Professional Historians: Thoughts on the Battle for Public Perception

Tags

academia, historical thinking, historical writing, media, public history

Last Saturday afternoon, I arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in a great mood. I’d spent two days at the annual conference of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. It’s perhaps my favorite academic gathering: the people are friendly, the papers always prove fascinating, and the plenary sessions highlight promising new ideas in the field.

I left the conference feeling optimistic about the future of the historical profession.

Then, passing an airport bookstore, I saw a large display featuring this book:

In the interest of full disclosure, let me note that I haven’t read any of Kilmeade’s books, nor do I plan to do so. But plenty of folks are picking up the latest history book by the Fox & Friends host. Today, Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans is the #19 book on Amazon.

Kilmeade’s former Fox News colleague, Bill O’Reilly, has staked his professional identity on his status as “America’s Bestselling Historian” since he was fired from that network earlier this year.

Ordinarily, thoughts of these folks writing history would inspire only mild annoyance. But the stature enjoyed by non-professional historians took on a new urgency on Monday. White House Chief-of-Staff John Kelly praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and he blamed the civil war on “the lack of an ability to compromise.”

Kelly’s interpretation has been sufficiently discredited elsewhere that I need not belabor the point.

But what bears repeating is the fact that the popularity of history books written by non-historians — and the corresponding lack of popularity of professional scholarship — contributes to the existence of a culture where large numbers of people accept Kelly’s proposition.

So what is to be done?

While it’s perhaps unfair to make historians responsible for a larger cultural problem by which many Americans have a tough time dealing with facts, it strikes me that there’s more we can do. Some of these observations are not especially new, but they carry a new urgency this week.

Write About Engaging People
Professional historians are often urged to tell more stories; in other words, to spend less time explaining and analyzing, and instead to write compelling narratives. That’s good advice, and by and large I think we’ve gotten better about heeding it.

But I think there’s a second piece of the puzzle: historians also need to spend more time writing about people. Audiences appreciate history that tells stories of people’s lives.

I’ve given Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club as a gift to several non-historians. Although it’s a work of intellectual history and not a tale of battles and conquests, people I’ve given it to have really enjoyed it. The reason is that Menand does a brilliant job centering his study on actual people living real lives. Far too often, it seems, historians use drop individuals in and out of our narratives at breakneck speed only to prove a point.

Avoid Nuance for Nuance’s Sake
“What caused the Civil War?” “Slavery.”

If there’s one good thing that’s happened this week, it’s that professional historians have been pushed to refute Kelly with a clear, concise answer. But this is something that historians all too often fail to do. By virtue of our professional training, we’re often quick to temper clear-cut claims in favor of nuanced arguments. Sometimes nuance is necessary. Other times, though, it needlessly muddles our arguments and proves off-putting to lay audiences.

In some excellent advice to historians seeking to write op-eds, Nicole Hemmer of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, noted the importance of scaling back on “hedging” and avoiding getting “too in the weeds.”

One wonders what our books and articles might read like if we adopted this advice more generally?

Start Caring About Readership Metrics
I suspect this point will prove the most controversial with academic historians. All too often, readership has been a secondary consideration in academic publishing. Sure, it’s great to have a lot of people read one’s books and articles. But the primary purpose of publishing hasn’t been to get readers. It’s been to check boxes on the CV for job searches, tenure, and promotion.

One of the speakers at the U.S. Intellectual History conference offered the provocative suggestion that historians should pay more attention to — and talk about — their sales numbers.

I think this is right. In our current political and cultural climate, we don’t have the luxury to enjoy scholarship for scholarship’s sake (nor do as many professional historians care about things like tenure given the state of the academic profession). Not everything should come down to sales metrics, of course. But it’s time for professional historians to start caring whether we’re reaching an audience or not.

Until we do, we’ll have ceded the popular conception of history to the likes of Brian Kilmeade and Bill O’Reilly.

 

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“Why don’t historians teach…?”

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical thinking, KKK

Over the weekend, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza dipped into a familiar narrative well: “Did you know the Democrats were the party of the Klan???”

