another note

I don’t know if anyone’s still “reading” here – in the age of RSS, I’m not sure what that means anymore – but I thought I’d point out that I’m posting again at no great matter. I might cross-post things here, but I might not. I was probably a little too ambitious in starting this blog.

housekeeping

I noticed that the maintenance I’ve been doing has sent all the posts back into the RSS feed. Sorry about that, but there’s no new content here.

Yet.

the loneliness of the academic

John McGowan has a nice post up at Public Intelligence about the isolation and self-doubt of young academics, and about his experiences just starting out trying to find a job and a publisher for his first book. (Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get a direct link to the post to work; go to the main page and scroll down to July 11th, 2006: “The Loneliness of the Young Academic.”)

Having found a tenure-track position after years of difficulty, McGowan writes:

I now had some vision of an alternative, so being once again on tenure track, still racking up the rejections, didn’t give me knock-down depression this time around. The first book got taken and I wrote a letter of thanks to the sweet man from Brown (Roger Henkle: I never met him and saw a few years ago that he had died) who read the manuscript and recommended its publication. The letter alluded to how grateful I was for his approbation because I had no way of knowing if the book was really any good, even though I thought it was. He wrote me back a very nice letter—and picked up on that note of isolation in my letter to him.

For McGowan, this isolation seems to have been directly related to his situation as a not-yet-established academic; after that first acceptance he

started in on my second book—and it was as if someone had waved a magic wand over me. I still got articles rejected from time to time, but now they were accepted more often than not. And I never had any doubt that the book would be taken. Yet it wasn’t as if I somehow knew how to do this now, or that I really thought my essays had taken some kind of quantum leap in quality. What was the difference? I don’t think I can say exactly. Yes, I now had a kind of confidence that came though in my prose. I had a “voice,” that mysterious thing that both means nothing and also means a tremendous amount.

For others, however, that sense of isolation and doubt can last on through the years, long after worries about finding a job, becoming tenured, or establishing oneself in the profession have passed.

Michael Kammen’s 1982 article “Vanitas and the Historian’s Vocation” (JSTOR)* opens with the discovery of such doubts where Kammen least expected to find them: in the person of Charles McLean Andrews, one of the biggest names in colonial American history in the early 20th century. Kammen quotes from a letter Andrews wrote to Max Ferrand in 1915 when, according to Kammen, Andrews was 52 and had been at Yale for five years after previously teaching at Bryn Mawr and Johns Hopkins:

Dear Max:

Of course I liked your letter. Who would not have liked to have something that made him feel that what he was trying to do was worth while. Expressions of interest in onesself or ones work are so rare in New Haven that I am almost tempted to have your letter framed. I get into the habit of wondering sometimes whether it is all worth the effort and the sacrifice and the drudgery. But I always come back to the one great solace that it is all to the good, and that whatever contributes to knowledge or to life is its own reward. Then I love it and that adds to my cares, lest I be doing that which is purely selfish because I am never happier than when I am at it. I am glad you liked the paper, and I am more glad that you told me you liked it. I liked it myself, and felt that it opened a lot of possible interpretations that had not been in the past a part of our thought of colonial history. I sometimes in my climbing think that I am looking on a new world of colonial life, and that in the past we have been living like cave men instead of searchers for the truth and the light. I keep at it, but it[is] all so slow and there is so much to know. I wonder whether I shall live out the doing of what I want to do. (1-2)

For Kammen, Andrews’ letter is a useful point of departure: it provides

a parable for the rambling reflections that follow in this essay. Andrews’s candor about his crisis of confidence is wonderfully refreshing. Haven’t we all felt as he did? Haven’t we all suffered self-doubt? And having achieved some goal–the arduous completion of a monograph, the presentation of a new course–haven’t we wondered whether it was really worth the expenditure of time and psychic strength at the expense of some other activity? Were we adequately appreciated? Was the effort itself properly understood? (3)

Not having completed a monograph or even a dissertation or article I can’t quite say that I have felt as Andrews did. To look back on these particular kinds of doubts is something I have to look forward to.

