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The
historian as detective is a recurring metaphor used at least as far back as
R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History, published posthumously in 1946.
Thanks in no small degree to the popularity of the CSI television
franchise, the image of the detective is now closely associated in the public
mind with the analysis of forensic evidence – as the producers of the PBS
series History Detectives have astutely recognized. In The Forensic Historian: Using Science to Reexamine the
Past, Robert C. Williams provides
an introduction to the field of forensic history that is brief but substantial,
clearly and engagingly written, and therefore accessible to undergraduates at
any level, not only as an extension to Williams' widely used guide for history
majors, The Historian's Toolbox, but even for those students in the
sciences fulfilling general education requirements in introductory history
courses. The examples are slanted towards cases drawn from the Western
historical tradition and therefore limited in scope from a world historian's
perspective, but the book is inviting and interesting enough for students that
instructors should recognize its potential to inspire rich critical discussions,
supplemented perhaps with examples and issues that connect its themes directly
to their own syllabi.
Brief
prefatory and introductory sections feature the forensic work of Mildred Trotter,
a former colleague of Williams at Washington University in St. Louis, and
Mikhail Gerasimov, who used the remains of Ivan the Terrible of Russia during
the 1950s to pioneer methods of facial reconstruction that are standard
practice around the world today, and set the tone for the rest of the
book. Williams explains cases with simple prose and an anecdotal style
that allows him to convey some rather complex technical aspects effectively;
researchers themselves become active characters in the stories that
unfold—some, like Walter McCrone and Vincent Guinn, become recognizable
to readers by taking part in several of the investigations that Williams describes—which
allows the cases to be understood not as the dry, cold process of scientific
research but as the focus of human ingenuity and discovery. Often the
personal attributes of the researchers and the background circumstances of the
cases themselves come across as more interesting than the research methods that
the examples highlight.
The
substantive chapters of the book address different topics of forensic history
through specific examples that form subsections of each chapter. Chapter Two
deals with chemical analysis as a method to discover forgery or false
artifacts, highlighting among other cases the fake Dutch masterpieces passed
off to credulous buyers that included the Nazi leader Hermann Goering by the
failed artist but talented forger Han van Meegeren and the notorious "Hitler
Diaries" that caused the renowned historian Hugh Trevor-Roper such
embarrassment. The next chapter examines the use of neutron activation
analysis (NAA) to investigate persistent questions surrounding the deaths of
Napoleon Bonaparte, John F. Kennedy, Zachary Taylor, and Ludwig van
Beethoven. Williams stays focused on the famous (or infamous) dead in a
chapter that discusses how bone pathology gave way to DNA fingerprinting as a
technique for verifying the identity of human remains or ancestry in the cases
of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the Romanovs murdered by the Bolsheviks, the putative
descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the dauphin (known as Louis
XVII) who died while imprisoned during the French Revolution, and a skull
fragment alleged to have been that of Adolf Hitler. The last substantive
chapter illustrates how forensics contributes to the dynamic of history as "a
continuous process of review and revision in an argument without end" (86)
through a varied set of examples ranging from the 1918 influenza epidemic, the
sinking of the Titanic, the cause of Tutankhamun's death, and identifying the
corpse of Osama bin Laden. The final section of this penultimate chapter
delves into cyberforensics, a field significantly different in many ways from
materials-based forensics but which also shares some of the same
characteristics.
The
concluding chapter lucidly recapitulates themes and examples addressed
throughout the book in a way that reinforces the point to readers that the
cases discussed do not simply provide historians with definite answers to their
questions but raise even more questions that perpetuate and reanimate arguments
about the past. Williams points out the capabilities as well as the
limitations that forensic methods can offer researcher—what questions can
be answered with a reliable degree of certainty and which cannot. He
shows how media frenzy, conspiracy theories, rumors, wishful thinking, and ambiguous
test results can complicate the research process, or at least how its
conclusions might be misinterpreted by a fascinated public, especially when
misrepresented by interested parties. He shows, too, how tools and
methods used by forensic historians are continually developed and reapplied to
questions explored previously with earlier methods. As Williams observes,
no historical case is ever truly closed.
Michael Clinton is an associate professor
of history at Gwynedd Mercy University in Gwynedd Valley, PA. He can be reached
at clinton.michael@gmc.edu. |
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