Introduction to Historical Method: Index

Series originally posted in Summer 2005

Below you will find a 5-part series entitled Introduction to Historical Method. The bulk of the information was taken from the notes and readings of a course in Historical Methodology taught by Professor Donna T. McCaffrey at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. As such, Dr. McCaffrey deserves full credit for the majority of the information provided as well as for developing the main structure of the way the information has been presented. However, I have amplified some topics and added my own touches--such as providing all of the hypertext links--where I've seen fit.

Additionally, the section devoted to "The History of the Development of Historical Method" relies heavily on Gilbert Garraghan's A Guide to Historical Method, which was a constant reference both throughout Dr. McCaffrey's course and the consolidation of these posts. Additionally, two works by John Tosh--Pursuit of History and Historians on History--have been utilized.

Finally, I realize it is somewhat ironic that a work explaining the proper use of method and technique in the study of History does not itself include proper citation. Simply put, I decided that this was the best, most web-readable way to present this information.

Part 1 : What Is History
Part 2 : The Meanings of History
Part 3 : The History of Historical Method
Part 4 : Practicing The Historical Method
Part 5 : Certainty in History

What is Historiography Again?

Yikes, been a while! Anyway, I've written plenty about historiography and historical theory/methodology, but Heather Cox Richardson offers a good way to help people understand just what the heck "historiography" is:

It may be easier to understand the concept of historiography if you put the idea of it into a different context. Think of movie Westerns. Almost invariably, they deal with the Plains West from about 1860 to about 1900. But their interpretations of the events of those years are strikingly different. It’s impossible, for example, to image someone making Brokeback Mountain in 1950, or Stagecoach in the 1980s. Just as those movies tell us a great deal about both the eras in which they were made and the filmmaking theories under which they were filmed, so too can historiography tell us much that we need to know about society.

That works for me.

NEW PROJECT - Burgundians in the Mist

I've decided to go in a new direction and start blogging about that area of history most near and dear to my heart--the history of the Burgundians of late antiquity. Not sure if I'll have anything new to add to the scholarship, but my goal is to educate and explain why the period that is now called Late Antiquity is so fascinating. I'll provide sources (both dead tree and online) as I go and will cover the historiography as well as "the facts."

This isn't to say the I'm done around here, but over the past year, I've felt less compelled to focus on "where history and politics meet." Suffice it to say "they do" and "they always will."

So You Think You Remember the Fifties?

George and Robert Leonard, founding members of the Fifties retro group Sha Na Na, examine the scholarly interest in how their singing group helped change the way Americans remembered the decade of the 1950's.

In the last few years, an unlikely group of scholars has been studying Columbia’s Sha Na Na as a test case: meta-historians, theoreticians of cultural history itself. In 2004, Rutgers University Press published a bold new book by Goucher professor Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics. In 2006, Elizabeth E. Guffey, a Stanford Ph.D. and associate professor at SUNY Purchase, published Retro: The Culture of Revival (London and Chicago: Reaktion Books distributed by the University of Chicago Press, retrothebook.com). Both books contain extensive studies of Sha Na Na’s “Fabricated Fifties” (Guffey’s term) because Marcus and Guffey — working quite independently — discovered Sha Na Na and Columbia College, in 1969, playing an unusual role in 20th century American history.

More precisely, in inventing it.

Read the whole thing for an interesting case study on the differences between history and preferred memory.

Review: The Road to Monticello

Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson.

This book could easily have been titled, "Jefferson the Bibliophile," but the author's inspiration for the actual title was to pay homage to John Livingston Lowe's study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu. Hayes' literary and intellectual biography uses the books Jefferson loved--as well as those read or possessed by the people taught, met or impacted Jefferson--to chart the intellectual provenance of the Sage of Monticello.

Unsurprisingly, the list of books cataloged by Hayes is immense and impressive. But the insight that Hayes derives from his study of the Sage's reading list (as well as those Jefferson compiled for others), particularly the marginalia found in the books themselves, are the key that unlocks the door to the Jeffersonian mind.

Hayes consistently points out that "Jefferson preferred the life of the mind" and one would have to agree: how else could on man read and write so copiously if he didn't prize intellectual pursuits over most else? The importance of Bacon, Locke and Newton to Jefferson are unsurprising. But Jefferson was also particularly keen for Aesop's fables

...especially those that were useful as political allegories, like the one about the miller, his son, and their ass. By trying to please everyone, the miller ends up pleasing no one and loses his ass in the bargain.

It wasn't always the serious, or at least the factual, book that piqued the Jeffersonian mind

Fiction, Jefferson observed, could fulfill the purpose of teaching moral virtue better than fact. History was too uneven--few episodes in history could excite the "sympathetic emotion of virtue" at its highest level. Fiction, alternatively, could evoke a reader's sympathy because imaginary characters can be fashioned in a way real personages cannot. Fictional characters can illustrate and exemplify "every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty...is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the ry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written."

