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• Wednesday, April 11, 2007 03:41 PM

  Confusion about what Historians do

  This article points out at least two issues about what historians can do, and do do. As a professional historian, I have no truck with people who try to dismiss the whole project of historical recreation as ideology writ large. Sorry folks, but Waterloo happened. Napoleon lost. Why he lost, though, is controversial, can be interpreted in different ways, and its overall significance may be greater or less than one historian or another maintains. We can trace an idea or a symbol, and say some important things about how that idea or symbol changed its meaning over time. This is useful. Just so long as you separate things you can verify from specualtion or inference--which Laine may or may not have done, as I have not read his book. In another context, you can get pissed off at someone who says that we have no peice of paper on which Hitler orders the extermination of the Jews. But it is true. What is bullshit is to infer from this first statement that he had nothing to do with it, or worse, that it didn't happen, which it clearly did. There, you need to look at the wealth of information we have about Hitler, the way he ran his government, other documentary and physical evidence, and Hitler's personal ideology and utterances. Taken together, they seal the deal--the Holocaust happened, and Hitler was in direct, even micromanaging, control of the state that perpetrated the outrage. If Historians and those who write or speak about them were more clear about what is being put forward as demonstrable, and what is, one hopes, informed speculation, then less of this nonsense (althoug not willful attempts at rabble-rousing like this) would take place.

  —James Levy Read James Levy's other letters
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