Three major Democrats—Prez Harry Truman, Justice Hugo Black & Sen. Robert Byrd—were in the Klan; the GOP has no record that compares to this pic.twitter.com/rMxw4TCE6C

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

When historians said that we knew the complex history of the Klan and the major political parties, he asked why we weren’t teaching this true fact about how the Democrats were the party of the Klan. When we said we were teaching the complex history of the Klan and the major political parties right now, in classrooms across the country, he said clearly we weren’t or everyone would know this true fact about how the Democrats were the party of the Klan.

He basically challenged Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who studies the history of race and Christianity in the American South, to some kind of historical duel, and then spent the whole weekend railing against leftist, “progressive” historians.

 

I had a whole post written out about how D’Souza’s “method” of historical interpretation is both invalid and makes no sense (either things change over time or they don’t, and if they don’t, there’s no such thing as history!) but I don’t need to get trolled for all eternity, so instead I’ll make a few points that bear repeating.

Change happens. Context matters. Words mean different things at different times. That’s at the root of historical analysis. D’Souza tries to pretend they don’t, and that’s his whole angle – that historians are playing word games. But simply by virtue of saying one definition of a word from a particular historical moment is the right one, he’s acknowledging the change while trying to deny it any meaning. [Historians do like playing word games in our spare time, though.]

Historians don’t just teach facts, they teach interpretation and analysis of evidence. Some people don’t like that, and call it politics, or intellectual mumbo-jumbo, or political correctness. It’s not. It’s the discipline of history.

When someone says “Historians don’t teach this!” you should consider whether they’re just mad that historians don’t teach the interpretation or narrative they want. When someone says “Historians don’t teach this!” you should also consider whether that person has seen the inside of a history classroom recently.

If all it took to unsettle a popular but incorrect belief about something was a few lectures in high school and college, that would be great. That isn’t the case, though. Do most of us understand probability properly? No, and that’s without it being treated like a political football like the stuff D’Souza’s talking about. Just because someone is talking about the past doesn’t mean they’re doing history. You should consider whether maybe they’re just trying rile people up to sell a book.

If anyone has any questions if/how/why historians teach specific things, we’re happy to answer them.

 

 

 

Slack chat: Charlottesville

Tags

civil war, historical thinking, KKK, monuments, narratives, reconstruction, slack chat, slavery, White supremacy

Erin Bartram: Any ideas for how we want to frame this/limit it? So it doesn’t turn into a collective primal scream?

Chris Bouton: I don’t really have any ideas in terms of starting off, we can talk about the response or the protest itself.

David Mislin: I dunno. I’ve been at collective primal scream since Tuesday.

Erin: Is it worth talking about the difficulty of talking about it with white Americans?

I say this because yesterday I just had a moment of “F*ck it, I can’t just make the same arguments with the same evidence over and over for you.”

David: Yeah, though I guess I’d modify that slightly. There are plenty of white Americans it’s easy to talk about this with. The issue is (like everything else, it seems) no one is willing to reconsider their position.

Chris: Why don’t we use this as the jumping off point.

I’d add to David’s point and suggest that the unwillingness of people to reconsider their positions speaks to a greater truth about dealing with human beings in general. Rational argumentation and evidence won’t convince everyone because many people don’t understand the world that way.

David: I think you’re right, Chris, though I also think the current political polarization in the country has exacerbated the phenomenon.

Chris: And that’s frustrating for people like us, who are trained in critical thinking and believe in its value.

I’d agree on the polarization issue as well.

Erin: That the evidence-based arguments don’t work for the discussion around the Confederate monuments is, to me, what reveals the deeper issue. There’s no way to say German Jewish kids shouldn’t have to go to the Goebbelsgymnasium but black American children should have to go to Robert E. Lee Middle School that doesn’t come down to “one of those causes was bad and one of them wasn’t.”

Chris: The monuments speak to that “Deep Story” that I keep harping on–and for good reason, I think it has a lot of explanatory power. That also highlights the different ways in which the Germans and Americans confronted their pasts. The Germans remembered and made it a societal impetus to learn from it. Americans erased it and constructed a new narrative that absolved everyone of blame. The Lost Cause has had a long reach in American History, Last year, during the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton referred to Reconstruction in terms of the North punishing the South.

David: That’s the critical point, I think. And to historians it’s not especially surprising, but I think most Americans would be stunned by how much the narrative about the Civil War changed in the span of two decades.

