r/AskHistorians • u/NMW Inactive Flair • Nov 06 '13
Feature Open Round-Table | Historiography and/as Polemic
Previous Round-Tables:
- Presenting: Presentism
- What we talk about when we talk about "revisionism"
- The Politics of Commemoration
Today:
Howard Zinn, in a 2007 letter to the New York Times defending his popular A People's History of the United States, offered the following in description of that text's intent:
I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.
However good or bad these intentions may be, they are intentions -- and they are not simply "I wanted to offer an overview of American history from the colonial era to the present." The book does not do that, its author did not want it to do that, and any engagement with the book must necessarily take this into account.
To engage in polemic is, under its strictest definition, to inveigh against something -- to identify some sort of problem or error or otherwise undesirable state of affairs and then to set oneself against it in speech or prose. For our purposes today, discussing historiography, we might adopt a somewhat more open definition: that of "writing history with intent."
There are a number of questions to pose at the start, and we seek submissions and discussion today on the matters surrounding them:
Is an "activist historiography" possible, or -- if possible -- desirable?
What is the relationship between historiography and propaganda?
What is the value of works, such as Zinn's, which we might loosely describe as being not simply "history" but rather "history and..."?
If we accept that such works have value, how does the reader go about extracting the history from the editorial? Or is any such extraction possible or necessary?
What are the challenges in keeping one's political, economic, religious or other views out of one's writing about history? Or should they be so kept out?
Submissions on more general topics are also welcome:
What are some works of history that you feel have been marked by this polemic or editorial quality? What are the consequences of this?
Which historians (living or dead) have walked this line with aplomb? Or fallen over the edge?
All are welcome to participate! Moderation will be light, but please ensure that your posts are in-depth, charitable, friendly, and conducted with the same spirit of respect and helpfulness that we've come to regularly expect in /r/AskHistorians.
14
u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Nov 06 '13
Using Zinn as a launching pad, let me rephrase the question to take into account the practicalities of his actual work:
Is it acceptable to cherry pick evidence, deceptively report what sources and documents say, and apply distortionary interpretations while not making it clear what these interpretations are based off of so long as you let people know at the beginning that your history doesn't stand up to any standard of academic scrutiny? Granted, I am being harsh, but I am also accurately describing his work. He admits, if you are willing to be rather generous in your interpretations of what he says, that he has done a poor job of writing history in order to advance his current social agenda. But even if he (indirectly) admits it, he still did a poor job of writing history.
The response to my charge is that he was just attempting to counter the biased textbook history. My response is that, well, first of all the textbook I used in high school was far less deceptive than Zinn's book, but more importantly, the way to counter bad history is not with equal and opposite bad history, it is with good history. If someone in this forum claims that, for example, the Chinese were stagnant technologically and socially, I don't respond to this by saying "No, the Chinese had flying cars, space ships and social democracy". Or to put this question more relevantly to /u/NMW, does a broad and admirable opposition to warfare justify the sort of WWI historiography that describes it as useless, ironic, and nothing but four years of miserable mud slogging while being ordered by vain aristocrats who never held a gun in their life?
This isn't to say that describing history has no social value. When, to use examples from this forum, /u/khosikulu describes colonial policies in Africa, or /u/AnOldHope describes the practices and ideology of white supremacy, or when /u/Samuel_Gompers describes labor movements, this has direct social implications and relevance to right now. But they don't need to distort the historical record to have this. And more to the point, whenever I see someone defend "activist history" it is always within the context of social and political positions that are broadly favored in academia, like minority rights, or feminism, anti-imperialism or the like. But it is never in defense of Niall Ferguson or Bill O'Reilly (not that the two are equivalent), even though they are doing essentially the same thing but in a different direction.
pant pant
Anyway, I kind of want to make this personal because there are also other biases that can be brought into play. Personally, I like the Roman Empire. I think it's art is pretty, its literature is wonderful, and its history is fascinating. I also like cross cultural contact and merchants. I think that, in a deeply primal way, Roman merchant fleets plying the Indian Ocean carrying wine, coral, silk, pepper and frankincense is super cool. I like China; I really want there to be significant trade connections. I think these are biases every bit as significant as someone who has joined a campus activist club--they just have the advantage of being utterly irrelevant to modern politics. If I knew a way to remove these I would probably be the greatest scholar who ever lived. However, I can at the least be cognizant of these biases, and more to the point, I won't start from them. An "activist historian" starts from their bias, saying "How can I show the common man has been ground down by capitalists?" or "How can I show the America is a beacon of democracy and justice in the world?" They don't attempt to characterize their topic of study, they attempt to use their topic of study to justify their characterization.
