Historiography is Sexy (and Important)
Warning: making up crap about two of the best history monographs of the twentieth century will make me frustrated.
Historiography is Sexy (and Important)
One word can put almost any room to sleep (unless that room is full of historians), and that word is historiography. Nevertheless, with the recent publication of the 1619 Project in book form, and the never-ending profusion of #takes on whether ‘history has gone too far’ or if it students are being taught the ‘wrong history,’ I argue that it is imperative that historians take the bull by its horns and make historiography sexy again. We’ve seen dozens of legislative efforts to ban or limit the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” and related concepts in public institutions. All these efforts stemmed from former President Trump’s (no longer active) executive order which stated that federally funded institutions could not teach “divisive concepts” about gender and race. Though the order itself had more bark than bite, the state efforts across the country in 2021 don’t seem to have an end in sight.
Critical race theory, at its core, argues that racism exists not only at the individual level, but is structural. Though this theory has been in academic circles for decades, its existence has recently become a powerful weapon against educators at the K-12 and college levels. Since the killing of George Floyd last year and the subsequent protests, and even before that with the New York Times Magazine’s publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 — Americans at large have begun to examine the role of structural racism in our society, while others have started to criticize the teaching of systemic racism at all.
If history can be summed up as the study of “change over time,” then historiography can be explained as the “study of the history of history.” For those who haven’t had to write a review essay in a history seminar, let me explain further. Historians take primary sources to answer questions about when, how, and why things in the past happened or didn’t happen. However, this means that every historical monograph or piece of historical research you read has an argument. Historians make claims, based on their interpretations of sources. However, this means that every argument a historian makes can reasonably be arguable. While every history monograph you read will have a set of facts (dates, people, events) that don’t change, the interpretation of these facts changes. If historians in the present day disagree with each other, the historical scholarship over time also will reveal disagreements and developments. The accepted interpretation of the role of slavery in the Constitution, for example, is something that has its own historiography. So does who started the Cold War, why did the French Revolution break out, when did decolonization end, as a couple examples. In academia, historiography looks like the review essays that are published in journals examining the state of a subfield, or the first few paragraphs of a historian’s book where they explain what past scholars have said about their subject and where and why they disagree.
I argue that, just as the study of history doesn’t limit itself within the walls of a university, historiography doesn’t stop at the door of the seminar either. Besides the discussion of the role of slavery in American history, the public has been engaging in other historiographical debates as well. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas, MLK Jr. Day, President’s Day, and even the hotly debated Columbus Day, pushes Americans into heated discussions in their homes, online, or in the media about ‘which history’ is the correct one. Or ‘whose story’ should be told in our history? Why is this statue in our main square? Why was it taken down? While writing historiography is difficult, it is not something that only a select few can grasp. Since it’s evident that historiography is all around us, historians, need to accept that alongside a public history, we need to provide a public historiography as well. Even without legislation attempting to curb what can be taught in classrooms, the need for historians to set the record straight with the American public is critical.
The Example of Bad Public Historiography
While almost five years of graduate school should have prepared me to be unsurprised by almost anything when it comes to a “history take,” a recent piece from The American Conservative left me flabbergasted and deeply afraid. After reading it, and then reading through the sheer number of angry tweets from fellow historians online, I came away with two important conclusions: first, the general public has very little idea of what historiography actually is and why it is important to them; second, historians can no longer sit on the sidelines frustrated by bad-faith constructions of the past.
In the piece, as Nils Gilman stated on twitter, Helen Andrews “[explicitly attempts] to rehabilitate the Dunning School’s execrable views of Reconstruction, with a dollop of red-baiting and neo-colonialist nostalgia thrown in for good measure.” Regardless of whether one specializes in the Reconstruction Era or not, this piece should deeply trouble you, because it reveals how far some will go to distort not only the past, but the aims and methods of history writing itself.