*Reviews in American History, December 1982.

comment once, comment twice

Already I’m getting what looks like spam, or at least some extremely irritating trolling. I’ve implemented a feature that says every commenter must have a previously approved comment. I believe this means that your first comment, if you have not yet commented, will be moderated, but that each later one will be approved.

I’m not entirely sure how that works, so bear with me as I figure it all out.

exceptable

What does [national] exceptionalism mean?

Is it a measure of degree? There’s distinctive, and then there’s even more distinctive: exceptional.

Agree/Disagree (please choose one): If you come up with a list of countries and compare them with each other, and it turns out that Country A is very distinctive, I suppose that makes Country A exceptional, except at the same time the act of making a list of comparable countries means that on another level Country A is not so exceptional as to be incomparable.

Statement (please mark only one blank per pair):

_Sometimes
_Often

the question of American exceptionalism

_exceptional?
_variation on a theme?

seems to produce scholarship that is

_most
_least

interesting for what it has to say about American history in general and

_most
_least

satisfying for the answer it gives to the the question: Is American history exceptional?

Update: Eric has a measured response here.

archiving

This may be a new blog, but I am not all that new to blogging (as some of you may know). To give more background to this blog, I’ve selected a few history posts from my other blog and posted excerpts from and links to the originals in the archives.

what comes naturally

It’s nice to see a bit of environmental history get reviewed prominently (as opposed to being confined to subscription/academic only publications): Neal Ascherson on The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn in the London Review of Books.

Particularly striking is this description of Frederick II of Prussia’s campaign to colonize the Oderbruch. It is a reminder that even into the 18th century European states were not engaged in border/territorial disputes only with other states: they were still in some cases trying to expand, integrate, and settle their own domains.

The imagery was warlike from the start. James Dunbar, from Scotland, wrote in 1780: ‘Let us learn to wage war with the elements, not with our own kind.’ Frederick II, looking out over drained marshes, announced: ‘Here I have conquered a province with peaceful means.’ It was in 1743 that he launched his grand offensive into the Oderbruch, but although he did not resort to the use of cannon, his ‘peaceful means’ involved widespread coercion, the militarisation of the labour force and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people living in the marshes.

In Frederick’s time, marshlands were regarded as sinister, useless places, breeding malarial vapours and sheltering not only dangerous wild beasts but primitive human beings beyond the reach of law. Today, we would treasure the lost Oderbruch as one of the marvels of Europe. On its way to the Baltic, the river frayed into countless shallow channels and lagoons, into swamps, shoals and muddy islands. Twice a year, it flooded up to ten or twelve feet deep, nourishing a dense cover of waterlogged bushes. Here lived ‘an almost unimaginable range of insect, fish, bird and animal life’, including wolves and lynxes. Blackbourn has the sense to rely heavily on the travel writings of Theodor Fontane, the most lovable and observant of German writers, who explored the drained Oderbruch in the 1850s and collected memories of pre-reclamation times. Fontane was told of the enormous shoals of countless species of fish, of pike hordes so dense that they could be scooped up in buckets, of crayfish which escaped the hot summer shallows to swarm in trees from which they could be shaken down like plums. And he wrote also about the old inhabitants. They were not Germans but Wends, Slavs who had survived in the marshes since the Germans colonised the fertile land almost a thousand years before. The Wends lived on mounds hidden in the swamp, their huts encircled by ramparts of cow-dung which kept out the floods and served as pumpkin beds.

Frederick put an end to all that. The marshes were drained, a new straight bed was dug for the Oder, its labyrinth of side-channels was blocked off, and miles of dykes were reared to keep the river in its place and protect the farms now being laid out with geometric precision across the Oderbruch. Thousands of German farmer-colonists were brought in and planted in little red-roofed farmhouses. The shy Wends melted away as the waters dried up. Fontane thought he could recognise Slavic headscarves in a few villages on the fringes of the Bruch. But the old life had gone.

