Kevin, your "second comment" below highlights a profoundly important
aspect of the study of history, and one that is too often neglected.
Thank you for stating it so eloquently.

--Jurretta

On Nov 15, 2006, at 12:17 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> <snip>
> A second comment:
>
> To my mind there is a danger in allowing stories like Lemann's
> to dominate our telling of history.  One of the reasons I
> admire the scholarship of Rhys Isaac, and especially his
> superb recent biography of Landon Carter, is that it
> problematizes the narrative of slavery.  An event like the one
> Lemann describes is dramatic, and because it is dramatic, it
> reads exceptionally well.  But it is dramatic in part because
> it has such clear and sympathetic protagonists, and likewise
> clear and vile antagonists.  Isaac's biography of Carter is
> unsettling because it forces the reader to ask, what would *I*
> have been like, and how would *I* have been shaped by the
> expectations and values of my society, had I been born into
> the station of Landon Carter?  How would I think and act, had
> it been *me* who was the owner of slaves?  To put it another
> way, it forces the reader to treat the slave owner as
> something other than a monster, who exists *outside* of the
> course of normal human events.  To my mind, this is the issue
> that Hannah Arendt, writing in another context, referred to as
> the banality of evil.  Evil is not something that exists
> outside of humanity, but rather is a potential within every
> one of us.  Isaac's biography show us how that is possible.
>
> Lemann's narrative is powerful because the heros and villains
> are so clear.  But the villains are pretty monstrous--there is
> nothing banal about them.  My sympathies are with the heroes,
> and I can easily imagine myself acting as they acted--or at
> least, I'd like to think I would act with the courage that
> they displayed.  But what about the villains?  How do we enter
> into *their* world, and see what it was that corrupted them,
> and led them to act as they did?  What work does it require
> from us, to imagine "it was these and these conditions that
> had to be in place, to have corrupted *me*, and shaped *me*,
> to have acted as they acted."
>
> When I teach reconstruction and Jim Crow, I put up images of
> post cards from lynchings from the late 19th and early 20th
> centuries, taken from the American Memory site at the Library
> of Congress.  The images on the front of the post cards are
> vivid and horrible--pornographic in their violence and in the
> degradation they portray.  But its the words on the back that
> haunt me.  Aunt Millie, writing to her cousin, all day to day
> and matter of fact.  Saw your uncle today.  Made a pretty
> penny selling eggs.  Oh, and by the way, attended the lynching
> too.  Now there we see banality, in all its inexplicable
> ugliness.  And how do we explain the society that produces
> Aunt Millie, and her familiar sensibilities--and her utter
> obliviousness to the evil in which she was participating?
>
> To my mind, that's the kind of question that gets obscured
> when we allow the big, dramatic, events to dominate the
> telling of history.  Hitler's executioners were willing.  So
> were the lynchers and so were the KKK terrorists.  If we
> demonize them too much, they become monsters, outside of
> history, and outside of the potentialities inside each of us.
>
> All best,
> Kevin
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
</snip>

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