This chapter heralds the commencement of a three-part undertaking devoted to the pioneering efforts of three esteemed film historians of the early 1970s as they set out to define Documentary and then narrativize its history. Our inaugural luminary is Lewis Jacobs (1904–1997), whose definition of Documentary was proposed in his anthology The Tradition of Documentary (1971). The anthology’s unprecedented and voluminous collection of ninety-two documentary voices—filmmakers, critics, producers, and theoreticians—stands as the first and most comprehensive documentary anthology ever compiled, as of 1971. Jacobs’s definiens centers on the “Preface” and the opening chapter entitled “Precursors and Prototypes (1894–1922).” In the “Preface,” he firmly establishes, as early as in the opening statement, the Griersonian-tinted ethical gist of documentariness. Later, in the opening paragraph of his first introductory chapter, he charges Documentary with five additional essential characteristics. Only after establishing this comprehensive foundation does he go on to unveil two additional, meticulously crafted tropes for Documentary. Both tropes, though, rely equally on Vertov’s definitional legacy, discussed in depth in the previous volume (PHD, Vol. I, Chaps. 8 and 13).