Thus did emotion, or a good yarn, help the mind see its way to logic.

For the intellectual historian, the meat-and-potato portions of the book are those in which Hayes traces the literary and philosophical influences of acute Jeffersonian works. Name a piece of writing produced by Jefferson and Hayes will trace its intellectual and literary genealogy. But he does so within the context of the times in which Jefferson was writing and illustrates how Jefferson did more than simply collate and regurgitate information. Jefferson's writing is filled with wisdom gained from reading, but also from his ability to observe and reason.

Jefferson was more than just a man of books, he was also, indelibly, a man--perhaps the man--of his time. Hayes puts Jefferson within historical and intellectual context and illustrates how this impressive thinker was able to build upon past literary works to help create a new and hopefully better nation. There is much here for the scholar and the layperson to digest. Road to Monticello is an important addition to anyone's, even Jefferson's, library.

Review: Tosh's "Historians on History" and "Pursuit of History"

The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (3rd Edition) and Historians on History: An Anthology by John Tosh

Early in The Pursuit of History, Tosh explains that "[h]ow the past is known and how it is applied to present need are open to widely varying approaches." Pursuit is a solid effort by Tosh to trace the origins of historical study and the methodologies that have evolved over time. He explains the difference between popular history and academic history and describes the importance of the latter.

The first half of Pursuit is dedicated to showing how historians should properly do their work, including how to find and use sources as well as how to write and interpret historical findings. All are well covered. The second half of the book is much more philosophical in tone. Tosh tackles a number of questions relating to objectivity, true knowledge and the reliability of so-called facts.

Simply put, he describes the battle between those who believe history is a cumulative discipline and those who view it as a relative and interpretive exercise as well as all of those with positions in between. Most importantly, he defends the discipline's viability and importance against those who attack it, including the postmodernists (though he doesn't dismiss all of the postmodernist contributions to the field). His notes and references are plentiful and he is fair with each of the "schools" of history.

Historians on History grew as an outgrowth of Pursuit and is essentially primary source material for the aforementioned work. It is comprised of excerpts from historiographical works on the field of history with brief input from Tosh. He lays the foundation for the book by describing the traditional reasons for studying history as well as the innovations and dialectic debates of the past 30 years.

He introduces each section with a brief biography of the author from whose work he has excerpted as well as an explanation of the particular historical philosophy which will be covered in that section. He then steps back and allows historians to illustrate their thoughts on a particular methodology or philosophy.

Not all sections are filled with works championing a certain method. For instance, the sections on Social Sciences and Postmodernism each contain relatively spirited articles defending or attacking these methods and Tosh doesn't interfere as he allows the reader to make up his own mind.

Tosh ends his compilation with a defense of the field of historical study. Tosh's writing is relatively clear and concise, though the same cannot be said for some of the excerpted writings. Though not always an enjoyable read, Historians on History is still a valuable work as it illuminates the thought processes of some of the field's finest minds.

Dark Ages, Shmark Ages / Sidonuis, the first neocon?

That popular conceptions of history tend to lag scholarly thought by a couple decades is nothing new. Witness this article in The Independent, "New light on the Dark Ages: Who are you calling barbaric?". For scholars of the period (late antique/earl MA), the discussion is nothing new and the article mentions Gibbon and alludes to "other interpretations." The re-examination was prompted by a new exhibit at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy. Sounds like good stuff. Unfortunately, the author saw fit to characterize the revisionist vs. traditional historiography this way:

But what if the barbarians weren't all that barbaric after all? What if the black/white, good/bad, God's chosen versus axis of evil, neo-conservative type explanation for this historical event is just as much state propaganda as the claim that Saddam Hussein was an hour away from bombarding us all with nuclear missiles?

Pathetic, really. Believe it or not, everything doesn't come back to Bushitler. Does this mean that we can now peg Sidonius Apollinaris as the first neo-con?

Anyway, here's the meat:

... what the new exhibition lays finally to rest is the notion that the barbarians were barbaric. True, they were often blond, worshipped their own gods, lacked cities with sewerage systems, heated floors, bathhouses and aqueducts. Often they were nomads. But the idea that they were in some absolute sense less civilised was Roman state propaganda. Crueller than the Romans? Hardly possible. More violent, more militaristic than the most militaristic state in history? Hard to conceive.

Once one steps back from the paranoid them-and-us, self-and-other way of looking at it, one sees that rather than the cataclysmic end of a great civilisation and its replacement by the forces of darkness, something far more compelling and creative was under way: the creation (as the curators of this exhibition put it) of Europe as we know it, welded together by Christianity, and with deeply rooted memories of Roman heritage which make dramatic returns to our collective consciousness every few hundred years: during the Renaissance, for example.

