Every Man His Own Historian

The idea ‘Every Man His Own Historian’ was first proposed by Carl L. Becker, the President of the American Historical Association, 1931, who is often listed among the proponents of the “New History”. The idea was first presented at a lecture delivered in an annual address of the President of the American Historical Association, in Minneapolis on December 29, 1931. Later it was published in the American Historical Review (Vol.37, No. 2, p. 221–36). Becker’s presidential address is frequently cited by his successors to encourage a better connection to history and the public.

“History is the memory of things said and done”

Through the idea of ‘Every Man His Own Historian’, Becker tried to reduce history to its lowest terms. For this purpose, he gave a very simple definition of history – “History is the memory of things said and done.” This is a definition that reduces history to its lowest terms, and yet includes everything that is essential to understanding what it really is. He considered ‘memory’ memory to be fundamental: without memory, there is no knowledge. The memory of things said and done is essential to the performance of the simplest acts of daily life. Historical knowledge basically comes from the memory of the people.

Everyman’s Memory as History

If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Becker calls “Mr. Everyman”, knows some history. Since we are concerned with history in its lowest terms, we will suppose that Mr. Everyman is not a professor of history, but just an ordinary citizen without excess knowledge. History in this sense cannot be reduced to a verifiable set of statistics or formulated in terms of universally valid mathematical formulas or in terms of theories. It is rather an imaginative creation and a personal possession. Mr. Everyman, fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical or emotional needs, and with his aesthetic tastes creates his own history.

Historical Activity at Mr. Everyman’s Mind

Daily and hourly, Mr. Everyman’s mind is lodged in a mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation, of impressions and images. From a thousand un-noted sources in his mind, he somehow manages, un-deliberately for the most part, to fashion history, a patterned picture of remembered things said and done in past times and distant places. It is not possible, it is not essential, that this picture should be complete or completely true. It is essential that it should be useful to Mr. Everyman. It may be useful to him that he will hold it in memory. Only those things, which can be related with some reasonable degree of relevance and harmony to his idea of himself and of what he is doing in the world and what he hopes to do. 

Professional Historian and Mr. Everyman

Although each of the professional historians is Mr. Everyman, each is something more than his own historian. Mr. Everyman, being but an informal historian is under no bond to remember what is irrelevant to his personal affairs. But the historians by profession, less intimately bound up with the practical activities, is to be directly concerned with the ideal series of events that is only of casual or occasional import to others. Professional historians consider that it is our business in life to be ever preoccupied with that far-flung pattern of artificial memories that encloses and completes the central pattern of individual experience. Professional historians are Mr. Everybody’s historian as well as our own since their histories serve the double purpose of keeping alive the recollection of memorable men and events. The history written by historians, like the history informally fashioned by Mr. Everyman, is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as “fact” and “interpretation.”