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Journalists and Historians
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16691 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1989 |
4,545 Words |
| Author
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Paul Johnson
Historian Paul Johnson is the author of 28 books, including
the much-acclaimed Modern Times: The World from the 1920s to
the 1990s. |
As a historian who now spends more than half his time writing history, and who worked for many years as a full-time journalist, I do not draw any fundamental distinction between the two crafts. In both roles I believe I am doing essentially the same thing. Journalists and historians are both, it seems to me, in the same business: communicating a knowledge and understanding of events to the reader. Both are involved in the discovery and elucidation of truth--that is, the search for the facts that matter and their arrangement in significant form. No one can possibly say where the historian's work ceases and the journalist's begins. The present is continually in process of becoming the past. The frontier of history ends only with today's newspaper. A good journalist casts anxious and inquiring glances over his shoulder at the past, and a good historian lifts his eyes from the page to look at the world around him.
I sometimes equate the progress of humanity through time to the image of an ocean liner moving steadily ahead through the waters. The engines hum ceaselessly, the propellers spin to a steady rhythm; there is no stopping and no return as the ship hurtles relentlessly onward. Behind is the irrecoverable wake, busily foaming close to the ship, then slowly vanishing into the immeasurable distance. In front is the virgin water. No one can bring back the waves that are gone, nor can anyone peer into the unknown depths that lie ahead. On the bridge, the rulers of the ship keep their eyes dead ahead. But in the stern, the journalist and the historian contemplate the receding waters. The journalist peers closely at the turmoil immediately beneath, the historian surveys the more distant waters as they vanish into the horizon. But both are looking at the same ocean, from the same ship, using their eyes, their minds, and their imagination.
Historians as Men of the World
The notion that there are fundamental differences between the journalist, who moves in the world of events, and the historian, who stays in the study, is a comparatively recent one. It dates from the process, beginning about 1850 and accelerating after 1900, whereby the writing of history passed largely into the hands of academics. But until the mid-nineteenth century, history was usually written by men of the world, as often as not by those who had helped to make it. The first great and enduring factual narratives, set down in the historical books of the Old Testament--Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and so forth--were compiled by men in the courts of the kings of Israel and Judah, witnesses of and participants in the events they set down. Herodotus, often
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