First off, instead of reading Andrews’ piece, I recommend everyone go check out Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner, Race and Reunion by David W. Blight, and A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights by Laura F. Edwards from their local library and sit with them for as long as you can. If you can’t read these books, at the minimum, I suggest reading some summaries or overviews of these books. Though some of these books may not be approachable for everyone outside of academia, even understanding the basic contours of these works will reveal what I mean when I talk about historiography and how it has become public facing today.
Let’s begin with the main problems with the piece in The American Conservative. First, it grossly misrepresents both Du Bois’ and Foner’s works as well as the historiography of Reconstruction of the past seven or so decades. The first mistake is Andrews’ conflation with the backlash to the 1619 Project to the historiography of Reconstruction since Du Bois’ 1937 Black Reconstruction. Though it is fair to say that Du Bois’ book was not initially received as well as it is regarded today, the analogy is flawed. The situation for the creators of the 1619 Project is completely different than what Du Bois faced when researching and writing his book. In addition to literal restraints on Du Bois’ research abilities, his potential audience and goals were different as well.
The second flaw in the piece comes with Andrews only (substantive) critique of Du Bois: his sourcing in Black Reconstruction. The quote Andrews uses to make this argument misrepresents the thrust of the very introduction that David Levering Lewis wrote for the book. She quotes part of this sentence: “That he chose instead to concentrate on government reports, proceedings of state constitutional conventions, dissertations, and virtually every relevant published monograph, but made only occasional use of newspapers and no use of unpublished archival records at historical societies, state repositories, and courthouses, disturbed many scholars, seven of whom dyspeptically noted the author’s generous foundation support.”[1] However, the author conveniently ignored the phrase preceding her quote, as well as the paragraphs preceding and succeeding it. As Lewis details, Du Bois began researching the book in 1931 (after receiving a grant) but continued to work with the NAACP while working. As Lewis states, “several occupational hats precluded Du Bois from conducting the kind of extensive primary research expected of a professional historian,” however, these “reproaches [were] of little concern to Du Bois” because the goal of the book was “preeminently one of aggressive reinterpretation rather than of original research.”[2] While Andrews not only (perhaps purposefully) ignores the main point every graduate student who has read Black Reconstruction is aware of when they start the book, that this work was attempting to bring in a new perspective on Reconstruction as a corrective to the Dunning School, she also ignores the reality of the situation for a Black scholar in the 1930s. As Lewis points out (just one sentence after the quote Andrews uses!!) there were “almost insurmountable handicaps confronting Black scholars who wished to gain access to southern repositories. Before the Civil Rights Era it was rarely possible for them to gain admission to historical societies and state archives.”[3] Not content with mere misrepresentation of Du Bois’ goal in Black Reconstruction, Andrews is willing to deny the literal fact that Black scholars, could not step into whichever building they wished under the Jim Crow regime.
The third error comes in the general thrust of the piece, where Andrews critiques Du Bois for a “bold attempt to apply a Marxist framework to the Civil War period.” As stated above, Du Bois’ goal in his book was to reinterpret the history of Reconstruction, not to write a new ‘textbook’ of the era in which just actors and dates are listed.[4] She claims that “Black Reconstruction is not the sort of book any scholar would want as the foundation of a new interpretive school. Du Bois was no historian.” Despite the descent into ad hominem, Andrews is claiming that Du Bois’ conclusions are all based on “motivated reasoning and tendentious distortions of evidence.” However, she only offers one specific example of this so called ‘motivated reasoning,’ which is cherry-picking to a grave degree.