One of the things that strikes me as someone who writes about the late 19th century is that you see these people who literally change their tune in their life. You’ll read their autobiographies from c. 1900 and they’ll talk about how they always thought the Civil War was a mistake when in their letters from the 1860s they were cheering for it.

Erin: I think those switches are often baffling to people, to the point that they don’t believe them, or don’t believe they happen “naturally.” See also: changing views of Indian land ownership.

David: I’m still surprised by them myself.

Erin: Because people are so sure you could never “evolve” like that. They’re sure they never would.

Chris: I’m not really surprised. Guess I’m too cynical.

David: I should clarify. I’m not surprised that people evolve; I am a little surprised by these particular people evolving given their other commitments. But that speaks to Chris’s point about how potent the Lost Cause was.

Chris: Gotcha.

I’ve been thinking of Charlottesville in terms of confronting the Lost Cause legacy, and that it’s taken over a century to begin the process of dislodging it from the public sphere.

David: Yeah. I guess what’s weird to me about all of this is that it doesn’t seem like most Americans have given a second thought to the Confederacy. People are attached to these monuments. Because history. But if you asked them, they’d have no affinity for the figures depicted or the Confederacy.

Erin: Yesterday I saw a clip of Chuck Todd having a revelatory moment about this, saying “Wait, how did I just think it was normal to have statues of traitors around.” You thought it was normal because it was normal. THAT’S WHY WE CALL IT NORMALIZATION, CHUCK.

Chris: Status quo bias?

David: Ah, yes. Chuck Todd’s moments. There have been a lot of those this week.

Erin: (We’d call them an “aha” moment in the classroom, which is where they should happen. You shouldn’t be having them live on air on your own show.)

David: (Sorry for that aside)

Chris: Asides are welcome. We spent an entire chat deconstructing David “Restrained Masculinity” Brooks.

I think part of the issue is that since most people don’t think too much about statues, they assume that they’re there for a good reason. After all, who puts up a statue to something bad? So you have to overcome that initial bias.

Erin: My town has one statue. It’s a temperance statue. Statuary mistakes were made.

But that’s a good point. It parallels the idea that people have that if something’s appeared in print, it must be real and valid, because clearly someone reviewed it.

Chris: Right, because our human brains are inherently lazy and they want things to make sense. And that answer is clearly the most satisfying one.

Erin: It’s makessense stop

Chris: I’ve been rereading Thinking Fast and Slow, so that’s also been in my head a lot. And I think the book’s insights are useful for dealing with stuff like this.

Erin: This sort of gets us to the question of how, as historians and (hopefully) decent people, we “start” conversations. Not conversations with Klan members, but conversations with white people who consider themselves well-meaning, but who hold the views of white supremacy but bristle at the thought of being called racist.

I think we as historians struggle because to us, it’s such a complex matrix, and there’s an avalanche of evidence, and it sometimes all comes tumbling out at once.

But can it be helpful just to get people to think about what “the Confederacy” was? For the first time?

Chris: We’re also dealing with different definitions of racism.

David: Perhaps it’s being avoidant of the deeper issue of race, but I think framing the initial discussion around the question of loyalty/betrayal to the nation is a good starting point, back to the earlier point about why we have statues to traitors.

Chris: As academics, we take a broader and more inclusive definition that not only includes racist acts, but institutional structures as well.

I’d agree with it about avoiding the deeper issue of race.

David: I’m hesitant to go there, because I feel like the statues are a symptom of a deeper problem that isn’t about them in particular. But perhaps it’s a way in to a deeper conversation. Get people thinking about Confederates as traitors, then get them thinking about why the Confederacy seceded.

Chris: That’s a good way to think about it. They’re the entry point into a deeper reckoning with the Lost Cause ideology that millions of Americans think of with pride.

Erin: That’s where people either own it or pull up short – the realization that defending Confederate “heroes” means that you don’t think what they did was wrong. I think that approach can work with some of the “it’s just history, I never really thought about it” crowd.

David: As I sit here, I’m actually thinking about how I’ve taught the Civil War, and realizing that I don’t make a big deal about secession itself. But that’s really the crux of it: I feel like we think about civil wars as wars over the future of a country. But the Civil War started with secession. Maybe that’s something that we should make more of? (and by we, maybe I just mean me?)