The current condition of the Oderbruch, Ascherson notes, illustrates another of Blackbourn’s points: that places that are presented as pristine and natural are, in fact, often subject to numerous outside and human-caused pressures.*

Blackbourn ends his book where he began: in the Oderbruch. Since German reunification in 1990, a certain amount of ‘greening’ has gone on, and the Oderbruch is now often referred to as a place ‘where nature is still intact . . . a natural paradise’. But it is not. The quiet river is the old drainage-cut dug by Frederick II’s men, and the yellow carpets of helleboraster are a recent invasive species. Even the disastrous Oder flood of 1997, which inundated the cities of western Poland and almost overwhelmed the Oderbruch, had immediate causes which were human rather than natural: fresh deforestation and wetland destruction in the Czech and Polish catchment areas.

In his final chapter, Blackbourn reflects on the illusions attending human efforts to shape the environment. The Oderbruch, as it exists, is

hard to justify rationally, a small, thinly populated area that lies well below the normal water level of a river that is a permanent threat to its existence. After more than 250 years, however, this new land has acquired the patina of age . . . I would not wish it returned to the ‘wilderness of water and marsh’ that existed before the reclamation, even if such a thing were possible.

And it is not possible. A few pages earlier, he writes: ‘What is at stake here is not “untouched” or “intact” nature, but the question of “renaturing” the Oderbruch – what this might mean and how far it might go.’ The way towards wisdom, he implies, is to recognise that we cannot ‘restore’ nature, or stop it changing. Instead, we can for a limited time alter a landscape to suit our needs or our pleasure. After that, the landscape will take back the job of its own unpredictable alteration. The ‘conquest of nature’ can never amount to more than an armistice.

*This is a point that William Cronon made quite forcefully in the American context in his essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in the mid-1990s.

foci of history

Eric Rauchway has responded to my call for someone to make a case for an “increased focus on political history” with a nice post on the development of a synthetic understanding of the past that demonstrates both the relevance of political to social and cultural history, and the relevance of social and cultural to political history: “history from below — and above, and below”. Who knew you could say so much about Wyoming? (I kid, I kid.)

I don’t have anything to add to Rauchway’s main points – I’m not yet ready to jump into the “debate over political history” fray to that extent – but I do want to respond to the initial way he frames his response to my post by talking about the focus of history (if there be any) and presentism.

Foci of history

Here’s what I wrote (which he quotes):

I would like to see someone lay out, post by post, a case for an increased focus on political history, one that makes no reference to current political representation or affiliation, partisan or otherwise, but which demonstrates the continued and future relevancy of the subject no matter which way the electorate turns.

On the question of focus, Rauchway writes:

Let me note two things: first, I see that this is about an increased focus on political history, which is to say increased presumably over the present focus of the profession (stipulating that the profession has a focus, which I doubt, but anyway, let’s stipulate! it’s fun to say); second that it is about an increased focus, which is to say we’re not talking about increased quantity of political history being done, but about a sharper synthetic focus on the political in the broader view of the profession.

This may seem like a minor point at first, but it is an important one: I don’t think the profession has a focus. It has foci: political, social, cultural, geographical, etc. A good synthetic understanding of history will be built around these various foci.

(Incidentally, no, I didn’t have this particular image in mind when I used the word “focus” in my earlier post; however, as it expresses something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time with respect to historical synthesis, and which is relevant to this discussion, I’m employing it now. In retrospect, I should have been more careful with the word “focus”, as I do not intend for one to be imposed upon the profession.)

So by “a case for an increased focus on political history” I don’t mean a case that says, or implies, or is taken to mean, “Hey everybody! Stop what you’re doing and go focus on something else!” This is a danger that I’m hoping to avoid: I want to get away from the “x approach is tired and stale, let’s all try something completely new” rhetorical strategy. Rauchway is correct to note that I am thinking in synthetic terms.

