Interview with George Huppert, Editor of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Earlier in the month I spoke to George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) about editing the Journal of the Historical Society. Huppert and associate

editor Scott Hovey aim to reach specialists and nonspecialists alike. The journal "presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research."

In the video embedded here I ask Huppert about the kinds of articles he seeks out and the models he looks to for the journal. He describes the ways in which the historian Lucien Febvre has informed his work and he notes the influence of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.

Huppert is a social historian of early modern Europe. He has written extensively on the Renaissance, humanism, the history of philosophy, and the annales school. He is the author of a variety of articles and books, including The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

London Calling Librarians

This guest post comes from Dana Goblaskas a former student of mine who works at the MIT library. Dana stuck out to me from the start because of her intellectual curiosity and because she was into pop music history, punk, and indie rock. Pluses in my book. Here she tells of her two-week trip across the water as a participant in University College London’s Librarianship Summer School.

Dana Goblaskas

As a self-proclaimed history nerd and an Anglophile, it’s hard for me to be giddier than when I’m immersed in the tangible history of England. And if I can earn credits toward my degree for that immersion, well, let’s just say the happy dances abound.

Last month, I took part in the inaugural session of University College London’s Librarianship Summer School, co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Studies. The two-week seminar examined the past, present, and future of Britain’s libraries and the field of librarianship, and featured daily field trips to museums, libraries, and archives throughout the city and beyond. Lectures by librarians, historians, and UCL faculty provided background for what my classmates and I saw during tours, and behind-the-scenes peeks into the workings of such places as the British Library and Bodleian Library at Oxford set our future-librarians’ hearts a-racing.

For the history nerd in me, there was plenty of “past” to learn about and see firsthand. Lectures about medieval manuscripts and eccentric pioneers of cataloging were coupled with glimpses inside Wren’s Library at Trinity College Cambridge (built in 1695), the Natural History Museum, and viewings of treasures like the Domesday Book at the National Archives.

Perhaps even more exciting than getting to drink all that in was seeing how much effort these institutions are presently putting into making their historical collections available to the world. With help from foundations like JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), many of the places I visited were in the midst of massive digitization, indexing, or retrospective cataloging projects. Inspired by the popularity of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? TV program, several libraries and archives were focusing on increasing public accessibility to the parts of their collections that could be used for genealogical research.

As for the future of Britain’s libraries, I think they’re heading in the right direction. Facing questions about libraries’ continuing relevance to society head-on, they are adapting to the communities around them and showing that they’re in it for the long run. A new “chain” of libraries called Idea Store is springing up around London, abandoning confusing catalog classifications and offering a wide variety of classes to support continuing education in their neighborhoods. The libraries in the London borough of Haringey recently won a grant that placed free medical clinics and wellness centers alongside their book stacks.

And in addition to focusing on expanding digital content and accessibility, some institutions are appealing to the public to help develop their collections. Projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL and Oxford’s First World War Poetry Archive rely on crowd-sourcing to create and identify materials, as well as on social networking tools like Twitter and Flickr to get the word out to wider circles of volunteers.

Coming back down to reality after two weeks spent doing not much more than hanging around inside and gawking at cool old libraries—or cool new libraries—was a little difficult. But coming back with great experiences, thousands of pictures, and a head full of ideas lessened the blow of the transition. And I’m excited by the prospect of so much more incredible content being made widely available. Now I just have to finish my research paper to earn those credits, and I think the happy dances will abound once again.

Sailing through California History

Randall Stephens

I've taken students on the occasional field trip to Boston. I've never sailed up the coast with them. (It's hard enough for me to navigate the cow path streets of Beantown.)