Erin: People say “they’re American veterans!” It’s instructive to remind them that these men died under the flag of another country. Put up all the monuments you want in the cemeteries of the Confederate States of America.

Chris: I don’t know how more times I’ll have to say it, but Lee committed treason. He was an officer in the US Army and resigned his commission to take up arms against the United States. That’s treason, pure and simple.

That’s an aside.

Erin: I mean, it’s not, because it leads to another common response that we have to grapple with: “Well, he was defending his state.”

Chris: Which is a pretty weak argument because there were plenty of Southern-born officers who fought for the Union.

David: Yeah, though I can see how that argument would resonate with certain people.

Chris: The defending his state is an argument about loyalty and we all like to think of ourselves as loyal.

David: But I also think that people can understand misguided loyalty.

Chris: And in the case of misguided loyalty, he can be forgiven for that.

“We’ve all made mistakes.”

Erin: And it furthers the “it was about states’ rights” argument.

David: I mean, if people need to think of Lee as a tragically misguided figure who was blindly loyal to his state with its abhorrent system of slavery, I could live with that.

It’s not ideal, but it’s also not deserving of a statue.

Chris: That last point is the most important one.

Erin: And it speaks to the same low bars for heroism we see today. No one should be applauding the CEOs of that dumb council.

Chris: Right, they did the bare minimum.

David: Yet they did more than the Evangelicals!

(another aside)

Chris: Yes, they did.

Erin: I mean, even in David’s scenario, Robert E. Lee was privately dismayed, furrowed his brow, and voted through the cabinet nominees anyway.

David: And tweeted his reservations!

Erin: And much like today’s GOP heroes, his dismay was false. He owned slaves, they own and benefit from the system they tut-tut.

And that’s a *charitable* reading of the Lee myth

Chris: He’s the Marco Rubio of the 1860s?

Or is he the Mitch McConnell?

And as David said, even under that favorable reading, he’s still not worthy of a statue.

Erin: Maybe he’s just the 1860s John Kelly.

David: I was going to say John McCain.

Chris: I was thinking about McCain, but McCain’s vote against the health care vote complicates that a little bit.

Erin: I still want to punch a hole in a wall rather than have another one of these conversations, which is not a great place to be in a week and a half before the semester starts.

David: If it’s any comfort, I’m on leave this fall and am sad I don’t get to have these conversations with students (the grass is always greener, I know)

Chris: I’d be happy if more people read the Confederate Constitution or the SC Ordinance of Secession

David: Does any of this change plans for teaching?

Erin: I mean, I’ve been struggling a lot with how to deal with the “history doesn’t really matter” crowd. As my roommate put it, those people are now saying “history doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care that it matters to and affects you, my classmates.” I’m far more anxious about apathy than I am about having these conversations, and part of that is just because, as a white woman, I can have them with greater impunity. That’s where I think I, as a professor, need to spend my whiteness capital.

David: Yeah, I’ve seen some of that too. Not just “history doesn’t matter to me,” but “this person’s viewpoint doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care that it matters to you, my classmates.”

I guess I’m feeling more motivated to push back at that with greater force than I have in the past

Chris: Concluding thoughts?

Erin: I think my thoughts are that as much as I don’t want to have these conversations and beat my head against the wall…I still do.

And even if I don’t want to, I have to. The moral imperative is too great.

David: Yeah, I think you’re right, Erin.

I’ve been thinking back to some students I had who were really dismissive when we read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, dismissive in a way that was quite racist, and I should have pushed harder against it. I think we all have an obligation to do that, even when we don’t want to. Because Charlottesville is what happens when we don’t.

Chris: And the pushback against Confederate monuments is growing, so this issue isn’t going away. Especially if 45 continues to tweet about it and make slippery slope arguments and false equivalencies.

Erin: He is worried about history being “erased,” so I guess we need to make sure history – and historical thinking – aren’t!

David: Yup. But if we’re still chatting about this next week, I’m having a drink before we start. (edited)

Erin: :cocktail emoji:

Chris: Agreed

Correcting the record

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical thinking, politics

Yesterday on the floor of the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made good use of the historical record. He asked Joni Ernst (R-IA), who was presiding over the Senate at the time, to officially state the number of consecutive days the ACA was under consideration and the number of hours spent in consideration. In doing so, she cited the Secretary of the Senate and the Senate Library.

