One of the topics that Gaddis brings up is time travel and whether it would make someone a better historian. He points out its use in literature, citing Michael Crichton's Timeline and Connie Willis' Doomsday Book as examples of graduate students jumping back in time for their thesis work.
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| Michael Crichton's time traveling novel Timeline |
I disagree with Gaddis, here, however. Gaddis' statement seems to cover every single type of historical study. But what if you are a historian interested in the social impact of an event? Time travel would be a perfect medium for someone to understand what it was like to live, breath, and survive in times as turbulent as the French Revolution, the War of the Roses, or the Hundred Years War. Imagine what it would be like, as a social historian, to discover what the people of England really thought about the Yorks and the Lancasters - or whether they even cared who was on the throne, so long as there was a king.
Time travel gives more of a chance for a historian to learn about the things that don't find their ways into the textbooks. Stepping into a time machine, a historian can learn about the social structure at Versailles, not simply by reading about it, but by experiencing it for himself. And he can choose when he wants to go to - the beginning of Versailles' strict etiquette under Louis XIV, or its final lapse under Louis XVI. The possibilities for studying social strata are endless.
Because Gaddis' statement is an all-encompassing denial of the benefits of time travel, I cannot help but disagree with him. There are definitely benefits to traveling through time for a social historian, as it allows for the discovery of information that is left out of many documents, simply because it was irrelevant or so commonplace that it was uninteresting to the chroniclers of the era. By traveling through time, historians would discover new things about a time and its people, and maybe even completely change their perspectives and attitudes towards the cultures they study.
One of the problems that Gaddis deals with is breadth--that if you went back in time, you would only be able to see a small portion of the era you would be studying, which does not allow a historian to see the "big picture" to most accurately interpret the past.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you to some extent Angeline in your assertion that certain historians would benefit from the ability to time travel. However, I find issue with time traveling on one important account that no one in this class seems to have mentioned heretofore:
ReplyDeleteBeing citizens of the 21st century, we, as time travelers would be very susceptible to marring history even after witnessing it int the present tense and first person, because we already know (or rather would know if we time travelled) how the story ends; or at least how it's "supposed to end" and this fact alone dissuades me from seeing any real benefit to time traveling over the use of multiple types and quantities of sources.
Thanks for your comment, Holly! I was, in fact, tempted to put in a paragraph discussing the butterfly effect, which is, in essence, the idea that you bring up in your response. It is knowing how events are supposed to end as present day historians, however, that I believe makes us more susceptible to changing the past simply by being there, and by trying to change the events that we wish hadn't happened. While thinking about the theoretical benefits may seem to outweigh the consequences, you are correct in saying that there would be a price to pay for prior knowledge.
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