"The Barbarian kingdoms," writes Jean-Jacques Aillagon in the catalogue, "gradually drew a new political map of Europe, dividing it between the Ostrogoths and the Lombards in Italy, the Franks in western Germany, Belgium and France, the Visigoths in Languedoc, Aquitaine and the Iberian peninsula."

He continues: "If Europe was born in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome, many of its roots also lie in the peoples of the north and east of the European continent." The aim of the exhibition, he writes: "Is to reveal the profound and subtle mix between Graeco-Roman and Germanic roots from which European culture stems."

Barzun on History (via Nat'l Review)

The November 19, 2007 issue of National Review contains an "Appreciation" of Jacques Barzun by M. D. Aeschliman. Similar pieces have been penned in the New Yorker and New Criterion and all were inspired on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The plaudits are well deserved. Barzun is the sort of public intellectual and polymath that we rarely see nowadays. I was first exposed to Barzun when one of my former professors (a practicing psycho-historian) sent me along a selection of articles on psycho-history, including an excerpt from Barzun's Clio and the Doctors, a skeptical critique of quantitative and other "scientific" methods of doing history. Later, I read much more of Barzun in my historical methods class (his book with Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher, was an assigned text) and have enjoyed his work on historical theory (among other things!) ever since. Here's a bit from the NR piece:

It is Barzun’s contention that history is fundamentally made by individuals, and that all forms of determinism are grievously mistaken and destructive. Human liberty is an absolute datum of consciousness and reality: The human person’s “supreme pleasure and prerogative,” he writes, “is to feel himself at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.” No subjectivist, Barzun is nevertheless a rootand- branch opponent of two dominant modern intellectual extremes and errors: scientific reductionism (“what it reduces is the individual”) and histrionic subjectivism, dominant in the modern arts, a kind of permanent childishness: “We are permissive, not from love of liberty, but because we lack self-control and fear restraint as such,” he wrote 40 years ago. “We praise innocence because we want the license to behave like an infant.” These extremes congeal into intellectual attitudes and institutional forms in the culture and the schools: the scientistic worship of material procedures and objects, and the anarchic exaltation of aesthetic eccentricity and “self-expression” (what C. S. Lewis called “a world of incessant autobiography”).

***
Though inevitably and consciously a philosophical historian, Barzun is rightly suspicious and critical of all works on “the philosophy of history”—from Marx and Hegel through Spengler and Toynbee—that deny human agency and novelty. “A trend is variable and may be reversed,” he wrote in 1964, “as history, which is the graveyard of trends and the birthplace of counter-trends, amply shows.” Communism is dead, though its Western historical trumpet E. J. Hobsbawm is still alive and sounding. There is no monocausality and no determinism in history:
The “relentless” modern “drive to de-anthropomorphize,” to “unman” the human person, Barzun writes, must be shown to be not only logically false but emotionally demoralizing and politically harmful.

In addition to his timely 1941 critique of Marxism—at the high point of Western intellectual sympathy for and collaboration with Communism—Barzun’s lifelong hostility to the implicit, incessant, invalid philosophizing of Darwin and the Darwinians (increasingly explicit and vocal today) isone of his most courageous and illuminating achievements as an intellectual historian and civic moralist. In the 1870s the German Darwinist biologist Haeckel wrote to Darwin to congratulate and praise him for having “shown man his true place in nature . . . thereby overthrowing the anthropocentric fable.” Barzun’s teacher Hayes, Barzun himself, his student Fritz Stern, and Richard Weikart in his recent From Darwin to Hitler have shown in detail how historically and morally disastrous this transgressive philosophical dehumanization was for the Western mind. Barzun quotes a 20th-century “positivistic” French jurist as writing: “Responsibility, which is the foundation of the penal code, eludes scientific analysis and is thus a source of error and confusion.” Like Dostoevsky and C. S. Lewis, Barzun repeatedly argues that “learned foolishness” is the most dangerous folly of all, especially when clothed with the authoritative mantle of high science as in “the behavioral idea that mind and purpose are illusions.”

Barzun’s rationality is never reductive or arbitrary: “Life, which spurs desire and fills the mind, is wider than science or art or philosophy or all together. Mind encloses science, not the other way around.” Yet the radical voluntarists and irrationalists—whether historians or artists—are also mistaken: We are conditioned rational beings with implicit obligations to civilization as an ideal and partial reality. Among early modern thinkers, Barzun particularly admires Erasmus and Swift in this regard. In “Swift, or Man’s Capacity for Reason,” he wrote in the somber year 1946: “The axioms of social reason have a long history in Western culture, and Swift met them again and again in his favorite authors . . . Herodotus, Lucian, St. Augustine, Dante, Rabelais, and Montaigne.”

