A historical philosophy quotation master list

History, a mosaic by Frederick Dielman, Members Room at the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building

Since shortly after I started teaching I’ve begun every semester with three quotations meant to explain to my students what my approach to both learning and teaching history is and, by extension, what they should be looking for as we go. I’ve always used the same three but sometimes expand on a given point with another, related line from a slightly different angle. I’ve found this approach does a good job of setting expectations, and gives me a few key ideas I can call back to for the rest of the semester.

Taken together, these three quotations are the basis of my philosophy of history. Today is the halfway point in this summer semester, and as I reflected on these again I decided, in the commonplace book spirit of this blog, to share them here. I’m including some other quotations that I may only occasionally bring up in class but that inform my understanding of history on some deep level.

I intend to expand this post in the future as I remember more quotations that I’ve found useful or inspiring.

The big three: Bloch, Hartley, Cicero

Bloch: history is about people

Marc Bloch (1886-1944), in The Historian’s Craft, written in 1941-42 but published posthumously in 1949:

“The good historian resembles the legendary ogre. Where he senses human flesh, he knows there lies his prey.”

Alternate translation: “The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there is quarry lies.”

I include this line to explain that the focus of the course will be humanity—both individual people and their characters, strengths, and failings as well as anything broadly construed as human. That is, culture. Anything cultural is fair game: war, politics, literature, religion, economics, etc.

For the last few years I’ve explicitly set this in opposition to the kind of history emphasizing abstract “forces” or “trends,” whether the hoary economics-is-everything models of Marx and friends or of modish bestsellers like Sapiens, which attempts to contextualize all of humanity on a grand cosmic scale by presenting all of human history in the last few pages. That’s not history, I argue, but geology, astronomy, physics, and the other sciences (not to mention a ton of speculation). Real history involves humans and human choices.

Hartley: history is about difference

From LP Hartley’s (1895-1972) novel The Go-Between, published in 1953:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

I share this to set up the expectation that people in the past thought and behaved differently, and the example of a foreign country is extremely helpful in this regard. I’ll describe the stereotype of the “ugly American” abroad—loud, rude, judgmental, refusing to learn even a few phrases in the local language, expecting everyone to accommodate him, comparing everything unfavorably to the way we do it back home—and suggest to my students that we want to avoid doing the same on a trip into the past. Just like in a foreign country, I say, you’ll see things you don’t like or disagree with, but we’re only there to observe and try to understand.

Related: from Herbert Butterfield’s (1900-79) crucial 1931 study The Whig Interpretation of History, a line I’ve quoted here several times before:

“[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.”

If I have time, I’ll often make an excursus on the two kinds of differences between ourselves and past people. The first is the obvious difference: a lot of medieval people thought and did things that seem straightforwardly strange and barbarous to us now. It’s easy to fixate on the strange and decide they are entirely unlike ourselves. But the second, more dangerous difference is the invisible kind, usually hidden by a superficial similarity: the Greeks had democracy, the Romans had a Senate! This one recognizable point can lull one into missing details like the prevalence of pederasty in ancient Greece, of gladiatorial combat in Rome, and of slavery in both. Be on the lookout for deep cultural differences especially where the past seems familiar.

Cicero: history is memory

I end the introduction to my approach as a student and teacher of history with my favorite Roman, Cicero, (106-43 BC) and this line in Orator ad M Brutum, section 120:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the worth of a man’s life unless it is interwoven with the memory of ancient things from a greater age?”

Studying the past is a way to expand our understanding and wisdom beyond the brief window of time we’ll actually experience. With five kids, I can offer plenty of examples of childlike ignorance and how my kids have grown out of it partly through the stories Sarah and I have told them. (Cf Polybius below.) A simple point but one that always seems to work well.

I’ll often expand on this by paraphrasing the following from CS Lewis (1898-1963) in An Experiment in Criticism (1961):

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”

Lewis is writing about literature but this line works just as well for history. And remember that history was traditionally—until the late 19th century, anyway—understood as a literary pursuit, an art.

I loathe the word empathy, but if I feel it would click with a given class I might invoke it here.

Others: approaches, priorities, and purpose

Butterfield: teaching and writing about history is a balancing act

Another from Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History:

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”

A small insight but an important one. This is one of the things that makes history an art, and the times I’ve enjoyed classroom lecture or discussion most are when I’m trying to strike precisely this balance—finding a way to say something generally true while suggesting complexity and exception. It’s a skill I admire enormously in the historians who have it.

Colonel Stonehill: history is what happened, not what didn’t

From the Coen brothers’ 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s True Grit, a line that they invented for the peevish, frustrated cotton factor and horse trader Col Stonehill:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I keep this one ready in my back pocket for alternate history questions. History, in my view, is far too complex to even begin to guess what might have happened had one or two variables been changed.

Related: from the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue’s (1930-2013) 2010 book The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past”

A good single-sentence line not only on the impossibility of predicting the future but also the difficulty involved in studying the events that have actually happened.

Polybius and Dr Johnson: the purpose and responsibility of studying history

Two more. The first is a line I don’t think I’ve quoted in class but that I’ve reflected on for many years. From Polybius’s Histories, I.35:

“There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful.”

The above pairs well with Cicero’s line on history as memory above.