At the same time, I do in fact also mean: an “increased quantity of political history being done.” This does not, I should emphasize, mean “political history for political history’s sake”; it simply means that if we’re going to move towards a broader, newer synthetic understanding of the past we’re going to have to know more about political history – and that’s going to require a fair amount of specialized work. Just as it will require continued work in social history, cultural history, and other specializations that are sometimes placed in opposition to political history. I hope that’s not controversial, but it may well be.

(How important one thinks this is may depend on whether or not one thinks that the shapes of our historical syntheses have taken on the correct forms relative to the various historical foci, so to speak. Is the history profession well-rounded enough? Is this image too elliptical? Sorry, most of what I remember of geometry has been obscured by bad puns. But I prefer this image to ones that refer to changes in scholarship in terms of cycles or fashions. Such images imply huge swings over time; I’m trying to think in terms of a shape that can endure over time.)

In other words, I’d like to see a case for political history that appeals to the broader profession, but which does not entail the precipitous decline or marginalization of other specializations. It may not be possible to create an increased focus on political history without leading to the kind of heavy institutionalization that came along with social history, for example, but one can hope for balance, even if the history of the profession suggests otherwise.

Partisan politics is not presentism

After discussing the meaning of focus, Rauchway writes:

Also, one has to argue for this without invoking what we usually call “presentist” concerns.

To a certain extent this anticipates the way I’d make my own case for political history: I’d probably steer away from particularly presentist arguments, not least because I’d want my case to be applicable to pre-20th century periods, as well as to histories written 20 or more years from now (one can dream). At the same time, I’m not against presentism and what I wrote:

one [a case for political history] that makes no reference to current political representation or affiliation, partisan or otherwise, but which demonstrates the continued and future relevancy of the subject no matter which way the electorate turns

does not rule out all presentist concerns. It mainly rules out ones that rely on arguments such as “We need to understand why party A keeps winning elections” or “why party B keeps losing elections”, as if the importance of political history depends on which party is in power: “Party B won? Then it’s back to politics, we need to understand this!” “Party A won? Cultural issues are key now!” These are caricatures, of course, but not entirely far-fetched. One could appeal to historians with Democratic affiliations by saying that a deeper historical understanding of politics could help them understand why the Democrats lost the last two presidential elections, but according to this logic a Democratic victory would make political history less important: this would not be a case for the enduring importance of political history.

On the other hand, a case for political history that said “we need to know more about the Constitution and executive power” or “about federalism” could easily be made according to presentist terms, but it would have an enduring relevance because the existence of the Constitution, the executive branch, and federalism do not depend on who won the last election (however tilted towards one party one’s current concerns may be). Presentist concerns will affect the nature of the political history being written but should have less of an influence over whether political history is written.

More specific to the context of the Cliopatria discussion* this is a way of trying to detach the debate over partisan diversity – generally referred to by the vague phrase “ideological diversity”, but often meaning “the distribution of faculty according to party registration data” – from the academic debate over methodological and pedagogical approaches to history. This is not to say that the two debates are unrelated, but the partisan debate has drawn so much attention already that it’s in danger of obscuring the academic one.

*I should note that the Timothy Burke comment I quoted in my first post is actually in reference to a different Cliopatria post, by Ralph Luker.

politics by other ends

I would like to see someone lay out, post by post, a case for an increased focus on political history, one that makes no reference to current political representation or affiliation, partisan or otherwise, but which demonstrates the continued and future relevancy of the subject no matter which way the electorate turns. Quite a strong case can be made for this, and indeed Timothy Burke even showed one way to do so during his recent comments at Cliopatria, but so far such a post or series of posts has not appeared.

