There is a famous proverb that says that in order to fully understand someone, you must walk a mile in their shoes. Comedian Jack Handley adapted this proverb slightly, saying “Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”
Joking aside, I found myself hearkening back to Handley’s words of wisdom as I waded my way through the dense prose of historian Leopold von Ranke for one of my history classes. In the preface to his first edition of “Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations,” Ranke specifically emphasizes his particular use of primary documents in writing his monograph: “memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses.” He then goes on to elaborate on his asserted importance of these firsthand accounts:
“Finally, what will be said of the treatment of particulars, which constitutes such an important part of historical work? … There are noble models for this procedure, ancient ones and — let us not fail to recognize this — also modern ones. But I dare not imitate them. Their world was different from mine.”
Ranke immediately recognizes and articulates one of the major pitfalls of the historian’s work: Try as we might, we cannot exactly imagine how living in a period other than our own must have been like. We did not live in the midst of their wars, their politics, their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) or their health conditions and diseases. We did not wear their clothes or sit in their furniture; we did not have personal relationships with others of their time period. In short, we truly have no idea what being a member of any historical era could possibly have felt like, and it is this drawback that makes writing history an especially challenging endeavor.
But, as Ranke readily admits, we do have one advantage, one window into these strange and wonderful worlds of old: primary documents. As a student worker in our library’s Special Collections, I have seen firsthand the incredible insight that primary documents can provide about a certain time period. Personal letters, diaries and even scrapbooks specifically emphasize aspects of life that historical men and women found important; they describe the living conditions, clothes and relationships from which we are so far removed. This is why these primary documents, as Ranke writes, help us “grasp the event itself in its human comprehensibility, its unity, and its fullness.” It gives us a taste, from the mouths of the characters themselves, of what framed their particular historical narrative. It gives us the lenses through which to see things obscured by the distance of years.
On the first day of a history class about pre-modern England, my professor stood at the front of the class and said, “Studying the men and women of Tudor England will be somewhat like studying an alien species.” These men and women’s lives were completely and utterly dominated by religion and by the political systems of kings and lords; in today’s increasingly secular and democratic world, it can prove almost impossible to really understand why Henry VIII would found a whole new denomination of Christianity in order to obtain a divorce, or why Joan of Arc would launch into a full-scale war against the British simply because she had dreamed of angels. Our modern world would write these people off as utterly insane, but their decisions were ones that people in their time would have recognized as valid or understandable, even if they weren’t always uniformly agreed upon as “good.”
This is why historians absolutely must rely on primary sources in their study of the people of the past. Without these documents, we could never hope to understand how important religion was, why obtaining a divorce required large-scale church reform or why war could be waged based on the voices in an illiterate peasant girl’s head. It is true that we will never completely understand these historical forces simply because we weren’t there. Ranke admits that, “One tries, one strives, but in the end one has not reached the goal.” In a way, historians are trying to understand and, in some cases, criticize these people from miles away. But because we have their primary documents, we have the ability to try to understand them even if we fall short. We may be a mile away, but we have their shoes.
— Sarah Russell is a senior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.
