Historians are constrained not merely by their humanity, by their finite intellectual and moral capacities. They are also limited by the nature of the evidence with which they work.
We commonly think of history as a noun, as everything that has happened. But we are able to retrieve only a tiny, tiny fragment of what has happened. Until recently, few human lives generated any evidence to speak of. Even famous people, such as queens and generals, recorded just a small proportion of their thoughts and actions. Those recordings, moreover, are always at least a bit biased, at least one step removed from what actually happened, are never quite the same thing as the thought or the action itself. Most letters, for example, are written not to capture precisely what one thought or did, but to create a certain (usually favorable) impression. And, as the saying goes, the winners get to write the histories, for the winners are most apt to have the opportunity to write, preserve, and disseminate their versions of given events or processes.
This is why books that set out to offer you the voice and perspective of the "subaltern," of poor people who lived on the margin, are often so deadly dull, a succession of statistics or abstruse theories--or tell us instead about what elites thought about the poor suckers they oppressed. It is not that the authors would not like to quote the diaries and letters of enslaved Chinookan Indian women from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, such documents simply don't exist. The descriptions we do have of such women are both very rare and biased, coming from people who had neither much respect for of knowledge of them.
Pity the poor historian! Not only is her vision beclouded, her hearing impaired; the fragmentary, dim figures and sounds she perceives are more often than not vaporous or false.
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