Historical Research

Most of the essays in the book, The Historian as Detective, approach history from a somewhat scientific outlook. The authors of these essays deal with the problems of historical research and constructing a puzzle from a pool of tiny pieces, which are not all present. In this sense, the authors look at historical research as a scientific problem which must be solved by gathering and examining all of the evidence. Some of the authors deal with gathering these pieces, looking for hidden objects. Other authors deal with interpreting the evidence properly, keeping the valuable items while throwing out the worthless ones. The title of the book reflects the editor's bent: looking to the detective's vocation in fashioning an approach to historical evidence gathering and interpretation.

The first three parts of the book which illustrate this point well. In these parts, Winks includes essays which deal with the gathering of evidence and the reliability of that evidence. For instance, Robin Collingwood looks at the reliability of "testimony," as that term might be applied to historical evidence. Collingwood uses the term "testimony" to refer to the questioning process which a historian must apply to evidence. He says that the historian must question all of this evidence in his own mind, asking himself whether the fits together and what it means. He asserts that there are no ready-made statements in history. He uses the exa

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nesses actually existed). However, the most important method used in attempting to verify the letters was analyzing them to gauge Lincoln's personality. This was done by comparing the views expressed in the purported letters with those expressed in previously verified writings. This last method makes use of the historian's particular abilities in analyzing evidence, while the other methods have more to do with the detective's craft. In the third part of his book, Winks discusses the evaluation of evidence once it is collected. One group of scholars seems to prefer the adversarial method, where evidence is put to the "courtroom" test of attack. Thomas Spencer Jerome, an attorney by trade no less, used this method to evaluate the usefulness of eyewitness evidence. He notes that educated men tend to remember wrongly much of the time when trying to describe an exciting incident. In an unabashed display of elitism, Jerome figures that uneducated men probably do even worse, since they are not used to the mental effort asked of them. Similarly, the written word is not to be automatically trusted for its veracity, since in its best form it may rely upon eyewitness accounts and in its worst form may consist of nothing but forge
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Approximate Word count = 2415
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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