Second, a quotation I included in the design of a poster I printed for my office door and classroom corkboards. In his Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Samuel Johnson (1709-84) uses the poet-philosopher character Imlac to voice his ideas on the inevitability (“The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments”) as well as the importance and value of studying history:

“If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent. If we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just.”

Given all the other insights above—expanding one’s own memory, learning lessons the easy way, learning what to study and how and even how to teach others—the responsibility inherent in knowing the past is a good place to leave off.

The pods bursting in air

Detail of A View of the Bombardment of Fort McHenry by John BOwer

I was returning from vacation when they dropped, but I’ve enjoyed catching up on The Rest is History’s series on national anthems so far. The episode on the “Deutschlandlied” was especially good, and though I enjoyed Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I do have two notes I have to get out of my system. (I almost titled this post “Key notes.”)

For context, they do a good job with the poem’s origin as an account of the unsuccessful British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Eyewitness Francis Scott Key’s poem was published as a broadside ballad under the title “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” a title that might helpfully clue modern singers in to what’s going on in Key’s contorted verse but doesn’t catch the imagination quite like “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Holland and Sandbrook, however, turn the bulk of the episode into yet another discussion of American slavery due to the presence, in Key’s seldom-remembered third verse, of the lines “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” This line has provoked its share of controversy (less, I’m guessing, than the words “the land of the free,” but that’s not our focus here), including the suggestion that the song “glorifies slavery.”

Sandbrook quotes a Key biographer who pointed out that the word hireling is a giveaway—the phrase “hireling and slave” refers to paid soldiers and mercenaries in the service of a tyrant. This is pretty obvious to anyone who knows the period and the importance of the citizen-soldier image to a newborn republic. In parsing the intent of the poet himself, Sandbrook notes that Key, a Marylander, was a slaveowner but also represented slaves in suits for freedom but also opposed abolitionism and also that the invading British in 1812 fielded a regiment of runaway slaves that Key may have been aware of. So he and Holland conclude that the contested line probably has at least some tangential but problematic connection to slavery-slavery, not simply the metaphorical slavery of British soldiers.

One thing neither host does is quote the entire third stanza:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
[Refrain]

This is clarifying. Read in its entirety, Key’s poem is a narrative, albeit a convoluted one. Where the first two stanzas narrate the worry and aftermath of the unsuccessful bombardment, the third sees the British in retreat and their unwanted presence expunged. Every line supports this reading. The fourth, which is the only other stanza the average person might know, wraps up the story with a reflection and peroration.

Sandbrook and Holland concede entirely too much to the argument that the third stanza is about literal slavery, for what I think are two reasons:

First, they seriously underrate not only the importance of the citizen-soldier image to Americans but also the contempt with which paid soldiers were held at the time and the suspicion of Americans toward professional armies. Remember that people haven’t always admired soldiers. Read the Anti-Federalists and their hostility toward a paid standing army in the employ of the President stands out as one of their most important objections to the Constitution. And the myth of Hessians as bloodthirsty warriors-for-hire, a myth important enough and provocative enough to be explicitly invoked in the Declaration of Independence, persists to this day. That aspect of the Revolution is still taught with a whiff of disdain for people who would hire themselves out as mercenaries, a disdain that survives in popular culture (as in The Crossing, a mostly good TV movie about Washington at Trenton).

Second, the excessive focus on Key’s personal and political opposition to abolitionism in the second half of the episode leads Holland and Sandbrook into the trap of assuming—or at least talking as if—only two positions were available on the issue: support for slavery and abolitionism. This is hard to keep in mind and even harder to get students to understand, but especially in the early decades of the 19th century, before the fringe positions of radical, John Brown-style abolitionism and James Henry Hammond-style support for slavery came to dominate the debate, there were lots of intermediate, moderate positions. Many of the Founders favored gradualist plans of slow emancipation, as did figures from Key’s generation like Henry Clay—also a slaveowner—and Key supported the colonization movement, which Sandbrook mentions but pooh-poohs. That’s a mistake. Colonization enjoyed widespread favor despite proving unworkable and being written out of the story by the radical abolitionists valorized in the present. Key’s opposition to abolitionists was opposition to extremism and public disorder, not the end of slavery itself.

Again, a good and mostly enjoyable episode, but skewed in its coverage by a couple crucial points where Holland and Sandbrook’s usual nuance is missing. Perhaps, per Alan Jacobs, another anti-American blindspot? Or is it just that Brits will necessarily have to work harder to get into the would-be Roman republican mindset of this era?

Numbers come from somewhere

Yesterday on Substack, a young Orthodox Substacker whose work I usually appreciate, feeling perhaps a bit too eager to pause over and reconsider what felt like an epiphany, shared the following:

Caesar was declared divine for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more. In the pagan world, Hitler would have been numbered among the gods.

There are a lot of factual problems (not least that this is not why Caesar was divinized) and dubious assumptions built into this note, which is framed as an even more dubious hypothetical (“would have”) anyway, and it was handled pretty thoroughly by responses like this one.

But what proved unexpectedly helpful to me was its use of the one million figure. I’ve seen this statistic repeated over and over again by people trying to paint Caesar as a war criminal—a category that would have been nonsensical in the ancient world—or guilty of genocide, which is itself a loaded and dubious term. I’ve idly wondered where they’re getting this number, statistics from the ancient world being so totally, notoriously unreliable. This time I decided to look into it.

