Blame odalisk�s review of a Foucault biography for todays meditation on history. Although I am basing discussion on a recent article, I am mostly addressing my own thoughts on the matter. Any misinterpretations of Darnton�s work are, of course, my own responsibility. For those who prefer less academic entries, I�ll try to post again later or click back for yesterday�s second entry.

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There is a very interesting article in the current (June 24) issue of the New York Review of Books by Princeton-based historian Robert Darnton. Darnton makes a bid for a new type of history that has made its way into numerous field. Calling this new brand of scholarship �incident analysis,� he describes their primary characteristic: �they focus on an incident, relate it as a story, and then follow its repercussions through the social order and even, in some cases, across successive periods of time.�

Darnton attributes this new class of historical work to the 1983 book The Return of Martin Guerre, where Natalie Zemon Davis looks at the 16th century trial of a woman for living with a man posing as her husband, who had disappeared sometime before. The trial took place when the true husband returned. Davis uses this incident as a way of illuminating key aspects of life in 16th century rural France.

Darnton defines the category of �incident analysis� fairly narrowly � such a work is based on a single incident, but follows it, like ripples on the water, both back in time too examine factors that allowed the incident to take place and forward to examine �its repercussions through the social order.� However, at the risk of being a little too meta, there is much to be learned about what we think about history from this current trend.

When I began my graduate work, I was much more interested in the materials of music than in its history. I was also interested in writing -- about music, about other things -- but to some extent the two interests were separate from one another. Ultimately, history drew me in because of one thing � I love to tell stories. As human beings, we love stories of many kinds, but especially those that move us to some kind of emotion and/or those that explain to us something about ourselves without being overtly didactic. The �true� story has always held a particular allure, somehow more important for being more genuine, although that assumption is, of course a fallacy.

At this particular time and place, it seems to me that story-telling is at a crossroads. From the popular culture side of things, for example, television programming seems to be letting go of traditional fictional story-telling media (sit-coms in particular) in favor of a different kind of story-telling � so-called �reality television.� In many respects, the reality program is no less fictional than anything else we see on our television screens. But the audience is invested in the fact that the people they are watching are participants in some more fundamental way than actors in a sitcom. Regardless of the absurd set-ups and ample editing, these things we watch are �really� happening on some level.

Darnton appears to be describing an analogous crossroads in the academic world. �Incident analysis� as Darnton describes it, is based on an ancient problem of historical storytelling � how can you really know the truth about the past and how can you tell the story about the truth? This type of historical analysis begins with a story in a very limited time and place. The story is the heart and soul of it. But is it true? And how can you ever know?

In my own dissertation, I am centering my chapters around what I have been calling �case studies� � a detailed description and analysis of a particular performance. Basing my work on as many types of archival material I can find � newspaper reviews, program books, financial records, donor lists, architectural descriptions, etc. � I begin each case study section with as detailed a picture of the sights and sounds of the performance as possible. My goal is both the provide a lot of material for later analysis but also to draw my readers in to what is absorbing me as a historian � my own historical imagination. Is this true? Yes and no. I have spent far more time with this material than anyone else in the world and the case study is my best interpretation of the data I have examined closely. But of course there is a fair amount of conjecture needed to assemble the materials into a coherent story. And I will freely admit that teasing out a story from disparate materials is what makes this type of project so attractive to me. I get to tell a story.

From the case studies, I follow the ripples � the factors making the event possible through to the effects the event appears to have had. From these case studies I draw conclusions about more general trends and the way a collection of incidents made changes in cultural institutions that continue to affect aspects of the music business today. This would appear to fit Darnton�s definition.

However, the case study in academic/historical work is nothing new, and as such, I�m not certain whether I agree with Darnton that we really need a new category of �incident analysis� to better understand the current trends in historical writing. True, he is discussing book-length analyses, but to me this seems to be more of a matter of a degree than something truly new.

The thing that struck me is a description Darnton mentions in the first paragraph but doesn�t really address: �The genre takes the form of short books on dramatic events � murders, scandals, riots, catastrophes, the kind of thing that used to be the specialty of tabloids and penny dreadfuls but now comes out in hardcovers bearing the stamp of university presses.� It seems to me that the thing that�s really difference about �incident analysis� is the nature of the incident. The incident is often grim or tawdry. It may reveal things about human nature that are difficult to look at. Often it deals with issues of class, race and economics that are uncomfortable, to say the least � Darnton uses examples of books on the Nanjing Massacre and incidents from the Holocaust, among others.

What these books reveal to me is not so much a new mode of discourse, but a willingness to probe difficult and inexplicable situations in hopes of assembling a sense of the true with what Darnton calls �a Rashomon effect.� The drawing of multiple lines between incidents and possible causes and effects prevents us from having to make too many clear decisions about the meaning of our past. Sometimes over-scrutinizing results in maintaining inscrutability.

But fundamentally, I think these micro-analyses are useful to us, not just in understanding the effects these particular events may have had on our current condition, but in understanding that small events can have big effects. It is both comforting and sobering to realize that things that may seem small effect large social change.

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