Quick Guide to History of Conservatism

Fred Hutchinson offers up the history of 5 strains of conservatism. I excerpt those that have medieval roots:

1) Traditionalist conservatism (first appeared in the 8th century BC)...

Medieval: Venerated heroes and saints. Defended the honor of the family. Viewed the family as a community of souls, living and dead, stretching back to the primordial past. Lived in tightly woven communities of long continuance. The ancients were seen as giants in wisdom in contrast to their own modest understanding. Venerated the literary classics. Taught the seven liberal arts.

***
3) Christian conservatism (1st century AD)

Roman and Medieval: Marriage, family, church, community and government are ordained of God for our good and we are obliged to submit to these institutions. The government must fight evil. "Christendom," or Christ's kingdom, is gradually being formulated in society as God works through the church. The church has a mission for the spiritual formation of souls. It also has a mission to educate the people, to develop the leaders of society and to sponsor culture. Man is fallen and needs redemption, restraint, and holy fear. For "athletes of Christ," the potential for personal holiness is great.

***

4) Natural law conservatism (13th century)

Aquinas, Locke and Montesquieu. Also called "classical liberalism." Man has a nature according to the Creator's design. By nature he is entitled to certain freedoms and bound by certain duties. Human reason is the means by which we discover these rights and the duties. The universal moral law and the laws of nature are binding upon man. The main role of government is to protect human rights. There are certain activities such as the police and the military which government can offer but men cannot provide for themselves. The legitimate role of government is limited. Men form a social contract with government — men will submit to government and government will protect their rights.

The missing are 2) Neoconservatism and 5) Libertarianism. Interestingly, of the 5, my own conservatism is a mix of the three above.

Congress Locks up the Kennewick Man, AHA Missing In Action Again

National Review editorializes:

[U]nder the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) — a well-meaning law passed in 1990 — tribes can lay claim to cultural objects and human remains locked away in federally funded museums or unearthed on federal land. In order to do so, they must prove a reasonable connection between themselves and the objects they wish to obtain.

When Kennewick Man came to light, a coalition of tribes in the Pacific Northwest demanded the remains under the provisions of NAGPRA. They said they wished to bury the bones, making further study impossible. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over Kennewick Man, took steps to comply. But then a group of prominent scientists sued. In 2004, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the scientists, pointing out that the modern tribes had failed to demonstrate an adequate link between themselves and the skeleton of a person who died more than nine millennia ago.

So the tribes turned to Congress. Two years ago, Sen. John McCain proposed altering NAGPRA’s definition of “Native American” from “of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States.” The new language would add two words: “...is, or was, indigenous...” McCain’s efforts failed, in part because of public objections. But now the change has slipped through in a bill of “technical corrections” that the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee has just approved.

While this is technically archaeology, shouldn't the AHA be interested? Where's their editorial arguing for safeguarding the profession and ensuring that we have timely access to items of the historical record (like Executive Orders that lengthen the duration of sealed Presidential records)? Would there be outrage if a bunch of Northern Europeans started putting a halt to bog-people autopsies?

The Fallacy of the unchanging Dark Ages

The Dark Ages was a 1,000 year period of "no change" according to this guy:

For most of human history, change has been the exception. Our ancestors for nearly a million years used one basic tool, a hand axe chipped out of stone. They made these axes the same way, every time. Theirs was a culture in neutral.

The Dark Ages were likewise unblemished by change. For a thousand years, there was almost no invention, no new ideas and no exploration. Literacy was actively discouraged. Anything that might pass for progress was outlawed.

Yikes. How did we possibly, um, change then...if there was no change. Methinks the man should listen to Terry Jones before making those kinds of statements:

Q You write that our view of medieval life is unduly grim because historians maligned the period. It's easy to see why a nobleman might want to burnish his image by commissioning a writer to vilify a predecessor, but who would benefit from a campaign to disparage an era?

A A very interesting question. Well, in the first place, it would have been the thinkers of the Renaissance, who wanted to establish a break with the past. They also wanted to establish their own sense of importance by belittling what had gone before. This then gets taken up by the promoters of Renaissance culture who are keen to establish its supremacy over the medieval world -- particularly since the Renaissance is a backward-looking movement which harks back to the classical world rather than establishing something new.

In the 20th and 21st century, Renaissance values have been adapted to fit the modern capitalist world. The whole myth that there was no sense of human individuality before the Renaissance is part of this attempt to make the present day seem the culmination of human progress, which I don't think it is.

Q Then how did the unrealistic stereotypes of the noble knight and the ignorant, downtrodden peasant originate and why have they persisted?