Let us examine her claim that Du Bois’ work should not be published as deluxe edition by the Library of America because it is not a “straightforward history.” Andrews clearly did not read further than the above-mentioned quote in Lewis’ introduction, nor did she read ahead to Du Bois’ introductory note either. Lewis, a few paragraphs after where Andrews seems to have stopped reading, states that “a certain lore has surrounded the book. Because it was ignored by the American Historical Review and disparaged by some mainstream historians during the era of McCarthyism, the impression persisted well into the 1970s that [the book] received scant notice at the time of publication or…that it was widely dismissed as serious scholarship.”[5] Thus, the initial negative reviews were to be expected, because at the end of the day, it was a book written by a Black man, about other Black people, for Black people to read. Regardless, there were many white readers who did find the book useful and even gave it positive reviews. Lewis points out that “the critical response to Black Reconstruction was generally quite positive outside the South, and even below the Mason-Dixon Line the book caused exceptional breaks in the ranks of Lost Cause historians.[6] There were definitely historians who were frustrated with some of Du Bois’ claims, but historians generally appreciated the work as a whole. Lewis cites William MacDonald of Yale who wrote that Du Bois was “justified in his rancorous onslaught on American historians of the Civil War period.”[7] He went as far as to say that there was “no need to accept the author’s views about racial equality in order to recognize the imposing contribution which he [Du Bois] has made to a critical period in American history, nor need one be a Marxian to perceive that, in treating the Negro experience as part of the American labor movement in general, he has given that movement an orientation very different from what it has commonly had.”[8] As Lewis, and countless historians since publication in 1935, have noted, the goal of Du Bois was always clear: he intended to turn the Dunning School’s interpretation on its head. And he did so in order to bring forward the voices of African Americans, emphasize the Black experience in the history of the United States, and hopefully support a fuller emancipation of African Americans from the chains society had kept on them in 1935.
Based on all we now see about Black Reconstruction’s initial reception and more importantly Du Bois’ clearly stated goals with the book, even if Andrews or others wish to claim it cannot be a secondary source on Reconstruction, it is undoubtably one of the most critical primary sources for scholars of the twentieth century and race in America. If Andrews has not read Du Bois’ note to the reader, or if you have yet to read it, it is important to read it here below:
“It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first.”[9]
Thus, Du Bois makes it clear from the first page that his goal is not to try to convince those who think Black citizens do not have agency or were not active participants in American history before and after the Civil War, because there can never be facts on that side. While there are many aspects of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction that can be debated,[10] it is fundamentally impossible with the sources we have today to claim that the millions of Black people in the South, did not participate in the polity in the South before and after the Civil War. Whether it was fighting for their voting rights after the war or literally laying down their lives for their emancipation before the war, African Americans have clearly been not just active but agents of change in the United States. At the core of Du Bois’ interpretation, and why it is still widely read today, is the important claim that Black Americans were instrumental in their own emancipation and also, they were a critical part of the story of South’s development after the war ended in 1865. To paraphrase MacDonald’s review from 1935(!), one doesn’t have to be a Marxist to see the importance of this reframing. Thus, regardless of Du Bois’ argument in Black Reconstruction as to why Reconstruction failed, this text was read, and must continue to be read, because it did what Dunning School historians refused to do: see Black people. Thus, Andrews’ issue with Du Bois’ radical politics fails to support both her claim that this book is not a work of history and her argument that Du Bois’ does not deserve to be republished or read at all.
Andrews plows on, however, and argues that Du Bois ignores the fact that “Reconstruction state legislatures” were ultimately “profligate and corrupt.” She misuses the data and sources and makes the core mistake she claims Du Bois makes, assuming correlation equates causation. Though she does not offer conclusive evidence to support this, besides cherry picking data from South Carolina and Louisiana, the goal of this claim for Andrews is clear: she intends to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In arguing that Du Bois’ comparison of Southern carpetbag governments to corruption in the North was only a false equivalency, by supporting her own bad-faith differences between Tammany Hall and the Southern Reconstruction governments (again, only with assumptive claims like “Southern corruption was not just a matter of a little graft here and there” as if corruption in Northern urban areas can be reasonably summed up as ‘a little graft here and there’), Andrews intends her readers to infer that every Southern state government during Reconstruction was corrupt to its core, or that there was so much rampant corruption that the changes during Reconstruction regarding public schools, voting, or hospitals, should all be viewed with skepticism. The argumentation is rank generalization and with no citations to support her claims that Du Bois’ interpretations of budgetary spending in the South was factually incorrect.
