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An Honor System for Historians?
Emma J. Lapsansky
| What are the responsibilities of today's scholars of history? How do we articulate those responsibilities? How do we monitor and sanction the behavior of those of us to whom our society has entrusted its classrooms, its media, and its museums, historic sites, archives, and other cultural institutions? How do we restore America's tarnished faith in professional historians? |
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Over the last several decades, we have witnessed dramatic changes in the way we conceive of, document, deliver, and define history. We even have a whole new vocabulary to describe what historians do. Cliometrics, oral history, public history, material culture, social history, docudrama, nuanced narratives, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities are concepts that would have been meaningless when Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed or when W. E. B. Du Bois helped set new standards for citation and documentation in his 1890s study of the Philadelphia Negro.1 |
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Today's scholar is often competing for the eyes, ears, and loyalties of a wide and heterogeneous audience. No longer writing only for the uniformly educated professional, today's academic historian often seeks to speak to anyone, with any background, who wants to know about the past. The advantage is the democratization of history—the discipline that helps to discern who and what we are. This democratization has increased the number of Americans who can see themselves, their families, and their communities in the historical narratives they encounter. Even the old-style museums—conceived of as philanthropic institutions to "uplift" the public, but often so arranged as to exclude or alienate much of that public—have been reconfigured to embrace concepts such as inclusive and diverse. The old-boy straitjacket that emphasized the heroism and nobility of white male leaders, while choking out women, children, and minorities, family life, workers, and the environment, has—for many writers and readers—expanded to embrace a more textured story in which the villainous, greedy, and debauched sides of our heroes are housed alongside their nobility, their children, their employees, their medical histories, and their sex lives in a dizzying kaleidoscope of historical texts, chat rooms, movies, museum exhibitions, mini-series, Web sites, historic sites, listservs, videos, theme parks, simulations, e-books, DVDs, electronic archives, historical reenactments, and online news delivery systems. |
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We have aimed to demystify what the History Channel calls history's mysteries, and many in our society are proud of our ability and willingness to take the courageous step of looking behind the mysterious and awe-inspiring veneers to uncover mortal beings with lofty ideals but with human failings. We have demonstrated our sophistication and our sturdy self-reliance by relinquishing our need for larger-than-life heroes, contenting ourselves instead with public figures who admit to being somewhat ordinary. We have raised informality to an art form. We have created a society of first-name familiarity, dressed-down Fridays, and undressed heroines. We have removed gloves and hats from women, ties and vests from men, and patent leather shoes from little girls because we have come to know that gloves may cover talons, ties and vests may disguise hearts full of corporate malice, and patent leather shoes may carry illicit drugs in false heels. Dignity and character, we insist, cannot be applied or seen from the outside; they must be cultivated from the inside, where they are invisible. External formalities, far from demonstrating these qualities, may actually obscure them. I was—and am—among those who refuse to be dazzled by gilt. |
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