History as Science

Reading the important introduction to Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), I am struck by White's lucidity. I do not recall a clearer explanation of why history is not a science.

[H]istory differs from the sciences precisely because historians disagree, not only over what are the laws of social causation that they might invoke to explain a given sequence of events, but also over the question of the form that a "scientific" explanation ought to take. There is a long history of dispute over whether natural scientific and historical explanations must have the same formal characteristics. This dispute turns on the problem of whether the kinds of laws that might be invoked in scientific explanations have their counterparts in the realm of the so-called human or spiritual sciences, such as sociology and history. The physical sciences appear to progress by virtue of the agreements, reached from time to time among members of the established communities of scientists, regarding what will count as a scientific problem, the form that a scientific explanation must take, and the kinds of data that will be permitted to count as evidence in a properly scientific account of reality. Among historians no such agreement exists, or ever has existed. ... [H]istorical explanations are bound to be based on different metahistorical presuppositions about the nature of the historical field, presuppositions that generate different conceptions of the kind of explanations that can be used in historiographical analysis.
White, Metahistory, 12-13. 

The assertion, "[t]here is a long history of dispute...", catches my eye, however. White offers here a proof that settles the question of the unsettled matter of historical method and narrative. How is it possible to make such an assertion without taking sides in the dispute under investigation?

What is History?

Essential Bibliography

What books and articles belong on a short list of essential readings defining history?

Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1953) might make the list. Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the influential Annales School. Perhaps instead of, or in addition to, The Historian's Craft, the short list should include Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (1973).

I am reasonably certain that the list must exclude Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (1934-1961). However, perhaps there is merit to M.F. Ashley Montagu, ed., Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (1956).

E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961) certainly belongs on any short list. But what about the responses?

Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (1967).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, "E.H. Carr's Success Story," Encounter (1962), 69-77.
Michael Fox, ed., E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (2000).
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (2004).

There are dozens of others.

Would it be cheating to list the entire print run of the academic journal History and Theory (1960- )?

I am inclined to leave out Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988). This book lacks international scope. But this omission could be an error.

Is there a place on a short list for Herodotus, The Histories (c. 440 BCE)? Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (c.395 BCE)? Tacitus?

The provocative Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian," American Historical Review (1932), 221-236 certainly merits inclusion.

Is there a single text by Leopold von Ranke that would serve to note his contribution to historiography?

Perhaps an important element concerns the practice of history appears with the inclusion of such works as Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001) and Lendol Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," The Journal of American History (March 2006), 1358-1370.

History is as much a way of thinking as an object of study.

My short list of no more than a dozen titles remains to be compiled. Suggestions are welcome.

Significance

Max Euwe (1901-1981) was a mathematician and the fifth official World Chess Champion. The beginning of his now classic text, The Development of Chess Style (1968)* has a assertion concerning the nature of history and the centrality of questions of significance that is as terse as any I have seen in the writings of professional historians.

To suppose that the history of any subject should be just a collection of independent facts is a serious misapprehension. They may, it is true, make interesting reading; but they may also have little significance for the subject in question. "Introduction," n.p.

*Originally published in Dutch as Veldheersschap op de Vierenzestig (1966)

"Malefactors of Great Wealth"

 Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, they spent several weeks exploring Cape Cod. On this day in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Provincetown, Massachusetts to set the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monument for a 252 foot tower that was completed three years later. Upon this occasion, Roosevelt gave a speech in which he first traced a view of the significance of the Pilgrims, and then proceeded to defend his anti-Trust policies. I am Provincetown.com has a detailed timeline of the process of planning and building the monument, including a description of Roosevelt's arrival.

Unlike my post three weeks ago in which I pasted the entirety of Alexander Hamilton's "Report on the Public Credit" into this blog, I am here pasting a few short excerpts. Using Roosevelt's own words, I aim to offer through the rhetoric of his speech a context for his bullying of corporate interests who believe the Roosevelt administration and Congress overstepped its Constitutional bounds in the regulations they put forth.

The text of President Roosevelt's speech was published by the Government Printing Office and is available online through the Internet Archive.

He eloquently expressed a basic element of the craft of history: judging people of the past by their own standards.

... there is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present. Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell, and the work they have to do. (6)
Address of President Roosevelt on the occasion of the laying of the corner stone of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument (1907)

The President wisely observed a shift from standing for oneself to standing for others.

That liberty of conscience which [the Pilgrim] demanded for himself, we now realize must be as freely accorded to others as it is resolutely insisted upon for ourselves. (7-8)

He drew from the Pilgrims and from the Puritans who followed in their wake a lesson of duty: doing good.

There is no use in our coming here to pay homage to the men who founded this nation unless we first of all come in the spirit of trying to do our work to-day as they did their work in the yesterdays that have vanished. The problems shift from generation to generation, but the spirit in which they must be approached, if they are to be successfully solved, remains ever the same. The Puritan tamed the wilderness, and built up a free government on the stump-dotted clearings amid the primeval forest. His descendants must try to shape the life of our complex industrial civilization by new devices, by new methods, so as to achieve in the end the same results of justice and fair dealing toward all. (17-18)

Roosevelt asserted that the Puritans were not "laissez-faire theorist[s]" (19). They sought regulation of conduct that violated the public interest.

The spirit of the Puritan was a spirit which never shrank from regulation of conduct if such regulation was necessary for the public weal; and this is the spirit which we must show to-day whenever it is necessary. (20-21)

He appealed to common sense as he delved into thorny issues of federalism in the regulation of corporate activity.

The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods. Our federal system of government is based upon the theory of leaving to each community, to each State, the control over those things which affect only its own members and which the people of the locality themselves can best grapple with, while providing for national regulation in those matters which necessarily affect the nation as a whole. It seems to me that such questions as national sovereignty and state's rights need to be treated not empirically or academically, but from the standpoint of the interests of the people as a whole. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the  sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state's rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people's rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions.

Experience has shown that it is necessary to exercise a far more efficient control than at present over the business use of those vast fortunes, chiefly corporate, which are used (as under modern conditions they almost invariably are) in interstate business. When the Constitution was created none of the conditions of modern business existed. They are wholly new and we must create new agencies to deal effectively with them. There is no objection in the minds of this people to any man's earning any amount of money if he does it honestly and fairly, if he gets it as the result of special skill and enterprise, as a reward of ample service actually rendered. But there is a growing determination that no man shall amass a great fortune by special privilege, by chicanery and wrongdoing, so far as it is in the power of legislation to prevent; and that a
fortune, however amassed, shall not have a business use that is antisocial. (21-25)

The core of his criticism of corporations, and his expressions of resolve to stay the course through the balance of his years as President, are found in two key paragraphs. The second and longer of these two is the source of my title, an oft-remembered phrase. Brief passages from this paragraph are commonly quoted in editorials and essays. Some of the passages left out of such editorials, however, make Roosevelt seem quite radical by today's standards. The paragraph deserves to be read as a whole. Roosevelt is quite clear that he views the aim of government to promote the interests of virtuous business and to prosecute to the full extent of the law (and to legislate in order to facilitate such prosecution) practices which are not virtuous.

