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The Slate I'm In: Hubert Humphrey, Jesse Ventura, Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor, and Me
ANNETTE ATKINS
Despite being a state mandated requirement for elementary, secondary, and even some college students—and therefore, a teaching requirement for many historians—state history as a field has become historiographically inert. In this essay, I describe how I am trying to reimagine and rethink the genre, focusing on Minnesota.
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STATE HISTORY IS A FIELD BORN AND RAISED in the great state-making days of our country's past. The overarching state narrative traditionally focused on great individuals and showed political and economic growth and celebrated the bravery, ingenuity, perseverance, and marvels of the journey from a more simple past to a more complex and sophisticated present. These books honored the dead and systematically celebrated the first, the best, the most, the distinctive. With this parochial emphasis, state history has never been on the cutting edge of the discipline. Even so, hundreds of us teach it. |
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Minnesota history has been part of my teaching assignment for twenty-five years and I've actually liked it. It is simple to find local projects, easy to help the students connect to the material, and fun, too, to take up the history that surrounds us. In all of those years of teaching state history, however, I had never been happy with the choice of books. Three Minnesota history books are currently in print. William Watts Folwell's four volume version is packed with details, maps, and information that Folwell gleaned from the documents, but also from his own familiarity with many of the founding events and people of the state. Born in 1833, he finished the fourth volume in 1927, just before his 94th birthday.1 Theodore Blegen, an immigration historian, published a one-volume history in 1963 that, like Folwell's, offers a strong political history narrative, but, uniquely for its time, also brought in a lot of cultural and educational history.2 William Lass's 1977 book—500-plus pages shorter than Blegen and 1200-plus pages shorter than Folwell's—also focuses on political and economic history, but with a strong emphasis on the shaping power of the state's land and natural resources.3 I am a "new" social historian, however, and none of these books fits what or how I want to teach. |
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Just after Blegen's book appeared, an earthquake rent the historical landscape, an intellectual earthquake that transformed most fields of historical study. The civil rights, women's, antiwar, and other movements shifted not just the social fabric of America (and elsewhere), but also the intellectual foundations of historical (and other academic) work. Historians of women, African Americans, immigrants, of the poor, of laborers, and other groups developed a critique that began "Yes, but what about ...?" "New" historians in field after field asked new questions and interrogated traditional definitions of power, authority, and agency. Traditional historians had told their stories from the top down; the "yes, but ..." historians flipped that over. We explored sources, embraced theory, did a lot of counting so that we could learn about the past from the bottom up. The people at the bottom became not pieces moved around by larger forces, but guides to another way of understanding the past. Their stories made us confront patriarchy and genocide, the limitation of rights and liberties that existed in the past. Historians increasingly highlighted cracks in the American system. We didn't stop teaching the American history survey, but we did stop teaching and writing a single, dominant, national narrative: much to the unhappiness of state legislators, boards of trustees, some federal agencies, and sometimes, even our students.4 |
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