A Well, undoubtedly you did have proud and unfeeling aristocrats who treated the peasants like dirt. Also, the Middle Ages is a wide span of time, and there were times and places where the peasantry would undoubtedly have been downtrodden and ignorant. So there is a basis for all that. But the little bit of history I'm interested in -- late 14th century England -- saw a rise in education and the pursuit of knowledge amongst ordinary people -- partly it was a result of the Black Death and the fact there were so few people around that everyone was questioning everything. But it was a time of intellectual activity amongst all classes. Much more so than today.

Q Washington Irving, who gave us "Rip van Winkle," apparently also contributed some fabrications that still distort our view of medieval life?

A Yes. He seems to have been responsible to a large degree for promoting the myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat and that this formed part of Church doctrine. It never did, and people didn't think the world was flat. Chaucer himself talks about "this world that men say is round." There's a fascinating book called "Inventing the Flat Earth" by Jeffrey Burton Russell, which sets the whole story out.

Q What does this tell us about the trustworthiness of historians, in general? Do you have any advice on how to spot a sound or flawed account of the past? Is there such a thing as history or only histories?

A Well, I think you're right that there is no such monolith as "history" in the singular. I think every age writes its own histories and I think it's important that they do. It's how we help to define ourselves and to know who and where we are. I don't think there is any rule of thumb to spot distorted history any more than there is to spot distorted news that we read today in the press or watch on TV.

The main thing is to be aware that the makers of "spin" are at work today just as much as they were in the Middle Ages or at any time in human history. It's all a bit like a detective story. We have to look for the motives behind what leaders do rather than take at face value the reasons that they give us. It's just the same with history.

Yup. And that's why I named this blog "Spinning Clio."

"Cultural history is written by dissenters"

Rod Dreher calls attention to Alan Ehrenhalt's 1995 book "The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America," (PDF version here):

While it is often said that history is written by the winners, the truth is that the cultural images that come down to us as history are written, in large part, by the dissenters -- by those whose strong feelings against life in a particular generation motivate them to become the novelists, playwrights, and social critics of the next, drawing inspiration from the injustices and hypocrisies of the time in which they grew up....The social critics of the past two decades have forced on our attention the inconsistencies and absurdities of life a generation ago: the pious skirt-chasing husbands, the martini-sneaking ministers, the sadistic gym teachers.

I am not arguing with the accuracy of any of those individual memories. But our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last thirty years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today, and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don't tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they cold have it back. For them, the erosion of both community and authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

Kennedy Assassination: Ideological Turning Point of Democratic Party

I missed the first round of interviews and reviews of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson. Rich Lowry has a new one up, though, which caught my eye:

[Kennedy's] kind of liberalism -- "tough and realistic," as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman -- was carried away in the riptide of his death. In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."

Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

Fred Siegal disagrees:

Mr. Piereson's own argument is persuasive and well-presented, but liberalism was never as reasonable as he assumes. The irrationalism that exploded later in the 1960s had been a component of left-wing ideology well before. Herbert Croly, the liberal founder of the New Republic magazine, was drawn to mysticism. In the 1950s ex-Marxists fell over themselves in praise of Wilhelm Reich and "orgone box," hoping that sexual therapy might replace Marxist theory as the toga of the enlightened. And in the very early 1960s a veritable cult of Castro, informed by Franz Fanon's writings on the cleansing virtues of violence, emerged among intellectuals searching for an alternative to middle-class conventions.

It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened. Depending on the temper of the time, such virtue and knowledge can derive disproportionately from scientism or mysticism--or it can mix large dollops of both. "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" lays bare the long-ignored failure of intellect that hastened the decline of American liberalism. If liberals can belatedly come to grips with their failure to acknowledge Oswald's political identity, they might be able to celebrate a revival that involves more than a Broadway show.

Ed Driscoll, too:

But the actual causes of liberal disorientation regarding Kennedy's death and the motives of his killer predate his assassination by several years. It was during the 1950s and early '60s that that liberal elites declared America's nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon "a vast literature that developed in the '50s and early '60s about the threat from the far right," Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell's The Radical Right.

As Piereson writes, leading up to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, there was a remarkable amount of violence in the south, caused by a backlash against the civil rights movement. In October of 1963, Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' presidential candidate in the 1950s who had been appointed the ambassador to the UN by Kennedy, traveled to Dallas for a speech on United Nations Day. Stevenson is heckled, booed, spat upon, and hit over the head with a cardboard sign. Stevenson says publicly, there's a "spirit of madness" in Texas. And Kennedy's White House staffers believe that he should cancel his already announced November visit to Dallas.

Thus, at the beginning of November 1963 a framework has been established that the far right is the threat to American democracy, "and that they've moved from heated rhetoric to violent act," Piereson says.