In the last six years we have shown that there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows; and we are strengthening the hands of those who propose fearlessly to defend property against all unjust attacks. No individual, no corporation, obeying the law has anything to fear from this Administration. (44-46)

During the present trouble with the stock market I have, of course, received countless requests and suggestions, public and private, that I should say or do something to ease the situation, There is a world-wide financial disturbance; it is felt in the bourses of Paris and Berlin; and British consols are lower than for a generation, while British railway securities have also depreciated. On the New York Stock Exchange the disturbance has been peculiarly severe. Most of it I believe to be due to matters not peculiar to the United States, and most of the remainder to matters wholly unconnected with any governmental action; but it may well be that the determination of the Government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver), to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the Government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. That they have misled many good people into believing that there should be such reversal of policy is possible. If so I am sorry; but it will not alter my attitude. Once for all let me say that so far as I am concerned, and for the eighteen months of my Presidency that remain, there will be no change in the policy we have steadily pursued, no let up in the effort to secure the honest observance of the law; for I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country — the people through their governmental agents or a few ruthless and domineering men, whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable, because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization. I wish there to be no mistake on this point; it is idle to ask me not to prosecute criminals, rich or poor. But I desire no less emphatically to have it understood that we have sanctioned and will sanction no action of a indictive type, and above all no action which shall inflict great and unmerited suffering upon innocent stockholders or upon the public as a whole. Our purpose is to act with the minimum of harshness compatible with attaining our ends. In the man of great wealth who has earned his wealth honestly and uses it wisely we recognize a good citizen of the best type, worthy of all praise and respect. Business can only be done under modern conditions through corporations, and our purpose is heartily to favor the corporations that do well. The Administration appreciates that liberal but honest profits for legitimate promoting, good salaries, ample salaries, for able and upright management, and generous dividends for capital employed either in founding or continuing wholesome business ventures, are the factors necessary for successful corporate activity and therefore for generally prosperous business conditions. All these are compatible with fair dealing as between man and man and rigid obedience to the law. Our aim is to help every honest man, every honest corporation, and our policy means in its ultimate analysis a healthy and prosperous expansion of the business activities of honest business men and honest corporations. (46-52)

Finally, Roosevelt steers a course between excessive individualism and excessive collectivism.

It will be highly disastrous if we permit ourselves to be misled by the pleas of those who see in an unrestricted individualism the all-sufficient panacea for social evils; but it will be even more disastrous to adopt the opposite panacea of any socialistic system which would destroy all individualism, which would root out the fiber of our whole citizenship. (58)

President Roosevelt, a Republican, was far more radical than President Obama. Those who disparage Obama as a Progressive have much to learn about American history.

Rethinking Sarah Palin and Paul Revere

The prescriptions for how to create a more effective high school history course that I discussed this morning in "The American Story" might serve as guideposts for the place of history in modern life. Consider the recent controversy regarding former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's creative misreading of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. The debate hinged upon whether her facts were garbled, grossly in error, or perhaps even strangely accurate (whether by accident or by design). Is factual inaccuracy the crux of the problem the Left and some of the Right have with her comments?

Central to Palin's view of America is her understanding of the heart of the American story. Her initial statement as it appeared on CNN ended with two key words: free and secure. The American revolution was a struggle against tyranny, a quest for freedom. She explained to Chris Wallace how Americans need to look to the past, to the victories of our founders, in order to navigate our way through the present and build a strong future. She sees in the American past, especially in the American revolution and the foundations of our government, a model for our future. America for Palin is an idea that needs restoration.

I'm publicizing Americana, and our foundation, and how important it is that we learn about our past and our challenges, and victories throughout American history, so that we can successfully proceed forward. Very heady days, rough waters ahead of us, Chris. We need to make sure that we have a strong grasp of our foundational victories so that we can move forward.
Palin to Chris Wallace, FOX News Sunday, at 14:13

There's not a clear sense in her comments that she is practicing "sourcing" as historians do, grounding her work in primary texts. On the other hand, visiting historic sites is another form of sourcing. Gazing at the U.S. Constitution under glass is not the same thing as reading The Federalist Papers or The Anti-Federalist Papers, but it's an activity few historians would discourage.

Palin's gaffe drove me to Paul Revere's 1798 letter, as it did for some of her supporters. We found different things there: I found in Revere's words a clear narrative at odds with Palin's, but Conservatives4Palin found support for her claim that he warned the British.

Those quibbling with Governor Palin’s statements have their history incomplete. During Paul Revere’s ride he was stopped by British soldiers, which Revere recounts in a 1789 letter maintained by the Massachusetts Historical Society ,in his original language (emphasis mine):

I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back,and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from,& what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.
"Governor Palin Gives the Media a History Lesson on Paul Revere's Midnight Ride"

Despite the typos (1789 instead of 1798, for instance), their history is a credible example of sourcing. Several other historians have acknowledged that Palin got this fact more or less correct, even if by accident. Even more important, it seems to me, Conservatives for Palin emphasize the heart of the American story as Palin and most of her admirers understand it: "Governor Palin’s bus tour has been successful in allowing her to highlight the greatness of the history of America."

In his concession speech in the 2008 election, Senator John McCain emphasized the greatness of America. But his spin differed from that now advocated by Palin. He noted and congratulated Barack Obama as the first African American elected President, contrasting it with shameful episodes when a Black man having dinner in the White House created grief for the President who invited him--Republican Theodore Roosevelt (see "Booker T Washington's White House Dinner").

Whether or not Paul Revere rang bells, whether or not he warned the British are questions that keep us fixated on the factoids--those pieces of historical knowledge that drove my classmates as far from history as they could get. We should be debating and discussing Sarah Palin's vision, and even more the visions of those who have actually declared their candidacy for President. We should be discussing and debating the American story. Do we look to the past for heroes who guide us into the future? Do we emulate the leaders of earlier generations, or do we rise above their prejudices?

The American Story

George Chalich was a high school teacher who inundated the junior class with factoids. I loved the factoids he gave us, but hated the slow pace of presentation and the alienating absence of dialogue. We memorized, to the last comma, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution; lengthy definitions of socialism, communism, totalitarianism, republicanism, and democracy; salary schedules for the federal judiciary, members of Congress, and the President; and the eight characteristic behaviors of the "good citizen": I can recall the first two: 1) "a good citizen votes;" 2) "a good citizen votes intelligently." Chalich's stories evoked an alternative vision of good citizenship. Drawing on his Serbian heritage, his story of the beginnings of the First World War becomes a lesson in historiography: "Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian patriot, the newspapers never get it right." The so-called assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand was not a criminal act, but an assertion of the patriotism of a nation within.
Spring Wind Rising (1994), 185-186.

We sat in our straitjackets, took notes, and made efforts to memorize George Chalich's lists. Most of my classmates learned to hate history. Skill at memorization was not high among the talents of teenagers in the 1970s. Even those good at it rarely look back with fondness upon the experience. It should be clear that the pedagogy of memorization is far from an exemplary model for nurturing historical knowledge, let alone historical thinking in high school students. Nor does this failed pedagogy serve the adults who return to school in middle age.

Teachers who are passionate for history should infect students with their enthusiasm, not inoculate them against outbreaks of history mindedness. In a recent National History Center roundtable, the panelists agreed, "that instilling the love of history into students’ lives was the most important objective in a survey course." Salt Lake City, Utah teacher Fiona Halloran notes, "Students come to class hoping for pleasure but fearing pain." She suggests liberty in their writing assignments:

Offering students liberty means asking them to write essays about dissent, identity, and hunger. What do those things mean? Let them decide. As they struggle to match historical events and ideas to concepts like resistance, they will have to wrestle with the most difficult questions history has to offer. ... [Assessment liberty] invites students to tell you about the ideas they found most compelling and their work is therefore brighter, more forceful and more specific.
Halloran, "Historical Gardening"

San Francisco's Valerie Ziegler emphasizes teaching students the process of producing history, and also gives them room for decision. She draws from the Reading Like a Historian project of the Stanford History Education Group (a project led by Sam Wineburg whose Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts I have mentioned in "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" and other posts). She looks to students to create their own answers to historical questions.

