Framing History

Kevin Gannon, who blogs under the pen-name 'The Tattooed Professor', recently wrote a post suggesting that, at least as far as the teaching of US history went, we should think about framing it in a 'continental approach'. He contrasted this with the traditional narrative describing the advance of the frontier from the east coast, which disregards such useful facts as the settlement of St Augustine in Florida by the Spaniards before the Pilgrims arrived, or even the apparently radical notion that the American Indians got here first, and went from northwest to south and east.

While it is an intriguing as opposed to a silly idea, I'm going to need more convincing that it is a good one.

Gannon's agenda becomes apparent when he characterises the traditional narrative teaching of the history of the United States in a rather negative light:

...it imprisons us in a nationalist framework of analysis without our even realizing it. If we approach US history as “the history of the United States as a distinct national entity,” we adopt all sorts of implicit assumptions about what is significant, what is historical–indeed, even what is human.... We may not see it, but we work from the same agenda that the most militant slaveholders, Indian-hunters, and xenophobes pursued. If we norm the “nation,” all else becomes abnormal.

The problem here is that Gannon is starting from the point of rejecting the traditional foundation of all historical study, not merely that of slaveholders and xenophobes. The Western tradition of historical scholarship is rooted in exactly the adoption of implicit assumptions about significance that will exclude people from the narrative, even if they had some relevance to it. I could go back to Herodotus or Thucydides to illustrate this point, but instead I'll stick with the English-speaking world and look to Bede.

Bede's preface to his his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, addressed to King Ceowulf (ruler of Northumbria, Bede's home in the northeast of England), refers to the monarch's 'eager desire to know of the doings and sayings of men of the past, and of famous men of your own nation in particular' [my italics]. Bede's understanding of 'nation', however, is rather different to ours. Bede's nation encompassed all those who spoke English, including people who lived in Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Mercia, distinct kingdoms each. Despite that quite explicit assumption that he is writing about his nation, Bede manages to race through about seven hundred years of history of his 'continent', in this case the island of Britain, in a few pages.

But it is only a few pages. Because he writes an ecclesiastical history, Bede is not much concerned with a pagan pre-literate history he cannot access, nor with the interaction of the Roman province of Britannia with the rest of the empire. He devotes more space to St Alban than to the emperors Claudius, Severus or Constantine, who in different ways all had claims on great significance in the history of Britain. Yet St Alban and St Germanus, important to a history of British Christianity, remain minor figures in Bede's narrative. He is writing about the English, and so his ecclesiastical history really begins with the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury, who sought to convert the pagan Angles and Saxons. Would Bede's account of the English people and their church been improved by integrating a longer narrative about British Christianity? Probably not, because Bede's interest was in how things came to be, not how they ought to be. He includes those interactions between the two he thinks are important to the history of English Christianity.

Gannon's proposal would be an excellent one for a course about the United States in North American history, but it defeats the objective of teaching US history. Indeed, I don't quite understand Gannon's resentment of a nationalist framework. It was exactly this pursuit of a nationalist framework that did much to advance the causes of African-American and American Indian history. In those cases, though, the nationalism was of those peoples and, at least in the case of the former, stopped short of embracing separatism. Gannon's course would undermine the very concept of the United States as a polity capable of addressing external forces because it reduces the polity to a hateful elite. Indeed, it would assist those forces that are creating our future world of networked global nodes overseen by a corporatised transnational elite. Polities like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica and Guiana are the vehicles by which ordinary working people have some hope of influencing this global elite on their behalf. Besides slave-holders and Indian-hunters, that US history includes other aspects that should provide food for thought to progressives like Gannon. The United States is also a history of oppressed white workers, in the indentured servants from the British Isles who laboured in the fields beside Africans in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia. It is a history of religious liberty, whether of the Pennsylvania Dutch who found sanctuary outside of Europe but within the dominion of a Hanoverian monarchy or Mormons moving teleologically westwards. It is a history of resistance to a racist political structure. These people are just as much part of a nationalist framework as the villains listed by Gannon. History courses are the major means of constructing a coherent political identity from people who might care to look beyond red, white, black and brown.

Indeed, if we are going to pin labels on people, why can't we accuse the American Indians of being eco-terrorists for contributing to extinctions, of being anti-immigrant and being slave masters themselves. It just becomes an absurd game influenced by politics rather than scholarship. It is systems, not people, for historians to hold to account in this context. What we need to do is acknowledge our assumptions and understand why they are necessary, rather than throw out old assumptions for new ones.

Back to Bede, to whom I will give the last word. He goes on, after the quote I cited earlier, to give some good advice to all practitioners of history, although let us excuse this faithful religious his eighth-century assumptions about morality -- 'For if history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good: or if it records evil of wicked men, the devout, religious listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse and to follow what he knows is good and pleasing to God.'

[Quotes from the Penguin Classics edition of Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price.]

Plants to seeds or seeds to plants?