She compounds this misuse of data by arguing that “if budget numbers are not eloquent enough, we also have the testimony of thousands of Southerners in books, diaries, and letters describing legislators who openly sold their votes for cash and judges who refused to convict thieves who were caught red-handed unless the victim paid the going rate for justice.” She says that “Du Bois discounts this eyewitness evidence as worthless.” But not once in these paragraphs on Du Bois’ primary source material or his view on Southern corruption does Andrews question or even consider why Du Bois didn’t take this ‘testimony’ seriously. Almost reaching performance art level absurdity, Andrews claims that all “Reconstruction revisionists must treat primary sources, as so many lies and delusions.” She then says there is ample writing from white Southerners claiming that “armed freedmen made them feel unsafe.” Through these paragraphs, there is no self-awareness at all. Andrews does not consider the consequences of her own words. What she is dredging up are the same Dunning School ‘histories’ which claimed that Black suffrage was the biggest mistake of Reconstruction, because of ‘corruption’ or lack of ‘representation.’ However, if Andrews really wishes to reanimate the corpse of the Dunning School, she must at least do what she claims Du Bois avoids, prove that her primary sources (which she neither cites nor points to others’ citations), hold more weight than the decades upon decades of primary sources that historians have been using since Du Bois’ book was published. These being sources that neither Du Bois nor other Black scholars in the 1930s or 1940s would have been able to get their hands on. By making Black Reconstruction the fake boogeyman for her Dunning-esque fears of Black voices appearing in her history of the United States, Andrews willingly overlooks decades of work by the ‘Revisionist’ historians who do not support Du Bois’ arguments on Black and white labor in the South.[11] Andrews also claims that since there were “true-believing liberals” from the North became disillusioned with Reconstruction, this is further proof that Du Bois’ history needs to be thrown out. Andrews again mixes correlation and causation with cherry-picked quotes. The two voices in the North she uses do not represent all white Republicans in the north, let alone representing the four million Black Southerners.
Finally, Andrews’ biggest mistake, which destroys her chance of being objective or even a ‘trusted’ voice on the subject, is the claim that “the plain truth is that Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad.” To unpack this, let’s become historians interrogating a claim: Who was Reconstruction bad for? Why do these claims of corrupt school commissioners and tax collectors hold more value in judging the efficacy (forget judging ‘goodness’) of Reconstruction? How do the events after Reconstruction change your impact your interpretation of the era?
When making a value judgment on a historical event or phenomenon (which is not the task of a historian), having clear parameters for your judgment is paramount. If not, you must be ready to handle the accusations of generalization and misappropriation of the past. In Andrews’ rush to paint Du Bois, Eric Foner, and other ‘revisionist’ historians of the Reconstruction era as politically motivated, Andrews not only reveals her own preconceived biases driving her piece, but completely avoids providing any evidence for her own value judgment.
Andrews continues her argument against the ‘revisionist historiography’ Reconstruction by turning to blatant red baiting. Without explanation as to why, she states that “Du Bois and Eric Foner, are both Marxists.” It is completely true that Du Bois became a member of the Communist Party, but Du Bois’ political leanings were never hidden in any of his writings, nor does Andrews make a compelling case as to why this discredits him.[12] Andrews drops the ball a little in her red-baiting, because the only evidence she holds of Eric Foner’s communism is his father and uncles, and a three-decade old op-ed. Though it is evident through some of Foner’s personal interviews and speeches that he might sympathize with progressives, unlike Marxist historians of the early twentieth century, there is no evidence that he has been underhanded or hidden any of his political leanings. Also, regardless of any historian’s political leanings, the value of the work they provide is their ability to represent the facts fairly and make a convincing case for their interpretation.[13]
Here is where Andrews’ final mistake, her value judgment, destroys her credibility. She states that “when revisionists say that Reconstruction only failed because it was not tried hard enough, what they mean is that America did not go all the way to a 1917-style revolution.” It is no secret that Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction advocated for a revolution in the United States. However, nowhere in Eric Foner’s 600-page-tome Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution does he advocate for this. Contemplating and analyzing the opinions towards land redistribution during the era does not make Foner responsible for those who supported land redistribution.
