Many Sides to the Story

Today I had a meeting with my adviser, Professor Whittenburg, about my thesis. I think it just might work. Just maybe. Possibly, I will have a draft of the first chapter by November 9th. That's my personal goal. I have an outline-- new and revised-- and two slightly more focused chapters with an epilogue. The trouble now will be fitting it into 70 pages, but Professor Whittenburg said just to write and worry about technicalities later. "Tell your story," he said.

My story. Remember how I said in the last "Why History?" that every person has their side of the story? Well, Professor Whittenburg is the one who first introduced me to that *incredibly important* concept. When I entered William and Mary as a bright-eyed freshman I knew that I wanted to be a history major, so I signed up for Professor Whittenburg's freshman seminar fondly known as "Saturday class." Yes, I had class every Saturday my first semester of college. We met at 9:00 or so in the morning, ate donuts and had a presentation from a student, then headed off in a big white van to some location in the Tidewater area. We went to Jamestown, Westover and Shirley Plantations, James City Courthouse, Historic St. Mary's in Maryland, Yorktown, and a thousand other places in our quest to discover Virginia from 1607 to the Revolution. (If you want to read my NIAHD Journal-- essentially all of the papers I wrote for the class-- click here.)

The first week of the seminar we were assigned three readings: "Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," by Carville V. Earle (found in Thad W. Tate & David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (1979), pp. 95-125.), "Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown," by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (found in The Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 1. (1979), pp. 24-40.), and “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18” by Edmund S. Morgan, (found in The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (1971), pp. 595-611.)

All of these readings are on the same subject: why people died in Jamestown. But, even though these authors wrote on the same topic, and the readings came out in the same decade, and all were printed in respectable publications, they couldn't be more different. Which begs the question-- how? Shouldn't they have the same conclusion? Isn't there one right answer? How can the same phenomenon have three extremely different articles written on it? Shouldn't one author be right? Which one is right?

The thing is, none are right. And all are right. In short (VERY SHORT), Earle blames the deaths on the water in Jamestown, getting extremely technical with the science of the environment and the way pathogens work. Kupperman blames the deaths on the fact that the men who settled Jamestown felt like prisoners of war and fell victim to psychological illness. And finally, Morgan blames it on the fact that the men who settled Jamestown were soldiers unused to having to produce their own food or take care of themselves in such an unsettled area. Normally they would pillage or the state would provide sustenance for them.

I think somewhere in all of the readings, combined together, we might begin to scratch the truth of the matter. But the point is, there is no simple answer to history. Moreover, just as these three authors have their three opinions, the men at Jamestown were not homogeneous in their mindsets. Perhaps some did feel like POWs, while others did expect England to send them ships full of food. And perhaps most just succumbed to bad water.

History is sticky and you can't take anything at face value. Behind every story there is another side to the story, as history-- both the actual occurrences and the writing of it-- is filled with complexities and composed of unique individuals with their own ideas and biases. The point of history, as my tutor Leslie told me in Oxford, is to pick a side and argue it as best you can. Believe in what you say. Because you'll be right. But someone else might be right, too. And that's not something you learn in an ordinary high school history class.

Want more proof? Tune in to the next Why History!