Rick Kennedy, professor of history at Point Loma Nazarene University, spent ten days on a sailboat this

May, teaching California history to eight students. (I interview Kennedy in the Youtube video here. We talk about how he teaches the class, the curriculum, and the experiences of students.) The class sounds like a blast. According to Kennedy's syllabus:

The course is not like a classroom course; rather, it is an extended fieldtrip. As such it strives to enhance a student's attentiveness to surroundings and ability to see layers of history at particular sites. On walking tours we want to have a heightened awareness of human history in geography, architecture, and town planning. The sailing will encourage awareness of the wind, currents, and tides that, in the past, had much influence on human hopes, plans, and accomplishments. Fieldtrips should help us learn to see the historical evidence that surrounds us, to read the ways topography pushes people in certain directions, the ways architecture proclaims intentions, and the ways a point jutting into the Pacific draws sailors to its lee.

We read and write too. We center the class on a great classic: Two Years Before the Mast, written by a student who sailed away from college in order to go to California in 1835. The book describes California during an era of political instability when a small number of Californios were trying to figure out what to do with a hard-to-get-to but increasingly desirable land.

The class is largely, but not exclusively, designed for those thinking about careers in teaching or tourism (parks, museums, and historic preservation). Emphasis throughout the class is on methods of thinking about local history that help us understand larger issues of world history, European history, American history, Native American History, missionary history, and varieties of cultural history. We also look for opportunities to cross disciplines into navigation, astronomy, and cartography.

Sign me up, prof!

There's much this class can accomplish. I was particularly interested in how a course like this can get students to think about the hardships and day-to-day lives or those who have gone before us. Sailing up and down the coast was a common enough experience for Californians. Re-enacting that, I think, gives history students new insight, even empathy.

Now, if I can just master that tiny sailboat on the Charles River . . .

Pseudohistory on Parade

Randall Stephens

In November 2009 Ronald H. Fritze wrote an essay for Historically Speaking: "On the Perils and Pleasures of Confronting Pseudohistory." He discussed his work in the trenches of fake history and asked questions about the enduring popular appeal of far-fetched stories and bizarre apocryphal tales. (Note to publishers: find some enterprising author to make a serious case for the existence of zombies and/or vampires in Alexander the Great's army.) According to Fritze:

As pop culture shows us, these ideas fascinate people. They form the premises of movies, television series, novels, and video games. They provide fodder for hours of fantastic chat on late night radio and drive legions of faithful audiences to weekend conferences devoted to the latest hot idea. Pseudohistory can be fun, just like a Star Trek convention or a Renaissance fair can be fun—as long as your pockets are deep enough and your skepticism sufficiently submerged.

But, he went on, there is a dark side to all this; hucksterism at best, a justification for all sorts of nastiness at worst. "Pseudohistory can sometimes bring about very real and tragic history for unfortunate acolytes," observes Fritze. (The history channel is a great purveyor of the lighter side of psuedohistory. They make expert use of the question mark to make documentaries on zany subjects seem plausible. Did Hitler live on in South America? Did ancient aliens roam the earth? Were their whalers on the moon in olden times?)

Here are a few recent, and not-so-recent, pseudohistorical items.

"Looking for alien DNA," cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com, June 15, 2010.

Zecharia Sitchin says he's willing to stake everything he's written about alien astronauts on DNA tests that could be performed on the 4,500-year-old remains of a high-ranking Sumerian woman. It's the latest - and possibly the last - cause celebre for a fringe celebrity.>>>

"APOLLO 11 HOAX PHOTOS: 8 Moon-Landing Myths -- Busted," National Geographic, July 20, 2009.

Forty years after U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon, many conspiracy theorists still insist the Apollo 11 moon landing was an elaborate hoax. Examine the photographic evidence, and find out why experts say some of the most common claims simply don't hold water.>>>

Amber Baker, "In search of the ark: Lovelander claims recent discovery points to evidence of biblical craft," Loveland Reporter-Herald, June 10, 2010.

A Loveland man who has written books and produced movies about the search for Noah’s ark said a recent discovery could “turn things upside down.” In April, Hong-Kong-based Noah’s Ark Ministries International announced that Chinese and Turkish explorers had found what the Christian group believes are the remains of Noah’s ark.>>>

Mark A. Chancey, "Lesson plans: The Bible in the classroom," Christian Century, August 23 2005.

