A New Start

Long ago, in a world far away, I had a blog that I loved. It chronicled a different life, but had to die (is there a rainbow bridge for blogs?) after it was used to try to destroy my career and screw up my life. This one, a third attempt tor restart my blogging habit, enters a very different world. One in which most of my long-time fave blogs have gone quiet. A few remain, but they are part of that other world - my career world.

Retirement is fabulous. I simply love where I live (PNW), and have made new friends here. Friends from my previous lives remain good, much missed friends who now live their lives thousands of miles away. I find that while I miss the intellectual challenges of teaching, I don't miss the politics and inanity that colored my last years at the university.

Being more distant from the discipline of history, I find myself now at a remove that allows me to think differently about both the discipline and the factoids of history, and am much more sensitive to how non-academics use & misuse history to support their opinions and world views. This morning, I was listening to Tavis Smiley interview Craig S. Wilder, historian at MIT and contributor to a new book on the relationship between slavery and capitalism.  Smiley asked a question that's been circling around my brain for a while: how did historians miss the links between slavery and capitalism, given the logic and evidence?

Wilder's answer wasn't surprising: historians look for what they expect to see, and generations of American historians have been trained in the histories that did just that. This is a good, solid popular audience answer, but touches on a greater issue: how graduate schools and the academe perpetuate the white man's history.  Within the profession, of course. we take pride in and hone our skills.  But we do a lousy job of teaching those skills to students who'll never take a graduate course. And we've apparently dumbed down our own articulation of those skills. I certainly did; I kept trying to teach my students to think critically, examine sources in numerous ways, search for and illuminate the assumptions of the scholars and/or writers of both the original documents and the scholars who used those documents. But in trying to assure my students that they could indeed do these things, too many of us lose just how different these skills are in context of the discipline itself.

An example (again taken from a radio program, probably on either NPR or PRI). An interviewer asked a historian how historians - and this man in particular - determined a source's credibility. Great question, right? I mean, if the radio audience is listening to this program, this is a fabulous opportunity to offer something akin to what Wilder said: historians look for what they expect to see, and generations of American historians have been trained in the histories that did just that. Unfortunately, this historian answered in a way that had me screaming at the radio. He said "well, I just take and use what feels like the truth." Holy crap.

Granted, this was a man in his 80s, long-time scholar etc.. His methods are so ingrained that he likely doesn't even think about them. But that's the problem: we don't think about them, and we denigrate the training and discipline that goes into our analyses as we speak to the non-academics of the world.

I see the popular idea that opinions are all equally valid, that scholars are simply spouting opinions that are simply couched in fancy language. I used to tell my students: opinions are like toe-nails. Everybody has them, but that doesn't mean we want to examine them. Discussions of opinions isn't what historians do - we examine the past and the interpretations of that past with a critical eye and the tools of the discipline, and develop new interpretations firmly grounded in the facts. If the facts don't fit - it's not history to simply ignore it. It's not the facts that doesn't fit your work - it's that your work doesn't fit the facts.

All too often, the society writ large doesn't understand what historians (and I would argue most scholars) actually do. History, for many, is simply remembering the facts of the past. Learning that it is a construct, people generally leap to the conclusion that historians have simply been spouting personal opinions no different from their own. And we are complicit in this, because we've not clearly articulated the importance or substance of disciplinary training.

Okay. I'm off my stump. More or less.

Except to draw attention to the current political rhetoric, the ways candidates are mis-using history (again) and the dismissal of truth and facts as irrelevant. Gah.