Each lesson in this curriculum begins with a debatable historical question that requires students to formulate answers based on their reading of historical evidence. My students leave my class with confidence in their reading, writing and understanding of how the story of history is told. They develop skills they can use beyond high school.
Ziegler, "Crafting a Love for History"

Chalich's memorization scheme aimed at cultivating a sense of citizenship (voting, not assassinating heads of states). Today's emphasis upon teaching and learning (the lingo that replaced the term pedagogy) cultivates behaviors that are necessary to an engaged and effective citizenry. Several panelists emphasized historical thinking as central to successful democracy.

In the final analysis the effective U.S. history course fosters active citizenship. History education is the best way to reach for equity, social justice, and new hope. Sitting in our classrooms today are the century’s new leaders; within them the seeds of true equity, gentleness, compassion and service are sown.
David Mitchell, "Primary Sources: The Seeds for Student Growth"

By examining how previous generations of citizens grappled with the issues, students see that they too have a role in shaping the events of their time. They have a stake—more to gain—in looking at how we got to this point. The spirited debate over who should bear the cost of the national road two hundred years ago is the health care debate of today.
William E. White, "The Idea of America"

Andrew Johnson explains in "Let the Questions Guide You," his contribution to the roundtable, how his course is built around four central questions. Well-informed readers will recognize the sources of his questions in famous political speeches and poems.

Each quarter of the school year is framed with a guiding question. “Was this nation conceived in liberty?” compels a study of colonial times, the Revolution and the Constitution, and the Washington and Adams administrations. The question itself constitutes both a compelling essay question as well as a sorting tool for what content to include and what to leave out. Similarly, “Is our government of the people, by the people, and for the people?” compels a study of the abolition movement, the Civil War, and Progressivism.
Johnson, "Let the Questions Guide You"

Lendol Calder, whose "uncoverage" model clearly influences the other panelists, discusses an assignment he uses the first week of his college U.S. history survey.

In the first week of my course, students write a two-page history of the United States. I don’t allow them to look anything up, which makes students think I am testing their factual knowledge. In fact, I use the assignment to learn what students think the story of American history is. By “story” I mean the basic interpretive frame they use to make sense of the American past.
Calder, "But What is Our Story?"

Calder emphasizes that factual recall is not the forte of a well-trained historian so much as an inquiring mindset.

The mark of historical mindedness is not recalling that “this happened and then that happened.” Rather, it is a distinctive sort of questioning and a distinctive method of discovery supported by certain habits, skills, and dispositions.
Calder, "But What is Our Story?"

All of the panelists emphasize student engagement with primary sources. They each emphasize at least some of the processes Calder has called the cognitive habits of the historian: "questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one's knowledge"(Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," The Journal of American History (March 2006), 1364).

George Bancroft

In his History of the United States (1875), George Bancroft highlights the authority of the Second Continental Congress that began meeting in May 1775.

Whom did they represent? and what were their functions? They were committees from twelve colonies, deputed to consult on measures of conciliation, with no means of resistance to oppression beyond a voluntary agreement for the suspension of importations from Great Britain. They formed no confederacy; they were not an executive government; they were not even a legislative body. ... They had no treasury; and neither authority to lay a tax, nor to borrow money. They had been elected, in part at least, by tumultuary assemblies, or bodies which had no recognized legal existence.
Bancroft, History of the United States, 353-354

Bancroft's fidelity to primary sources was nearly pathological, according to Richard Vitzthum.

While some historians improve their work through revision, Bancroft did not. Revision tended to carry him further and further away from his evidence, a temptation that he, of all historians, would have been well advised to resist. When he revised, he did not go back and restudy his sources: thus his first editions reflect his fullest immersion in the evidence.
Richard C. Vitzthum, "Theme and Method in Bancroft's History of the United States," New England Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1968), 363, note 4.

But fidelity is perhaps the wrong word. The sources adorned more than they informed Bancroft's narratives.

The omnicompetent narrator of the History merely fits useful ideas and phrases from the sources into his own interpretive context. His disregard for the context in which they originally appeared is often complete. ...
[T]he History is based as often on secondary as on primary sources, belying Bancroft's claim here that he chiefly used primaries ... in saying he "derived" his narrative from source material, he means he has raised it to the level of philosophy.
Vitzthum, 372

Whether primary or secondary, Bancroft's citations are incomplete.

Bancroft to a large extent based his narrative on source material, both manuscript and printed, but ... did not scorn to employ secondary works which he considered reliable. ... The chief criticism of the historian's use of sources--which is one of technique--is that his style of citation is not sufficiently complete always to give the reader the information necessary for checking up or for himself locating the source.
Watt Stewart, "George Bancroft Historian of the American Republic," Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 19, No. 1 (1932), 80.

Snippets

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (1999) sits in a certain room of my house where I spend a lot of time waiting. By the end of 2010 I should have finished reading it through in one to five minute segments. There I read this morning the passage I read two days ago, being reminded anew of a passage in another book completed two weeks ago.

Borges' note on method:

I let them talk; I carefully avoided formulating questions that might suggest determined answers.
Borges, "A History of the Tango," 394

Lembke's critique:

In fact, there was much more wrong with his testimonies than he acknowledged to his readers. In the first place there is [Bob] Greene's [Homecoming (1989)] own leading question: "Were you spat upon?" Had he asked a more neutral question such as, "What were your homecoming experiences?" the veterans' responses would be much more valid.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), 80

What is History?

Notes from reading the first chapter of Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1953)


"How ... can one make of phenomena, having no other common character than that of being not contemporary with us, the matter of rational knowledge?" (Bloch, 22)

The word history applies to any study of change through time (Bloch, 23)

"In any study, seeking the origins of a human activity, there lurks the same danger of confusing ancestry with explanation." (Bloch, 27)

"...to the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs." (Bloch, 28)

"...a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time." (Bloch, 29)

"Some, who consider that the most recent events are unsuitable for all really objective research just because they are recent, wish only to spare Clio's chastity from the profanation of present controversy....In truth, whoever lacks the strength, while seated at his desk, to rid his mind of the virus of the present may readily permit its poison to infiltrate even a commentary on the Iliad or the Ramayana." (Bloch, 31-32)

"It is therefore advisable to define the indisputable peculiarities of historical observation in terms which are both less ambiguous and more comprehensive."
"Its primary characteristic is the fact that knowledge of all human activities in the past, as well as of the greater part of those in the present, is, as Francois Simiand aptly phrased it, a knowledge of their tracks. Whether it is the bones immured in the Syrian fortifications, a word whose form or use reveals a custom, a narrative written by the witness of some scene, ancient or modern, what do we really mean by document, if it is not a 'track,' as it were--the mark, perceptible to the senses, which some phenomenon, in itself inaccessible, has left behind?" (Bloch, 45-46)

"...we have no other device for returning through time except that which operates in our minds with the materials provided by past generations." (Bloch, 47)

The past cannot change. "But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself." (Bloch, 48)

Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning

"Am I a professor? Then what will I say today? But if I am a teacher, what will they do today?"
Lendol Calder, 1370

The New Social Studies of the 1960s aimed to transform classrooms that had been conduits for the transmission of knowledge into agents of cultural change. Looking back from the standpoint of 1992, Byron Massialas summarized the prospects of teaching through inquiry.