Ira Chernus, who blogs at History News Network, takes a look at the idea that this year sees the fiftieth anniversary of 'The Sixties'. He uses this to make a springboard to a broader notion that historical scholars need to have a clear idea in their head about how to define an era under examination. Chernus points out that for most Americans 1964 wasn't much different to 1963, although the seedlings that would carry the blossoms that characterise 'The Sixties' had sprouted sturdily in 1964. It is simply a matter of, in retrospect, making the connections. Chernus argues that this matter of connections, however, is crucial to historical understanding. He proposes that while from our perspective The Sixties can be seen as plain as day, people at the time were largely unconscious of the change, and that in writing a history of The Sixties, the presence of this consciousness is important. He effectively says that one can't have The Sixties without people knowing they are living in The Sixties. I had already drawn similar conclusions while I was researching my original dissertation topic, and it represents one of the reasons why I turned to a different (although in my mind related) subject. I draw a different conclusion, though, about what this means if historical scholars want to write about a phenomenon that the public broadly understands as 'The Sixties'. The fiftieth anniversary of my 'The Sixties' occurred a few years ago, and my 'The Sixties' ends a little bit after the time Chernus seems to be suggesting they begin. But that's not the big lesson I draw from Chernus' post. For me Chernus is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the way historians can approach their subjects. I first noticed this in relation to John Higham's estimable Strangers in the Land, a book I view nonetheless as deeply flawed. Higham structures his book around the Immigration Act of 1924. This is the end of his story, and he tries to show all the seeds that sprouted to brought Americans to this. I'm not really willing to connect this piece of legislation as closely to the Nativist movements of the mid nineteenth century, one of the plants in Higham's anti-immigrant garden. As a consequence of pondering Higham's work, I question a 'looking back' approach to history. The various historical plants that grew into mid-nineteenth century Nativism did not all lead to the 1924 Immigration Act. In fact, I would argue, very little of mid-nineteenth century Nativism has much to do with later legislation, or even with today's political crisis over immigration, which afflicts the two main pillars of the Anglosphere, Britain and the United States. And, in the light of this, I concluded it is much better to start from the seed, and trace its growth, than to view the blossom, and look down for its roots. For me, a construct such as 'The Sixties', is a useful starting point as a teaching tool, or a marketing device, but historians should undermine the validity of these constructs for the purpose of understanding the past. They belong to the dying age of the weekly newsmagazine.

Lava me, Domine, ab iniquitate mea?

The messy truth is that a country’s economic specialism is, if not ingrained, then certainly the expression of its particular history, culture and circumstances. It is path-dependent, and hard to change with anything as temporal as public policy. Political maturity lies in recognising that Britain’s specialisms are in services, especially banking, and some sophisticated corners of industry. Its competitive advantages are openness, ease of doing business, world-class universities, the English language and – here is the warning to Westminster’s increasingly hectoring and interfering politicians – a lack of ministerial caprice.

That's from an opinion piece that appeared in the Financial Times last week. What it presents is a properly conservative understanding of public policy. Before more radical groups in the United States hijacked the word 'conservative', it was broadly understood in the English-speaking world as a political stance that recognised change was an inevitable fact of life, but that change could be channelled, rather than dammed. Gradually, as change flows around the landscape, natural erosion alters shapes. Treating change as water, rather than as a shattering earthquake or volcanic eruption, limits the stress on the surrounding built environment. Even so, I find the article imperfect. The fact is, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 challenged the structure into which the British economy had been shaped during an era that began with the rise of the EuroDollar market, and really took off with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. The water-levels were rising, but policymakers in Britain neglected to construct all the requisite barrages and weirs needed to deal with the coming flood.

But, continuing this blog's move away from 'war' and towards culture, the article does suggest that Cultural History is a guide to big issues of public policy. One could argue that the contrasts between the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Roman Church in Ireland go some way towards explaining the different attitudes towards the European Union in those countries. Scotland's presbyterian national church keeps much closer to its European models than England's. The English were less keen to let go completely of elements of the Catholic church and made for themselves a hybrid that foreshadowed the cultural hybridities of the passing Post-Modern Age. This Post-Modern movement of hybrid forms was one that English popular culture stood in the forefront through its musical contributions. The American media are noticing a similar process has been going on within their own country, a process that is highlighting an obsolescent perspective on racial problems, but once again calls into question the nature of a cultural entity called 'America'. (As if Americans could ever escape questions of their essence.)

For historians, the problem is that while History is lived going forwards, History is written looking backwards. In looking at how hip-hop culture is used by non-blacks, it at least superficially resembles the familiar 'appropriations' of White America, going at least as far back as Minstrelsy. Only time will tell if that is indeed the case, but applying the traditional concerns about 'appropriations' may not itself be helpful. It certainly did not readily apply to the white English working class males who gave us 'pop music'. If the old racial system is eroding, there is the potential that a new hybrid is emerging, one that could be more fair to all participants.

And, while Janan Ganesh is quite right to argue that Britain's enduring history of a dominant financial sector is not actually a problem to be fixed, but as a crucial part of the solution, he is wrong to highlight politicians as capricious administrators breaking with British traditions. They are responding to a real demand for changes that may, in fact, be impossible to deliver without creating some kind of 'Church of England' hybrid.