Category Archives: HIST204-Archive

The Usual Suspect

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Carl Becker would be rather proud of Detective Grant—rather than a bespectacled academic pondering a weighty tome, the historian hero of Daughter of Time is a gruff, battered, longtime veteran of Scotland Yard who by his own admission gave little and less thought to history after his schooling. However, he finds himself unraveling a mystery of a rather different sort when a portrait of Richard III makes him question everything he thought he knew about the key.

Grant’s attempts to discover the truth behind Richard are quite interesting, demonstrating many historian’s techniques and thought processes, all from his hospital bed, with the aid of his American friend Brent. So too does he demonstrate the pitfalls of historical accounts relying on one another, with the case of More’s inaccurate portrayal of Richard being used by everyone else after him and thus tainting the truth of the man.

And another [case of Tonypandy] bites the dust

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How does a bedridden cop crack one of the biggest mysteries in English history? Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time illuminates what it means to “do” history. When the protagonist Detective Grant becomes intrigued with a portrait of Richard III and the horrendous crime the medieval monarch is supposed to have committed, he sets out to uncover what really happened.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Grant soon finds that modern sources are unable to adequately explain how or why Richard III might’ve murdered his two young nephews. In fact, while they portray a sinister and calculating king they also acknowledge his many admirable qualities and achievements; it is this apparent contradiction that spurs Grant to dig deeper.

The detective is scandalized to find out that Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, a contemporary account and the definitive history of the period, is nothing but a regurgitation of another’s story; More was only a boy during Richard’s reign. Interrogating sources is an important part of a historian’s work. We must seek to contextualize documents and not simply take them at face value. The questions we are currently asking in our archive assignment are a good guide: Who created the document and when? Who is the intended audience? What is the intended purpose of the document? Etc.

Grant is finally able to get his hands on some primary sources with the help of his sidekick-researcher Brent Carradine. Little by little, he pieces together the puzzle of the past. In some cases, what sources don’t say is as important as what they do say: in Henry Tudor’s Bill of Attainder against Richard, the new monarch makes no mention whatsoever of his predecessor’s crime.

Another notable aspect of Grant’s historical journey is that he talks with his companions and colleagues, much like a historian might dialogue with her peers. He shows us the importance of reasoning out loud and bouncing your ideas off of others.

In the end, Grant outlines the evidence he has amassed and builds his case. The driving question guiding the detective’s research: who had the profile and the motives to dispose of the princes? Was it the long-accused Richard III or his successor the usurping Henry VII who killed Edward’s two sons? For Grant, the facts just didn’t stack up against Richard. He is widely-reported as having been a level-headed, just, and merciful king. Henry, on the other hand, was power hungry and crafty. We can almost never know exactly how history happened, but we can make informed theories about the past based on the evidence we have. Using the evidence and his knowledge of human nature, Grant busts the case of how a malicious rumor came to be accepted as truth.

What is History?

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Barbra Tuchman’s definition of history struck me as beautifully romantic. Her emphasis on the story, the narrative, the personal effect history can have on an individual in my mind rang true to the core. Her story regarding her time spent writing her first thesis struck a particular chord. Immersed in literature, Tuchman almost literally had history flow through her as she wrote; it seemed to act as her muse. Her tale, unlike Edward Carr’s, deals with a more scientific and concrete interpretation of the subject. He speaks of a continuous process, a process built upon interaction between historian and facts; a historical dialogue between past and present.

History to me, much like Tuchman, is all about the story. I can remember back to my youth and listening to my father tell me stories about King Arthur and his knights of the round table or being captivated by tales of the adventures of Robin Hood made me curious about the subject. My thirst for knowledge about history came primarily from those stories, and as I grew older and began to read on my own, I found that reality was even more fascinating than the fantasies my father had told me. I was captivated by the lives of people such as Richard the Lionheart, Harold of Essex, Henry V, and other medieval  figures of note. From this captivation, I delved more deeply into the subject of history, specifically the history of medieval society. From that childish interest and excitement I matured into a genuine love for history in general. The dates and facts, however, always came second to the story as a whole. As I got older I began to think of the subject in a much larger sense, a sense which Tuchman took to heart as well. History to me is the world’s novel, a novel in which each society throughout time contributes a chapter. A novel whose protagonist is human kind, one which shifts it’s nature from time period to time period, reflecting the direction in which society is heading.