Vigilance Against Bias
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| William Cronon |
Other postmodern critics remained
partial to the scientific method. For example, William Cronon, who was an
ecologist as well as an anthropologist, blended history and science to create a
scientific historical narrative.
However, he acknowledged that the process of producing history was
shaped by the biases and preferences of the historian, and he agreed with
John Tosh’s observation that even primary sources were subject to
unreliability. As Tosh explained it,
“Many primary sources are inaccurate muddled, based on hearsay or intended to
mislead, and it is a vital part of the historian’s work to scrutinize the
source for distortions of this kind.”1 Cronon concluded, however, that
vigilance against bias was necessary in scientific history as well. “When we
choose a plot to order our environmental histories, we give them a unity that
neither nature nor the past possesses so clearly. In so doing, we move well
beyond nature into the intensely human realm of value. There, we cannot avoid
encountering the postmodernist assault on narrative, which calls into question
not just the stories we tell but the deeper purpose that motivated us in the
first place: trying to make sense of nature's place in the human past.”2 At the same time that postmodern
historians were debating the pros and cons of objectivity, large numbers of
women, people of color, and members of the working class began to enter
graduate schools of study. The
profession of history, like other academic professions at the time, began to
absorb new ideas and accommodate an array of new voices. Supported by academic credentials that gave
them the right to publish in their own names, younger members of university
history departments began writing history from new perspectives. Bringing up new topics and asking different
questions about old ones, they changed the way historians thought about the
profession and process of writing history.