Through a proper classroom environment and teaching method, students of virtually any age could be involved in reflection and critical thinking. Springboards from any of the traditional social sciences and history could be introduced into the classroom to create interest and reflective thinking about social events.
Massialas, "Retrospect and Prospect," 121

His use of springboard as metaphor for the value of history, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines all serving something higher called Social Studies merits more examination than I can give it here.

Although the reform movement began with consideration of social-political contexts and psychological factors affecting students, Massialas tells us, many teachers embracing this reform movement emphasized "the structure of knowledge of the organized disciplines" (121). Historians, for example, failed to see that their disciplinary knowledge and processes were means to another end, a place to start but not the map. History dominated the curriculum that Massialas and his associates sought to transform into Social Studies. They conducted empirical studies of classroom practices that "confirmed the idea that a social-issues, rather than a traditionally chronological, curriculum is more in tune with the demands of modern society" (122).

The New Social Studies Movement ended by the mid-1970s; that is, it ended before I took a course in Social Studies teaching methods from a historian.


Undergraduate Education

O. Gene Clanton espoused some of the ideals of this now defunct reform movement. He advocated inquiry-based teaching of history in his methods class as theory, and his practice seemed to reflect this theory. Clanton had been my professor two years earlier for the second half of the American history survey: U.S. History, 1877 to present. In that class, he structured our classroom practices around what he called an inquiry approach. He divided the class of sixty or so into two groups; his teaching assistant took the other half. We then sat in a circle and talked about the documents--primary sources, mostly texts--that followed each narrative chapter in Richard N. Current, American History: A Survey, vol 2.

Clanton's teaching of history was refreshing and liberating. But it was not the method of inquiry-based reflective thinking and learning espoused by Massialas and his colleagues. Clanton did most of the talking.

In Inquiry in Social Studies (1966), Massialas and C. Benjamin Cox make the point that a discussion technique does not necessarily alter the method of classroom as conduit.

[T]he teacher assumes the role of expositor of knowledge while his students act as recipients. The materials at hand are the sources of knowledge and the major task involved is most easily described as the process of transmitting finished knowledge from source to recipient. The techniques utilized in this transmission, whether lecture, discussion, student reporting, or film projection do not differentiate the method itself. If the intent is to inform students of some already organized system of predetermined knowledge, the method is expository.
Massialas and Cox, 62

Paulo Friere calls this expository method the banking concept of education. The teacher (subject) narrates to passive receptacles or listening objects (students).

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.
Friere, 53

The alternative sought through the New Social Studies was concept based, student centered, and focused on contemporary problems. The teacher was to manage and coordinate, rather than dispense, the construction of knowledge. In my education courses, the professors used the term facilitate.

The materials at hand are at once the sources of promising springboards or hypotheses and the compilations of factual evidence required to support or refute these hypotheses. The students in this case become participants in the process of reorganizing this knowledge around new centers of attention and interest. The learning situation is characterized by the seeking, discovering, reorganizing, and testing of knowledge.
Massialas and Cox, 62

This movement towards inquiry based teaching in social studies ran aground. When I was in college, several history professors dismissed it as a fad of the Sixties. Even so, to the extent that it was part of other educational developments that favored student centered education, it echoes through much of educational theory today, if not the practice of teaching. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that prescriptions for developing reflective thinking in high school and middle school social studies classrooms anticipate recent calls for rethinking the history survey in college classrooms.


Teaching and Learning

Checking e-mail in class is rude and immature, but it is also a predictable response to a worn-out pedagogy that no longer has a place in the history survey.
Lendol Calder, 1360

In his essay, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," Lendol Calder seeks ways to empower students as the agents of their own learning. He refers to a label Sam Wineburg used in conversation with him: the attic theory. Wineburg's attic theory of cognition resembles Friere's banking concept, or what Massilas and Cox call expository teaching.

As it happens, people do not collect facts the way homeowners collect furniture, storing pieces for use at a later time. ... Facts are not like furniture at all; they are more like dry ice, disappearing at room temperature.
Calder, 1361

Calder points out that covering a subject means not only going the length, but also connotes concealment. Historians, he alleges are quite adept at covering up, or "hiding what it means to be good at history" (1363). Like Wineburg in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001), Calder attempts to identify the peculiar signature of the practice of history. He seeks to introduce to his students six "cognitive habits: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one's knowledge" (1364).

Calder's process in his course on American history since 1945 is particularly relevant to Patriots and Peoples (this blog). His course divides into six units; each goes through a three stage process. Film clips are used

to create an environment so rich in information and so charged with interesting problems that students who are inert in the face of lectures and textbooks will be stirred to ask a few historical questions. After the film awakens their capacity for wonder, I then send students out to do what historically minded people do: follow a question that takes them beyond what they already know.
Calder, 1364

In the second stage, the class examines primary documents. Entry to class requires a ticket: a three to five page essay on questions formulated by the student (inspired by the film), and using the documents as evidence. One gets the sense that Calder is looking for questions that are focused on the time and place of the United States in the past half-century or so, rather than broad universal questions of the sort favored by the New Social Studies reformers.

A generalization, in order to have wide applicability, must not refer to a specific event, period, or region. A more reliable and useful generalization would be one which, if formulated as a theory, can apply to all times and places.
Massialas and Cox, 333

After formulating their own questions, and answering them through analysis of prescribed documents, the students are prepared to read the work of professional historians. Calder uses Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. Johnson's work is stronger, that is, less polemical than Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States.


Theorie und Praxis

As a student in high school and college, I craved the rare opportunities to talk back, to argue with the professor, and to get expert guidance in my own self-directed study of the past and its relevance to the present. On the other hand, I would have felt cheated in a course concerned with the late-nineteenth century if the author of Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969) and Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900 (1991) should have considered it his place to be silent while my peers and I constructed our knowledge from William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. It was good that the doctor in class was a teacher, but he needed to be a professor, too.

As a teacher, I remember that Clanton's practice did not quite match his theory. Nor does my own practice of PowerPoint based presentations interspersed with focused discussion quite match my theory tersely expressed in the title of Carl Becker's classic article, "Everyman His Own Historian." I follow Clanton in looking for balance between making useful deposits and facilitating student management of their investments.


Works Cited

Becker, Carl. "Everyman His Own Historian." American Historical Review (January 1932): 221-236.

Calder, Lendol. "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey." The Journal of American History (March 2006): 1358-1370.

Clanton, O. Gene. Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969.

________. Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continum, 1993.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Massialas, Byron G. "The 'New Social Studies'--Retrospect and Prospect." The Social Studies (May/June 1992): 120-124.

Massialas, Byron G., and C. Benjamin Cox. Inquiry in Social Studies. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. New York: Sentinel, 2004.

Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

A Firmer Grasp

Historians know more about the events of the past than the people who lived through them.

Naturally, we can see events in proper perspective; we know a period better than the active participants in it because we see its results, and because events disclose their real significance by what they produce, and the products can be seen only by those who come afterward and look back ... even of movements, motive, and incident, we often have a firmer grasp than did the men [and women] that were part of what we study.
Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, "Introduction," xi*

McLaughlin offers a primer on the sources preferred by historians.

It is commonly said that unconscious sources are the best; that is to say, not chronicles written with express purpose to hand down opinions and knowledge of events to succeeding generations, but materials prepared without reference to future times. ... [A]ny diary, especially one written faithfully for one's own eye without the future reader continually in mind, artificial though it be, is necessarily of great value in letting us see the man [or woman] that writes and in giving us a view of passing events as he [or she] sees them.
McLaughlin, xii

Diaries and other records kept for personal recollection are preferable to those manufactured for posterity. Diaries written for revelation will contain deception, but there is less motivation to deceive oneself.