Andrews ends with the claim that currently people are trying to “rewrite history so that good is bad, heroes are villains, and the solution to every problem no matter the circumstances is to give money and power to racial minorities.” Firstly, Andrews basically crosses the line into not just Dunning School rhetoric here, but into the rhetoric of those who supported Jim Crow, school segregation, and poll taxes. By directly stating that Du Bois, Foner, and other historians are ‘rewriting’ history to make ‘heroes’ into ‘villains,’ Andrews is claiming that Du Bois’ central goal (as well as the goal of many historians who have uncovered sources from Black and white voices that were not used in the early twentieth century) to emphasize the role of Black Americans in attempting to create a multiracial democracy in the South, is not only bad, but that the Black agents in the South were the ‘villains’ of the post-Civil War South, and they should remain that way. Not only does Andrews use her strawman version of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction to misrepresent the historiography of Reconstruction, but she fundamentally argues that writing in the stories of the millions of Black Americans into the history is not a worthy task. In fact, not only is it unworthy in her eyes, but it is a threat to her. It is a threat to her vision of American history.[14] Her emphases on the ‘rampant’ corruption and violence against white Southerners belie the true reason why Andrews wishes to claim that Reconstruction was ‘bad.’ She does not wish to bring forward the work on poor whites in the South or the economic devastation the region faced after the Civil War, what Andrews intends to do is discredit the core mission of Black Americans after the war, to build a democracy in which they were equal citizens, in which they were given the political, economic, and social safety they were due.
I did not take issue with this piece because I felt some deep-seated need to defend the honor of Civil War and Reconstruction historians. This piece of course exemplifies bad history and bad historiography, but at its core it doesn’t anger me just as a historian. It frightens and angers me as a citizen of this country, as someone who took her declared an oath of allegiance to the United States of America, as someone who voted in every election since her citizenship, because she felt this was finally the moment where she would be allowed to be written into the history of this country. With this critique of two historians and a historiography, Andrews is hiding her real goal: deciding who can and who can’t be a member of the American political system, who can and who can’t be an American. Andrews is not critiquing the validity of a single book in this piece, she is denying the efforts Black Americans took in building American democracy, and then further denying the very history and existence of the formerly enslaved themselves.
Why We Need a “Public” Historiography.
I first heard the word ‘historiography’ in my eleventh grade AP US History class, when my teacher assigned an excerpt from Eric Foner’s 2002 book, Who Owns History?. Foner’s book is broken down into nine speeches that he gave over his career. I remember the excerpt in his introduction where he discussed slavery’s legacy in the United States. I recently bought the book, and what struck me is how the introduction still holds so much power today, nearly twenty years after its publication. He states that, “Nowhere is the gap between scholarly inquiry and public perceptions of history more stark…slavery has played a prominent role in recent disputes about history. The public display of the Confederate battle flag in the South inspired demonstrations, economic boycotts, and one statewide referendum. The movement for reparations for slavery gained increasing support among black politicians and intellectuals.”[15] That book opened my eyes to something I had yet to fully consider as a sixteen-year-old, that the ‘history’ that I had been reading up until then was an interpretation by someone which could change, and that was okay.
