1.1: History Involves Choices

The scholar Hayden White once said, “lives are lived, stories are told.” The Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot made a similar point to White when he noted that “human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators.” The two scholars were both emphasizing that there is a gulf between, to use Trouillot’s words, “what happened and that which is said to have happened.” The story we tell about what happened is what we call the narrative, and creating it involves all sorts of choices: what do we include and what do we exclude? Which person or people do we focus on? Is the story funny, inspiring, triumphant, or tragic? Where do we begin the story and where do we end it? These sorts of choices are necessary, whether telling a friend about our day, recounting our life story, or presenting a history of the modern world. Whether I decide to tell a friend about my day by emphasizing a few weird things that happened to me even though most of what happened was perfectly ordinary is a relatively harmless decision. The choices we make about the historical narratives we tell are far less so. That is why we must be clear about how and why we make our choices instead of continuing the conceit that the practice of history is objective. Once we acknowledge that history is not simply an account of “what happened” further questions become necessary: who determined that this was the version of the narrative that should be told? Why are we focusing on this group of people and not another? Why is the narrative being told as a triumph when it seems to be a tragedy from another perspective? Historical narratives are not neutral or objective, in other words. They were constructed by particular people at particular times, based on a particular set of ideas about the world, and often reflect the existing social and political order. That is why it is so necessary for historians to examine the stories we tell so that we do not end up passing on versions of these stories burdened by the baggage of racism, nationalism, and imperialism.