A hermeneutics of empathy as a fundamental basis of historiography seems to me to be a reasonable position. (If you want to style it "compassion" to add theological resonance, that's fine by me, so long as you are explicit about what you are doing. And I would have some philosophical quibbles about whether "empathy" is an adequate basis for hermeneutics, but that's not important here.) After all, one of the functions of historiography is to rescue the past from what E.P.Thompson termed "the enormous condescension of posterity" and this is a contribution to practical reason, as a caution to the conceits of the present. (By contrast, with respect to postitive lessons to be drawn from history, such historical thinking is a species of argument by analogy.) Historiography is caught up in something of a paradox, since the historian knows much more about the historical topic than do the historical agents,- (since that is, after all, the point of his exhaustive and continuing historical research,)- but, equally, the task of historical understanding and explanation involves taking account of the limits and constraints in the information, communications and understanding of possibilities affecting the courses of action of historical agents. This is where I find questionable the emphasis of narrative and "drama", in contrast to the ubiquity of the background of social and institutional practices. The dispositions and attitudes of historical agents can not really be understood without taking into account the conditions and structures in which actions and articulations are intricated. When social systems emerge and hold sway, with numerous nodal points of cross-implication between the constraints on various actors, they exercise an enormous force and power over the participants, such that they come to seem to be a "natural" reality over against the capacities and understandings of agents, who are all variously affected by this, regardless of whether they oppose or accept the system and regardless of their peculiar motives. Hence, with the example of American slavery, the political economy of that "peculiar" institution needs to be taken into account, without which consideration its historical endurance and impact makes less "sense". It is not just a matter of the "moral" rationalizations, of how its dread fatalities were confronted or evaded, that needs to be taken into account, for they may well have been quite secondary to the actual force of the system, which concerned not just those who were advantaged by it, but also those who were disadvantaged by it. For example, the spread of the plantation economy, which was the primary vehicle of slavery, would have effectively created a large class of poor whites, since not only was the best land taken up by the planters, but small farmers' crops would have had to compete with the produce of slaves. Yet it was the ambivalent postion of this class that came to form a bedrock of support for the system. Likewise, the spread of the plantation economy, especially after the invention of the cotton gin, was occasioned by the vast and growing demand for the produce of slaves on the part of the factory economies of New England and England. And this reality was deeply embedded in the aggregate national economy as a whole, affecting "free", as well as, slave state interests. In fact, before the Civil War, the nominal market value of slaves was 3 times as great as the net capital stock of the rest of the nation, exclusive of land, and the export value of slave-produced materials was a prime factor in the balance of trade, (hence the availability of foreign capital.) Finally, the U.S.A. was very much founded as a white man's republic and the transport, (i.e.murder and kidnapping), of Africans and their condition of involutary servitude was very much in contradiction to the thinking of the white man's republic and its voluntarist ideology. But, of course, this contradiction was displaced onto the Africans themselves and served to stigmatize them, and this thinking in terms of the white man's republic persisted after the Civil War and affected variously abolitionist and irredentist currents. Indeed, it is hard to see how such a mode of "perception", re-enforced by persistent patterns of social realtions and the competitve scramble for advantages, could be readily overcome, and the subsequent difficulty in overcoming racism against Afro-Americans testifies to this "fact". The thinking of the white man's republic persists to this day, at least insofar as the equation of white = "normal" = normative is still fairly prevalent. And if there is a lesson to be drawn here, it is the need to distinguish between social-psychological attitudes and socio-structural effects. For, if much progress has been achieved in "reforming" the attitudes of whites, many embedded structural effects, involving the distribution of assets, resources, and opportunities and the strategic investment in the maintenance of social positions, carry on their legacy in transformed conditions, such that structural effects regenerate racial attitudes.

When people (Ahem, Jerry S) set themselves up as final arbiters of the language, it might behoove them to avoid things such as ending sentences with preposition and what some might call borderline comma splices. I'm just sayin' . . .
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While I entirely agree with the importance of history with compassion (I saw a talk by Michael Luick-Thrams, who studies the WWII POW camps in Iowa and elsewhere in the US, in which he said "A historian has to learn to be forgiving." Though there are limits) I also find the emphasis on change, particularly in modern history, to be a bit one-sided. Stability, continuity and preservation are interesting phenomena, particularly when they seem to run against the grain of change. The way in which different components of a seemingly stable system support (or are in tension) with each other helps to explain both the success and failure of efforts to change them.

There was not a single anti-slavery movement, for example. There were several, each struggling against different forms of slavery, some of them successful sooner, some later, some died and had to be resurrected before success was to be had. And slavery persists today in places: that deserves, demands, explanation (and rectification, but that's a different issue).

Every "tradition", every "social habit", every "ubiquity" was once new. It succeeded in becoming part of the system, sometimes by transforming the system, and in maintaining itself within the system. Thousands, millions of people turned new ways of doing things into traditions, then habits (Marc Bloch, I think it was, distinguishes between a conscious tradition and an unconscious habit), then faced questions and challenges: sometimes habit was returned to conscious tradition, sometimes it changed. It's a long trajectory, not just the short landing, that tells the whole story.

p.s. Ophelia was not the only person who objected to "Madame DeFarge."

Jeez, Ralph, I've always been worried I wasn't smart enough for you!
Hurrah for a call for compassion, and the recognition of our epistemological limitations!

I remember a time when people reserved their most heated and personal comments for private email correspondence. kids these days . . .
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