J. O. Kinnaman is not a name well known in contemporary academic circles. He has argued (in Diggers for Facts: The Bible in Light of Archaeology) that Jesus and Paul visited Great Britain, that Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus' uncle and dominated the tin industry of Wales, and that he himself personally saw Jesus' school records in India. According to an article by Stephen Mehler, director of research at the Kinnaman Foundation, Kinnaman reported finding a secret entrance into the Great Pyramid of Giza, in which he discovered records from the lost continent of Atlantis. He also claimed that the pyramid was 35,000 years old and was used in antiquity to transmit radio messages to the Grand Canyon. Kinnaman might not be the best figure on which to base material for a public school textbook.>>>

A Crosspost on Presidential Speeches on Energy from the Miller Center of Public Affairs

Lauren Dunsmore
University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs

President Obama addressed the nation yesterday about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He also talked about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels, a theme in many presidential remarks.

In a 1977 speech on energy, Carter says we will have to drill more offshore wells if we don't conserve.

Ford had similar remarks on May 27, 1975. Check out this clip in which he says Congress has done little or nothing to decrease America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Click here to see how past presidents—from JFK to Reagan—addressed domestic crises during their administrations.

Follow up on Josiah Quincy House Class Project

Randall Stephens

About a month back I posted here on a fruitful class project I undertook with undergraduates. Since then the local paper, the Patriot Ledger, has done two stories on the resource website we created for the Josiah Quincy House. (As we worked on the JQ House website we tracked down loads of digital sources, included an extensive bibliography, along with photos, maps, illustrations, and a video interview.) Jack Encarnacao, a reporter for the paper, met with me, museums operations manager Leah Walczak, and the students at the Quincy home. A photographer snapped some shots as well. Fun stuff. I post here excerpts from the Ledger articles:

Jack Encarnacao, "Josiah Quincy House Comes to Life on Eastern Nazarene College Class Website," Patriot Ledger, June 3, 2010.

QUINCY — Professor Randall Stephens' class at Eastern Nazarene College studied the Josiah Quincy House in Wollaston, one of the city’s lower-key but significant historic sites. The home was built in 1770 by Revolutionary War colonel Josiah Quincy, son of Col. John Quincy, after whom the city is named.

The fruit of the class’s research – skimmed from Library of Congress archives, journals and maps – is on display at a Web site the students created: enc.edu/history/jq.

Stephens said he was pleasantly surprised at how evocative the house was to students, and the extent to which they were motivated to dig for nuggets of interesting Quincy history. Much of the historical information about the house comes from Eliza Susan Quincy, who in the 1880s kept journals, inventoried the contents of the house and commissioned photographs of its interior. She wrote about how Josiah Quincy had stood on the residence’s roof to monitor troop movements in Boston Harbor early in the American Revolution. >>>

Jack Encarnacao, "Renewed Interest in Josiah Quincy House Prompts More Tours," Patriot Ledger, June 13, 2010.

QUINCY — After a larger than expected turnout for last Saturday’s tour of the Josiah Quincy House, Historic New England is offering several more opportunities for the public to check out the historic home in Wollaston.

More than 100 people showed up for the free tours last week. The house is at 20 Muirhead St. and is usually open to the public only once or twice a year. . . .

Leah Walczak, Historic New England’s museum operations manager, said tours were added because of renewed interest in the site tied to recent publicity of a class project website built by students at Eastern Nazarene College which is also in the Wollaston section of Quincy. >>>

Contingency

Heather Cox Richardson

Two of the speakers I heard at The History Society’s conference last weekend got me thinking about the importance of contingency in historical events. Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute argued that the pattern of American politics since the early twentieth century had been determined by two central pivot constituencies. George Washington University’s Leo Ribuffo disagreed. He pointed instead to the unexpected quirks that had shifted key elections. Ribuffo’s funny look at the oddities of history poked a hole in the idea that there was any such thing as the sort of clear pattern Barone found in the political history of the past century.