Burke’s comment deserves to be highlighted, however, so I will excerpt it here:

If what you expect from political history is instead the antithesis of social history (as opposed to a new hybrid form) then I think you’re actually retarding the improvement of knowledge over time. I’m actually somewhat whiggish in this respect, that we know more and know better over time, that if you want to work on American constitutional history, yes, you also have to think about the social history which interrelates to it. What you’re right about is that the obligation has not been felt in the opposite direction by many of the orthodox figures of a certain generation of social and cultural historians–some of them felt safe writing out “dead white men”, and so on. But I think that’s changing, quite noticeably in many respects. The product of that change should not be a reversion to formal separations between rigidly maintained specializations, it should be a new hybrid practice which then generates new research projects and problems for discussion.

In that respect, if a given department (like UCLA) says, “We want to hire in cultural history”, I can well imagine that the person they hire might actually also end up being in a meaningful sense a political historian. For example, a historian who works on memoralization and public memory might well become someone interested in the state, in governance, in laws. A social historian might become someone interested in political elites, and from that interest increasingly move into sounding more and more like a traditional “political historian”. A cultural historian who researches the history of passports and cross-border travel in Europe might turn into a a scholar resembling diplomatic history, studying the formal relations between states and the inter-state institutions. And so on.

The pressure you need to bring to bear to allow those kinds of evolutions is not the kind you’ve conventionally hammered on, I think. It’s not, “Hire more formal specialists in a certain field”. It’s more in the cut-and-thrust of substantive criticism of what people actually write and teach. I think you affect scholars far more when you ask, “When you wrote about yeoman farmers, why did you rigorously leave out any discussion of gentry?” or “When you write about customary law in colonial Africa, why don’t you write about the political history of imperial governance?” When you complain about syllabi, I think the complaint is powerful only if you register it in tangibly canonical terms. Like, “How can you justify teaching a class on this subject without teaching X or Y book?”

Those are the complaints that sting scholars, and often spur them to change their pedagogy and their publication–or to feel a need to hire or solicit specialists who can address those oversights and absences. Or at the least, they spur the kinds of statements of refusal where you really can argue strongly against the close-mindedness and narrow ideological premises embodied in such refusals. That’s where you sort out people of good faith and people who really are out to reproduce a narrow orthodoxy: when you go to a specific point of exclusion in their work or their teaching and ask, “Is that deliberate? Why are you doing that?”

This is a case I may soon be making myself, if, contrary to what I thought I would do half a year ago, I decide to go back and write my dissertation.

The first task, however, will be to work out a viable plan for finishing the Ph. D. and then moving into a non-professorial position. It would be irresponsible for me to go back without preparing to make that transition – this is one of the many things I learned from reading the Invisible Adjunct’s archives – but if I can find a way, that’s what I hope to try to do. And if not, that’s okay, too; I’m ready to move on, if need be. Either way, I’ll know more in a few months.

And now I really must step back a bit from the blogosphere.

Update (2/2): See Eric Rauchway’s response here. And now there’s more from me here.

“a blank check for tendentiousness”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently reading through a collection of essays by Thomas Haskell. One of them, “Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge” is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the topic.

Haskell charts a moderate course in just about all of his essays: he is neither, as their detractors would call them, a “naive empiricist” nor is he, as their detractors would call them, an advocate of an “anything goes” approach to the world. Here he focuses on both the history and the present (as of the early 1990s, when he wrote the essay) of academic freedom, briefly sketching its origins and then critically examining whether or not the policy can still be justified on the basis of recent skeptical attacks on “truth” and “reality” (scare-quotes courtesy of skeptics). He is particularly critical of Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Hayden White, the implications of whose views Haskell argues actually undercut even the possibility of continuing to justify academic freedom to both academics and the general public.

As Haskell’s essay is not available online, I can only provide an excerpt here in the hopes that at least some of those involved in today’s academic freedom debates will read the whole thing if they have not done so already. The following quotation outlines what Haskell sees as the dangers of the tendency not just to try to insert politics into all aspects of academic life, but to see everything in terms of politics. It’s relevance, however, extends far beyond the confines of the academic world.

