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Good history is in the details, many details, accumulated by focused study, often years of study - details tied together in to-the-point clarity. Good history is not produced by mere imagination, devotions and poetic utterances - no matter how artistic.
If history were just art, a writer could spin his work unfettered by concern for what really happened outside his own imagination. He could communicate myth with abandon as did storytellers during the Stone Age and later, and as did those priest-scribes who made of the past whatever advanced the worship for their particular god. If Osama bin Laden were to write history he would do it as an art.
Historians have archaeology to draw from. They have primary documents that tell them what people were declaring. They cannot verify the way scientists can, but they can be empirical, which is a part of science. If I write that the Avesta describes Zoroaster as God's prophet, I am being empirical. If I write that Zoroaster was God's prophet, I am being artful. Or, if I write that Custer's wife said that he beat her and there is no recorded evidence of this, I am also being artful.
The evidence on which some history is based is not good enough that history can be called a science in the same sense that biology is a science. But good history is more than just an art, and it tries to be as scientific as possible. Good history tries to describe what happened, with the kind of detail that creates an honest, dispassionate and accurate, although imperfect picture. It is not a tract for a political or religious point-of-view. It gets as close to the impartiality of science and to the devotion to detail of science that it can.
November 17, 2007
Science describes gravity without asking why gravity. Science cannot answer such a big question. Scientific knowledge consists of understanding connections, not motivation connected to physical matter. In studying the past and staying within the world of the empirical, some historians try to figure out why rather than merely describe connections. Why did the industrial revolution start in England rather than Japan, Switzerland, Sweden or Argentina? It is a question that involves circumstances playing upon human motivation and human motivation playing upon circumstance. Confusion easily arises between what is cause and what is effect. Sociology resorts to correlations, which are imperfect in describing cause. The question why might be fascinating, but the answers always are limitied. It can be worthwhile to understand what happened, and sometimes we have to be satisfied with not knowing why it happened.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/sci-art.htm