The claim that Caesar “kill[ed] a million Gauls and enslav[ed] a million more” ultimately comes from three passages in sources that post-date Caesar by a generation or more. Here are all three relevant portions in approximate chronological order:

• Valleius Paterculus (19 BC-AD 31), Roman History, II, 47: “During this period, including the years which immediately followed and those of which mention has already been made, more than four hundred thousand of the enemy were slain by Gaius Caesar and a greater number were taken prisoners.”

• Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23-79), Natural History, VII, 25: “In addition, too, to the victories gained by him in the civil wars, one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men were slain by him in his battles. For my own part, however, I am not going to set it down as a subject for high renown, what was really an outrage committed upon mankind, even though he may have been acting under the strong influence of necessity; and, indeed, he himself confesses as much, in his omission to state the number of persons who perished by the sword in the civil wars.”

• Plutarch (c. AD 50-c. 120), Parallel Lives: Caesar, 15: “For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.”

That’s it. Whatever sources these historians used, if any, are long since lost. Of these, the closest to Caesar’s own lifetime gives by far the lowest casualty figure. All of them are approximations, a point made especially clear when they write about prisoners.

I ran these sources down thanks to the bibliography in Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus. After summarizing the statistics we get from the three sources above, Goldsworthy notes that:

It is hard to know the basis for any of these numbers. The figures given for enemy casualties in the Commentaries on the Gallic War do not add up to such a great total, while Caesar’s account of the Civil War often did not mention such things. It is questionable that numbers for losses amongst the Gaulish tribes were known with precision, although it may just have been possible to calculate from records the number of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Probably these numbers are exaggerated, but still give some indication of the appalling human cost of Caesar’s victories.

Goldsworthy is a careful scholar and an expert military historian—an area often lacking in other classicists—and his Caesar is the book on this subject, as far as I’m concerned. His caution in accepting the one-million figure is warranted and well-explained.

There are other surviving figures that can indicate something of the devastation of the Gallic Wars; Goldsworthy notes in the same passage that the total tax Caesar levied on his entire province in 50 BC was lower than the funds required for a forum he built. But is that because of devastation or disparities in property values and population density? With factors like these unknown, the surviving numbers can only suggest. Absent our sources’ sources, we can only speculate about demographics and statistics, and even that speculation must be based on what the sources do tell us, however little we choose to trust them. (Here is a very skeptical take on the numbers in Caesar’s Commentaries specifically that should give you some sense of the scope of the problem; it’s not just about battle casualties.)

The obvious point of comparison—the one invoked by our Substacker in the first place—is the death toll of the Holocaust. Certain kinds of skeptics operating under ulterior motives will question the standard figure of six million Jews, but for the Holocaust we have mountains of data available—prewar and postwar population figures, logistical documentation, military and industrial reports, and the Nazis’ own plans and records. (Read Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent KL for a deep dive.) For Caesar’s Gaulish victims we have this handful of sources.

One might call ancient historians’ stats and figures “vibes-based.” But lest we feel too proud of ourselves, that’s essentially what that Substacker was doing, too. That note was designed as a zinger, not to provide an accurate picture of history. Which is too bad, because the Christianity-shaped chasm separating even secular modern ethics from Caesar’s is important to acknowledge.

Numbers come from somewhere. It is worth finding out where and, even more importantly, the limits of their usefulness—especially when they are consistently deployed as some kind of gotcha.

Gordon Wood, RIP

I was sorry to learn of the death of the great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, two days ago, and even sorrier to learn of the circumstances. Aged 92, he deserved a better ending, but none can doubt he leaves behind a great scholarly legacy. Since his death I’ve seen lots of tributes and recommendations of his most famous books—the kind large enough to be called tomes, influential enough to be called monumental, magisterial, definitive—but I’d like to acknowledge a small personal debt and recommend a less celebrated book.

When I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago I received an MA in European History. I had taken Dr Edwin Moïse’s class on Vietnam as part of my focus on military history, Dr Rod Andrew’s seminar on American historiography as an elective, and read the late Sir John Keegan’s then-new The American Civil War: A Military History but otherwise didn’t touch US history—and hadn’t since my sophomore year of college. But at my very first teaching job as an adjunct at Greenville Tech my department head plopped a US History I course in my lap.

If you’ve heard that the best way to learn something is to teach it, it’s true. Completely. I learned more about American history over that first year or so than in all my studies up to that point. For the first time I began to form a coherent overall picture of everything from Columbus and Jamestown to Appomattox. Part of the joy I discovered in teaching—which I never could have predicted I would end up doing for a living—was the feeling of suddenly getting it, of the material clicking for me. A large part of my work since then has been communicating that joy to my students.

But I had a healthy self-doubt and didn’t want to fall prey to Dunning-Kruger. I knew enough to know how little I knew, and spent a lot of time checking myself, probing for gaps and holes in the narrative I was perceiving and presenting, and wanting to make sure I was getting things right.

This is where Gordon Wood comes in. I have a lot of those famous books that I’ve read or dipped into as needed—The Radicalism of the American Revolution (c. 450 pages), Empire of Liberty (c. 780 pages), and The Purpose of the Past (300 pages on historiography)—but as I taught the Revolution for the first time I picked up his little 200+ page survey for the Modern Library Chronicles series, The American Revolution: A History.