.@SenSchumer gets @joniernst to admit O-care got 25 consecutive days of hearings, 169 hours of consideration

Trumpcare: 0 days of hearings pic.twitter.com/odHYpgDYUx

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) June 19, 2017

Now, the idea that Obamacare was done in secret without contributions from Republicans is so pervasive that even official Senate records might not make a difference, but it is important to note that we have those records.

We haven’t always. While the current Office of the Secretary of the Senate is a big operation, it started as one person whose job it was to keep minutes, send messages, and make sure senators had paper, ink, and quills, i.e. to keep the Senate operating for the sake of the senators, not the public. Both the House and the Senate kept journals, as is required in the Constitution. These are basically the minutes, listing bills introduced, nominees proposed, and letters read into the record. In some cases, we see days on end of no quorum and swift adjournment!

The Senate wasn’t initially open to the public, and while the House was, there was no one officially keeping record of what was said. Instead, newspaper reporters recorded House speeches and debates, which is why 19th century newspapers are full of multi-column speeches.

As a result, the first official published “records” of the debates in Congress – the Annals of Congress – covered the 1st through 18th Congresses, 1789-1824, but were compiled after the fact from records and newspaper reports, and only published between 1834 and 1856. The subsequent Register of Debates (1824-37) was published contemporaneously, but is still primarily a summary rather than verbatim transcripts.

The Congressional Globe (1833-73) started with summaries and moved towards verbatim transcripts over time, and from 1873 on, the Congressional Record has provided the most comprehensive official account of what’s said in the legislative branch.

As my links indicate, the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates, the Congressional Globe, and the first year of the Congressional Record are available through the Library of Congress. If you don’t have access to the full bound edition (though what home is complete without it), you can piece it together through several different sites, including Archive.org.

In 1979, C-SPAN made Congress even more accessible by broadcasting live, though as last year’s Periscoped Democratic sit-in reminded us, C-SPAN cameras can only be used when Congress is in session, and the party that controls Congress decides when that is.

So often, though, we hear things like “history is written by the winners,” and lots of historians work on the history of people who often left scant record – even people who were barred by law from reading! The records we have for Congress aren’t perfect, but they’re a darn sight better than what we have for lots of other things in the past.

Still, though, they don’t capture everything. One of the most confounding things about the Puerto Rican debt crisis is that Puerto Rico was explicitly excluded from bankruptcy protection when a law was rewritten in the 1980s, and while there’s at least one mention of someone raising the issue as the law moved through Congress, there’s no indication in the record of why the exclusion was inserted in the first place.

But the situation I started with is different. I said earlier that there was an “idea” that Obamacare was passed in secrecy.

But it happened less than ten years ago.

And many of the people involved in it are still in Congress.

And we have the Congressional Record.

And we have C-SPAN footage.

And we have the Senate Librarian.

And we have Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and the rest on tape. 

Obamacare’s secret rushed passage isn’t an idea. It isn’t a myth. It isn’t a common misconception. It’s not something we can’t verify because we don’t have any contemporaneous records.

It’s a lie.

It’s a lie, and it’s also a reminder that history isn’t just about facts, evidence, and “the truth.” If it were, Chuck Schumer would never have needed to make Joni Ernst read the facts into the record. If it were, Joni Ernst reading the facts into the record would have mattered.

Hey NPR!

Tags

Erin Bartram, higher ed, historical thinking, pedagogy

Most of the time we give you context for the news, but sometimes we are the news. NPR had a recent feature with Nobel-winning physicist Carl Wieman in which he talks about his efforts to encourage “active learning” in the sciences. Wieman talks about all of the hallmarks of active learning: small groups, engagement with the material, working through problems, not sitting and listening to long lectures. Wieman is not alone in advocating this, nor is this call new, despite the headline “Hey Higher Ed, Why Not Focus On Teaching?”

As a result, one question and answer stood out

Are the active learning teaching techniques applicable as well to the humanities, among those teaching Shakespeare or art history, or for that matter, a K-12 classroom?

That gets to be a more complicated issue, and I would argue on the basis of the research on learning that they almost certainly apply to most of the humanities because you can identify a historian … How they think about things, how they evaluate sources, etc. They have very much clear, expert decision making processes, and we have that. We know how to teach those better, but we don’t have people in those fields who have tried them in the classroom.