And yes, before someone says it, I did just write a polemic about polemics. For nuances sake I should say it is certainly possible to write valuable history as a polemicist, and if that weren't the case I would need to throw away literally every scrap of literary evidence from the ancient world.
4
u/PaulyCT Nov 06 '13
I'm interested in why you believe that you would be a better scholar if you could somehow remove all of your biases from your work. Because to me, that would make whatever work you produced so insufferably dry and mundane and boring as to not matter the slightest in the realm of academia, let alone the realms that are indirectly touched by historical scholarship.
2
u/recondition Nov 07 '13
I don't think it's possible to be a human and also be purely objective, because even an apolitical stance is a political stance. Everyone has something at stake, especially with history.
5
u/hillofthorn Nov 06 '13
What is the value of works, such as Zinn's, which we might loosely describe as being not simply "history" but rather "history and..."
Zinn's People's History of the United States was fascinating stuff when I was 19, but by the time I got my History BA I knew his work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.
Nonetheless, Zinn's book sparked my interest in focusing on American history. His chapter on the American Revolution and his analysis of the origin of American patriotism (I am at work and don't have the exact quote with me so forgive me as I am paraphrasing), that the middle class supported the new government because they saw in the new order an opportunity to be wealthy, and hence supported a new state that only enfranchised wealthy men, is a gross simplification, and I suppose rather inaccurate, understanding of a complex social relationship. Regardless, I was introduced to the concept of understanding social relationships, imagined or real, as a product of underlying economic interest. This certainly isn’t the only analytical prism for studying historical events, but it has become part of my toolbox, so to speak.
So polemics, as inaccurate and misleading as they may be, can contribute something to our analysis of the past. Usually the contribution comes from picking them apart, of course.
3
u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Nov 06 '13
Yeah, it was a really great read back when I was in high school, but I remember the exact point where I realized that it wasn't quite the book it aimed to be.
Near the end, he mentioned nuclear weapons protesters in Bangor, Maine, outside the submarine base there. Except there is no submarine base in Bangor, Maine. Its waaaay up river. There is (well, was) a sub base in Bangor, Washington, which presumably is what he meant. I read that, and thought "wow, if he can't get such a simple and obvious fact right, why should I trust him to be right about the deeper stuff?" As far as I know, newer editions have never fixed that error.
Anyways though, point is, I finished the book, I came away with a similar view to your own. It is an interesting book to read, and offers an, if not unique certainly a minority perspective to American history that is worth hearing, even if it is one that should be read with a very critical eye (But then again, you should always be reading with a critical eye to some degree, just more so when the author so obviously wears his politics on his sleeve). It just can't be separated from his politics, which he wears so prominently on his sleeve.
3
u/squealing_hog Nov 06 '13
My field is physics, and I'd like to contribute a short adjunct. Physics is a science - with that we all agree. A science strives to discern, systematize, and describe in all possible minute detail, the truth.
By asserting there is such a thing as 'truth,' as science does, is to make a fundamental assumption - there is, and there is not. A science should be unbiased, but with this fundamental assertion we cannot say it is valueless - there are things which it supports and those it does not.
I think to assert a history is not polemic requires an assumption - that it doesn't tread on anyone's toes. It cannot be valueless, because it asserts by its nature, at the very minimum, this is, and this is not.
A bias asserts one does not present the facts as they are. Mr. Zinn has one of those. But often a bias is conflated with having values - that balance is the state of being unbiased. This is not so. The truth itself, the fundamental behavior of the universe is not balanced.
But this implies that by asserting the facts as they are, you have things that are, things that are not, each in measure. Unless humans are perfectly rational actors - and psychology increasingly fervently says we are not - then you have placed yourself against a position of ignorance merely by stating the truth, and we expect such positions of ignorance to exist by virtue of human behavior.
Even by rejecting bias, we are asserting is/is-not against someone else. Is that not polemic?
To write the truth is to write with intent. History will never be valueless and so to write it in such a way would necessarily be biased.
If we acknowledge this, then we should ask ourselves - what else do the facts imply? This is dangerous territory. Marx argued that the facts always imply communism, and that quickly became a dangerous way to think, prone to bias, as people wanted the facts to justify the outcome. Can we say what the facts imply without bias? Can we systematize what the facts of history imply?
We have in physics, but we did so by inventing calculus and other mathematical disciplines. But what do you, historians, think?
1
u/lawdog22 Nov 07 '13
I would like to address these bullet points individually, and I think it is a very important topic:
1) Is an "activist historiography" possible, or -- if possible -- desirable?