This book was a godsend—short, well-written, approachable, and measured. The great test of the historian is to be both comprehensive and brief, and Wood demonstrated that favorite insight of Herbert Butterfield, that “The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” I still recommend it to students who want a good scholar’s take on the Revolution but don’t want to tackle the 800-page behemoths popular among buffs.

But most importantly, it reassured me. Over and over I read in Wood what I had arrived at and presented to students. I was not comforted that Wood agreed with me, but that I had worked my way into a position that accorded with a great authority. I was doing something right. I hadn’t lost my way among the details as I scrambled to form a big-picture interpretation. Wood settled my anxiety that, having been forced to return to American history, I could and understand and teach it. His work gave me confidence and made me a better teacher. For that I’m still grateful.

Gordon Wood, scholar, writer, and teacher, RIP.

I highly recommend The American Revolution: A History if you’d like a short, readable introduction to the topic (something I’m always interested in for any subject in the hopes of recommending it to students). For a valuable recent service from Wood, here’s his critique of the 1619 Project. And for a more personal appreciation and reminiscence from a former PhD student, here’s Clemson’s C Bradley Thompson on how Wood, who was his dissertation advisor, shaped him as a scholar.

Buchan’s Augustus

To my surprise and joy, today marks the beginning of my fifth John Buchan June here on the blog. When I began this project five years ago it was a bit of a lark, a way to reclaim my birth month from other, more obnoxious themed celebrations. Since then it’s become a major part of my reading and intellectual life, has put me in touch with some wonderful people, and has become one of my favorite seasons of the writing year.

As I’ve run short on Buchan’s novels—I hope to cover the last few I haven’t read this month—I’ve branched out into his short stories and non-fiction. In the last couple years I’ve read two of his short biographies: a literary-critical introduction to Sir Walter Scott and a pithy, elegant little life of Julius Caesar. Today I start John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s best full-size biographies: Augustus.

I won’t recapitulate Augustus’ life in detail here. Buchan begins with the boy Octavian, whose background of an unassuming equestrian ancestry and close relation to the most charismatic and powerful man of the day would prove surprisingly advantageous in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Named his adopted son and heir in Caesar’s will, Octavian seemingly came from nowhere but was well-connected enough—thanks to those family ties to Caesar—and sober enough—thanks to that middle-class upbringing—to step into the role and navigate its numerous immediate hazards.

Among these were the courting of his favor and largesse by numerous people with ulterior motives and the rivalry created with Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s most trusted subordinates, the moment he was named as heir. Caesar’s assassins were still at large and fellow-travelers like Cicero, respected by the senatorial partisans and implacably hostile to Antony, hoped to use moral suasion and appeals to tradition to bring young Octavian to their side. But Octavian and Antony reconciled, revoked the amnesty given to the assassins, and proscribed political enemies they had formerly shielded from each other. A bloodbath ensued, “the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record.” Cicero was murdered, Brutus and Cassius killed themselves following military defeat, and Rome passed beyond the possibility of restoring the Republic.

Perhaps, anyway. That’s a what-if game that Buchan doesn’t really play, which is appropriate to his subject. He presents the future Augustus as canny and cautious, a man whose lack of imagination served him well in a situation too complicated and treacherous to treat with romance or fantasy.

This becomes most apparent in the latter half of Augustus, after civil war has again broken out, Octavian has defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and offered to relinquish his dictatorial power only to have it reaffirmed and expanded by the Senate. Now the Princeps, first citizen, he begins what to Buchan is his true work—rebuilding, restructuring, shoring up, and strengthening for the long haul.

Two things distinguish Augustus as both a biography and a work of literature. The first is Buchan’s scholarship. Those who rate Buchan as a mere entertainer and skilled craftsman of adventure stories miss an important aspect of the man. Deeply educated in and passionate about the classics, his knowledge of Greek and Roman literature informed his entire life and undergirds even his fiction—most obviously in novels about relict paganism like The Dancing Floor or Witch Wood but also in the education, moral framework, and long historical perspective shared by his heroic characters.

But his love of the classics was not limited ready quotations or the encyclopedic familiarity of the amateur. He had a sharp understanding of historiography. In the preface of Augustus he explains his use of the available sources, their biases and limitations, and makes his judgments clear throughout. He uses them critically, carefully dissecting and comparing in order to construct as a true a picture of events as possible—not with the intense ideological skepticism to which we have grown accustomed in many of our classicists—and complements the literary sources with the latest findings from the still-growing fields of archaeology and papyrology. Augustus, as a work of history, is meticulously constructed and judicious in its use of evidence. It holds up, and would pair well with a more recent biography by a scholar of similar sensibility, like Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus: First Emperor of Rome.

Buchan’s scholarship, like his writing, is excellent but not showy. Several chapters late in the book offer thematic looks at the Empire under Augustus. One examines Augustus’s family and friendships, another the social and religious reforms Augustus, with limited success, attempted to institute, but the most interesting is an imaginary tour of the Empire from east to west. Buchan impresses upon the reader not only the geography of the Augustan world but the immense variety encompassed by it—ancient, thriving, desirable Egypt; the slightly past-prime glories of Greece; the villages and smithies of Gaul; rugged, fragmented Spain; the difficulties and dangers of travel by sea; and rumors of other faraway places like Britain and future troubles among the Germans beyond the Rhine and, much more subtly and of an entirely unprecedented kind, Judaea.