While many other historians have or are currently writing eloquent responses to this story, let me just shorthand all of those for you.

If you’re not in academia, which hopefully many of the readers of this blog are not, it is not surprising that you might think all history classrooms look like lecture halls full of sleepy students pretending to take notes while an old dude in a patched tweed coat drones on and on at the front of the room. That’s what you see in movies and on TV, and it may have been what you experienced in college.

But it’s not an accurate representation of what goes on in most history classrooms in 2017, nor does it take into account all the reasons why that style of classroom might persist despite the desires of the professor.

And so, there are really just two basic takeaways here. First, Wieman says “We know how to teach [the thinking processes of history] better, but we don’t have people in those fields who have tried them in the classroom.”

Everything he is talking about is being done, day in and day out, by thousands of historians across the country, in community colleges and Ivies, in small classrooms and large.

Historians have been doing those things for ages because they are the methods of our discipline. Despite the persistent stereotype, I don’t know a single history professor whose ultimate goal for their students is passive memorization and then regurgitation of material. Reading historical texts, analyzing them, writing about them, and discussing them with others is our bread and butter.  Yes, people do still lecture, though many of us do it very sparingly, and lots of historians are working on how to do it more effectively.

Secondly, any serious discussion of the kind of classrooms Wieman loathes and loves that doesn’t acknowledge the financial and structural constraints facing universities and professors is worthless. It’s not just about “good management.”

To be very blunt, lectures can be done on the cheap and delivered to hundreds of students at a time. In particular, if you are a publicly-supported university and have seen your state appropriations decline and then plummet, this is appealing, even if there is abundant research to support other methods of learning. In the throes of the recent recession, there was plenty of discussion of the “efficiency” of purchasing lectures given by faculty at top universities, to spare the expense of paying flesh-and-blood faculty. Good pedagogy? No. Driven simply by a failure to understand good pedagogy? Not really.

When I was a graduate student at a flagship state university, one that managed to maintain state funding far better than others during the recession, I usually was a teaching assistant for 250-person lecture course. We and the students attended two lectures each week, given by full-time (though not necessarily permanent) faculty, and then each teaching assistant taught three 25-28 person discussion sections on Friday, in which we engaged with students in all the ways that Wieman wanted. When I advanced and taught my own courses as a graduate student, I taught “small” classes of 40 people in which I employed the techniques of active learning as best I could.

Were these large lectures and smaller discussion sections the “best” way to teach students historical thinking? Perhaps not. Would state governments like to fund universities so that faculty could use the sorts of teaching methods that are best for their discipline?

Moreover, most of the teaching of history in the US at this moment is done by highly-qualified, engaged scholars with the highest degrees in their field who are hired by the course, or by the semester, often with little notice, paid very little, and not compensated for any “extra” work, including the work of course preparation. While many of the methods of active learning are not inherently “more expensive,” they often require investments of time that non-permanent faculty simply don’t have or won’t be compensated for.

These are some of the basic realities of teaching history on the college level as I see them –  from my experience at a large public university and a small private university, from reading about pedagogy in higher ed, and from talking to colleagues across the country and abroad. If NPR has any interest in talking to me or anyone else in the trenches, we’d be happy to talk, as we’re already talking about this all the time. Just know that we won’t offer any pithy answers or easy solutions.

If you want to read more about how historians are thinking about pedagogy and trying new things, there are lots of great people writing online. Teaching US History is a great place to start. I write there, and on my own blog, as does the awesome Kevin Gannon. The good people at Digital Pedagogy Lab are thinking and doing about teaching and learning all the time. Or you could just check out the #twitterstorians feed on Twitter and see what we’re talking about.

 

 

Women also know history, Ted

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical thinking, politics, science, Ted Cruz, war, Women

In the wake of the president’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, much digital ink has been spilled over the meaning of this move, including attempts to put it into context. One attempt, by the Harvard historian of science Joyce Chaplin, led to quite a dust-up with Ted “Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone” Cruz. This altercation touches on the way Americans think about the founding of the nation and the role of the international community more broadly, as well as the limitations of Twitter and the way that women who do history are viewed and treated when they exert expertise.