Some of the premises underlying academic freedom are open to serious objections, but the Victorians were not wrong to distinguish between motives more and less political. Those who see ominous political implications lurking beneath every bed and hiding behind every door, do so not because “that is the way the world is” – an impermissible formulation on their own premises, after all – but because of assumptions they deploy as a matter of choice. The skillful deployment of these assumptions is a kind of game. Foucault was past master and Fish a world-class practitioner, but anyone can play. Here’s how: First, acknowledge no limits to interpretation. Second, acknowledge no difference between intended and unintended consequences. Third, disregard all distinctions between acts of commission and omission. Fourth, firmly embrace (as if true) the logical fallacy of supposing that whoever is not for your cause is against it.

These axioms constitute a blank check for tendentiousness. Adopt them and you, too, will find that politics has expanded to fill your entire universe. Threatening agendas and scandalous breaches of responsibility will rear up on all sides; masks will fall away and sordid motives leap into view. Advocates of speech codes will be revealed (in the eyes of their opponents) as stealthy Stalinists; advocates of free speech will be revealed (in the eyes of their opponents) as covert bigots. Actions and inactions, words and silences, choices and accidents, things done and things left undone – all acts and omissions to act will testify to the universality of self-aggrandizement and the pervasiveness of political machination. Anyone who rebuffs your idea of a proper solution will be “part of the problem”; anyone who argues for an understanding of events more complicated than your own will be guilty of “blaming the victim.” Once these strategic premises are in place, responsibility will have been transformed from a concrete relation into a diffuse quality that floats freely through all relations, ready to be imputed to anyone, anytime. If it suits your needs, you can find fault with the person who sends his annual charitable donation to Amnesty International for not caring enough about world hunger, while simultaneously accusing the person who sends her contribution to Oxfam of being indifferent to torture – for from this standpoint, nothing evil “just happens.” Remember: good acts omitted are no less incriminating than evils committed; the indirect consequences of a person’s acts signify unconscious wishes, even if not conscious intention; moral liability extends as far as interpretation can carry it. And interpretation knows no bounds.

Once this perspective is adopted, Fish’s description is undeniable: politics floods the world, leaving, as he says, “no safe place.” It is a perspective from which academic freedom can be seen as an enviable political prize, well worth hanging onto; it is also one from which all efforts at justification have to be interpreted as self-serving rhetoric. Illogical though the assumptions underlying this perspective plainly are, their appeal today is great. Rieff may be right; we may already live in a culture that cannot conceive of acts that are not self-serving and can only define autonomy as the opportunity to use without being used. If so, the “safe place” the Victorian founders of the university tried to create under the banner of academic freedom is beyond any possibility of justification. One can only hope and trust that this is not the case.

the tides of fashion

In my more pessimistic moments I am sometimes inclined to imagine that the historical profession, instead of moving steadily forward through experience and self-criticism to deeper understanding and steadier, more penetrating vision, just swings aimlessly back and forth with the tides of fashion, like the ladies’ garment industry. Even before the turn of the century, though history was emphatically still part politics, and international politics perhaps its most reputable branch, the deeper thinkers were in revolt against narrative, and exhorting their colleagues to break its drowsy spell. Already a growing faction of social and economic historians were telling each other that the occupants of the more famous and better paid chairs were incapable of seeing beneath the surface to the real currents of history. Before long, some of them already occupants of those coveted chairs, the vanguard were saying loudly that military and diplomatic history were idle and frivolous when they were not positively immoral, and that even political history was no better unless it exposed the molding of movements and institutions by the vast impersonal forces of social change. By the 1920’s this fashion in history was everywhere triumphant, but already its champions could feel their heels being trodden on by hungry young men who despised materialism and positivism, Darwin and Dewey and Marx, and flaunted the mystiques of élans vitals and autonomously developing systems of ideas. Their turn came, and for the past fourteen years the dominant fashion has been some form of what we seem determined to call “”intellectual history.” ”… I have no guess as to how long the present phase may last or what will follow, but like women’s fashions, fashions in history have only a limited number of ways to go. Perhaps military and diplomatic history may come back again, especially if the cold war ever thaws, and war and diplomacy cease to be such painful subjects.