I might have passed over this disagreement except that the previous day, in a session devoted to a review of his work, William Freehling—one of our leading scholars of the antebellum American South—had also mentioned contingency. He explained that his work on the rise of secession had made him come to see history as a series of themes flowing through time, altered at an immediate level by contingency. For proof of his theory, he challenged the audience to think of events in their own lives that had been determined by something accidental. And who can’t?

Two references to chance in two days made me wonder: What is the role of contingency in historical change? Professors Freehling and Ribuffo are undoubtedly correct. Our lives are not predetermined by impersonal societal forces. Chance matters. But historians study the past to figure out what creates change in human society, and Barone’s identification of a pattern that gave certain constituencies control over political elections also had great merit. How do these two seemingly contradictory factors work together?

As I thought about it, I came to lean toward Freehling’s vision of contingency, with an important adjustment. I do believe that societal change is driven by larger forces (my personal favorite is ideas) and that there are unexpected accidents that affect change in quirky ways. But—and this is an important but—I think that the larger forces in play limit which accidents turn out to be important, change the terms of those accidents, and ultimately define their significance. That is, a chance meeting might enable two scientists to develop an energy technology that goes on to change the world, but that chance meeting can only happen in certain kinds of societies, the nature of the meeting is determined by the society, and the results of the meeting can only matter in a society that recognizes the importance of their sort of work. That same chance meeting of two brilliant innovators in a society convulsed by civil war might mean they pass each other unnoticed as they struggle to get their families to safety. If they do speak, they might work together not on energy technology, but on a new wagon box spring or artillery carriage . . . or they might kill each other. And the result of their collaboration or collision might either fall forgotten in a society that has no current use for it, or it might revolutionize society in ways that have nothing to do with energy. In this scenario the same two great minds meet—a contingency—but the significance of that meeting depends largely on the trends of the larger society in which they live.

Or so I think at this particular (contingent?) moment.

Larger Pictures

Heather Cox Richardson

The Saturday night plenary session of the Historical Society conference got me wondering about the larger contours of history. The main speaker was Michael Barone currently of the American Enterprise Institute, who delivered a presentation on “The Enduring Character of America's Political Parties in Times of Continual Change.” Leo Ribuffo of George Washington University and Sean Wilentz of Princeton commented. (Listen to full lecture and comments here.)

Barone revealed his past career as a pollster (he was a vice president at the polling firm of Peter D. Hart Research Associates from 1974 to 1981). He outlined the percentages of the vote for each party in elections spanning the twentieth century to point out that elections were decided by quite small margins. To win, parties had to mobilize pivotal constituencies: quite small populations that determined the electoral votes of large states or regions to swing elections one way or another.

Ribuffo responded to this analysis by pointing out that Barone’s numbers imposed an order on electoral politics that simply wasn’t there. Elections were often decided by quirky contingencies that no one could have foreseen.

Wilentz also poked holes in Barone’s analysis. He pointed out that Barone had utterly neglected a discussion of the role of class in determining voting patterns. Any analysis of American politics without that element included was simply missing the point, he suggested.

And listening to these three distinguished scholars, I couldn’t shut up the voice in my own head whispering that the role of ideas in politics was absent from this particular discussion. Surely the parties stand for something, and people vote according to their beliefs about what the parties will do in office.

Each of these arguments has merit, and is probably, at some level, right. So how can they be reconciled to produce a definitive account of American political history? Or is it the nature of deep historical research to produce a number of accounts from which individuals pick as most important the ones that resonate most closely with their own unique experience?

This is a different question than that of the postmodernists, who ultimately argued that there was no such thing as “truth” or “history” because each perspective was different and equally valuable. The question of reconciling the different perspectives of cliometrics, contingency, class, ideology, and so on, is fundamentally a question of what constitutes good history.