Yes, but only in a very limited sense. A person can be an "activist historian" and still maintain academic integrity, but the circumstances have to be appropriate.
For example, I have mentioned on here before the sort of bastardization of the historical record that transpired during the early 1900s that resulted in a decades long argument that the Constitution was merely a tool designed to protect the wealthy. This was achieved by certain academics cherry-picking their sources and evidence, as well as placing it all within a metanarrative that supported their conclusions.
Long story short, the Legal History academy itself had drifted into a sort of tunnel vision state. Later legal historians realized what had happened, and began writing and researching to correct these mistakes. To me, that is where activism, i.e. writing and researching with an agenda, is appropriate. Correcting the misconceptions of the academy itself is a form of purpose driven scholarship, but its purpose is to create a more pure discipline.
On the other hand, a piece of work like what Howard Zinn or Larry Schweikart write is not about correcting the academy. Rather, it is about pushing a particular agenda or point of view on the people as a whole by selectively picking your evidence and making it fit your ideological framework. To me, this sort of activist histiography is patently unacceptable and should be universally condemned.
2) What is the relationship between historiography and propaganda?
Dangerous at best. History is often used as a way to push or fuel propaganda. E.g., Aryan superiority, American exceptionalism, etc. etc. I would argue the historian's job entails recognizing when history is being hijacked to fuel these sorts of ideas and refute them.
3) What is the value of works, such as Zinn's, which we might loosely describe as being not simply "history" but rather "history and..."?
I honestly have a hard time with this question. Sure, Schweikart and Zinn's little pseudo-academic duel got a lot of people interested in history. But to what end? Did people who read these books become interested in history as an inquiry, or history as a way to fuel their preconceived notions of the past?
4) If we accept that such works have value, how does the reader go about extracting the history from the editorial? Or is any such extraction possible or necessary?
I mentioned this in a prior comment - seek the adverbs.
5) What are the challenges in keeping one's political, economic, religious or other views out of one's writing about history? Or should they be so kept out?
It is inherently difficult to do this, but I believe it is something that should be done or at least acknowledged. We can never divorce ourselves completely from our discipline; our values inherently find their way in, if nothing else in the very topics we choose to write about. Why do I write about Constitutional issues, dueling, and other things and not the history of Due Process? It's personal bias; my interest filters my work before it even begins. This part cannot be overcome in my opinion.
Or biases will manifest themselves in our conclusions oftentimes, but this is acceptable so long as the record can support our bias. Otherwise, we risk being Zinn or Schweikart, and making conclusions to support our biases by omitting evidence.
15
u/[deleted] Nov 06 '13 edited Nov 06 '13
Originally published in 1944, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation warned of the ceding of moral ground entirely to the economic sphere. His concerns, I’m afraid, have largely come to pass. The “protective covering of cultural institutions” no doubt include the influence of our scholars and universities – indeed our historians.
Although our subject matter is the past and our we are ultimately beholden to the facts we uncover in the course of our research, we do not occupy a sterile, unbiased, objective middle ground on which there is no place for political or moral statements. This is barely a controversial statement to make, as many in academia have long realized that it is impossible to be completely objective even if ones goal is to be as unbiased as possible. But I argue that it is not merely that we historians should do our best to make our biases known insofar that others can evaluate our work with them in mind. That is something we should do – but it is not enough.
As part of the cultural institutions that help to protect the “human and natural substance” of a free, open, civil society scholars do not just have the ability, but the obligation and responsibility to BOTH be historically accurate and to resist the move towards an amoral economy. These two goals are not, I would argue contradictory as they might seem on the surface to those who are convinced of the goal (even if unattainable) of objectivity.
Returning to Polanyi’s words, he argues that “Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom.” Therefore, I do not reject the notion that our work as historians must be held to the highest standards of academic integrity, research, and peer review. Instead, these are part and parcel of our work in reporting the world as it is, or was. We must at the same time be willing to accept the risks associated with taking a moral stand while doing so.
Finally, it is not too soon to say that this is a very real problem, particularly for those of us living in the United States. As Chris Hedges has argued in Death of the Liberal Class our cultural institutions have begun to fail us when it comes to facilitating piecemeal change – a function which has been historically present. Need every history written be polemical? Certainly not, but as members of a cultural institution, we are obligated to at the very least to be part of that protective covering which is necessary to insulate the human and natural elements of our open society from injustice. There are myriad ways to go about this. I am not calling all historians to man the barricades. But, ultimately, we shed this duty at our own peril.