-Garrett Mattingly, quoted in Michael Kammen, ““Vanitas and the Historian’’s Vocation,”” Reviews in American History, Dec. 1982*

Note also that according to Kammen (in the article text) Mattingly wrote this in 1959. Its resemblance, however, to what people say today about historical “fashions” is striking.

Those with JSTOR access can read Kammen’s article online here . I recommend it to anyone with an interest in what historians think and worry about in their less-guarded moments.

Update: You can also find Kammen’s article (in edited form) in Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture. Kammen notes:

The appearance of this essay elicited more spontaneous reactions than anything else I have ever written, including books. One scholar summed up the tone of much of the correspondence that came in: “It speaks to my condition.”

*Full citation for the quotation (from Kammen’s footnote): Garrett Mattingly, ““Some Revisions of the Political History of the Renaissance,”” in The Renaissance, ed. Tinsley Helton (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 9.

specialization and its discontents (short version)

I’m putting together a longer post on the problem of specialization vs grand narrative in history, but with the end of the term coming up it may be a while before I finish it. In the meantime, I’ll just post a few thoughts here:

While I was trying to catch up with the discussion of Ross Douthat’s recent article about Harvard (and higher education in general) in The Atlantic, I came across this post by Kieran Healy from just about a year ago discussing Simon Schama’s criticisms of academic history (link via No Loss for Words). The discussion seems to have been started by Timothy Burke here, and then continued by the Invisible Adjunct here, before making its way over to Crooked Timber.

To sum up very briefly: Schama argues that academic history is too specialized and too obsessed with footnotes, and calls for a return to some golden age of narrative history-writing; Timothy Burke points out that broadly written histories aimed at the public could not be written without the detailed research that goes into monographs, but that historians indeed should nevertheless work on writing more “broadly communicative” histories; the Invisible Adjunct and Kieran Healy both point out the problems with idealizing some past “golden age”; the original posters and various commenters complain about the contraints created by the norms of graduate education and tenure and promotion committees; everything settles down after a while.

None of this is all that remarkable. The complaint is quite an old one: I could probably do a whole additional post on The Historian’s Craft summarizing what Marc Bloch had to say about specialization and synthesis. Indeed, Schama himself actually published a longer article on this very topic back in 1991. If you have access to the New York Times historical database you can read it here.

What is remarkable about this particular discussion, however, is that – though he was still critical of academic history – Simon Schama never actually said most of what the Independent attributed to him.

If you clicked on the link to the article, you probably noticed that it’s now available only to subscribers. As I am not one, I had to go back through Lexis-Nexis to look it up. (Sorry, Lexis-Nexis doesn’t seem to do permalinks. Update: Thanks to Sharon, you can find the article here.) While doing so, I happened to come across the following letter to the editor, dated one week after the original article (29 Feb 2004):

HEADLINE: LETTER: HISTORY HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER

BYLINE: SIMON SCHAMA

BODY:
Contrary to the headline “History just isn’t what it used to be: Schama slams academic historians”, (22 February), I most certainly did not “slam” academic historians in the interview I gave on the three- part BBC4 series Historians of Genius for which I provide brief introductions. In fact, when egged on to say something of this sort, I was at pains to say what I believe, namely that we are now in something of a golden age of narrative writing and that more history which combines scholarship of the highest level with narrative craft is being written than ever before. Antony Beevor was just one of a long list of names – including Cannadine, Colley, Brewer, Tillyard, Jardine, Ferguson – whose work I want to celebrate. Nor (since a leader in your paper took me to task on this) did I say anything, or indeed have anything, against footnotes; and in the same interview I went out of my way to sing the praises of Gibbon’s footnotes, which are things of stunning erudition, elegance and mischievous wit.

Simon Schama

Columbia University, New York, USA