Forced to think this one through, I would throw my weight behind the idea that all of these different factors matter in general, but that individual ones take the lead in different eras. They also might matter in every era, but answer different questions. For me, though, the question Barone, Ribuffo, and Wilentz raised remains an open one.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 3: Plenary Session on America's Enduring Two-Party System

Randall Stephens

The Historical Society's 2010 conference came to a close at George Washington University with a final plenary session on Saturday night dealing with the nature of America's two-party system. (Listen to the audio file embedded below. It will take a moment to load. The quality is not the greatest, but the words can be made out OK.) Heather Cox Richardson (University of Massachusetts Amherst) introduced Michael Barone (American Enterprise Institute), who spoke on “The Enduring Character of America’s Political Parties in Times of Continual Change.” These two parties, ancient in the world of modern politics, have long diverged sharply, said Barone. Some deeply consistent themes have defined the Democratic and Republican parties since the mid-19th century. The two distinct parties represent very different constituencies and have, since the 19th-century, upheld rather distinct political ideas. For instance, Barone described the outsider aspect of the Democratic Party, which tended to represent immigrants, saloon keepers, and many on the margins. The party of Roosevelt, populated by interest groups and factions, Barone remarked, lacked the cohesion of the Republican Party.



Commenters Sean Wilentz (Princeton University) and Leo Ribuffo (George Washington University) both praised Barone's extensive knowledge of political history, but each had serious critiques of Barone's key arguments. Ribuffo thought Barone overemphasized the differences between the parties. The two parties were, argued Ribuffo, less like a donkey and an elephant and more like kissing cousins, even incestuous cousins at times. Wilentz argued that Barone had not paid appropriate attention to class. Wilentz and Ribuffo also questioned Barone's insider-outsider thesis. The white democracy of the South hardly fit that pattern. At other points the commenters took issue with the continuities Barone saw.

The lively discussion was a fitting end to an intellectually engaging, vibrant conference that gave attendees much to ponder about the state of the profession and the future of historical inquiry.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 3: New Directions in the Study of Race and Slavery

Randall J.Stephens

Historians of the last two generations have been fascinated by the question of what race amounted to, or, how race was made. How was racial inferiority constructed and how did slavery take root in the early modern era? This panel, fitting with the umbrella theme of the conference, looked at some recent trends in the study of race and slavery. The three presenters skillfully spanned the centuries and ranged over several continents. (See the Youtube videos here, which record the first 10 minutes of each presentation.)

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

Joyce Malcolm (George Mason University School of Law) spoke about the legacy of slavery in the North during the Revolutionary War. She began by describing the surprising number of slaves in Massachusetts. Military service and its link to freedom varied widely between the North and the South. Malcolm called on historians to closer examine what happened to black soldiers after the war. She also pointed to the need for greater scrutiny of the possibilities and limits of freedom in the emerging nation. (The last New Hampshire slaves, noted Malcolm, died in the years before the Civil War.)

Robert Cottrol (George Washington School of Law) invited historians to think of the issue of slavery and its

legacy beyond the antebellum narrative and beyond the South. He called on historians to look at Latin America, opening up a bigger, hemisphere-wide picture. Slavery in Brazil, for instance, took place for a much longer period and was much more intensely tied to the African trade. Comparisons and contrasts between national legal systems explain some basic differences between North and South America. America's egalitarian ideals were embarrassed by slavery. Slavery's justification in the US revolved around race and black inferiority. Brazil, by contrast, was not a liberal society and was not as contradicted by the institution of slavery. Cottrol also asked several larger questions that are part of a broader project, including: "What is slavery's impact in terms of race relations?" And, he wondered: "How has slavery continued to shape the Western Hemisphere up to the present?"

Early in the European-African encounter white perceptions of Africans were shaping ideas of racial difference. Amy Long Caffee (University of South

Carolina) discussed the auditory notions English traders had of Africans in the early modern period. White traders and travelers reported their views to a larger public back in England. The documents of such venturers, observed Caffee, are "rich with sensory details." These reports speak volumes about what Englishmen thought of as a "barbarous land and people."

