What's Love Got to Do with It?
A New Turner Thesis

Virginia Scharff

Virginia Scharff Forty-seventh President of the Western History Association. Photo courtesy of Annie Swift.
In this essay, I worry that we train professional historians to write safe books about small topics, even as we have an obligation to try to write interesting, well-crafted, important books. But to write those books, we need to draw on emotional as well as intellectual resources, namely, bravery, joy, and love. I use the example of the historian Fawn McKay Brodie to illustrate both the risks and the rewards of taking on big, difficult subjects in history.
Lately, I've been wondering. What happens to history graduate students? They start out with enthusiasm and creativity, and by the time we're done with them, they have become grim drudges, slogging out their dissertations with dread and rage in their bones and the edge of hysteria in their voices. It's horrible to watch the transformation. Smart, winning, funny people, set to the tasks of mastering the literature of, say, western history, and then of producing an original piece of scholarly work, begin to fray at the edges. It's not the archive that does it to them. They love the research, the finding out of lots and lots of things about whatever it is they're planning to write about. And they do find out lots and lots, and lots and lots of things.	1
Then they have to write. Writing anything is hard, but writing history imposes its own particular set of difficulties. In recent years, we have done a job on the notion of truth, have questioned deeply whether there actually is such a thing, whether we can even know whether there is such a thing. But history, I'm afraid, depends on our willingness to go ahead and bravely decide that you're going to tell a story that is, as far as you can ascertain, true. While you're writing history, you have to keep stopping and looking things up, to make sure that you're telling the truth.	2
Not only do you have to say things that are true, to talk about things that really happened, but you also have to convince other people that what you're saying is true and worth knowing. This is, as many of you can attest, another hard thing to do. It slows you way down, sucks the juice out of your sentences, drives you crazy with the things you don't know and can't say. I may be the only person here who has been tempted, at a moment when a convenient fact goes missing, to simply make stuff up. I indulge this compulsion by writing that other stuff: fiction. But I don't call my novels "histories," and I'm not trying to pass off those yarns as true stories of nefarious doings in the fine town of Laramie, Wyoming.1	3
Writing history is different. Historians don't have to swear an oath to tell the truth, but we might as well. Instead, we have a conscience, helped along mightily by the fact that, if anybody reads the stuff we churn out (and we hope they do), the readers will include people who know more about some of the things we're writing about than we do, along with a few people who have a predilection for checking up on us, just to make sure. Indeed, if you don't start out writing history with a conscience, publishing can induce one.	. . .