Horizons of History

THE most familiar distinction in the meaning of history has become its most fundamental problem. History refers both to what has happened in the past and to the historian's account of it. Now in itself this ambiguity need notand for centuries did not-raise any momentous difficulties, for the prevalent attitude toward history has been embodied in a third definition which has operated as an effective synthesis of the first two. By this third definition history is the organized past, with events constituting the subject matter and the historian contributing the organization of them, whether narrative or analytical. In our times, however, this synthesis has been shredded. What was once a solution has now become our foremost problem, for the polar constituents of history as the organized past-that is, history as the past on the one hand and history as the historian's organization of it on the other-stand forth in their separate identities. Behind this dissolution of the historical unit are two different kinds of development. The first is the philosophical tendency which questions both the knowability of the past and the integrity of the historian's organizing faculty. This is the tendency which has stimulated the far-flung debate on historical relativism and has activated the large literature upon epistemology and upon values in history. But at the same time there has been a second, more practical, development at work to undermine the unity of history and historian. Essentially, this has consisted in the burgeoning of history as past events beyond the capacity of the historian to organize it. This growing misproportion is not simply a physical matter of the crushing accumulation of evidence. More profoundly, it involves the addition of different kinds of evidence, with which the historian is only marginally or fortuitously equipped to deal. The very horizons of history are expanding, and as they do, the geography of history changes. The traditional field of history becomes one of many fields, and the traditional implements of the historian become cor-