The second great strength of Buchan’s Augustus, and one of the traits that most distinguishes it from modern histories of the same period, is its pervasive emphasis on character. Personality, virtues, and vices matter to Buchan, as do the cultures that produce them. People are not ciphers moved about by sociological forces and statistical trends beyond anyone’s understanding. Choices are not an illusion, but reveal character and have consequences.

Augustus therefore abounds in incisive character sketches. I wrote last month about Buchan’s final assessment of Cicero, but his portraits of other key players like Brutus, Agrippa, Cleopatra—whom he rightly takes down a peg—the poets Virgil and Horace, Augustus’s wife Livia, his ne’er-do-well daughter Julia, the brutish, shortsighted Antony, and, late in the story, Varus enliven the story and drive its events.

Perhaps the two best are of Augustus’s lifelong friend, ally, and lieutenant, Agrippa, and of Augustus himself. Upon Agrippa’s death, Buchan sums him up not only as a skilled combat leader but an able logistician and administrator whose friendship with Augustus made everything the latter achieved possible and yet nursed no resentments or private ambitions. Indeed, Buchan notes that even “gossiping Roman annalists, who found specks on every other sun, never suggested scandal or criticism about his public or private life,” living simply and honestly even after victory over Antony and the rise of Augustus to undisputed preeminence. That Augustus could enjoy the friendship and loyalty of a man like Agrippa, Buchan writes, reflects well on both.

“Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid, he is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

As for Augustus, the book is his, and Buchan’s most compelling character sketch is that which emerges over the course of the entire book. The contrast with Julius Caesar, whose late career and death drive the early chapters and first bring Octavian to prominence, is striking. Where Caesar was stirring, robust, magnetic, and driven by almost visible flashes of genius, Augustus was physically brittle, cagey, cautious, and lacked imagination in the way one might enjoy poetry while never being carried away by a daydream. Crucially, this son of the workaday equestrian class was always ready for the long, arduous work of building and lacked the aristocratic Caesar’s ego and destructive simplifying impulse. The difference between the uncle and adopted heir was that between boldness and prudence. Buchan explicitly invokes Aristotle’s phronesis. “Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid,” he writes, Augustus “is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

Buchan published Augustus in 1937, shortly after being appointed Governor-General of Canada by King George V. Buchan’s long concern for the fragility of civilization and the hard work of governing, unblurred by any illusions about human nature, are at the forefront of this work. Having reluctantly accepted his new position but dutifully embraced its burdens, it is easy to see why the principled, nose-to-the-grindstone character of Augustus appealed to him. (I will also not be the first to point out that, like Augustus, Buchan suffered immensely from recurrent lifelong illnesses, another point of kinship.) The result is one of Buchan’s best non-fiction books. Augustus was both critically well-received, even being adopted as a classroom text by one of the classicists he consulted, and commercially successful.

Last year I took some issue with Buchan’s presentation of Julius Caesar. I think his portrait of Augustus, which is sympathetic and admiring but by no means uncritical, especially with regard to the compromises Octavian made to survive early on, is impeccable. Where Caesar manipulated and destroyed, Octavian inherited a mess and, as Augustus, made the best of it. Buchan’s assessment that it was only because of Augustus that something of Rome remained to be destroyed by the barbarians centuries later is traditional but surely correct.

Buchan avoids making Augustus about his own time—“History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels,” a point I wholeheartedly endorse—but he does pause over the present in the final paragraphs. “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin,” he writes, in words that will be familiar from early in his fiction career, “and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires.” The problems of Buchan’s day were not new; Augustus had faced them before in different form. But what troubled Buchan was the willingness of many moderns to cast off the hard work of self-governance, to “experiment with unknown forces” like shameless wars of aggression as a means of strengthening society and the hitherto undiscovered science of racial purity, and to embrace mob politics and dictatorship.

Imagining a resurrected Augustus surveying the world in 1937, Buchan concludes on a chilling note: “when this expert in mechanism observed the craving of great peoples to enslave themselves and to exult hysterically in their bonds, bewilderment would harden to disdain in his masterful eyes.”

The same must certainly be true—with variations—ninety years later. This is reason enough to read Augustus, but that it is also a fine work of history, an insightful study of human character, and a brilliantly readable narrative from a great author are the chief reasons to seek it out, enjoy it, and learn from it.

* * * * *

As mentioned previously, I read Augustus in a reprint by House of Stratus, a publisher that seems to be defunct, but the entirety of Buchan’s book is available in a carefully presented online version from the University of Chicago, with helpful additional commentary and footnotes by the scholars who transcribed it, here. This by itself is a testament to the virtues of Buchan’s book.

I hope to read another of Buchan’s major biographies—likely Oliver Cromwell, which will make even tougher demands on my sympathies than Julius Caesar—before the end of the month. Stay tuned, and thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June.

Learning outside one’s field and sharing enthusiasm

Roman historian Adrian Goldsworthy, who maintains an underrated YouTube channel that I’ve recommended on Substack before, dropped a new video this morning. It’s a conversation with historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, whose book Persians: The Age of the Great Kings has been sitting high on my to-read stack for a while.

