Historians old and new

I am not a historian of medical history, let alone on eighteenth-century men-midwives in England. A recent heated debate between a professional (Helen King) and an amateur (Don Shelton) in this field (see references), however, has drawn my serious attention to the ideas history (good or bad), the definition of historians (trained, amateur, or 'new'), and the benefits of the internet (good or bad?).


Qualifications define profession, provide credentials, create authority, and at the same time exclude amateurs. I am a historian because I was trained to be so in a History department while I am not a literary critic because I have never received relevant training in university. History is about evidence and analysis. Evidence proves and/or rejects, more often, and/or sheds light on new analysis. Historians having access to rare documents, for example, and bringing us new understanding about the past are great historians. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced many great historians of this kind when historians in general had had limited accessibility to rare and more often not quite rare documents.


Rareness is sometimes not about rareness in its strictest sense but more about accessibility. Geographical barrier, limited library funding, or even political instability could easily lead historians into dismay at the lack of access to the most common documents or latest research in their related fields let alone really rare documents only held in the British Library or the Library of Congress.


Thanks to the internet, Google Books, Internet Archive and other free online academic resources, in Shelton's words to adopt Thomas Friedman's invention, "levelled the playing field". Millions of rare books have been made freely available in the internet.  "Digital resources," Shelton says, "allow any historian to conduct original research by remotely accessing source material which previously required physical access."  An eighteenth-century book printed in London and previously only available in a few university libraries in the world, for example, can now be read, full-text searched, and downloaded by a high school history student in Hong Kong.


Suffice to say, historical analysis is more than evidence. A document tells us nothing until a storyteller joins in to speak it out. Our society needs more storytellers than ever before. Google has done the most part of it. Let us, old and new historians, do the job professionally. 


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References:
Helen King's "History without Historians? Medical History and the Internet," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2011, pp. 212-221.
Don Shelton's "The Internet and 'New' Historians," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 222-231.
Helen King's "Response to Shelton," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 232-238.