Summarizing the panel Mark Smith (University of South Carolina) commented that slavery was not an anomaly in the 19th century. It was the norm. Smith also linked the stereotypes, sensory and otherwise, of the 19th century to similar ones in the 20th century.

During the q and a session, participants considered where the field is headed. Malcolm thinks that more connections will be made between regions and eras. She also believes that the stereotypes of the antebellum period will be challenged more. Cottrol suggested that changes in graduate education--encouraging students to ask larger questions and requiring language work--could shift the field. Smith finally pointed out that emancipation and questions of slavery and freedom will possibly become a greater part of how historians in the area work.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 2: Notes on Friday Sessions

Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens

On Friday morning, Allan Kulikoff (University of Georgia) was offering a provocative proposal to solve the crisis in the history profession that included wholesale changes in the way graduate school programs are structured. (Listen to audio from the session):



And two rooms down the hall, sociologist Ricardo Duchesne (University of New Brunswick) suggested that "restlessness" was at the heart of Western uniqueness. Duchesne's presentation couldn't have been more different from Peter Coclanis's (UNC-Chapel Hill) plenary address the night before (which should appear soon on C-Span). And it is perhaps indicative of the culture of open conversation that the Historical Society works hard to foster that Coclanis, a past Society president, engaged Duchesne rather than dismiss him.

In the afternoon, there was a terrific session on the "Comparative Ways of War," featuring Brian McAllister Linn (Texas A&M and current president of the Society for Military History), Robert Citino (University of North Texas), and Peter Lorge (Vanderbilt). They combined formidable expertise in (respectively) American, German, and Chinese military history with healthy doses of caffeine-enhanced humor.

In the evening's Christopher Lasch Lecture, “How History Looks Different Over Time: The Case of the First World War," Adam Hochschild traced the development of two views of World War I in Great Britain that continue to confront each other today. One considers the war as noble and necessary. (Listen to the audio file here.)



It was the dominant view during the war and throughout most of the 1920s. But there was a minority view of the war during the same period that saw it as senseless slaughter inflicted by an incompetent military leadership. In the 1930s this second view gained ascendancy. World War II took center stage in the 1940s and 1950s, but since the 1960s the senseless slaughter view is almost universally held in Great Britain--save among academic military historians who have been influenced by Fritz Fischer's findings of Germany's bellicose intentions prior to 1914 and who have a greater appreciation for British generalship. As we approach centennial commemorations of WWI, Hochschild predicts that the competition between these two views will be on full display.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 1: Small Window, Big Picture?

Randall Stephens

A well-attended session on Thursday afternoon here at George Washington University dealt with what we can know or generalize about on a local level. What does the

information at the local level tell us about slavery and freedom in the antebellum South? It deserves attention here. I include videos below of the presenters (due to youtube's 10 minute limit, I've only included the first 9 minutes or so from each):

"Does It Take a Small Window to See the Big Picture?"

Chair and Commentator: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary

Presenters:

Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary
“Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner”

Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia

“How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland”

Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
“Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery”

Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary
“What the Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn’t”

Ely summarizes the session as follows:

Histories of localities have won considerable attention over the years. Examples range from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and several important books on New England towns to Charles Dew’s Bond of Iron and Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox. Some distinguished

reviewers have recognized the assiduousness of the research that underpins certain of these studies and even praised the “sophisticated” analysis they may offer—yet these critics tend to write off the stories these works tell as atypical, and to deprecate their local perspective as inherently unreflective of broader realities. Eric Foner has added that “local histories, so valuable in bringing into sharp relief the details of daily life, seem to have an inherent bias toward continuity as opposed to historical change,” especially when the locality in question is rural. Such critics typically go on to praise canonical histories of entire regions (for example, “the American South”) because they “allow far more scope for generalizations.” But how useful are generalizations that turn out to be contradicted on the ground in one locality after another?