The Light of Limited Experience

President James K. Polk's diary is particularly useful because it "does not appear to have been written with the expectation that it would be conned by future historians" (xiii). Moreover, Polk was "peculiarly simple in his make-up" (xiii); he was not devious in his writing.

[H]e moved straight ahead with unusual directness, following his course unflinchingly, guided by the light of a limited experience and often led by a prejudice or a partisan antipathy which one can fairly easily detect.
McLaughlin, xiii-xiv

Polk, according to McLaughlin, is easy to read and shallow, and was thus incapable of guile.

By nature he was too simple, too plainly lacking in wide sympathy, too narrow in his emotions, too straightly hemmed in by education and practices of life, to become the prey of conflicting impulses.
McLaughlin, xiv

McLaughlin mentions other sources concerned with the period of Polk's presidency, including Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View; or, History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 (1856). But we know what Benton could not know because Polk's diary reveals things about which "benton was sometimes in the dark or was but shrewdly guessing at what we know to be the fact" (xii).

We can see the Polk Administration more clearly than Benton because we have Polk's own account. We can understand Polk's actions better than the President himself because we see their effects, and because we are sophisticated enough to see through his prejudices.



*McLaughlin, Andrew Cunningham. "Introduction" to The Diary of James K. Polk During his Presidency, 1845 to 1849. Milo Milton Quaife, ed. Volume I. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1910.

Calvin and the Constitution

History is eloquent in declaring that American democracy was born of Christianity and that Christianity was Calvinism.
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (1932)

Had he lived, John Calvin would have been 500 years old this month. He died, but his ideas live on, perhaps even in the Constitution of the United States. A writer for the New York Times asked Calvin's most recent biographer whether it was "fanciful" to detect traces of Calvin's thought in the Constitution. “Absolutely not,” replied Bruce Gordon, author of Calvin (2009).

Calvin’s legacy has been traced in everything from modern marriage and modern science to modern liberal government and of course modern capitalism. By many accounts, he is a major source of modernity’s very understanding of the self.
Peter Steinfels, "Man of Contradictions, Shaper of Modernity. Age? 500 Next Week," New York Times 3 July 2009

Several bloggers celebrated Calvin's birthday by posting claims that he is the virtual author of our republican form of government; others mocked these assertions. Reed R. Heustis, Jr. found quite a few new readers for his "John Calvin and the American Founding" at Worldview Times. Heustis sees the world in clear dichotomies--one is either a Calvinist or a Marxist. Such logic gathers ridicule as a dog gathers fleas. Ed Brayton asserts that Heustis deserves ridicule, noting that Heustis "presents not a single quote from even a single founding father that supports that claim." But Heustis does cite an authority: John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (1987).

Many joined the chorus denouncing Heustis by posting comments at Dispatches from the Culture Wars (Brayton's blog), including yours truly. To support my initial claim that Calvin's influence was predominantly negative--an example to avoid, rather than emulate--I quickly found a quote from the pen of Thomas Jefferson in Edwin Gaustad's Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (1987).

The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of a lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus.
Jefferson to William Short, 1820, as quoted in Gaustad (48)

My response nagged at me, in part because I knew that I had Eidsmoe's book someplace in an box yet to unpack. Although I had missed a slice the birthday cake baked for Calvin at the Presbyterian university here in Spokane because I had been busy moving my belongings to our new home, I now had time to consider the man's legacy. It takes me a few weeks to unpack a ton of books. Two hours of unpacking, sorting and repacking--it is a smaller house--was sufficient to locate Eidsmoe's Christianity and the Constitution.


Eidsmoe's Scholarship

John Eidsmoe blogs for the Foundation for Moral Law, where he posted "Celebrating John Calvin's Legacy--Not so much Charles Darwin's." His point in his blog entry is expressed in greater detail in his book: Calvin's emphasis on total depravity "led to the system of limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and reserved individual rights that characterize republican self-government." He also cites in the blog, and in more detail in the book, the authority of two prominent nineteenth century historians: Leopold von Ranke and George Bancroft.

John Calvin was the virtual founder of America.
Leopold von Ranke, as cited in Eidsmoe (18)

In Christianity and the Constitution, Eidsmoe reveals his sources for the idea that Calvinism "stands out above all others" (18) among the ideas that influence the founders. Five of the first six footnotes--documenting the assertions of Ranke, Bancroft, Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné, and Emilio Castelar--are to a single text: Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. Boettner's book dates to 1932, but Eidsmoe cites a 1972 reprint. The remaining footnote for the first three pages of the chapter "Calvinism" is discursive. Eidmoe identifies himself as a minister of the Church of the Lutheran Brethren, "lest [he] be accused of a Calvinistic bias" (19).

Boettner's text is a work of theology, not history. It does contain a brief section, "Calvinism in History" at the end. Eidsmoe's technique of citing authorities that declare the influence of Calvinism is readily aparent in Boettner's section on history, and he offers a longer list of authorities than Eidmoe. In Eidsmoe, the Ranke quote is attributed to E. W. Smith and cited from Boettner. Boettner gives us the source of Smith's statement.

In his book, "The Creed of Presbyterians," E. W. Smith asks concerning the American colonists, "Where learned they those immortal principles of the rights of man, of human liberty, equality and self-government, on which they based their Republic, and which form today the distinctive glory of our American civilization? In the school of Calvin they learned them. There the modern world learned them. So history teaches" (p. 121).
Boettner, 215

Egbert Watson Smith's The Creed of Presbyterians (1901) delves into history, as Boettner, at the end of a theological tract. Under the title "The Creed Tested by its Fruits" Smith strings together quotations from dozens of authorities, citing the source of many. Both Ranke and Bancroft are among his authorities, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, these two are omitted from the footnotes. I have failed to locate the source of Ranke's statement and failed as well to find the origin of Bancroft's frequently repeated line:

He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty.
Eidsmoe, "Celebrating John Calvin's Legacy"

Eidsmoe presents hyperlinks. Ranke's line is referenced to Philip Vollmer, John Calvin: Theologian, Preacher, Educator, Statesman (1909) in which appears an essay, "Calvinism in America" by William Henry Roberts. Perhaps the work of Roberts is the Ur-text for arguments that "Calvinism is the chief source of modern republican government" (Vollmer, 202). Smith cites another text by Roberts, Proceedings Seventh General Council (1899). Eidsmoe's hyperlink for Bancroft's statement takes us to David W. Hall, Genevan Revolution and the American Founding (2005). Eidsmoe certainly deployed this quote in advance of the the publication of Hall's book (Boettner is cited in Christianity and the Constitution), but perhaps Hall documents it better. I'll add the book to my reading list.

As I mentioned to the author of the blog, Samuel at Gilgal (another list of quotes from Boettner), it would be helpful if someone could locate the source of Ranke's statement instead of joining the ranks of those that repeat it endlessly.


