This is worth reading.

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Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 4:26 PM
Subject: FW: cnet: Gordon Wood on historiography


>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: CONSERVATIVENET list for conservative-libertarian history
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Jensen
> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 2:26 PM
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> Subject: cnet: Gordon Wood on historiography
>
> A sage historian laments the "present-mindedness" of many of his 
> colleagues.
> By Jonathan Yardley  Washington POST book World Sunday, March 16, 2008; 
> BW15
>
>
> THE PURPOSE OF THE PAST
> Reflections on the Uses of History
>
> By Gordon S. Wood
> Penguin Press. 323 pp. $25.95/ $17 at Amazon.com
>
> A quarter century ago Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown
> University, stepped out of the academic cloister and began writing
> book reviews -- essays, really, running to around 4,000 words apiece
> -- for serious but non-academic publications, chiefly the New York
> Review of Books and the New Republic. No doubt he did so in hopes of
> reaching a wider readership than previously afforded him by academic
> journals, but he also did so out of a conviction that too many
> historians at American universities were drifting off into a hothouse
> where they talked and wrote only to each other, concentrating on
> theory and the holy trinity of race, class and gender.
>
> Though not without sympathy for some of these developments, Wood was
> concerned about their larger implications. As he says in his
> introduction to this collection of 21 essays: "The result of all this
> postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,'
> 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history
> writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of
> literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that
> needs a wide readership to justify itself." As watchers of the
> bestseller lists are well aware, "popular historians who have no
> academic appointment, such as David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Ron
> Chernow, Thomas Fleming, and Stacy Schiff, have successfully moved in
> to fill the void left by the academic historians preoccupied by
> issues of race, gender, and multiculturalism."
>
> Unlike many, if not most, of his colleagues in the history
> departments, Wood does not look down his nose at these writers: "I
> had great respect for Barbara Tuchman and have even greater respect
> for her successor as the premier popular historian of the country,
> David McCullough." Instead, he welcomes their work, not merely on its
> merits -- which of course vary widely from writer to writer and book
> to book -- but as an antidote to the narrow and often heavily
> ideological history that comes out of the universities, more often
> than not in "the special language that literary critics now use to
> separate themselves from the power structure as well as the common
> herd of us ordinary readers: 'interpellation,' 'exfoliation,'
> 'ambiguation,' 'valorized,' 'intellection,' 'narrativized,' and
> 'meta' this and 'meta' that."
>
> The essays in this book, though written as book reviews with all the
> potential for evanescence that this literary/journalistic form
> entails, emerge in The Purpose of the Past as an account and a
> critique of "what has gone on in American history writing over the
> past twenty-five years, at least as it is represented by some of the
> books that I reviewed"; they also "reveal my own varied responses to
> what has happened to historiography during this tumultuous period."
>
> The tumult began with the wave of intense political feeling that
> swept through liberal arts departments in the 1960s and has been
> churning things ever since. Wood, who is now in his mid-70s, is old
> enough to have been trained as a historian in less rancorous times
> and fortunate enough to have come under the influence in graduate
> school at Harvard of Bernard Bailyn, "the most inspiring of
> historians," to whom the book is dedicated. But he has also been on
> campus as a professor during this period of change, a first-hand
> witness who somehow has maintained an open mind and a sense of fairness.
>
> Of all the fashions discussed in these essays, the one that gets the
> most attention goes by the rather clumsy name of "presentism":
> allowing "modern sensibilities" to color and often to control our
> view of the past. It is proper, as Wood says, that "the problems and
> issues of the present should be the stimulus for our forays into the
> past," since "it is natural for us to want to discover the sources,
> the origins, of our present circumstances."
>
> But the present "should not be the criterion for what we find in the
> past. Our perceptions and explanations of the past should not be
> directly shaped by the issues and problems of our own time. The best
> and most serious historians have come to know that, even when their
> original impulse to write history came from a pressing present
> problem. . . .To be able to see the participants of the past in [a]
> comprehensive way, to see them in the context of their own time, to
> describe their blindness and folly with sympathy, to recognize the
> extent to which they were caught up in changing circumstances over
> which they had little control, and to realize the degree to which
> they created results they never intended -- to know all this about
> the past and to be able to relate it without anachronistic distortion
> to our present is what is meant by having a historical sense."
>
> Thus, while Woods writes admiringly of the "magnanimous temperament"
> of James MacGregor Burns, he laments the "extraordinary
> present-minded and hence depressing picture of antebellum society
> that Burns has drawn" in The Vineyard of Liberty; Burns, he says, "is
> a political activist for whom writing history is really politics by
> other means." He also writes admiringly about Jill Lepore, but finds
> in her history of King Philip's War, The Name of War, the same
> tendency to see the past in terms dictated by the present, in this
> case "modern racial terms" that blind her to the inescapable truth
> that the late 17th century "was a cruel and brutal age, and human
> life was a great deal cheaper than it is for us today." Jon Butler's
> "otherwise excellent book," Becoming America, "is ultimately marred
> by the present-mindedness of its author." As for two recent books
> about slavery:
>
> "I suppose the most flagrant examples of present-mindedness in
> history writing come from trying to inject politics into history
> books. I am reminded of Rebecca West's wise observation that when
> politics comes in the door, truth flies out the window. Historians
> who want to influence politics with their history writing have missed
> the point of the craft; they ought to run for office."
>
> Wood's own view of "the point of the craft" is at once far more
> modest and vastly deeper than that of the ideologues who play so
> large a role today. Historians, he writes, "seek to study past events
> not to make transhistorical generalizations about human behavior but
> to understand those events as they actually were, in all their
> peculiar contexts and circumstances." In an especially penetrating
> review of Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, a resolutely
> presentist and political book, he writes: "History does not teach
> lots of little lessons. Insofar as it teaches any lessons, it teaches
> only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its
> managers intended or expected. History is like experience and old
> age: wisdom is what one learns from it." Once again, he must be
> quoted at length:
>
> "Unlike sociology or political science, history is a conservative
> discipline -- conservative, of course, not in any contemporary
> political sense but in the larger sense of inculcating skepticism
> about people's ability to manipulate and control purposefully their
> own destinies. By showing that the best-laid plans of people usually
> go awry, the study of history tends to dampen youthful enthusiasm and
> to restrain the can-do, the conquer-the-future spirit that many
> people have. Historical knowledge takes people off a roller coaster
> of illusions and disillusions; it levels off emotions and gives
> people a perspective on what is possible and, more often, what is not
> possible. By this definition Americans have had almost no historical
> sense whatsoever; indeed, such a sense seems almost un-American."
>
> Those are not words calculated to comfort either ordinary Americans
> or professional historians, but they are true. Not so long ago
> American students were taught history "to inculcate patriotism, build
> a national identity, and turn immigrants into citizens" -- to
> encourage them to think of their country as exceptional, to think of
> it "not just as different but as specially or providentially blessed,
> as somehow free from the larger tendencies of history and the common
> fate of nations." Fewer people, historians especially, believe this
> now. But at least it was a reason to study history and grant the past
> some respect. Now most Americans are blissfully ignorant of history,
> and too many historians are interested in it primarily as a mechanism
> for promoting their own views and special interests.
>
> Against these unpleasant contemporary realities, The Purpose of the
> Past is a beacon of common sense, sanity and wisdom. It is rare
> indeed when a collection of mere book reviews can stand alone as a
> unified and coherent book, but that is just what this one is.
> Handsomely written, deeply informed and resolutely fair-minded, it is
> essential reading for anyone who cares about history and the uses and
> abuses to which we subject it. *
>
> --30--
>
>
>
>
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