The conversation is informative and, since Goldsworthy and Llewellyn-Jones know each other from way back, a lot of fun, but Goldsworthy’s introductory remarks have some especially good insights. Noting that Persian history lies well outside the usual area covered by his channel, Goldsworthy notes

It’s slightly different from a lot of the stuff we tend to talk about and a lot of my own interest, but it’s complimentary, and the more you learn about different periods of history and how we try to understand them the greater the benefit for whatever your own focus is. It helps you to have that perspective of—sometimes it inspires you to ask slightly different questions to a topic that otherwise has become very familiar. It might suggest different approaches, different ways of using the evidence, or different types of evidence.

The same way a reader might alternate—as I do—a diet of spy thrillers with the occasional sci-fi novel or a string of mysteries with a western, it’s both refreshing and helpful for a historian to read outside his own field for precisely the reasons Goldsworthy lays out. It can give you new eyes, or at least clear the intellectual cobwebs away. Indeed, as Llewellyn-Jones discusses in the course of their conversation, his own approach to the classical past began with a theatre background and changed as he encountered and investigated new topics—Penelope’s veil in the Odyssey is an intriguing one—with surprising connections to each other.

Goldsworthy also points out the value of making history accessible to a public that always has an appetite for it:

“[I]f you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding . . . you’re less than useful.”

It’s all very well studying the past, coming to understand things, but if you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding—I think the awareness that this is fascinating, lots of people would be interested in this, it tells us important things about ourselves as human beings, it helps us to understand the world better, but unless you can actually communicate that, you’re less than useful.

He notes that courses on ancient history are popular with students and have no problem with enrollment. Such courses, however, are unpopular with the powers that be for non-academic reasons.

I could point out the same thing about military history (which is where my background overlaps with Goldsworthy’s somewhat). I’ve twice proposed development of an American Military History course that is listed as a possibility in the South Carolina Technical College System, each time making it to the curriculum committee stage before being shot down. I have no doubt it would be a popular class, not only because the well-known general interest in military history but also because some of our transfer students go to schools like Clemson with well-established ROTC programs. Maybe the third time is the charm.

Another significant topic of their conversation is the danger posed to Llewellyn-Jones’s program at Cardiff University. I’ll leave it at that but will note that it’s fun to hear some seasoned historians talk smack about administrators.

I haven’t quite finished the entire video but it’s been a pleasant and interesting discussion so far. I strongly recommend it. I’m hoping to pick up a copy of Goldsworthy’s latest, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, for my birthday next week and I mean to start Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians soon. Give their conversation a listen or a watch.

Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

Lying and counting the inexplicable

The Messenger, Luc Besson’s brutal, ugly, inaccurate, and very very late 90s film about St Joan of Arc, is a terrible movie, but it has one brilliant scene that I’ve reflected on since the one time I watched it more than twenty years ago.

Late in the story, as Joan sits in prison awaiting trial and sentencing, she is visited by a character played by Dustin Hoffman called “The Conscience.” The Conscience has a literally satanic role as an accuser, introducing doubt where Joan has heretofore felt only conviction. His interrogation eventually centers on Joan’s sword, which she miraculously found in a field, an event she took as a calling from God. The Conscience seizes on this, pointing out that it is not self-evidently a sign, but simply a sword in a field. In an increasingly rapid montage, the Conscience suggests many possible ways the sword could have wound up there that did not require God placing it here for her to find.

Having run through several scenarios in which the sword is dropped during combat or simply lost by accident, the Conscience says, “And that’s without counting the inexplicable.” Whereupon we see a man trudging through the same field carrying the sword, which he throws, entirely unprompted, into the tall grass. He doesn’t even stop walking.

The scene is clearly meant to mock supernatural belief—and it doesn’t even get St Joan’s history with that sword right—but that penultimate image of “the inexplicable” makes a valid, important point.

A young true crime YouTuber got me thinking about the Conscience and the inexplicable again. In my constant search for another Lemmino, I’ve tried out a lot of documentary channels on YouTube. Sturgeon’s Law being what it is, most of them aren’t very good. But in the course of finding a handful of decent documentary YouTubers to listen to or watch as I do the dishes or make the kids’ lunches, I’ve noticed that even the best of them have a persistent flaw.

The YouTuber in question is a college graduate with a degree in history. He’s smart, funny, and clearly paid attention in his historiography classes, as he demonstrates a good historian’s grasp of how to gather and assess evidence—most of the time. Faced with contradictory or irreconcilable details in whatever evidence he’s gathered (usually on old missing persons cases), he is far too willing to declare that someone is lying. Not mistaken, ignorant, misremembering, or misinformed—lying.

Part of this may be generational and cultural. I’m a geriatric Millennial from the Deep South, where accusing someone of lying is still serious business, and he’s a northern Zoomer. But it’s also a historiographic problem.

The accusation usually stems from discrepancies in whatever evidence is available—note that—and unacknowledged subjective impressions of the people involved. Discrepancies, in true crime theorizing, offer the same incentive that “anomalies” do to the conspiracy theorist. Our YouTuber falls into this trap whenever he takes discrepancies as evidence of willful deceit.

A lightly fictionalized version of a real example:

Two tourists disappear while hiking in Central America. Their diaries, when found, include a final entry on Monday, April 20. Locals confirm this date. But another tourist who briefly got to know them before their disappearance later recalls seeing the two tourists on Tuesday the 21st. But when first asked about the missing tourists by the police, the records show she stated this happened on that Monday. Why did she change her story? Why is she lying?