The members of this panel recognize that the historian’s job is to gather, organize, and interpret data in ways that yield reasonably broad, meaningful conclusions. But we also contend that sweeping conclusions that cannot account for the complexities pervading the lives of real people are not worth very much. A signal challenge for historians in the twenty-first century is to ferret out the particulars of life as people really lived it and to draw from those details conclusions that are both well founded and widely significant. . . .

Each of us finds that local realities seriously complicate and sometimes contradict received generalizations. Laws passed following the Nat Turner rebellion did not end black preaching and church leadership in Virginia, thanks to the assertiveness of black Baptists supported by more than a few of their white brethren (Hillman). Whites in western Maryland, far from identifying instinctively with the North at the onset of the Civil War, wrapped themselves in the mantle of Southernness and of proslavery orthodoxy—yet

within less than two years, two-thirds of the white men of Frederick County came to support Lincoln and Emancipation (Loux). The Virginia law of 1856 allowing free blacks to enslave themselves to white masters was not an expression of spiraling antipathy toward free African Americans or of a general desire among whites to reduce them to bondage; in fact, the law’s framers formulated it in concert with free blacks themselves as a measure to protect certain black individuals (Maris-Wolf). And in a society of profound inequality, many whites nevertheless adopted a live-and-let-live attitude toward free blacks (Ely). Ely chaired the panel; after the other panelists offered presentations of their work on the subjects just named, Ely offered a closing comment, drawing on those presentations and on his own work to address what this proposal has called the big questions.

Dispatches from the Historical Society, Day 2: Christian Identities in Modern Germany

Randall J. Stephens

This Friday session, which I chaired, took place after lunch, when bellies were full and eyes were heavy. Attendees trickled in until we had a good number. The presenters engaged us on historical-theological change and continuity in Modern Germany.

Ryan Glomsrud (Harvard University) asked: How do we summarize and describe the context of theologians and philosophers? What counts as appropriate contextualization for a theologian a cultural critic, or a moral philosopher, like Karl Barth? How do we concretize some of these ideas with social and theological context?

In Glomsrud's view, Pietism is the forgotten religious context for 19th century religion and Weimar Germany. Glomsrud challenges the abstract categories--imminent, gnostic, transcendent--used to describe theologians and public intellectuals.

Pietists organized themselves around projects--youth conferences and the like. Barth launched his career in this world. Journals attached to the Pietist 19th century movement served as the bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Glomsrud finds a continuity in this model from one century to the next. And he asks historians to think about how this continuity might reshape what we think of the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

Late 19th-century ecumenism certainly drew on new sentiments in Europe. Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) focused on the return of religious history in the ecumenical and confessional age. His paper “Christian Unity in a Secular and Confessional Age: Ignaz von Döllinger, Vatican I, and the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875,” answered questions about why these conferences took place, what occured at them, and what they tell us about the era. The theological consensus fell apart, commented Howard, when Catholics questioned the participation of Anglicans. The center could not hold.

So what does this tell us about the era? Howard noted the severe limits of thinking of the 19th century as a second confessional age. But also it was no secular age either. Ecumenism was limited for a variety of reasons. Still, the legacy of the Bonn conferences lived on into the 20th century.

Nicholas Brooks (University of Virginia) began with a quote, "Paul has become fashionable again." Perhaps that is in response to the postsecular age or to his reimagining/reevaluation by Gary Wills and others.

Brooks's paper “Interpreting St. Paul for the New Germany: Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, 1920-22,” considered the views of Barth and Heidegger on Paul. Those views, said Brooks, revealed a very specific pattern in 20th century thought and marked a break with the previous century. Where Glomsrud saw continuity, Brooks saw discontinuity. In Brooks's words: "Barth's and Heidegger's readings of Paul might be situated in the history of Paul-interpretation, and how in invoking Paul's writings, Barth and Heidegger in similar ways signaled their divergence from the intellectual and cultural heritage of the nineteenth century while providing footing for the beginning of a new era in Weimar and European culture more broadly."

Heidegger viewed Paul as an existential type that took on greater relevance in the 20th century. Paul's religion was not the religion of Jesus, thought Heidegger.

