"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel" and How History Changes

Abstract

"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel" and How History Changes Lara Putnam (bio) SHARON Block has written a brilliant reengagement with a historical actor she first wrote about a quarter century ago: Rachel Davis, who, as a teenage indentured servant at the turn of the nineteenth century, suffered repeated sexual assaults by her aunt's husband, spoke out, and ultimately saw him tried and convicted of rape. The subject matter is raw and painful, and Block never loses sight of its moral weight. Yet somehow, without treating Rachel's life as mere fodder for an intellectual excursion, Block manages to take the opportunity to walk us through a meticulously insightful account of how historical knowledge is made—and why, when it is remade at a new point in time, it looks different. Several recent controversies have pushed into the public eye one-dimensional portrayals of historical revision, with critics implying that if historians' narratives change, it can only be evidence of "presentism" driven by current values and political needs.1 Block does take values and politics seriously, but her painstaking account shows up one-dimensional caricatures of historical revision as the straw men they are. "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel" shines light on the multidimensional, interactive evolution through which changing research practice brings historians closer to thoroughly accurate understandings of the past, rather than further from them. E. H. Carr famously declared in 1961 that for historians, facts are like fish. In the commonsense view, he explained, "The historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him." But on the contrary, according to Carr, "The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish [End Page 701] swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch."2 In this article Block again and again spells out the crucial contingencies undergirding her own fact-finding process: the way things that other people or institutions or businesses wrote or compiled or provided made it possible for her to conduct the research she did. In doing so, she makes visible by contrast the voluntarist paradigm limiting Carr's insights. Historians want to catch particular fish, so they choose how, Carr declared. But of course it is not that simple. What kinds of fishing tackle have been manufactured? Whose needs and goals—and whose assumptions about which fish are worth eating—shaped tackle design over time? What happens when climate change shifts ocean currents, altering which fish one might think about using in a recipe? Self-reflective tales that foreground the researcher's actions and choices are not so rare (indeed in some disciplines they are routine). But works that spell out the infrastructural conditions that made those actions and choices possible are a different matter. Block does not just tell us what she looked for and why; she details the institutions, investments, technologies, and norms that made particular kinds of sources accessible to her in particular ways, shaping both what she could see and what she could not. Today's infrastructure includes Ancestry.com and its vast array of digitized census, burial, transit, and military service records; hundreds of nineteenth-century newspapers, digitized and rendered term-searchable through optical character recognition software; and instant access to place-specific contextual knowledge through similarly term-searchable mass repositories of the last century-plus of historical scholarship (JSTOR first and foremost). Block is explicit about how much the new technological landscape of information retrieval matters. But hers is not a technologically determinist account. She is frank in pointing out the impact of changed values and salience in addition to changing technologies of source preservation, access, and analysis. Reading her account of her own evolving research, we see how all of these components have interacted to shift which questions about the past seem both meaningful and potentially answerable—and therefore, which questions people are using our...