The most likely answer is that she didn’t, and she’s not.

Imagine meeting two strangers in a foreign country. You see them again sometime later. Being recent acquaintances, you notice them, but you’re busy with your own business. When they disappear, it turns out you’re one of the last people known to have seen them alive. Suddenly, details of that day take on a significance you never could have anticipated, you’re forced to try to recall things you never knew you would need to remember, and you may not have learned about the disappearance for days or weeks after it happened.

You’re interviewed by local police and by investigators from the tourists’ home country. You return to your own country and your previous life, and years go by. The investigation is reopened several times and you are interviewed again at some point in the process. How well will you remember these things this time? How well did you remember them in the first place?

No one in this scenario is lying, covering things up, or changing their stories. People make mistakes, misremember things, have their memories tainted by bad information relayed from someone else, or simply don’t know. None of this is “lying.”

This is where the inexplicable comes in. Without even factoring in these faults and flaws of memory, how well can you account for your own behavior, even in ordinary circumstances? People do things they can’t even always explain to themselves—out of habit, or intuition, or boredom, or a myriad of other barely conscious non-reasons. To paraphrase a meme, you do just do things.

But imagine a single day of yours is, for reasons beyond your control, placed under a microscope, with the authorities—and YouTubers and podcasters and a legion of other amateurs—poring over your every movement. Who wouldn’t end up looking a little suspicious, especially after being run through a strong rinse of insinuation, as the true crime and conspiracy folks are wont to do? Who couldn’t be accused of lying when forced to remember details you may have forgotten or simply can’t explain?

A few good rules of thumb for sifting evidence:

• Always assume there is information you don’t have, especially when dealing with incomplete evidence. You can only work from what’s available. It’s irresponsible in the extreme to speculate on casefiles that are still partially classified, but guess what you’ll see on almost every true crime YouTube channel?

• Even if you have a complete set of the available evidence, remember that the evidence is not a complete account of reality. Every piece has its own built in biases—limitations in the kind of evidence it’s designed to gather—and will leave things out.

• Always assume there are things you don’t understand. This is especially important in highly technical cases like the radar, transponder, and cell tower evidence in the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 case which—guess what?—our YouTuber, who doesn’t understand a lot about aviation, takes as evidence of the authorities lying. Aviation is a good example because it’s so obviously complex, but there are hidden technical pitfalls everywhere. In our lightly fictionalized example, consider the possible role of customs and immigration law in our tourists’ story, or unspoken local custom, or simple slang. These invisible technicalities can be the most dangerous. Just keeping Old and New Style dates straight in modern history can wreck your study of a specific event.

• Don’t let your prejudices influence your interpretation. This should be obvious, but how many of us consistently meet this standard? Our YouTuber hates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI, so guess how evenhandedly he approaches reports, statements, or other evidence from these institutions? The FBI’s handling of Waco doesn’t mean they’re lying about a child who went missing in the Great Smoky Mountains.

• Always leave room for the inexplicable. Compare the Umbrella Man. And even if you carefully work through every alternative and can prove someone is lying, as the aforementioned Lemmino points out, you may never determine why they are.

• Above all, remember historian’s bias. Approaching any event in the past will give us a different perspective and sense of its significance from everyone who actually lived through it. This is especially important to remember for people called to give an account of something that wasn’t significant to them at the time, that might, in the moment, to have been able to turn out some other way.

I could go on, but these are handy and important and should remain at the forefront of your mind when doing research. And if these are still not enough to dissuade you from leaping to the conclusion that someone you don’t know, under circumstances you haven’t lived through, that you don’t and can’t ever have a complete picture of, is lying, at least have a high enough regard for truth that accusing someone of falsehood becomes a charge you hesitate to make. Your conscience, at least, should demand as much.

The art (and danger) of inference

I’m currently reading David Woodman’s new book The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. It’s excellent so far, despite Woodman having to do a significant amount of the endemic hazard of Anglo-Saxon history: parsing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the available sources, squeezing them for every drop of potentially helpful information. This is always a laborious bit of reading, but where some books make this a chore, Woodman keeps it moving and interesting.

One of the difficulties of reconstructing the past in a period like Anglo-Saxon England is the incompleteness of the literary record. The historian must place great weight on documents originally intended for specific limited purposes, like royal writs (letters to members of local courts), diplomas (short records of land grants made by the king), and law codes. Early in the book, Woodman points out that in the typical diploma

[t]hose who were present at the meetings of the royal assemblies at which various grants of land were made are listed as witnesses at the end . . . These lists are set out hierarchically, beginning with the name of the king himself, from the form of whose title (known as his ‘royal style’) various kinds of important information can be gleaned; then there follow, most often, the names of the archbishops of Canterbury and York, then the bishops of the kingdom, then the ealdormen and thegns (both types of royal officials). Because of this hierarchical structure, and because the diplomas themselves are dated, they provide crucial detail for the realpolitik of tenth-century England, of the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers.

It is possible to note, for example, that a particular family member may be listed higher than another in a witness list in one year with their positions reversed later—or one of them disappearing entirely. This suggests—one can infer—a change of status or favor. Æthelstan himself shifted up and down in his father Edward’s lists, and Woodman gives attention to a bishop from the north who, judging from his presence in such lists and the broader political situation at the time, must have gone over to supporting northern rivals to Æthelstan for a time.

