I have recently finished reading Associate Professor Graham Broad's book One In A Thousand: The Life and Death of Captain Eddie McKay, Royal Flying Corps (University of Toronto Press, 2017). With no particular interest in aviation history, this was an odd choice since the book focusses on the life of a Canadian pilot from the First World War. It was recommended by a colleague as an approach to history that might be helpful to the completion of my own thesis on an obscure Australian educationalist who became a prisoner of the Japanese Empire in the Second World War.
Surprisingly for someone who considers himself a slow reader, I managed to get through this book over a single weekend. This was partly made possible by the text's brevity, coming in a just over 170 pages including references and index. But it was also very well-written and, therefore, enjoyable even for someone who is not too familiar with First World War aviation history.
Broad calls this book a 'pedagogical microhistory' (p. xx). On one hand it is a narrative interpretation of the life and (mostly) military career of Captain Eddie McKay - a pilot in the Canadian military during the First World War. On the other hand, the book includes brief but insightful discussions of the research methods and theoretical considerations that underpinned the production of the narrative. This is what the author calls a 'double narrative' (p. xx); one of the subject and the other of the process.
Although the narrative that forms the focus of this work is both easy to follow and interesting, for me, the most engaging (and useful) dimension of the book was the historiographical reflections that are embedded into each chapter.
In a forum discussion post from February 2017, Broad described these reflections in the following terms:
"About a third of the book is self-conscious exploration of historical methodology, where I go back to consider the choices I made, how I found material and thought about it, and so forth, when writing the biography. These sections are meant for students of history, but I hope they'll be of interest to anyone interested in the profession."
What I found particularly interesting in these reflections was that the story of constructing this history was as engaging as the narrative about Captain McKay itself.
In the historiographical reflections Broad discusses the kinds of sources he was working with, the limitations those sources contained, how and why he made particular choices in constructing the narrative and what all of these observations mean for his understanding of the discipline of history more broadly. Although I certainly do not intend to spoil the content of the book here, a summary of the titles of these sections shows the variety of issues he addresses:
Historians and Their Sources
Historians and Fact Finding
Triangulation and Reading Against the Grain
Mentalite and the Military Past
Thinking about Thoughts: The Past as a Foreign Country
Historians, Historical Ethics and the End of History
Appendix: The Mysteries (which covers some unanswered questions from the book)
Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of these reflections was their honesty in highlighting the parts of Captain McKay's story that Broad found difficult to pin down. This reveal a humility in the face of complexity that I found admirable (and not necessarily common) along with a determination to engage deeply with difficult material that I also found encouraging. Collectively, the reflections struck me as a fantastic example to younger scholars. They provide a clear example of a skilled historian admitting where, when and how he is uncertain and unwilling to overstep the evidence. And, in a world where it seems as though many people are extremely certain about so many issues, I found this all very welcome. If nothing else, it reminded me that lack of total certainty does not necessarily mean total uncertainty.
In the historiographical reflection entitled 'Historians, Historical Ethics and the End of History', Broad takes his discussion to what I think is a logical conclusion and writes that:
"... another historian with different interests and abilities might have told the story in a different way." (p. 139)
What the reflections provide is very clear evidence that Broad's version of Captain McKay's story is reasonable but that it is also very reasonable that another story could be better.
More importantly, the reflections turn this book into a relatively detailed discussion of historical methodology - something that history books don't often provide outside a brief orientation in an introduction or preface. What is particularly powerful here is that One In A Thousand hangs all of the theoretical and methodological discussions on a very clear case study in the life of Eddie McKay and the methodology is discussed in stages, as the narrative develops. While I do enjoy reading about historical theory it can become a little tedious, especially when separated from specific examples and I thought that this book bridged that gap effectively.
My only criticism of this book worth mentioning is that it did not provide detailed reference to the growing body of microhistory literature that has emerged in the last 10-15 years. Most importantly, I would think, is Sigurour Magnusson and Istvan Szijarto's What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013).
This is certainly no major flaw in the book since Broad located his microhistory in the tradition of earlier advocates such as Carlo Ginzberg and his own contemporary Steven Bednarski. It may have also been a conscious choice to avoid this becoming an overly complicated discussion of what microhistory is and how it works. Broad certainly does enough to provide some context for One In A Thousand but with a slightly wider reference to the literature I wondered if this could have been an even more useful book in pointing readers to the field of microhistory as it currently stands.
Nevertheless, One In A Thousand is a brilliant example of how so many 'big questions' of history can live inside even the smallest topic. I'd also go a little further and say that the book also demonstrates that historical complexity, in a disciplinary sense, does not necessarily emerge from the most conceptually challenging (or verbose) topics or the largest in terms of scale (time or content). Sure, writing a history of the entire First World War will require intense amounts of work but there is also a greater ability to rely on secondary material and there is no necessity to piece together the lives and experiences of individual soldiers which can be incredibly tricky. To put this simply, macrohistories have embedded challenges relevant to their scale but the same is true of microhistories and I think Broad has effectively provided an example of how a small unit of study (a person) can push into sophisticated theoretical and methodological territory.
In a slightly wider view, this book also provides an excellent model for setting up historical 'activities' in educational settings (school and university) that take students deep into the processes of the historical discipline. Often, I find that 'source work', at both secondary and university level, can be tacked on to investigations of key issues and events whereas One In A Thousand provides a lengthy example of how classes could be engineered so that content emerges from source-work. I'm not here suggesting that this should be the only way students learn history but it does seem to offer very rich opportunities for blending skills, content and theory.
Most of all, this book made me wonder why microhistory has not taken off as an explicit field of Australian historiography. There are certainly good works of Australian history that I would consider to be microhistories but, as far as I can tell, it is not common among Australian historians to employ a conscious microhistorical approach [1]. Reading this book made me a little disappointed that this is not the case but just a little bit hopeful that there is a good opportunity to promote microhistory in an Australian setting - especially considering the great work being done by the Centre for Microhistorical Research (in Iceland) and the University of Toronto (in Canada) where Professor Broad currently works.
This is a book I am likely to re-read and re-read again. It provides access to some of the teaching and ideas of a world class historian in less than 200 pages. I would openly encourage anyone who has an interest in historiography, aviation history, military history or microhistory to read this book, especially aspiring historians.
[1] See Peter Stanley's Quinn's Post or The Lost Boys of Anzac for books I would consider to function in a microhistorical manner. Also see Sean Brawley's 'Mrs O'Keefe and the battle for White Australia' as an example of a study that includes an explicit adoption of microhistory.