As everyone knows, different versions of the past are the bits that make up not just our personal lives but our national stories as well. Foner’s claim in 2002, despite the rise of globalization and tremors within nation states, still holds true: “the scholarly writing of history…has always been tied to the nation-state.” Regardless of whether one is writing a history of American foreign policymakers during the Spanish American War or a subaltern history of South Asian farmers during the final days of the British Empire. Though 2021 is not the first or last time Americans have clamored for a more ‘patriotic’ or ‘hero-filled’ history, I believe this time historians should consider something different.
In a previous post, I argued that history has always been a double-edged sword, a story that can engender action and anger as well as apathy or complacency. While it is critical that historians who do “public history” keep up their amazing work, I don’t think historiography needs to be left to the ‘professionals’ to think about. If K-12 teachers, school board members, high school and undergraduate students, and parents are discussing not just the role of history in their lives and what history needs to be taught, then we as scholars should be willing to explain why certain history is taught. What one can call a “public historiography” is an explanation to students and all kinds of readers what doing history looks like. We need to explain that “rewriting history” is not a threat, but the literal job of historians. The reason pieces like this one in The American Conservative can attempt to resurrect outdated and frankly, racist, interpretations of history, is not because there is a decisive majority of Americans hoping to erase decades of the past and millions of peoples’ stories. It is because we as historians aren’t taking advantage of the current situation. We have an opportunity to explain to the public what it is historians do, what good history looks like, and why histories change over time. The current situation is not just an opportunity, but a threat to the discipline, and the history which we historians have worked for decades to research and write. What is the use of our painstaking research and writing on histories of the economy, race, politics, and society if we can’t explain to readers and students why these histories have expanded in the first place?
[1] W. E. B Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and David Levering Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America (the Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois): An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, (Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5824856.
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] An aside, but this is the goal of every historian who writes a monograph. Every social scientist in their work is making an ‘argument,’ in that they are posing to their colleagues and other readers a new interpretation of how to think about a certain event, phenomenon, or idea. Historians before and after Du Bois’ work have differed on the methodology and types of sources they use to make their claims, but in no historical monograph will a historian try to claim that their framework or interpretation (Marxist, Conservative, or whatever) must be the only interpretation.
[5] ibid.
[6] W. E. B Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and David Levering Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America (the Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois): An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, (Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5824856.; Perhaps Andrews needs to reread these reviews first if she wishes to tout the importance of primary sources.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid. (review citation: William MacDonald. "The American Negro's Part in the Reconstruction Years" New York Times (1923-), Jun 16, 1935. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/american-negros-part-reconstruction-years/docview/101447728/se-2.)
[9] W. E. B Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and David Levering Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America (the Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois): An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, (Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5824856.
[10] Such as: How people participated and why? What did Reconstruction look like and for who? Why did Reconstruction fail? Even after the end of Reconstruction, what impacts did it have on America’s legal, social, cultural, political, and economic arenas? Who was affected by Reconstruction’s failure, and how? Other debates and new avenues of research are still lively in Civil War and Reconstruction history today. The contours of the racial divide in the South and North, the labor issues in both regions, the economic destruction of the South, immigration and emigration to and from the South, the impact of wars with Native Americans in the West on Southern Reconstruction, the growth of the federal government, the role of the judiciary, the transformations in political and legal institutions are just a few examples of subjects that won’t cease to bring in new research.
[11] An aside: Andrews says that “it may be that these fears were partly motivated by racial prejudice” and then calls Du Bois’ writing “glib” with completely no self-awareness. Though there were cases of destruction of property in the South during and after the Civil War, the complete lack of mention the Ku Klux Klan, Black Codes, and the plethora of other cases of violence against the Black population is rank Gone With the Wind fan-fiction.
[12] Besides the not-so-subtle and wildly offensive assumption that being a Communist means one can’t write history or publish a book.
[13] If professorships and book awards were handed out based on political leanings, one wouldn’t be seeing the collapse of the academic job market right now.
[14] Which only exists in her dreams, in my worst nightmares, and sadly still in some textbooks in this country.
[15] Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).