  To understand slavery, knowing what it meant to the owned is no less important than knowing what it meant to the owners. In demanding that the historian of slavery attend to the slaves’ stories about slavery in order to know what slavery meant to the slaves, Du Bois presupposes the fundamental, methodological tenet that the historian’s primary charge is what Max Weber called Verstehen, or “interpretive understanding,” not mechanical explanation. According to Weber, the sciences of human action, including history and sociology, “speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches subjective meaning to his behavior—be it overt or covert” (1922, 38, 41). One of the aims of Verstehen, he argues, is rationally to make sense of the motivation prompting an action by placing that action “in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning”—as when, for example, we interpret a woodchopper’s chopping of wood as an act undertaken to secure a wage; or, alternatively, to provide a supply of firewood for the woodchopper’s use (1922, 42).