|
|
|
Should We "Reconstruct" History?*
David S. Trask
Guilford Technical Community College, Jamestown, North Carolina
|
RECONSTRUCTING HISTORY is the first publication of the Historical Society, an umbrella organization created in 1998 for historians who are unhappy with current trends in the study of history and the role of historians in American society. Although some of the original impetus for this organization came from opposition to the 1994 National History Standards, the contributors to this volume have expanded their critique to include the challenges to scholarship and society that are posed by both postmodernism and multiculturalism. Postmodernists are stigmatized as those who make a "transparent effort to discredit history as a distinct intellectual practice" (p. 41). Multiculturalism is equated with the growth of cultural studies and is identified as part of a postmodern agenda to undercut modernist elitism (pp. 41-42). Many scholars share with the authors of this volume the recognition that the new millennium began in the midst of an era characterized by angst about this nation's understanding of the past and the type of historical knowledge needed to grapple with the future. Furthermore, many historians may respond favorably to the Historical Society's belief that scholars have thoughtlessly severed their ties to the public and abandoned their roles as interpreters of national experience and meaning. However, many, probably most, historians will not move from a shared concern over selected issues to support for the full critique of the history profession and its future as offered in Reconstructing History. Nevertheless, the concerns presented in this book are worthy of respect and extensive discussion. |
1 |
|
The book is a collection of essays, most of which have appeared previously, with lengthy, original introductions written by the co-editors, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. They lay out a belief that practitioners of historical study have abandoned sound methodologies for false, non-historical projects. Among the historians whose essays are included are Marc Trachtenberg, Eugene Genovese, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Russell Jacoby, Leo Ribuffo, Bruce Kuklick, Donald Kagan, Diane Ravitch, John Patrick Diggins, Sean Wilentz, and Martin Sklar. Because these essays span the decade of the 1990s and reprise well known critiques issued during the recent "culture wars," readers looking for new perspectives will be disappointed. Never the less, it is worthwhile to use the current cessation, permanent or not, of these curricular conflicts to reflect on the relationship between classroom teaching and the ideas and fears of these influential historians. The book is, after all, dedicated "To our students, custodians of the future of historical studies." |
2 |
|
In brief, the authors claim that large numbers of historians have been infected by postmodern literary theory and have abandoned the tenets of traditional historical analysis such as scientific objectivity, listening to the evidence, and writing in a style comprehensible for a general readership. They imply that the full range of ills that they believe are afflicting the history profession can be laid at the door of European literary theories that should simply be "returned to sender." These desertions from sound scholarship, according to the founders of the Historical Society, have undermined the value of history in the classroom while damaging professional history's relationship with society at large. |
3 |
|
The book presents this argument in five parts. "The Historical Society as a Critique and a New Ideal" offers the rationale of the founders for the creation of the Historical Society as an antidote to bad practices pervasive within the profession. These conditions receive fuller treatment in "History and the Contemporary Intellectual Milieu," which argues that historians have abandoned civility, evidence and perspective to pursue ideas drawn from literary theory and multiculturalism. The writers believe that historians have been especially lax in their alleged unwillingness to apply rigorous analytical standards to the history of minority groups, preferring, instead, to reinforce an ethos of victimization. "Meditations on the Practice of History" consists of personal testimonials of historians who argue for the value of following the rules of the "old" historical methodologies. Then, in "An Educational Mission: Standards for the Teaching of History," the contributors assert that the postmodern intellectual trends outlined in this indictment have trickled down to the classroom and, in the form of the National Standards for History (1994), are overwhelming good historical instruction. Finally, the editors offer a sampling of works that try to counteract the claim that contemporary historical questions require new historical methods and perspectives. The essays in this section, "Historians at Work," claim that traditional methodologies can address contemporary issues with insight. |
4 |
|
A fundamental weakness of the book is that the essays address selected intellectual trends in isolation from the society that has made many of these ideas both present and plausible. The book offers an incomplete portrait of present-day historiography and the world in which historians work. The key idea of Reconstructing History is the belief that many historians have abandoned "the ideals of objectivity and the honest use of evidence" (p. 3). The editors call for a return to traditional methods but then fail to analyze or systematically relate these methods to the works they criticize. Readers of this manifesto will look far and wide for evidence that supports the positions taken by the contributors. There are few instances where the authors move beyond straw man images of "bad" history to cite and engage specific instances of the practices they deplore. The argument portrays a history profession that was doing all things well until it was derailed by theories that seduced many scholars. Moreover, the blending of postmodernism and multiculturalism into a single intellectual outlook ignores the major differences that exist between the two kinds of ideas and the contexts in which they are articulated. The authors seem unable to discuss postmodernism or multiculturalism in terms that scholars familiar with the concepts would acknowledge as accurate. By the same token, setting up a grand dichotomy between different camps of historians grossly over-simplifies the state of present-day historical opinion. |
5 |
|
Where does this book stand in regard to teaching history? Does the crisis they portray bear any relationship to what is going on in the classroom today? The authors seem far removed from the realities of the world they seek to analyze; any sense of connection with the "lived" world of the classroom is absent from their writing. Yet at the same time, they are talking about a set of problems not entirely different from what I see among my students. On a certain plane, students possess their own kind of relativism. Though they have never read Foucault, Bakhtin, Derrida, or Takaki, students arrive in class, influenced by the media of their time, with a collection of attitudes and assumptions oddly similar to the theoretical mentalities that alarm the historians in this book. People today tend to rely heavily on contemporary values and experiences for their understanding of the past, often reducing the differences between the past and the present to costume styles. They instinctively judge past leaders according to what they, as 21st century people, think should have happened based on their own 21st century experience. It takes great effort to get students to ask, "How was it different in the past, and why did people do things differently?" They rely on a kind of innate logic rather than upon historical knowledge. For example, students often interpret the execution of Louis XVI simply as immediate retribution for the king's attempted flight from France in June, 1791--and as an individual act--rather than as the consequence of a political and social crisis that culminated eighteenth months later. Their judgement ends up as a kind of relativism whereby moral instinct holds back empirical or critical thinking.. |
6 |
|
Thus does a challenge in the present-day classroom parallel the problem that Reconstructing History poses. But the answer is not to return to the familiar methods and narratives underlying the historical writings of prior generations of scholars. Whether we use multi-cultural or traditional concepts, historians must focus both their writing and their teaching upon how to enlarge awareness of the past through marshaling evidence and analysis. What the authors of this book seem to propose could easily lead history teachers to indoctrinate their students rather than teach them skills of critical analysis. The editors see the media reducing students to "blank slates" for whom "Manicheanism comes easily" and who "instinctively gravitate toward a quasi-autobiographical history" (p. 45). However, quite to the contrary of reverting to an older history, effective instruction recognizes rather than condemns the ideas and understandings that students have accumulated from a lifetime immersed in electronic media. One of the main problems in present-day college history teaching is that faculty know little about the world-view of their students. School teachers, however, have had to come to grips with the ahistoricism, the relativism, and the individualism among their students. Thus it is critical that any serious effort to address the position of history in American society must include insights from the classroom. We can best resolve the fears about history teaching which permeate Reconstructing History by listening to classroom teachers whose daily activity places them at the intersection of history and some of the most profound assumptions of American life. |
7 |
|
* Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds. Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xxii, 377.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for
personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce,
publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or
sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any
way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part
without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|