Bringing uncertainty to history

Despite what you may have heard about “knowing the past so we aren’t doomed to repeat it,” the entire historical enterprise is shot through with uncertainty.

“Knowing” the past is not a straightforward task, the historical record is not a stable dataset, and the task of establishing clear causal links from past to present to future will leave you frustrated. If you are looking for something more nuanced than names and dates, then the study of history is one long cautionary tale of a methodology marked by uncertainty.

But that is, in fact, an accomplishment of the field: the introduction of uncertainty is the product of more than half a century of methodological refinement in the historical profession. To put it another way, it’s the unknowns, the silences, the gaps—these are the spaces in which our human conceptualization of our own past comes to us most profoundly. In those gaps, in those silences, we can look for power relations, institutional arrangements, and value systems that lead us to deeper understandings of society at a given time, in a given place. The “certainty” of the historical record is an artifact of a time when women, minority groups, workers, and nonhuman life/the environment were not part of the inquiry.

“As the profession works more and more to attain inclusion among its ranks, it will become more likely to tell a deep and variegated history, one more attuned to the realities and complexities of the human experience.”

When only a few main narratives are allowed into the record it is far easier to develop straightforward causal explanations of historical change. To put it simply: narratives of progress are easier to sustain when one studies primarily white men in the global North. This type of certainty peaked in the early twentieth century, and as the century groped along through war and civil unrest, so too did the study of history grope toward a deeper uncertainty. Add more perspectives, especially those of marginalized groups, and the narrative falls apart—it becomes many stories, many causes, not leading in a definable progressive direction. As the profession works more and more to attain inclusion among its ranks, it will become more likely to tell a deep and variegated history, one more attuned to the realities and complexities of the human experience. The end goal, I believe, is to render a past that captures as many perspectives as possible; only then can history be said to be something other than a selective reading by and for powerful interests.

Complicating historical (un)certainty

To be clear, a lack of historical certainty does not mean the work has grown sloppy or simple, or that any historical explanation is as good as any other. Far from it. Instead, we have seen a move away from singular causes, the course-of-empire, male dominance, and military primacy as the crucial modes of historical explanation. In their wake, we see three critical features of the new (post-1960s) historiography: (1) the discovery of the social, (2) multicausality, and (3) evidentiary critique.

By discovering the social, the historical profession has now sought to include those traditionally written out of the historical record, to bring everyone not wealthy and royal, or male and military, into the frame. This is not an easy task, since those erased from the record include people not legally free, enabled, or invited to leave one behind. Telling these stories has required methodological creativity. The lyrics of a slave field song, a midwife’s diary, the letters home from America of a Chinese rail worker, the pamphlets of an LGBTQ activist group, an oil refinery worker’s photography collection—suddenly each of these could become as valuable (perhaps even more so!) to historical understanding than presidential papers.1For path-breaking examples of the genre, see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); and Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); for historiographic discussions, see Paul E. Johnson, “Reflections: Looking Back at Social History,” Reviews in American History 39, no. 2 (June 2011): 379–388; and Peter N. Stearns, “Social History Present and Future,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 9–19.

Second, and connected to the first, historians no longer believe a single causality is sufficient to account for change over time. If you include multiple historical viewpoints, many narratives, then your account of historical change will inevitably evolve into a braided account, many strands coming together. Civil War historiography, for example, was once comprised entirely of generals and battles. Today, historians approach the Civil War as a global, national, and local set of events, intertwined around processes of ideological changes over slavery and economic changes connected to industrialization. Men, women, and children—combatants and noncombatants—now enter the story in crucial ways. Like the discovery of the social, multicausality adds complexity, a search for source materials that go beyond battle maps.

“The facts we choose to collect, the records we preserve, the topics we choose—these tell us as much about ourselves in our time as they do about the time from which we compile them.”

Third, the evidentiary critique: here I might invoke the historian E.H. Carr, who in describing the relationship between the “historian and his facts” notes the unsettling truth that the past is not some mine full of gold waiting to be brought to the surface.2London: Penguin Books, 1961More Info → The past is really just events in the past, and it is the historian who creates the archive—the “facts” are made by us, they are not self-evident. Isn’t this fabrication, then? Yes, yes, it is. It is a form of making, but not with the intent to deceive. The facts we choose to collect, the records we preserve, the topics we choose—these tell us as much about ourselves in our time as they do about the time from which we compile them. This realism forces a constant evidentiary reflexivity—the past is the past, but it is also inherently about us here, in the now.3See Joyce Appleby, Margaret C. Jacob, and Lynn Hunt, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).

Bringing disaster into history

The overthrow of a master-narrative in history has been liberating for new subfields. And, over the past twenty years or so—in part due to the density of disasters shaping our social and political space—the study of disasters in history has emerged as a subfield. It is an interdiscipline, bringing together sociology, anthropology, policy studies, and geography as methods through which to attempt explanations of disasters over time. Disaster history, in the broadest sense, is an inquiry into the ways that the social shapes the natural, a consideration of the many material ways that the natural world is shaped by human activity. It is an invitation to interrogate the categories we have inherited—“natural disaster,” “technological disaster”—and see the human forces of politics, economy, and culture at work making meaning out of unwanted events.