First, the tweets:

The USA, created by int'l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int'l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today

— Joyce E. Chaplin (@JoyceChaplin1) June 1, 2017

Just sad. Tenured chair at Harvard, doesn't seem to know how USA was created. Not a treaty. Declaration+Revolutionary War+Constitution=USA. https://t.co/tQALvjdkTs

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 2, 2017

Sad. US Senator, Harvard Law degree. Doesn't know that national statehood requires international recognition. https://t.co/gcxtJifWCl

— Joyce E. Chaplin (@JoyceChaplin1) June 2, 2017

Lefty academics @ my alma mater think USA was "created by int'l community." No–USA created by force, the blood of patriots & We the People. https://t.co/zOxVdj21en

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 2, 2017

Treaty of Paris simply memorialized that fact, of our total victory at Yorktown. Her claim is like saying a plastic globe created the earth. https://t.co/eHDPfmsjIB

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 2, 2017

Historians of all stripes chimed in to respond and engage, and there are great pieces to read that will take you through the nuances of the historical debate, but I think there are a few important takeaways external to the issue of historical interpretation.

First, as historian of early America John Fea notes, the connection between the Treaty of Paris and the Paris Climate Accord is much more complex than Chaplin’s original tweet suggests. Moreover, Cruz’s response was itself rather simplistic, as I’m sure a senator with such a pedigree – a pedigree which TV pundits never fail to remind us of when he engages in one of these debates – is aware not only of the importance of the Treaty of Paris but also of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, though he doesn’t mention it.

Yet we cannot and should not simply write this off as the limitations of Twitter. It is, instead, a good example of how differently people view the “point” of history.

As the conversation progressed, Chaplin and the many historians who engaged on Twitter and through other written forms were more than happy to go into the specific historic complexities surrounding the 1783 treaty, including the exclusion of native American nations from its negotiation, comparable “declarations” that did not lead to successful independent nations, and the importance of international support in the American victory.

Cruz, however, chose to double down on a vision of the American founding moments that is incomplete, simplistic, and unsupported by historical evidence. Come on, Ted, if nothing else, you think everyone’s going to buy this narrative in a post-Hamilton world?

Cruz knows these complexities, and he’s happy to engage in complex discussions when it suits him, as we’ve seen throughout his tenure on the public stage. In this case, however, he chose to thump his chest and bellow “America First!” while tossing out red meat phrases like “Tenured chair at Harvard” and “Lefty academics.” He used “history” as a blunt instrument, as a club.

The gendered dimensions of this clash should not go unnoticed. That participating in international accords and obeying federal law is so often framed as “submission” isn’t just a coincidence. As Joanna Walters noted in her piece in the Guardian, “A man told Chaplin that Cruz ‘knows a hell of lot more than you, sweet cheeks’.”

I am very sure that man still thinks that, not simply because we are in an age when expertise is not only devalued but ridiculed, or because Chaplin is a professor at a “lefty” East Coast institution (as though Harvard is some bastion of progressive ferment!), but because of Chaplin is a woman who makes an argument about the nation’s founding that her detractors find inherently “feminine.”

When she and others (including male historians!) argue that that founding was messy, precarious, imperfect, and dependent on the international recognition and material aid of others, it seems to some an attempt to “feminize” the founding, to cut away at the idea that America is not only a place where you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but also a place that literally pulled itself into existence by its own bootstraps.

Right now, as never before and as ever before, to admit that the US has ever needed or wanted international recognition and cooperation is a sign of weakness to so many, even as they desperately crave recognition and admiration for their manly independence. No wonder Ted Cruz didn’t include the Articles of Confederation in his tweets; to do so would have been to acknowledge that the Constitution did not spring, fully-formed and practically perfect in every way, from the collective forehead of The Founders. THE US NEVER TAKES A MULLIGAN!!11!!!ZOMGTOTALVICTORY!!

Would this have gone differently had Chaplin not been a woman? Only a fool would say otherwise. Of late, women’s scholarship on the American Revolution has been a point of discussion for historians, mostly because it’s so often ignored and erased. As historian of colonial North America Ann Little notes, a recent roundup of the 100 (really 114) best books on the American Revolution only included 11 single-authored books by women, and three of those were by the same historian.