"So when the news spreads that Kennedy has been killed, the immediate response is that it must be a right winger who's done it," Piereson notes. And while the Birch-era right definitely had severe issues, JFK's assassin on November 22, 1963 had, of course, a polar opposite ideology. "When the word is now spread that Oswald has been captured, and that he has a communist past, and they start running film of him demonstrating for Castro in the previous summer, there is a tremendous disorientation at this."

...

The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level.

Ideology and Anglo-Culture

The Kirk Center's most recent University Bookman contains William Anthony Hay's review of J.G.A. Pocock's The Discovery of Islands. Begins Hay:

Each generation revises history to fit its own needs and preoccupations because, while the past itself remains constant, the prism through with it is seen changes. Besides helping people understand their own time, history shapes identity and provides a sense of place. These factors together explain how historiography—the principles, perspectives, and methods behind the writing of history—responds to questions driven by contemporary preoccupations.

Spot on. Take British History, for example:

The Whig interpretation in Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s nineteenth century History of England and Henrietta Marshall’s children’s book Our Island’s Story describes British history as the progressive movement toward increasing liberty and prosperity. As academic history emerged in Britain under the guidance of scholars like Macaulay’s nephew George Otto Trevelyan, it largely assimilated Whig assumptions to shape public culture into the 1920s. Declining power and a crisis of confidence posed new questions that led British historians to examine the past in different ways. Marxism and social science methodology turned historiography from constitutional history and focused instead on class conflict and social change. Postmodernism reflected the growing hold of expressive individualism from the 1960s with a consequent interest in identity that posed questions about sexuality and ethnic differences. Failure of the post-1945 social democratic consensus during the 1970s followed by Thatcherism further shifted the terms behind historical inquiry.

So, what about Pocock?

Decolonization, renewed interest in histories of component nations within the United Kingdom, and reorientation toward Europe as part of Britain’s membership in the European Union have also influenced historiography, and J. G. A. Pocock’s essays in The Discovery of Islands offer a profound reconceptualization of British history....Pocock argues for a British history that examines relationships within the Atlantic archipelago and its overseas progeny.

This rings familiar--the interpretive frameworks of the Anglosphere and Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History came to mind. The seeming symbiosis of the latter with Pocock isn't too surprising, given both Bailyn and Pocock found themselves largely on the same side (forgive the implied oversimplification) of the "republican synthesis" debates of the '70's and '80's. This leads to the context that Hay provides concerning Pocock's point of view:

Far from nostalgic pining for a world he admits has been lost, Pocock’s emphasis on the British diaspora follows from his efforts to understand the terms in which people see themselves or what he would call “the nuts and bolts of the mind.” A noted historian of ideas, he pioneered a new approach to intellectual history that viewed texts in the context of their time so as to understand the language contemporaries used to communicate ideas. Instead of great books providing a debate amongst themselves across the ages, key texts could offer insight on how men at a specific point of time saw their world. Pocock’s approach to British history as the story of nations interacting with and occasionally seceding from an imperial state plays this theme from his other work in a different key.

Both Bailyn and Pocock dealt with how ideologies were formed and used to justify the actions of individuals and groups. Bailyn has gone deeper into how Anglo culture and society has been maintained and modified around the Atlantic basin. Pocock has turned his head to Europe.

“Europeanizing” British history involves downplaying the centrality of the state and refocusing relationships toward continental Europe rather than within the British isles or overseas. Deconstructing identities often involves a smug provincialism among elites who cannot see beyond their own times. Pocock warned that demolishing Whig history—even though it brought a deeper understanding of past and present—amounted to a program for “asking the present to live without a past that justifies it.” Much the same could be said of postmodernist enthusiasm for Europe without the compensating benefit of illuminating the past. Indeed, where revisionism opened doors, the politics behind the new historiography of Europe seems eager to close them. Pocock contends that a history of either Britain or Europe must consider how it is a creation of nation-states even before attempting to transcend that framework.

Too often this mistake is made: the present circumstance is taken as a priori. Little thought is given to the political, social or cultural structures or mores that were in place that allowed [insert currently en vogue enlightened state here] to flourish. Pocock is warning that we need to be careful. Finally:

Pocock’s concluding chapters highlight the symbiotic relationship between historiography and politics. History serves a central purpose in public culture, and, consequently, the question of how it is to be written never quite finds a resolution. Each generation rewrites its history to understand its present. Pocock gives a judicious and well-written overview of the process, and his essays leave a sense that the past may not be such a foreign realm as is sometimes thought.

