializes in the hidden lives of 19th century American women, extolled \u201cthe pleasure of making discoveries in archives, and the crying need to keep these archives going.\u201d<\/p>\n Marshall, an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College<\/a>, read a passage from the Custom House chapter in Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s \u201cThe Scarlet Letter,\u201d when the narrator discovers a bit of old cloth embroidered with a scarlet \u201cA,\u201d an artifact so resonant with meaning that it was as if history itself could \u201craise up from these dry bones.\u201d<\/p>\n Marshall, whose 2005 volume \u201cThe Peabody Sisters\u201d was a Pulitzer finalist, said that writing history sometimes requires a physical immersion that can\u2019t be duplicated using a screen. She said, \u201cIt\u2019s up to you, the researcher, to actually find what is actually there.\u201d<\/p>\n Panelist John R. McNeill<\/a>, an environmental and world historian from Georgetown University<\/a>, said archival discovery created serendipity, \u201cprized moments for everybody in our business.\u201d<\/p>\n John R. Stilgoe<\/a>, Harvard\u2019s Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, complained that digitized images are often poor \u2014 no match for the ones, for instance, in his collection of 150,000 slides. \u201cI see a lot of flickering lately,\u201d he said, describing himself as \u201cthe last man on Earth with a film camera.\u201d<\/p>\n Archives have their place in historiography, but so has the material world around us, said Stilgoe, which sometimes escapes even professional historians. He talked about loading up his old Chevrolet Suburban with \u201cpaper goods\u201d during summer road trips, drawing inspiration for a new book by restoring a lifeboat, and finding old slave collars under a neighbor\u2019s woodshed.\u00a0 Stilgoe suggested to the 400 listeners: \u201cOpen yourself to what\u2019s around you.\u201d<\/p>\n Shifting technology does make it easier for historians to utilize visual material \u2014 maps, charts, and images \u2014 in books and presentations, said Nancy Kollmann<\/a>, a Russian and legal historian at Stanford University<\/a>. But the Internet and digitized archives help little in some historical pursuits, she said, such as her current investigation of criminal law practices in 17th century Muscovy.<\/p>\n At that time, the Moscow-centered Russian realm was a nonsecular sphere in which representational art, when there was any, centered on the church. In the absence of images of flogging, executions, and other practices, Kollmann turned to what historians once used almost exclusively: the power of narrative. \u201cYou have to make word pictures,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Kollmann related one story, culled from court records, that allowed her to draw a picture of a hard-to-see Muscovite past. It was the tale of a village woman who (with her son\u2019s help) killed her second husband after he raped her 8-year-old daughter. The story revealed the gender strictures of village life. (Widows often remarried to survive.) But it also opened a window onto a legal system that allowed discretion. The penal code of the time stipulated a death sentence for her crime, but the judge, who interviewed character witnesses, allowed the mother and son to get off with a flogging.<\/p>\n \u201cThe past is full of people like us,\u201d said Kollmann, though they lived in times very different from our own. That is where historians are called upon to make sense for the rest of us.<\/p>\n