Brenda Wineapple on understanding the people of the past
It requires research
The historian Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven books, including Keeping the Faith, about the Scopes trial, and The Impeachers, about the trial of President Andrew Johnson. This quote is take from a New York Review of Books interview in its weekly mailing.
To me, it’s always seemed that you can’t clearly or cleanly divide history from literature or literature from history. We live in time; our lives unfold in time and are largely determined by time.
So when writing, I try to consider how someone grasped the historical moment in which they lived; who or what else inhabited it; how they responded to it, whether in defiance or acceptance, in partial ignorance or open embrace; and of course how and when and if chance and the unexpected derailed all that.
The interviewer asks how she does that.
Research, research, research: research, and particularly primary sources (diaries, letters, shopping lists), help an author create the time and place and the perceptions of the people and places they write about — what the subjects saw, what assumptions, even if benighted, guided them.
Of course, we all have our own points of view; that goes without saying. But what are we then going to do? That is, why not try as best we can to understand the perspectives of other people at some other time in some other place, asking what their “guiding narrative,” if any, might have been?
After all, it’s one thing for an author to have an active moral compass, which is important and even necessary; being moralistic is quite something else.
David, have you read Alan Jacob's _A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love_? I was thinking of it yesterday and this quote brought it to mind, as it's all about reading charitably.