Historians' quest for context in the archive

What do you do when you find the same sort of letter over and over again in the archives?  Like, say, this one:

I'll return to this letter in a minute.

Historians are big on context.  When teaching undergraduate students, this can be as basic as developing reading skills: Be sure to read around the passage or phrase you're interested in to make sense of it.  Be skeptical of claims based on quotations that seem too good to be true.  Things get more complicated when you consider the full document that a quotation is drawn from.

At another level, historians are interested in the circumstances in which events occur and ideas develop.  Unlike scholars in some disciplines who seek out "master factors" that explain everything, historians are suckers for making sure their stories incorporate lots of contextual information.  At its worst, this can degenerate into mere description and lose any analytic rigor.  But at its best, this "quest for context" (as I've heard Robert Self describe historians' project) helps us gain a richer understanding of the complexity and diversity of the human experience.

Now, back to that letter (go ahead, click on it).  On first reading, it doesn't seem that promising a source for the historian of religious education.  It's on a rather mundane topic: who should pay for particular educational materials, the Local Education Authority (think school board) or individual "voluntary" schools (schools that received some state funding but remained under the control of third-party, typically religious organizations).  Letters that contain the phrase "requisitioned in the usual way" aren't exactly the sort of thing that inspire excitement.

If you read a bit more closely and realize exactly what sort of education materials are at issue, the letter becomes more interesting.  This isn't a letter about math textbooks or art supplies.  Instead, what the letter-writer wants to know is whether the LEA is allowed to buy prayer books for local church schools.  Now things are starting to get juicy, right?  You'd never see anything like this in the United States.  State funds going to purchase explicitly religious materials for explicitly religious schools?  Welcome to post-WWII England.

So far, so good.  But this is just one letter.  Perhaps the Isle of Wight education authority was just super-careful and wanted to make absolutely sure that they could pay for prayer books requested by voluntary schools (as the law in fact permitted them to do).

In fact, there are dozens of letters just like this in the records of the Ministry of Education.  So many, in fact, that you get a clear sense of just how exasperated ministry officials were getting with these information requests. After reading a few of these letters, I could practically write the replies myself, "The local education authority is required to provide the funds for regular education expenses for voluntary schools, including religious education, as long as the costs are reasonable."

It wasn't just the Isle of Wight, in other words, that was unsure about the regulations surrounding religious education in the 1944 Education Act.  Across England, education authorities pestered the Ministry of Education about what sort of religious education they could and couldn't pay for.  In some cases, it's clear that the LEA wanted to support the denominational voluntary schools but were uncertain if the law allowed them to do so.  In others, like the West Riding of Yorkshire, the education authority, more secularist in outlook, had to be leaned on rather heavily by the Ministry of Education to fulfill its statutory obligation.

But there's a thread that connects all these letters: the question of "denominational" education.  In letter after letter, you see the phrases "denominational instruction," "distinctive of any denomination," and the like.  A phrase that seems technical or mundane in just one letter assumes far greater import when it's inescapable. 

So I would argue that this letter only makes sense in the context of the dozens of other letters raising the exact same issue.  The existence of so many letters on one topic reveals something deeper than any single letter on its own can suggest: that there was widespread confusion and anxiety about what constituted "denominational" religious instruction in the immediate aftermath of the 1944 Education Act.  This claim can also be spun into a larger discussion of denominational conflict in the immediate postwar era (of which there was plenty).

The historian's task, then, is more than just collecting a series of texts and reporting on their contents.  Historians have to look for connections across documents.  And it is those connections that allow the historian to transcend the particularities of any given piece of evidence to make broader claims about the past.