Hamburger's "Separation of Church and State"

The latest University Bookman contains a review of Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State", which delves into this "stubborn ideology". Hamburger recounts the evolution of the "wall" argument, hitting all of the appropriate touchstones. But then there's this:

In fact, it was not until the 1840s that the idea of separation of church and state really began to gain wide acceptance, as native born Protestants, alarmed by increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants, and viewing the Catholic Church as an obscurantist, authoritarian institution that, ruled by a foreign prince, exercised a kind of mind control over its members, embraced separation of church and state as a way of limiting the grave threat they believed Catholicism posed to American freedom....Nativist Protestants used the idea of separation of church and state to restrict the influence of Catholic clergy in politics and to eliminate public support for Catholic education.

Particularly notable in this regard was the school question, where nativist legislatures, seeking to make the public or common school an agent of both Americanization and Protestant evangelization—the two were closely linked in their minds—promoted common schools in which a non-denominational Protestantism was taught, the (Protestant) King James version of the bible was regularly read, and textbooks filled with anti-Catholic propaganda were used, even as they refused public support for “sectarian” Catholic schools because such support would allegedly violate the separation of church and state. Nativists could hold these contradictory positions because...they did not think of themselves as part of a structured, hierarchical church; accordingly, as they saw matters, supporting a non-denominationally Protestant public school system while denying funds to Catholic schools on separationist grounds made sense because what they sought was the separation of church from state, not of (the Protestant) religion from government.

...recognizing that the Constitution did not actually mandate separation, nativists began in the 1870s to propose constitutional amendments intended to make separation the law of the land and to preclude any possibility of public funding for “sectarian,” that is, Catholic schools, while leaving the non-denominational Protestant public school system fully intact... Yet, ironically, while nativists recognized that the First Amendment did not in fact separate church and state, they do not seem to have recognized that the logic of separation, strictly applied, would require the secularization of the public schools...

Ah yes, unintended consequences...

Hazards of Late Antique/Germanic History--Don't just guess!

From Martin at Aardvarchaeology (this is all him, so don't be confused by formatting):

The concept of an Old Norse religion (as it has been used by e.g. Karl Hauck and Lotte Hedeager) is useless. Such a non-codified, orally performed and transmitted body of mythology and liturgy cannot be coherent across time nor space. So all statements about Old Norse religion must be qualified with two questions: Where? When? And when things don't add up, this is only to be expected.

Think about it. Even heavily codified religions, such as Judaism or Christianity, aren't coherent.

This skepticism of monolithic coherent entities in societies of the past and present is actually a post-modernist viewpoint, and to my mind a valuable one. Unlike real po-mos, however, I don't draw the conclusion that anything goes in interpretation. Quite the contrary, I find it a strong argument to drop all discussion of anything not strongly anchored in source material. Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber darf man ganz bestimmt schweigen, po-mo Dummköpfe.

This reminds me of something I wrote the other day in a letter to a charming Aard regular:

"The problem is often called 'essentialism', as I think you may have seen in my review of Herschend's The Idea of the Good. The argument presupposes that there's this huge block north of the Imperial border called Germanic Society, that this block has the same essence from the border to the North Cape, and that when the block changes, all of it changes at the same time, in the same way. All this is in my opinion a) pure speculation, b) very, very unlikely."

Southern Conservative History: It's not all Black and White?

The points made by Donald T. Critchlow in "What’s Wrong with the New Conservative History?" were:

First, I do not believe enough attention has been given to framing the history of conservatism more broadly within the context of modern liberalism. Second, we need to stop seeing the rightward shift in the electorate in the late twentieth century as simply a racial backlash. Both points suggest that many historians working in this field simply are not getting the full story.

Well, maybe they are:

...new wave of historians, many of them young, believe that one cannot understand today’s housing, schooling, economic development or political patterns without understanding the mostly apolitical white Southerners of that era. None of these scholars play down the inbred racism of the region, but they argue that the focus on race can obscure broader economic and demographic changes, like the dizzying corporate growth, the migration of white Northerners to the South and the shifting emphasis on class interests after legal segregation ended.

Critchlow and the "new wave of historians" point to the suburbanization of southern whites as a key factor in understanding the spread of Republican conservatism in the south.

Matthew D. Lassiter was motivated to research his own Southern roots. He found a gap between the history he had learned in school and his experience growing up in its wake in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,” said Mr. Lassiter, 36, who wrote “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton) published last year. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he taught undergraduates and assigned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”

Mr. Lassiter, who now teaches history at the University of Michigan, said: “Who are these moderates? They don’t seem to be participating, yet they’re completely complicit in the system of Jim Crow.”

Mr. Lassiter’s book looks at how the federal government subsidized white flight to the suburbs, where middle-class whites could embrace colorblind values but still maintain all-white enclaves and schools. “When you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story,” he said. “White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey.”

Kevin M. Kruse, who grew up in Nashville and now teaches at Princeton University, focuses more on rank-and-file segregationists than moderates. In his 2005 book, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism” (Princeton), he argues that in moving to the suburbs, “white Southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery, and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.”