From Theology to History

The arguments that appear at the end of several theological treatises from a century ago are deployed at the beginning of Eidsmoe's Christianity and the Constitution. Where others end, he begins. The publisher (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan) makes a strong claim for Eidsmoe's scholarship on the dust jacket: "He meticulously documents his position, using the writings of the founders themselves." Eidsmoe does not rest on the authority of prior historians, but delves into the primary sources--writings of the founders--to elucidate their influences and support a thesis that that not begin with him. The core of Christianity and the Constitution is thirteen chapters, each one concerned with one of the so-called Founding Fathers. Twelve of these chapters concern men that were present in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Eidsmoe begins with John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). He was not at the convention, but is "the man who shaped the men who shaped America" (81). Eidsmoe accesses Witherspoon's writing and influence through two biographies and one master's thesis. Citations to the writing of this "founder" are all "as quoted in" Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon (1969 [1925]); Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman, John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot (1897); and Roger Schultz, "Covenanting in America: The Political Theology of John Witherspoon," MA Thesis, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1985. No where does Eidsmoe cite Witherspoon's writings directly.

It may be a fine point, but I would not call extracts of primary sources from secondary works meticulous documentation from "the writings of the founders themselves." Perhaps he does better with James Madison. Indeed, The Papers of James Madison (1962), ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. Rachel appear as the source for a long extract of Madison's Bible study notes. Eidsmoe also cites several letters from this scholarly resource. With respect to Madison, the publisher's claim has merit.

Eidsmoe's argument for the influence of Calvin on Madison begins with Madison's decision to attend the College of New Jersey, a Presbyterian college, even though Madison's family was Episcopal. Noting its pro-independence sentiment, he also claims "by 1769 the Episcopal church had become largely Calvinistic and not much different from Presbyterianism in basic doctrine" (95). Eidsmoe draws on Madison's letters to show the influence of Witherspoon, and Madison's attitudes toward Christian ministry, a career he considered for several years.

Unfortunately for the argument that Calvinism was a decisive influence on "the father of the Constitution," Madison spoke and wrote very little about religion after he entered politics. Eidsmoe addresses this problem, but departs from Madison's own writings, except for Federalist 51, and instead relies upon the analysis in James H. Smylie, "Madison and Witherspoon: Theological Roots of American Political Thought," The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1961, and a few extracts selected by Smylie. Smylie asserts, "man's innate depravity, of which Presbyterians are keenly aware, must be checked by counteracting forces" (Eidsmoe, 101).

Smylie extended his arguments through other articles, and studies of the influence of Witherspoon upon Madison and others has proceeded since his day. Perhaps because it is less less typical of historical scholarship, Terence S. Morrow's thesis in "Common Sense Deliberative Practice: John Witherspoon, James Madison, and the U.S. Constitution," Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Winter 1999), 25-47 is worth noting: "Madison's views on representation, this article contends, drew upon the teachings in rhetoric and moral philosophy that he received from John Witherspoon" (26).

Perhaps there is something of merit in assertions of Calvin's influence on our system of government beyond what is evident in Heustis's shoddy logic and convoluted argument. At first glance, Eidsmoe seems little better, and his "research" leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, he does offer leads to other scholarship. His argument leaves me far from convinced that Calvin was "the virtual founder of America," but his case suggests Calvinist churches, colleges, ministers, and ideas were not without influence.

Flash from the Past

It is with a sense of triumph that I look back on my first year of graduate school and a declaration I made then. I resolved to war against the textbook, and to teach with some other form of writing. This declaration was not a statement against reading. No, I expected and expect students in my history classes to read a lot--too much, they often write in the evaluations. Textbooks are a genre that have no life outside of classrooms. Perhaps that means they should have no life at all.

The alternative to textbooks that I had in mind is described well by Lendol Calder on a syllabus he employs at Augustana College. I'm indebted to Historiann's "Manifesto Against 'Coverage'" and John Fea's comments there, as well as his "Uncoverage" post for bringing Calder's work to my notice. The online version of Calder's 2006 article, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" in the Journal of American History has links to his syllabus:

What? No Textbook? In fact, we will read not one but two major histories: one by Howard Zinn, the other by Paul Johnson. These are not traditional “textbooks.” In fact, real people have been known to read them, which one can’t say about textbooks.
Calder, HI 132 Syllabus

There we find an alternative, and a definition of sorts: books read by "real people," as distinct from college students and professors. His texts are Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. Thus, the students read a liberal view, and a conservative one; they read an American writing about America, and they read the words of a foreigner, too.


My Pledge

I cannot produce solid evidence that I pledged to eschew all textbooks during that first year of graduate school. Moreover, in my comments to Historiann's "Manifesto" I named a textbook that I have assigned, so I've failed at least once to uphold that alleged pledge. Nevertheless, I dug through my files and located a book review I wrote twenty years ago. In my seminar in American Historiography, one of the assignments was to write a book review of a US history survey textbook. The professor assigned which one. Mine was Gary B. Nash, et al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

While most of my peers were busy grappling with texts that had all sorts of gaps, exclusions, and suppressions of the emphasis on race, class, and gender that was then in vogue, I had the leader of the movement to include all these. Even worse, the text reflected the state of the art in its graphics, sidebars, and supplemental apparatus. I spent the obligatory three pages describing the enormously rich features of this text, and managed to highlight one or two small quibbles.

Midway through page four, I began my criticism:

...apart from the expensive extras, and underneath the colorful embellishments still lurks the traditional form of a textbook. Whether this form has outlived its usefulness needs to be considered.
The authors expend several sentences in their Preface explaining that an intent of the book is to provoke thought on the part of students. It is precisely this goal, however, that is ill served by textbooks. I think that now matter how balanced and innovative a text may be, it is doubtful that such a form will ever prove adequate to this task--indeed, as I sought to illustrate earlier, it is a text's inadequacies that are more likely to stimulate questioning (the first step in creative thought). A coherent narrative that attempts to present the history of a people generally cannot do more than present a string of conclusions to be memorized. Until writers of instructional materials leave the analysis incomplete (or, at least, stop pretending to have completed it) to force students to struggle to produce coherence, learning history will remain largely passive reception of information. A word that aptly describes such a process is brainwashing.
"Review of Nash," February 1988

I don't think I agree with everything written by that young historian in training, and it's looks as though he might benefit from reading Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Still, the kid might have a point.

Note to Students and Parents

In the spring I will be offering a new class for the students at Deer Park Home Link. This post augments information in the course description.

Home Link Historians is a writing class designed for students that read history as part of their curriculum. Students will keep a journal of their reading in the form of a blog (short for web log). Instead of writing for an imagined audience, as in most writing classes, students will write for readers that will be able to leave comments.

I will use several writing prompts to offer structure and stimulate thought about issues central to the study of history. It does not matter what era, nation, culture, or special topic the student is studying: the writing prompts will be flexible.

The first prompt: What are you reading? Why are you reading it? What do you expect to learn?

The student blog will be located at Home Link Historians. It will be single blog with many authors writing under pseudonyms to protect their individual privacy.


Sample entries in Patriots and Peoples

For students and parents coming here to get a sense of how keeping a blog as a history reading journal might work, these samples might be of interest. For regular readers of this blog, this listing highlights some of my better entries over the past year.

“Thinking Historically”

On keeping a journal: “Spiral Notebooks”

Primary Source focus: “Lee Resolution”

A topical blog entry concerning a common myth: “Columbus and the Flat Earth”

Another popular myth: “The Burning of the Boats”

Investigating a text’s footnotes: “Depopulation: Ubelaker’s Low Estimate”

Comparison of two texts on a limited subordinate topic: “Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images”

Current events connection: “Booker T Washington’s White House Dinner”

Now that you're already looking at my online writing, you might also find my Chess Skills blog of interest.

Spurious Quotations

Historians are dull people; they can kill a conversation with a fact.
Robert Littlewood

It is impossible to verify the quotation above. Bob Littlewood said something along these lines when I was in his office for one of our periodic meetings. We were discussing the possibilities and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research. Many of our conversations worked their way through the perceptions of scholars in one academic discipline about the methodologies of another. I was working in literature, anthropology, and history.