This kind of thing is not stated outright, of course. Woodman points out that, as important as Æthelstan’s reign is, there is no good contemporary narrative source for it. Much must be reconstructed from later sources—like William of Malmesbury, writing after the Conquest—or the spotty annual narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or simply inferred from documents like these.

You can learn a lot this way. Inference is a powerful tool, especially with a large body of such legal texts to work from. But it also has dangers. Here’s Woodman later, first recapitulating the potential use of diplomas before exploring their dangers:

From the lists of attendees included in royal diplomas . . . quite a lot of detail can be reconstructed about the composition of the royal assembly, not least the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers, since the lists are set out hierarchically according to status. But these lists require a certain circumspection. Most of the diplomas in question survive only in later copies, made long after the original grant of land had been issued. The copyists responsible could make mistakes—for example, in the spelling of names, in the order in which the names should have been listed, or in the omission of names that should have been recorded. We should also be aware that there may have been individuals present who went unrecorded.

One might also add: individuals who were not present but were still important.

The modern historian has a wealth of tools at his disposal, but his most important may be judgment. He can only infer so much from the composition of such a document, and he should not press his inferences further than the documentary evidence will allow. Less prudent historians have read entire imaginary histories into such sources. Woodman avoids that, which is one of the things that has, so far, made The First King of England a valuable read.

A good reminder of why, despite all the technical tools available now, history is an art, not a science.

On smallpox blankets

A slight ding on Philip Jenkins’s History of the United States, which I’m still reading and still enjoying. In a chapter on the Indian prehistory of North America, Jenkins points out the role of virgin soil epidemics in massive demographic change across the continent, well beyond any areas of initial European settlement (thanks to networks of preexisting trade routes and exacerbated by endemic inter-Indian warfare) and far before any “deliberate policy of Indian Removal” by any modern European-descended state.

All well and good—I’m often at pains in class to point out these early disasters, occurring in an age before germ theory, were accidental. But that paragraph ends with this passage:

Sometimes destruction by biological means was deliberate: in the 1760s, the British ransacked smallpox hospitals for contaminated bedding to offer as gifts to the Ottawa people.

On a strict technical level, most of that sentence is true—although the word ransacked is a bit much, as we’ll see. The problem is that Jenkins accidentally implies a widespread policy (“the British ransacked . . . hospitals”) over a long period (“the 1760s”) when this occurred exactly one time in one specific place.

The root of the smallpox blankets legend is the 1763 siege of Fort Pitt (formerly Fort Duquesne, later Pittsburgh) during Pontiac’s War, one of the aftershocks of the French and Indian War. Well-coordinated attacks on overextended British outposts in the far-flung new reaches of the Empire overwhelmed or came close to overwhelming several forts. Fort Pitt held out, but the siege conditions and overcrowding led to an outbreak of smallpox.

The precise details are unclear (here’s a good longer explanation) but in a letter to British Commander-in-Chief Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of Fort Pitt’s garrison mooted the idea of giving contaminated blankets from smallpox patients in the fort (n.b: from the fort hospital, not hospitals plural) to a diplomatic party as part of the customary exchange of gifts during negotiations. Amherst apparently approved on the basis that the situation at the fort was desperate. Based on fort records, it appears two blankets and a handkerchief were used (by someone, possibly a trader on his own initiative rather than the fort’s commander) and their previous owners reimbursed.

But here’s the most important part of the incident: it didn’t work.

Smallpox, per the CDC, can theoretically spread through bedding contaminated with pus and bodily fluids but is unlikely to, especially if the fluids dry and age. It is much more often transmitted “by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people.” Beyond the mechanics of how smallpox spreads most effectively, other contextual factors further complicate the story. Here’s Fred Anderson in The War that Made America, which I recently recommended:

There is no evidence that Amherst’s genocidal intentions and [Fort Pitt commander] Ecuyer’s abominable act actually succeeded in spreading smallpox among the Shawnees and Delawares who besieged Fort Pitt, for smallpox was already endemic in both groups at the time.

Another historian has pointed out that the smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt arrived with the Indians in the first place.

Again, we are dealing with a single failed attempt at biological warfare in a desperate situation. So while that sentence in Jenkins’s book—a sort of tossed-off aside—is in some sense correct, it falls apart at the detail level.

The bigger problem is precisely that tossed-off quality and the impression it creates. The smallpox blankets are legendary—mythic. Even students who don’t know much about the colonial era or the complex history of European and Indian relations usually recognize this story. That’s because it has escaped its original context and all its bothersome details and, having thus escaped, the attempt to spread smallpox is assumed to have been successful.

So it’s become a story too good to check and, as proof of white perfidy, can be transplanted to the European villain of choice. I’ve seen Cortes and the Pilgrims accused of it, or “Europeans” generally, as if it happened many times.

This is an unfortunate single sentence in a book that is otherwise excellent so far, but the mere fact of its appearing in a good book by a careful historian points toward its prominence as easy shorthand for the evils of European and Indian interaction. But that very ease should raise our suspicions, especially since the story is so often used as a one-size-fits-all cudgel. Any story that handy for the purpose needs to be checked.