Holy Historiographical Changes, Batman!

Very interesting:

...a new approach [of examining the origin and relationship of the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Luke and Mark]... has been proposed by Richard Bauckham, a scholar who already has an impressive record of research into Christian origins. In a previous book – Gospel Women (2002) – he was able to show, by a close study of personal names both in our texts and in the records of Palestinian culture, that a particular group of individuals in the New Testament, and their relationships with one another, have a striking internal consistency with regard to names and provenance and also reflect accurately the naming and family connections that were customary in their culture. In the face of such evidence, it is hard to believe either that these names could have been fabricated or that there was any serious loss of accuracy in remembering and recording them by the time the Gospels came to be written. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham continues his investigation into named individuals, and shows that the same conclusion holds for all. We have every reason, therefore, to assume a faithful and unbroken link between the original witnesses of Jesus’ life and death and the record of these things in the Gospels.

Following this clue, Bauckham then suggests we should take seriously the testimony of two second-century churchmen, Papias and Irenaeus – the first of whom has usually been dismissed by scholars as unreliable. Carefully examining the relevant texts – including the famous statement of Papias that Mark’s Gospel is derived from anecdotes heard from St Peter – Bauckham concludes that these writers gave absolute priority to eyewitness accounts of Jesus, many of which are likely to have been given by his closest followers; indeed, he argues that the fact that some minor characters in the Gospels are named, while others remain anonymous, strongly suggests that it was the named ones who were consulted for their personal recollections and that the Gospel writers, or those whom they consulted, were drawing on first-hand evidence that was inherently reliable and consistent, though with the inevitable variations and slight lapses which attend the exercise of memory in any age or culture – hence both the close similarities and the sporadic divergences exhibited by the Synoptic Gospels.

{via A&L Daily}

Do non-European Cultures have a "Medieval" Period?

I have a daily Google alert for the word "medieval". Today it included a link to a Princeton University Symposium on Medieval Japanese art. That got me thinking: is it really correct to associate the word medieval--which describes the time between classical European history and the Renaissance (roughly)--to a concurrent time period in a non-European culture or society's history? I suppose it's more correct than alluding to the same period in Japanese history as the "Middle Ages", but then again, the term "medieval" is essentially a synonym for "middle ages." So how has it come to pass that we refer to a Japanese Medieval period which may or not have truly been "in the middle" of anything? Is it a relic of Eurocentricity?

Copperheads: Then and Now

Mac Owens writes (originally, here):

I had the good fortune to read a fine new book about political dissent in the North during the Civil War. The book, Copperheads: The Rise an Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, by journalist-turned-academic-historian Jennifer Weber, shines the spotlight on the “Peace Democrats,” who did everything they could to obstruct the Union war effort during the Rebellion. In so doing, she corrects a number of claims that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The historical record aside, what struck me the most were the similarities between the rhetoric and actions of the Copperheads a century and a half ago and Democratic opponents of the Iraq war today.

In contradistinction to the claims of many earlier historians, Weber argues persuasively that the Northern anti-war movement was far from a peripheral phenomenon. Disaffection with the war in the North was widespread, and the influence of the Peace Democrats on the Democratic party was substantial. During the election of 1864, the Copperheads wrote the platform of the Democratic party, and one of their own, Rep. George H. Pendleton of Ohio, was the party’s candidate for vice president. Until Farragut’s victory at Mobile Bay, Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, and Sheridan’s success in driving the Confederates from the Shenandoah Valley in the late summer and fall of 1864, hostility toward the war was so profound in the North that Lincoln believed he would lose the election.

Weber demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the actions of the Copperheads materially damaged the ability of the Lincoln administration to prosecute the war. Weber persuasively refutes the view of earlier historians such as the late Frank Klement, who argued that what Lincoln called the Copperhead “fire in the rear” was mostly “a fairy tale,” a “figment of Republican imagination,” made up of “lies, conjecture and political malignancy.” The fact is that Peace Democrats actively interfered with recruiting and encouraged desertion. Indeed, they generated so much opposition to conscription that the Army was forced to divert resources from the battlefield to the hotbeds of Copperhead activity in order to maintain order. Many Copperheads actively supported the Confederate cause, materially as well as rhetorically.

In the long run, the Democratic party was badly hurt by the Copperheads. Their actions radically politicized Union soldiers, turning into stalwart Republicans many who had strongly supported the Democratic party’s opposition to emancipation as a goal of the war. As the Democrats were reminded for many years after the war, the Copperheads had made a powerful enemy of the Union veterans.

Incidentally, other than the review Owens, this is the only other "professional" review I could find. The book came out in October of 2006.