Sister William got called a what? Indian giver? Irish history? Ex-slave, ex-master, hope for us all. History be damned. We can't know, y'know . . .

She of Marillac House, in her elaborate Daughters of Charity "God's geese" outfit, kid spotted her, called her a witch, she told him she would "whop (him) upside (his) head.” He responded, surprised, "How'd you know me?"

You could find black kids on the West Side in the '60s who thought blacks were a majority, so few whites did they see. Some asked me once if I were a cop, even though I was wearing black shirt and Roman collar.

Giving: "Indian giver" is an Americanism, for "a person who gives something and then asks for it back: from the belief that North American Indians expected an equivalent in return when giving something," says Webster's New World College Dictionary.

It was more than a belief. In his Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman says the Dakota (Sioux) did just that. When he was given a wonderful pipe, he made sure he gave the Indian giver his pick of tobacco and other items. If he hadn't, the Indian would have taken the pipe back.

There's all the difference between reporting second-hand and being there, as Parkman was and as Gerald of Wales was when he gathered information for his 12th-century History and Topography of Ireland, in which he took an all too English (actually, Norman) view of my ancestors. Be that as it may, he did so from first-hand knowledge, and from principle too.

"It is only when he who reports a thing is also one that witnessed it that anything is established on the sound basis of truth," he wrote. Being there makes a difference.

Giants in those days . . . It was a memorable scene when Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave who became an international writer, lecturer, and defender of his people, came to his ex-owner's deathbed for a breathtaking reconciliation. The former master, Thomas Auld, was 80. Douglass had excoriated the man publicly, nursing great bitterness. It was 1876, in Talbot County, Maryland. Auld had asked to see him. Douglass told of the meeting in his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

"We addressed each other simultaneously, he calling me 'Marshall Douglass,' and I, as I had always called him, 'Captain Auld.' I instantly broke up the formal nature of the meeting by saying, 'not Marshall, but Frederick to you as formerly.'"

They shook hands. Auld wept. Douglass couldn't speak. They both got hold of themselves "and conversed freely about the past."

This is from James Tuttleton's essay, "The Many Lives of Frederick Douglass," in Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the end of the Twentieth Century (Ivan R. Dee, 1995).

Tuttleton, an NYU prof, comments that while slavery was a "monstrous evil," it still left room for "that incalculable element -- human feeling . . . the human equation -- affection." Affection led a succession of whites to treat the young Douglass decently, seeing that he learned to read and, later, was spared lynching after trying to escape, observes Tuttleton.

As much as Douglass flayed Auld rhetorically over the years, on his deathbed Auld was to him "no longer a slaveholder in fact or in spirit." Douglass therefore "regarded him as I did myself, a victim of . . . birth, education, law and custom."

Douglass was criticized for this reconciliation. "But in transcending the desire for revenge and perpetual punishment," says Tuttleton, he "gave us our best hope for American racial harmony."

History on the ropes . . . The Killing of History is a book I was trying to get hold of. It's by Keith Windschuttle, an Australian, and published by Macleay Press, apparently also Australian. The library is trying to find it. Meanwhile, from a review of it last August in the Wall St. Journal by Roger Kimball, managing editor of New Criterion magazine and author of Tenured Radicals, I gather that history as we know it is under siege.

Historians have traditionally been critical, saying "It ain't necessarily so" to this or that historical tidbit. But today some are saying, "What difference does it make?" It's a variation on Mehitabel the cat querying Archie the cockroach in Don Marquis's columns and books of the '20s and '30s, "Wotthell Arch, wotthell."

Their thesis is that history is a lot of cracking good stories, and the guys with the best stories or the ones that tickle the ruling elites become historians of note. Their versions last, so who's on first anyhow?

The "main course" on the college level becomes skepticism, says James Tuttleton, another critic of zany thinking, in his Vital Signs, essays on American literature published by Chicago's own Ivan Dee. Sifting and sorting evidence -- deciding just who was on first -- becomes mere story-telling.

The mentality trickles down from academic upper reaches where the likes of Simon Schama perform. Schama is a card-carrying, Ivy League-based professional. In a 1991 book, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, about the British Gen. Wolfe and the American historian Francis Parkman, he shook things up mightily, winning praise for shuffling decades and centuries apparently for the hell of it. Then writer Joe McGinniss did something like it in a 1993 book, The Last Brother, in which he gave us Ted Kennedy's verbatim thinking without benefit of any cooperation from Ted Kennedy. Reviewers cried foul, but McGinniss said in effect, if Schama can do it, so can I. Schama was surprised at this.

Francis Parkman, on the other hand, strove for "photographic detail" in his accounts of Plains Indian life, as in The Oregon Trail, and the Wolfe-Montcalm battle that won Canada for the British on the plains of Abraham in 1759, to name two of Parkman's subjects. Parkman's "minutest details" rest on "authentic documents" or "personal observation," says Tuttleton. He drove himself through sickness and trouble to find things out for himself. Schama, on the other hand, mainly horses around.

Read all about it: Killing found on doorstep . . . "Eureka!" I said in Archimedean delight. There on my doorstep was a dear foundling, a fresh new copy of The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, by Keith Windschuttle (Macleay, 1996, $24.95), which I had said the library was looking for on my behalf.

Eureka! said I. "Yippee! I found it!" Reader Josh had seen the Wall St. Journal review of it some months back and had bought it at Borders -- where the noses are pierced and the coffee counter help is blue-collar arch -- looking ahead to a rainy day "which hasn't happened yet." So Josh was letting me do the inaugural reading, in the course of which I was bound to expatiate. Stay tuned for expatiation.