Under Littlewood’s tutelage in anthropological theory I read The Sacred Canopy (1967) by Peter Berger; Eric Wolf’s seminal essay, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore (1958); Talal Asad’s “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man (1983); and much more. I outlined a research program focused on the study of patriotism as civil religion with attention towards Texas v. Johnson 491 U.S. 397 (1989), the Nez Perce flag dance, the rise of the Religious Right in the Seventies and Eighties. Because I mentioned in passing Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization (1987) by Hans Peter Duerr, he read it and demanded some accountability from my perusal. Dreamtime is a fantastic book with a mere 125 pages of main text and many hundreds of pages of footnotes. Once Littlewood looked at the book, I could no longer afford to neglect the footnotes, which were “the most interesting part,” he said.

Dreamtime is a book that I stumbled upon in the bookstore. While I was looking at it, a colleague came by and we discussed the book. I showed her the extensive footnotes and bibliography amounting to more than three quarters of the volume. This colleague, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric, told me I should spurn the book simply out of principle in opposition to writers that draft long discursive footnotes. I listened to her dissertation on principles, on writing, and upon the consumer behavior of bibliophiles. I bought the book because it reflected principles of scholarship important to me. I value footnotes.

I read Dreamtime the day I bought it, but forgetting my principles, neglected the footnotes until Littlewood drove me back towards them.

I’ll be having this really interesting conversation with James, and then he’ll start speaking in footnotes.
Sherman Alexie

Readers of Sherman Alexie’s poetry and fiction will have seen statements where he disparages certain aspects of academic practice and perhaps also his use of footnotes as a trope for detail obsessed scholars. His statement above, if it was ever spoken, was reported to me through a third party to whom he spoke about me. Nearly a decade after this alleged utterance, he admitted to me that he probably said something along these lines.

Novelists are in the business of making up conversations to carry along a story, including often credible accounts of another era. Part of the business of historians is creation of stories from verifiable fragments of conversations in other eras. Footnotes offer the records of verification, and often the adventure of the quest or alternate plots lines for the story. In the case of bad history—fabrication, falsification, plagiarism—the footnotes (or their absence) often tell the story. These facts may end interesting conversations, but they also provoke new and vital discussions.

Footnotes are integral to reliable texts.

Thinking Historically

Some notes from part of a history lecture:

What is history?
Why study it?

The past helps us understand how we came to be the way we are.

The past shows us alternative ways of living to contrast our own.
• The cost of petroleum was of no interest to Captain James Cook.
• Scurvy, which Cook reduced among his crew, is not a significant health problem today.*

Historians . . .
• Respect our subjects
o Avoid thinking of people in the past as backward and ignorant because they didn’t understand vitamin C or the relative differences between T-mobile and Verizon.

• Carefully limit our generalizations
o Avoid putting all people of a particular place and time into a single box. For instance, consider the statement, “Seventeenth century sailors were horny and spread syphilis.” Even though that statement contains a kernel of truth, it does more to create and perpetuate stereotypes than to shed light on the lifestyles, culture, and health risks of seventeenth century sailors.

• Avoid anachronisms
o McCoy on Star Trek (set a few centuries in the future) called twentieth century surgeons “butchers” because they used scalpels; likewise eighteenth century bloodletting was often condemned by these same butchers. These criticisms assess behaviors of historic individuals by standards unknown to them.

• Are aware of our own biases
o We attempt to judge people in the past by their own terms, not ours.
o We might go on to note, and even celebrate, the changes in mores, but we begin by considering people according to the standards of their time.

• Work from evidence
o Our statements about the past must be supported through artifacts (usually primary texts) from the past.

• Focus on
o Continuity and change
o Cause and effect
o Significance


*“Recurring nutritional deficiency diseases, including rickets, scurvy, beri-beri, and pellagra were thought to be infectious diseases. By 1900, biochemists and physiologists had identified protein, fat, and carbohydrates as the basic nutrients in food.” “Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (October 15, 1999), 906.

Zinn, Historiography, Weapons of History

At History is a Weapon a brief audit of the role of bias in history begins, "History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened." That much should be obvious, but is worth hearing from time to time. The audit offers quick entry into some of the central questions of historiography, and stands as the welcome page to a website that presents scanned versions of several texts, including A People's History of the United States. History is a Weapon describes itself as "an online Left reader focusing largely on American resistance history." I think that's an accurate assessment for a site that is a terrific resource.

I've added a link under "American History Links."

Notebook Artifact: Summer 1995

Written in a spiral notebook 28 June 1995, Fort Loudon Lake, Tennessee.

What we call history and what we call the novel are more recent than what we call the Columbian encounter. When Natives embrace writing and written genres, we cannot affirm that what they embrace is wholly Western because these forms emerged in a world deeply infused with economies and ideologies formed in contact with multiple non-European worlds. (Even the Renaissance and subsequent Reformation owe much to the deepening interchange between Christian and Muslim words that characterized the late-Middle Ages.) However, we might examine how “history” and the “novel” were formed as Western constructs during an imperial age, and how they must be reformed in our own and future ages. While American Indians were always present as the Other in history and the novel as we have received them, they now speak as agents who employ and transform these genres. Still, the Natives of today do no share the same world as their ancestors any more than Europeans and Americans share the same world as Europeans of the sixteenth century. Still yet, there is enough continuity with the past in present-day native communities that many writing as Natives offer perspectives that must be distinguished from the perspectives of European Americans.

American Indian fiction and American Indian history are deeply European American discourses. These discourses must be transformed by Natives, as well as by non-Natives writing about Natives, in order to more accurately render the worlds of the indigenes of North America—past and present. One location of transformation may be the construct that distinguishes “history” from “fiction”.

This is not to say that we must lose our ability to distinguish what is true or accurate from what is not. Rather, truth must be seen from other points-of-view. Truth may be situational, rather than empirical. It may be experiential, rather than objective.

I am not advocating that we abandon the practice of history, especially not ethnohistory and the new Indian history. I am advocating that the truth-claims of these genres of writing do not necessarily have priority over the truth-claims of fiction. In fact, certain so-called novels by contemporary American Indian writers, if not more truthful and more accurate than what we call history, at least offer necessary truths that cannot be accommodated within the constrictions of history as it is currently understood. It is possible, therefore, that some of the best work in American Indian history in our day is packaged as fiction, and is thus too much ignored by historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, who often believe they already understand these truths of fiction, too easily posit themselves as more enlightened than historians. Yet, without the groundings in material realities and the ability to step back from their subject matter that are second nature to the historian, they are equally restricted by their conventions of analysis. Despite a strong movement toward several forms of interdisciplinary multiculturalism in literary studies, the offerings of historians have been too much ignored. In taking fiction seriously as history, it is imperative that we remember the conventions of history as they have been received.

There remains a crucial difference between the food obtained by such human constructs as the atlatl, bow and arrow, gun, and slaughterhouse, and the food consumed by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in one of their imaginary meals. Too often, in extolling the truth-value of fiction, it is easy to forget the difference between the death of the Jim Loney of fiction and the many real persons who have died similar deaths.

Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images

Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Cortés’s Castilians fought from a long tradition of tactical adaptation based on individual freedom, civic rights, and a “preference for shock battle of heavy infantry” that “grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes,” and other distinctly Western traits that gave numerically inferior European armies a decisive edge.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 7.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land.
Zinn, A People’s History, 2.

