Books: The Past Recaptured

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AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION by James Davidson and Mark Lytle; Knopf; 388 pages; $19.50

Like artists of every stripe, the best historians make their work look easy.Their research may have been long and arduous, but they filter the odor of archival dust and mildew out of the finished product. Also gone are the blind alleys and dead ends, all the large and petty frustrations of scholarship. Few readers mind being spared such details. Yet the tracks that historians cover are sometimes as fascinating as the past they recapture.

This point is not new, but it is amply demonstrated and expanded in After the Fact, a collaborative effort by two young writers and teachers of history (both received Ph.D.s from Yale in 1973). Authors Davidson and Lytle want to interest others in the challenges and occasional romance of their discipline. Historians, they insist, are not simply messengers in time, bearers of immutable facts: "For better or worse [they] inescapably leave an imprint as they go about their business: asking interesting questions about apparently dull facts, seeing connections between subjects that had not seemed related before, shifting and rearranging evidence until it assumes a coherent pattern. The past is not history; only the raw material of it."

To support this thesis, the authors adopt a casebook approach. They select 14 incidents from the U.S. past, ranging chronologically from the Jamestown colony to Watergate. They show how each subject makes different demands on the historian. The Salem witch trials of 1692, for example, call for close scrutiny of a single, tiny village, while the U.S. decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima demands a broad inquiry into the dynamics of overlapping committees and bureaucracies. Finally, Davidson and Lytle show how certain historians have faced and stared down these problems.

The story of how the Indian maiden Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith from execution by her tribe is taught to nearly all American schoolchildren. Most of them grow up thinking they know better, just as they stop believing in Santa Claus and George Washington's cherry tree. Because the only source for this episode is Smith's journal, the skepticism seems justified, especially since the captain elsewhere describes a suspiciously similar rescue by another young woman in Central Europe. But historians have found that where it is possible to double-check Smith's facts, the old adventurer comes off remarkably well. Perhaps the drawings showing Pocahontas throwing herself across Smith's neck are roughly accurate. The same cannot be said of John Trumbull's famous group portrait, Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Most members of the Continental Congress signed the documents not on July 4, 1776, but on Aug. 2; furthermore, the ceremony did not play to a full house of participants. Historians who have traced the whereabouts of the members conclude that some could not have put their names to the Declaration until October or November.