A G K Y R A

A few days ago I got back into doing some genealogical research that I started in the summer of 2005. Almost all my family has been in the same area around Kansas City since the beginning of the 1800s and continuing to this day. My mother and father left the ancestral homeland to southern California, where I grew up. Prior to settling in Missouri, most of the family (on both sides) appears to have settled in the Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky areas. Before that, they were in Virginia and North Carolina, but all that is fuzzy and hard to establish with any certainty.

On my mother’s side are lots of German, Irish, and English immigrants, all of whom came to the United States in the mid-1800s. In one case, I was able to locate one of my great-great-grandmothers (age 1 at the time) on a list of passengers who sailed into New York Harbor on the brig Freitag from Hamburg, Germany, arriving on May 29, 1848. She was from Holstein. She eventually married a man who had himself emigrated from Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany. (I realize “Germany” may be an anachronism.) That’s on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family. On my maternal grandmother’s side, they are almost all German immigrants: from Wurttemburg and from Wildbach, Saxony, and those ones married Irish and English immigrants. My father’s side of the family is mostly Americans as far back as I can trace (to the late 1700s), but there is little information available about them.

One of my ancestors on my mother’s side fought in the American Revolutionary War. Jarrett Williams was his name, and he was a Lieutenant in George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Regiment. I have the genealogy and the supporting documents that prove my lineage, so I’m now eligible to join the Sons of the American Revolution or the General Society Sons of the Revolution, two hereditary patriotic organizations.

In reading about the Revolutionary War, I more and more come to sympathize with the English government. I think I would have been a Loyalist! I understand why the English government wanted to keep a standing army in the colonies, and I understand why they wanted to raise tax revenue to cover some of the costs and to make up for the losses due to smuggling. I empathize with Parliament’s concern to demonstrate their authority over colonist mobs. I find myself shaking my head disapprovingly when I read about Sam Adams’ rabble rousing. At the same time, I can imagine how the colonists must have felt too: a bad economy, a distant government suddenly showing off its power without good reason. I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a gigantic misunderstanding. (I wonder that about a lot of things.)

I’m glad to be an American and glad for the good that our nation has done in its 230 year history. I’m glad I wasn’t around to have to choose sides, because it would have been a difficult choice to make. If I had lived then, I (or the person who would correspond to me-of-today) might now be thinking of joining the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada.

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Last night, I reread a book by historian David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). It’s a catalog of just what it claims to be, and he’s merciless in giving lengthy examples from the major works of his contemporaries. He can’t have been very popular. It’s mostly an excellent and helpful work. His dry humor and acerbic comments are sometimes quite funny, as some of the quotes below may convince you.

“Those historians who imagine themselves to be emancipated from philosophy are apt, in Keynes’s phrase, to be the slaves of some defunct philosopher.” (xii)

“In the republic of scholarship, every citizen has a constitutional right to get himself as thoroughly lost as he pleases.” (xviii)

“The thoughts of many historians are neither logical nor illogical, but sublogical.” (xx)

“History, it is said, is an inexact science. But in fact historians are inexact scientists, who go blundering about their business without a sufficient sense of purpose or procedure. They are failed scientists, who have projected their failures to science itself.” (xxii)

“Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, poor twisted Teutonic soul that he was, is an easy mark for a methodologist. Most of the fallacies in this book could be illustrated by his arguments.” (66)

“Herodotus, the putative ‘father of history’ (grandfather might be more correct) …” (71)

“[T]here are fashions in error as well as truth.” (99)

“These two historiographical knights errant boldly attacked the problem, as [Charles] Beard himself said of another scholar, sans fear and sans research.” (105)

“At one point, Toynbee mentions ‘the Tarsian Jewish apostle of Christianity in partibus infidelium.’ He means Paul.” (287)

The fallacy of the prevalent proof “makes mass opinion into a method of verification. This practice has been discovered by cultural anthropologists among such tribes as the Kuba, for whom history was whatever the majority declared to be true. If some fearless fieldworker were to come among the methodological primitives who inhabit the history departments of the United States, he would find that similar customs sometimes prevail.” (51f)

The furtive fallacy “is the erroneous idea that facts of special significance are dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious. It begins with the premise the reality is a sordid, secret thing; and that history happens on the back stairs a little after midnight, or else in a smoke-filled room, or a perfumed boudoir, or an executive penthouse or somewhere in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or the Reich Chancellery, or the Pentagon. … In an extreme form, the furtive fallacy is not merely an intellectual error but a mental illness which is commonly called paranoia.” (74f)

The fallacy of identity “is the assumption that a cause must somehow resemble its effect. … The Picts constructed brochs and souterrains which are small, dark, and mysterious. From this, some have concluded that the Picts themselves were small, dark, and mysterious.” (177)

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