Footprints and the passage of time
Historians write about history (which is not as “well, duh” as it sounds). Before putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, we research our topic, whether a person, event, location, or whatever.
Research takes us wherever the topic goes, sometimes along an information interstate and sometimes into figurative “rabbit holes.” In our quests for knowledge about particular topics, we go with the flow and wherever it takes us.
Yes, we research history, but there’s more to our work, especially when researching particular people or eyewitness accounts about specific events. Recently I realized that when historians research people, we follow their footprints across the passage of time. Not their footsteps, an audible sensation many writers mistakenly substitute for “footprints.” It’s the footprints left fresh the moment someone walked where history was taking place.
My footprint epiphany involved winter’s first snowfalls in Maine. On Friday, November 29 we awoke to 2 inches of crusted snow. My boots left clear footprints where I crunched through the snow to clear it off the back steps and to check the bird feeders.
On Friday, December 6 we awoke to a nuisance inch of fresh snow that must be cleared off the cars and steps. In the backyard, I noticed that the new snow had partially filled my November 29 footprints.
And it hit me that the passage of time fills in the footprints that people leave in history. Just as the next snowfall will erase my November 29 footprints etched in crusted snow, so does time erase the footprints of those walking through history long before we research it.
From soldiers participating in the Mud March to sailors landing on the Cape Fear beaches to attack Fort Fisher to slaves escaping through Southern swamps to civilians plowing the farm fields, millions of footprints were made during the Civil War. While literally filling them all in, the passage of time has fortunately left countless figurative footprints for historians to follow.
May such footprints appear as you research history in 2025!
I had one History professor tell me recently while taking his class that history is not the study of what took place, but the study of the RECORDS or “memory” of what took place. This is echoed by several well-known popular historians on YouTube, for example. This is apparently the lofty theory du jour. I completely disagree with that belief. When I was a police detective, it wasn’t my job to just find or study the “records” of what took place, or the”memory”, but to find out, to the best of my ability what actually happened. Being a factfinder, a truth-finder. And the evidence I found pointed me to a suspect (not a “memory” of a suspect), to how he or she committed the crime, when, where, and sometimes if I was lucky, why. The ultimate purpose of a detective is to find out WHAT HAPPENED. Finding the clues or evidence is just the beginning, the bare minimum. By the same token, a historian is, or should be, a detective of the past– find out what happened, to the best of your ability, based on the evidence and sources you find. I believe that nowadays, many academics seem to shy away from the concept of the quest for TRUTH, because “truth” has somehow become a dirty word, and the “memory” or “experience” of truth is more valuable than the actual truth. I hope we grow out of this way of thinking.
My guess, though, is that as you interviewed witnesses, they had varying degrees of reliability for a variety of reasons: their memories were bad or their memories faded over time, or they didn’t get a good view, or they were covering their asses, or they had an agenda, or they were flat-out lying, or whatever. As historians, we have to look at sources that have similar degrees of reliability. Fortunately, we have a lot of historical context available to us to help us figure out that reliability (so, we have access to all sorts of information and context that you, as a detective, would not have been able to take advantage of in your work). But at the end of the day, it’s impossible to nail down some things as “facts.” Some stuff is knowable, but some stuff is not, and you just have to do your best to make educated, informed guesses.
Look at competing interpretations of January 6. For as clear-cut as some facts seem to be of that event, there seems to be a lot of disagreement about what happened and what to even call it. And how people think about that event–how they remember it–affects how they talk about it, how they talk about it, and how they think about people who agree and disagree with them, so the “memory” of the event frames a lot of thinking.
The Civil War, 160 years removed, was a lot more complicated.
Yes indeed. If only we had tape recorders, or movie cameras, back in the day. This is one thing we’re contemplating as we prepare the script for the film of my book – remember the interviews with G.I.s and Marines in the front lines in Vietnam? We might film CW journalists conducting interviews with soldiers in that style – guys conscious of a camera (audience) watching them. In any event, primary sources recorded in real time are invaluable, which is why diaries, and letters written close to the occurrence, are so important. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best sources ever for this is A. S. G. Lee’s ‘No Parachute.’ A Sopwith Pup and Camel pilot in the RFC in 1917, Lee used his logbook, diary and letters to his wife – each a progression of immediate recording of events of the day, reflection a few hours later, more reflection a day or two later – and then his perspective from 50 years after the war to compose his autobiography, the most beautifully-written and powerful such account from this period. Anyone writing history should read it, even if they have no interest in his subject matter.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, thus it is such a joy to not just be writing a Civil War history, but to have it concern my ancestor’s remarkably detailed and observant diary. He has allowed me to follow every step he took in a given year of the war, as he was very precise about his travels – by train, steamer and on foot – and this opens vistas on what his regiment was doing, and clarifies some things that have either always been murky or which historians of the past did not get right. It makes him alive for me…
I enjoyed this reflective piece, Brian. Thanks for sharing your experience!