Was there a middle class in sixteenth century Spain? What civic rights existed for Spanish peasants? Neither Howard Zinn’s emphasis on gross disparities of wealth, nor Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans offers substantive information concerning the European society that initiated the centuries long conquest of the Americas. The portrayals of American indigenes vacillate between prelapsarian hunters and farmers living in harmony with pristine nature and brutal, warlike savages. Likewise, sixteenth century Europeans are caricatures offered in fleeting images.

Zinn’s image of the desperate circumstances of the Spanish peasantry obscures both the existence of large commons in early modern Spain and clear evidence of rights of citizenship. David Erland Vassberg’s The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile: Mobility and Migration in Everyday Rural Life (1996) points out that commons were “under the jurisdiction of a powerful city, bishop, military commander, or noble lord” (7), but does not quite present the image conjured by Zinn’s word “owned”. Vassberg also supports part of Schweikart and Allen’s emphasis on civic rights. Sixteenth century Spanish villagers knew theirs.

Rural people of the day were keenly aware of their citizenship rights, locally and in federations. For example, in 1542 a villager testified that he was a native of La Bóveda, but was currently a vecino of Villaureña, and of the Tierra of the city of Toro (Zamora), where he had certain rights.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 7.

Vassberg also notes that diversity existed among Spanish villagers in different geographical areas from “independent landowners” to “landless wage-earners” (11). Zinn’s emphasis on disparities of wealth may hold true for Andalusian peasants, but not for Basque farmers. Schweikart and Allen’s tradition of civic participation finds further support in Vassberg’s text.

Since the High Middle Ages the monarchs of Castile had recognized the right of municipal self-government, and had accepted the principle (although they occasionally violated it) that local offices should be held by local citizens, with preference to the native-born. … The right to local self-government was regarded as the natural birthright of every Spaniard. We can see that in the actions of the conquistadores in the New World: one of the first things that they did everywhere was to set up municipal governments, following the Spanish model familiar to all of them. … Although they were divided by social and economic inequalities, rich and poor felt united by strong bonds of mutual privilege and responsibility.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 12-13.

During the Reconquest, “settlers moving into new areas were typically allotted lands; therefore, the norm in these medieval settlements was for vecinos to be adult male property-owners (Vassberg, 16). This practice seems to render Zinn’s 2 percent figure unlikely, although it seems a reasonable figure for feudal societies. It may be worth noting that an article claiming to be “the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement,” published in 2007 would make it unlikely that Zinn’s figures could be any more than a crude guess.* In any case, Zinn’s figure may be more accurate for the seventeenth century than for the fifteenth and sixteenth. There certainly was a polarization between rich and poor in Spain during its decline from preeminent power during the days of Columbus and Cortés. Indeed, migration patterns that resulted from conquests in the Americas were one of the contributing factors to the seventeenth century crisis that included urban decline, economic stagnation and ruralization, and consolidation of polarized class structures. These are central themes in The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-Century Spain (1994), edited by I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla.

The performance of the Castilian economy was thus [due to economic and geographic centrality of the new global economy] a crucial factor in the performance of all the other major European economies. For the first three-quarters or more of the sixteenth century Castile’s population multiplied, the arable was extended, agricultural production increased, the level of urbanisation rose, the manufacture of silks and woollens flourished in the great textile centres of Toledo, Granada, Segovia and Cordoba; wool exports remained buoyant until the 1590s, and traffic with the Indies until the 1610s. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century this expansion first petered out and then fell back on itself. The progressive downturn of the Castilian economy was arguably one of the triggers of the general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century, the mark of the shift of economic preponderance from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and the archetypical model of the ‘failed’ economy.
Thompson and Casalilla, Castilian Crisis, 2.

Spain’s initial success in the colonizing enterprise may have produced the opposite of its desired goal of extending national wealth. This lesson should give us pause when we think we comprehend our own long-term economic self-interest.

Academic Tribalism: Neglect of Spain

Americanist historians as a group often seem ignorant of Europe, although some take a few courses in European history as graduate students. In this ignorance, historians reflect the sort of knowledge that characterizes the United States population as a whole. We are a provincial people. But, historians of England, France, and Germany often are lacking appallingly in knowledge of Spain as well. Academic specialties in the past of certain nations generally develop through cultivated gaps in knowledge regarding others. Thompson and Casalilla note the effects of superficial analysis.

[T]he failure of the Spanish economy has in a long tradition that extends from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth been explained in terms of arbitrary government, a bad religion, the tyrannical Inquisition, reactionary hidalgo values, the wretched laziness of the people, the absence of a capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit and other failings of the national character, as much as in terms of objective economic analysis.
Thompson and Casalilla, Castilian Crisis, 3.

Why was Spain's early lead eclipsed by France and England, which became the dominant power? Schweikart and Allen, for their part, emphasize England’s “adoption of the joint-stock company as a form of business,” its greater openness to “risk taking and innovation,” and “property rights and political rights” that grew out of labor scarcity (15-16). England’s state sponsored pirates also played a significant role in retarding the growth of Spain’s American colonies (11-12), they suggest. Zinn, for his part, is less concerned for the differences among European colonizing powers than for their shared ideologies of supremacy over indigenous peoples.

However, in a strange twist of ideologically driven scholarship, Zinn’s greater attention to the works of Bartolomé de Las Casas does more than shelves of work by conservative writers to advance the idea that “concepts of equality and freedom” are central to European thought.

Even if the curriculum were confined to thought strictly European in origin, it would still present a rich variety of conflicting ideas, including the very concepts of equality and freedom from oppression invoked by those who would reorient the curriculum.
Statement of the National Association of Scholars

Conservatives claiming left-wing bias in the Academy chant this mantra while scholars focused upon the ideologies of European global hegemony delve into the writings of Las Casas. While Schweikart and Allen decry the “crescendo of damnation” (7) of Columbus and his heirs during the quincentennial, the 1991 publication Rethinking Columbus: Teaching about the 500^th Anniversary of Columbus’s Arrival in America offers a synopsis of Las Casas’s History of the Indies: “The Spanish Fight for Justice in the Indies” (82-83). Conservative pundits claim that liberation from slavery was a European idea, a point they allege left-wing scholars suppress, but Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) includes ten pages from the writings of Las Casas (35-44).

European Political History

The long road to American democracy as a fit product for export may have grown from seeds planted in ancient Greece, but there were many setbacks along the way. England’s thirteenth century Magna Carta was one episode, later muted by the tyranny of the Crown. Likewise, thirteenth century Spain showed more incipient democracy than would be true three centuries later.

There were early Reconquest towns and villages that functioned as direct participatory democracies: all the citizens of a place would meet in open assembly (concejo general de vecinos, or concejo abierto) to make governmental decisions. But with population growth, and the increasing complexity of municipal life, the open assembly was gradually supplanted by the governing council (concejo reducida, or cabildo). This council was increasingly dominated by the local socioeconomic elite, especially the hidalgos. The old direct democracies had largely disappeared by the mid-1300s, but they survived much longer in certain small and remote villages where universal poverty encouraged the maintenance of egalitarian customs.
Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 15.

Neither A Patriot’s History nor A People’s History offers sufficient detail regarding the worlds of colonizing Europeans to locate their partially accurate facts in a trustworthy narrative. The Spanish conquistadors and the Indians they subjugated lived in and produced a richly varied world that defies the gross generalizations of ideologically driven histories.

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* Mauricio Drelichman, “Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” The Journal of Economic History 67 (2007), 608-642.