They are always quick contextualize personal narratives with hard, cold facts, like the evident death toll of the early colony, which they attribute to a failure to plant crops like corn for food. Settlers were foolishly determined to leave land and time open to cultivate the cash crop of tobacco. Laws forcing men to plant food suggest, according to the historians, that the settlers lacked a sense of what was necessary to survive times of scarcity during the winter -- and 3,000 of them died as a result. Statistics and primary source documents such as laws, records of immigration and even botanical information about the labor-intensive nature of farming tobacco vs. corn are required to fully flesh out a picture of what life was like and to solve the mystery of why the death toll was so high Virginia. The authors also offer an analysis of why slavery was not likely to have fueled the tobacco boom -- laws separating races were only passed during the 1660s, and the high mortality of the early slave trade...
Psychohistories, such as those of John Brown, tend to be impressionistic, and often isolate the individual actor from greater historical and social influences. Grand theories, like Frederick Turner's Frontier Thesis about the quintessentially expansionist impulse of American democracy, may be persuasive on a poetic level, but often reveal more about the psychology of the historian, given that they tend to be supported more by generalizations about events, rather than facts and statistics. After the Fact makes a persuasive case for how a focus on 'just the facts' is the superior strategy for historians to take when analyzing the past.
Works Cited
Davidson & Lytle. After the Fact. New York: McGraw/Hill, 1999.
Nash, Gary. American People. New York: Wesley: Addison, 2000.