The questions asked in disaster history are many (a sampling might include):

  • How and why are certain risks/hazards tolerated but not others?
  • Why do we repeat the same patterns of development despite clear “lessons” of disaster?
  • How are standards of safety attained (and enforced, or not)?
  • How do policymakers frame disasters in terms of law and governmental responsibility?
  • How do disasters shape and how are they shaped by culture and norms?
  • Why do disasters impact communities disparately?
  • How do disasters inspire creativity/altruism/millennial thinking?
  • How/why do disasters mark out time?
Stairway to an observation platform at the Weldon Spring Quarry/Plant/Pits Superfund site in Weldon Springs, MO, outside St. Louis. Photo: Scott Knowles

In my own career I have been attentive to the history of certainty/uncertainty in another realm: the history of engineering, a profession where the lack of certainty is historically unacceptable, unprofessional, even criminal. As such, I am highly interested in debates over acceptable levels of certainty in built systems—and I am eager to trace these levels of certainty/uncertainty not as immutable, but as reflections of cost-benefit negotiations, public policy compromises, and professionalization battles over time. In other words, engineering safety has a history, and its history is closely linked to the broader history of disaster, if we consider roads and bridges, nuclear weapons and power plants, and dams and levees as critical to disasters (I do).

Weldon Spring Quarry/Plant/Pits Superfund site containment cell, which has toxic chemical residues, including radioactive material. Photo: Scott Knowles

Disaster history is also a means of thinking about scale—moving past an “event”-focused definition of disaster and seeing trends spanning longer stretches of time. The traditional definition of disaster describes an overwhelming event delimited by spatio-temporal lines that are tightly drawn with clear cause-and-effect relationships. “Slow disaster” is a way to think about disasters not as discrete events but as long-term processes linked across time. The slow disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeterminate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as “disaster,” but in fact claiming much more life, health, and wealth across time than is generally calculated. The slow disaster is the time scale at which technological systems decay and posttraumatic stress grinds its victims—this is the scale at which deferred maintenance of infrastructure takes its steady toll—often in ways hard to sense or monetize until a disaster occurs in “event time.” The experience of war victims fits the concept well—as does the process of climate change, sea-level rise, the intensification of coastal flooding, and heat waves.4Scott Gabriel Knowles, “What Trump Doesn’t Get About Disasters,” New York Times, September 13, 2018.

The emergence of research in the “Anthropocene” heuristic has proven remarkably productive of new scales of disaster research. The Anthropocene is strictly speaking a geological term used to define the era of time in which humans have been the dominant geological force on the planet. As climate scientist Will Steffen described the conceptual challenge before us in 2011, “the concatenation of both slow- and quick-onset events, coupled with the increasing connectivity of the human enterprise, can lead to some unexpected global crises . . . such as the spikes in food prices. The Earth System scale adds another twist to the concept of speed of change, as for the very large geophysical changes that have exceptionally long lag times but may then occur suddenly with potential devastating effects . . . Humanity, now largely in its postagrarian phase of development, has no experience of dealing with such combinations of scale and speed of environmental change.”5Will Steffen, et. al., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio 40, no. 7 (November 2011): 752.

The Anthropocene concept is now attracting researchers from many disparate disciplines (including but also beyond the physical and natural sciences) and bringing climate change squarely into the frame of analysis. This is yet another way that disaster history destabilizes a progress narrative at the center of “human civilization” history. The results have included already a shelf of provocative books and articles from authors like Gabrielle Hecht, Christoph Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Anna Tsing, and Roy Scranton—and has also given rise to innovative new forms of research and teaching like the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt’s (HKW) Anthropocene Curriculum, and the Anthropocene Field Campus.6→Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141.
→Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (New York: Verso Books, 2016).
→Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
→Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, November 10, 2013.

Embracing disaster history

“Historical uncertainty is capable of bringing us into an openness to the realities of power and the social in the pursuit of norms, even technical norms.”

The uncertainty of disaster history is not unknowability, but it is knowing in a different register, it is knowing through narrative, through metaphor, through context with limits. In this regard, how can history ever be of use to the physical and natural sciences, to engineering, or even to the “hard” social sciences? Historical uncertainty is capable of bringing us into an openness to the realities of power and the social in the pursuit of norms, even technical norms. No process, even a scientific and technical process of discovery and application, is free from social context. History provides us the methodology of humility in our search for the social, the multicausal, and the reflexivity to see ourselves in our pursuit of knowledge. Disaster history, as one branch of history, can provide stories from the past, in which we might find ourselves: similar people, similar struggles—or we may find dissimilar people and struggles that still illuminate some key aspect of ourselves in our time and place. Disaster history may also liberate us to try for a fusion of the analytical and the irrational—the graph and the story, the cost-benefit analysis and the social analysis—dual modes of explanation working together. Finally, a relentless focus on scale allows us to see that we are not bounded by simple contexts like community, or nation, or by limited time horizons like the disaster “event”—it empowers us to learn lessons from the past over longer stretches and in surprising places. In these ways, a move toward uncertainty is not failure, it is an embrace of humanity in all of its myriad guises.

References:

1
For path-breaking examples of the genre, see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); and Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); for historiographic discussions, see Paul E. Johnson, “Reflections: Looking Back at Social History,” Reviews in American History 39, no. 2 (June 2011): 379–388; and Peter N. Stearns, “Social History Present and Future,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 9–19.
2
London: Penguin Books, 1961More Info →
3
See Joyce Appleby, Margaret C. Jacob, and Lynn Hunt, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
4
Scott Gabriel Knowles, “What Trump Doesn’t Get About Disasters,” New York Times, September 13, 2018.
5
Will Steffen, et. al., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio 40, no. 7 (November 2011): 752.
6
→Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141.
→Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (New York: Verso Books, 2016).
→Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
→Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, November 10, 2013.