Mark Hamilton Lytle

I enjoyed this book about using historical documents to figure out what really happened. Reading between the lines, so to speak, the authors illuminate a multitude of historical instances, including the first slaves at Jamestown, Watergate, and the meat packing scandal during Roosevelt's presidency. Some of the events I was familiar with, some not.

My only quibble with this book was that it was slightly ponderous and pedantic occasionally. Otherwise, well worth reading.

I am reasonably sure this is a college textbook, but it's shameful something which ought to be the foundation of an education of history seems to be tucked away and forgotten by our education system until you become a history major. Or possibly minor.

The basic goal of the text is to illuminate how history is deciphered, it's limitations and ultimately that it is an epic mistake to treat history and the past interchangeably. Each chapter approaches a particular way of studying the past show more through a specific historical event highlighting how the type of data available inherently limits and focuses the history that can be constructed. The characteristics of the resources historians have availible may have been consciously curated to tell a certain story at the time of it's creation as in a photograph, public political speech, or literary activism, or their character may be shaped without intent by virtue of documentation being limited to certain classes, the fact than any human documentation is limited by the experience of those documenting it or simply that time passes swiftly and is unconcerned with leaving proper documentation.

The authors intentionally choose to look beyond the common-knowledge assessment of the history they discuss to show how history can be misleading or how it is impossible to strip the past down to a single point of view or rigid chain of cause and effect. This is not to say that there is no such thing as an authentic past, but that history is incabable of reproducing it. It is simply too big, complicated and messy. It explodes outward exponentially from a single event in the actions and beliefs of people colliding into still more events each hopelessly and unconsciously interconnected in their immediacy. The ultimate message seems to be, we should all study the past, but understand that no single person owns it. Which is probably why you're unlikely to face such an approach in the usual education. It fundamentally undermines the idea that there is such a thing orthodox history, and instead points out that the past is only seen from where it's witnesses are standing. show less

After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection is a great teaching book, even though it is sold as a textbook (my overall opinion of textbooks is rather low). Every chapter takes a different historical approach to a different problem in American history and has its own subset of teaching points. Nearly every mainstream type of historical research is represented: political, organizational, economic, statistical, legal, environmental, psychohistorical, and so on. Yet the authors deal with show more each in a way that never sounds dry, nor does it ever sound like a textbook listing theory after theory. I found almost all of the chapters both informative and interesting.

If you are considering buying this used for a class, keep in mind that newer editions have chapters not present in the old editions, and that at least one chapter has been removed. Also, the version that comes packaged with a CD-ROM is mightily overpriced. Regardless, as a graduate student in history, this book has shown me a number of interesting and new ways to attack historical problems. show less

Not so much a life of Carson as a consideration of how her career as a writer and public intellectual was influenced by her upbringing, education and career; with further reflection by Lytle as to how Carson has influenced his teaching and philosophy.