Women are broadly under-represented as historians on college syllabi, in documentaries, and in Google image searches for historians, even as they make up 42% of new history PhDs. Chaplin’s expertise was so easily questioned in part because she doesn’t “look” like what most Americans think of when they think of historians, especially historians of “manly” topics like the founding of the nation and of science.

It’s not surprising that our image of a historian is still an old white man in a tweed coat with elbow patches, but it doesn’t have to be. Use the photos posted under the #ILookLikeAHistorian hashtag to get that old image out of your head. Make note of what kinds of history gets promoted at your local bookstore, and who writes it. Seek out and read books by women historians, especially those who write on topics that men like “Sweet Cheeks” think are the province of men – politics, war, labor, and economics. Follow Women Also Know History. And maybe just…don’t get your historical analysis from Ted Cruz.

Why words matter

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Erin Bartram, historical thinking, narratives

Historians look at texts all the time. We consider images and sounds and spaces to be texts as well, but much of the time, we’re talking about words. To that end, we work to understand the meaning of the text by placing it in historical context. Defining and redefining words is one way of exerting power, and historians are attentive to the way words reflect and also shape historical experiences.

To that end, a few examples from the past 24 hours that illustrate why historians pay such close attention to words.

Today, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), one of 13 white men drafting the Senate’s response to the House’s Obamacare replacement, had this to say to a reporter: “The public wants every dime they can be given,” he said. “Let’s face it, once you get them on the dole, they’ll take every dime they can. We’ve got to find some way of getting things under control or this country and your future is going to be gone.”

The Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a resolution by voice vote  “directing every public official in Oklahoma to exercise their authority to stop murder of unborn children by abortion.”

Tennessee’s governor signed a bill that requires the words in state law to be interpreted based on their “natural and ordinary” meaning. While the governor denied that this had anything to do with same-sex marriage, conservative groups that campaigned for the law explicitly stated that it was to “to prevent judges from defining references to husband or wife, which appear throughout the Tennessee Code, as the gender-neutral ‘spouse.'”

In each case, politicians used words or worked to control the meaning of words in order to shape the limits of a particular conversation and achieve particular political ends

Hatch positioned “the public” as those in the country who take rather than contribute, jeopardizing “your future” through their greed. In doing so, he was participating in a much longer historical conversation about taxation, freedom, the government’s role in providing public services, and ideas about the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor.

In declaring abortion to be murder, Oklahoma politicians stated that they believe a legal medical procedure is actually the unlawful killing of another person. In doing so, they are participating in a much longer historical conversation about bodily autonomy, particularly that of women, and when a fertilized egg becomes a person with legal rights.

Those supporting “natural” and “ordinary” meanings of words in Tennessee are using words in an attempt to resist a change by explicitly denying that specific words and concepts can change or have complex meanings. In doing so, they are participating in a much longer historical conversation about marriage, gender roles, the place of law in religion, the place of religion in law. Perhaps most importantly, they’re doing the thing that always makes a historian pay attention – they’re claiming something is “natural,” implying that it has an unchangeable meaning that exists outside of human culture and time.

If the meaning of words were natural and ordinary, of course, many disciplines – like history – and jobs – like Supreme Court justice – would barely exist. It’s precisely because the meanings of words change in different contexts and in different historical moments that we have stories like these. This is why historians pay such close attention to words.

When did people in the United States start using “citizen” instead of “subject,” and what did that mean? Did it mean much to them at all? If you asked a member of the general public what a “citizen” was and what a “subject” was, would there be any consensus on the “ordinary” meanings of those words?

What did it mean that common law defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will?” What did it mean that until the late 20th century, state laws defined rape so as to deny the possibility of its existence between people who were married to each other. Our “ordinary” definitions of rape today clearly don’t tell us the whole story.

When the Supreme Court redefined Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations”, declaring the relationship between tribes and the United States to be like a “ward to its guardian,” what did those words and the relationships they described mean to those involved? Nowadays, most people don’t talk about wards and guardians in everyday speech, so no “ordinary” meanings can help.

You don’t have to know the history of everything you hear about in order to think about it critically and historically. One good way to start is to think about language like this, and to be very wary of people telling you things have unchanging, natural, ordinary meanings. If that were the case, they shouldn’t have to spend all this time telling us so, right?