The Paul the Heidegger and Barth offered was different from the liberal version, argued Brooks. Paul's religion does not look to a unified whole, Heidegger thought. Real religion presents the world in a kind of radical chaos. It is mutable. Barth and Heidegger launched very different projects using Paul. Heidegger takes a very serious vision of finitude. Barth conceives of God as wholly other and takes on a "post-metaphysical" outlook. The work of both Barth and Heidegger on Paul had special resonance for Westerners in mid-century.

Tal Howard used Freud's term "the return of the repressed" to speak about the trouble in intellectual history with regard to religion. Each of the panelists was thinking through how theologians, divines, and philosophers reenvisioned faith or belief in a supposedly increasingly secular era. Religion has returned, though, and religious studies and religious history is strong. (See the theme for the 2011 AHA!) And these papers were great examples of the strength of the field.

Posted Soon: Videos from two other sessions. The Internet connection here is as slow as Christmas.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 1: History for the Non-major

Randall Stephens

It is hot in Washington, DC. I flew into our nation's capitol on Wednesday and wilted immediately. The heat and humidity, the residue of a former swamp, didn't keep away historians who came to explore the present and future of historical inquiry. On Thursday I attended a few wonderful sessions that explored some of the basic themes of the 2010 Historical Society conference, held at George Washington University, and organized by Eric Arnesen.

The panel on "Historical Inquiry Outside the Traditional Undergraduate History Classroom" considered "past inquiry" outside of the typical history classroom. The question of: Who are we teaching, how are we teaching them, and why? animated the session.

John Thomas Scott (Mercer University) used the term "past" rather than "historical" to indicate the interdisciplinary nature of honors courses and general classes populated by non-history majors. Scott and other panelists looked into the possibilities and perils--perils for historians at least--of working more broadly and reaching out to a larger audience.

How does one get students to think historically about any number of subjects? In what ways do courses primarily taught for non-majors differ from typical history classes?

Sarah E. Gardner (Mercer University) spoke about some of the classes that make up Mercer's honors program. Baseball and American culture, a real draw, includes a class trip to a Florida spring training camp. Gardner teaches a course on Gangster Films in the 1930s. These classes tend to use primary sources. Student engagement with documents, she noted, has been key. Gardner pointed out that these classes typically leave out historiography and the widely differing views of historians. She ended by considering some of the downsides of this omission: There will be some lack of contextualization and argument, among other things.

Doug Thompson (Mercer University) related the institutional dynamics of Mercer and talked about how various disciplines engage a critical question or problem. Mercer's Great Books program, Thompson said, is a major recruitment tool. Great Books curricula ranges over historical material but is not bound by the rigors of the historical profession.

John Thomas Scott rounded out the panel by speaking about the research projects honors students and non-majors complete as part of Mercer's program. He highlighted the proliferation of on-line resources in the last 15 years. That has made it possible for undergrads, even at a smaller liberal arts university like Mercer, to do quality research. (Undergrads have countless journals, newspapers, and original sources at their fingertips.) Scott also focused on how Mercer faculty encourage undergraduate publication and paper presentations. Mercer publishes a couple of excellent in-house undergrad research publications that showcase student work.

There were several intriguing threads that came out during the Q and A. One that struck me was a conversation about what a non-history major really should or shouldn't know. Katrin Schultheiss (George Washington University) asked what an engineering major really needed to know about in depth historiographic debate. In this case, are basic skills history teaches more important? How does history content fit in with that, too? It left us with much, much to consider.

Blogging from the Historical Society Conference: "Historical Inquiry in the New Century"

Randall Stephens

The 2010 Historical Society conference, "Historical Inquiry in the New Century," runs this week from Thursday to Saturday. I'll be posting updates from George Washington University.

A number of the panels will deal with the state of the field and offer some insight on where things are going. I will be selecting some panels and plenary sessions to highlight here. I'll have my Flip camera with me, so I'll be posting some short videos on this blog as well. Stay tuned.