Doing History in Interesting Times

In July, 2002, my OU colleague Andy Horton and I attended a Film and History Conference at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It was a terrific conference and, for a variety of reasons, one of the most memorable trips of my lifetime. One of the things that interested me when I submitted a proposal for the conference – and later when I attended it — was why UCT’s history department was hosting such a conference. As far as I could tell, the study of film had not been a traditional strength of the department.

During a break between sessions I asked one of the members of UCT’s history department about this. And what he told me was interesting. UCT was historically the leading university in South Africa and one of the leading universities on the continent. Though few Black students had attended UCT during apartheid, the institution had a reputation as a center for opposition to apartheid.  During those years, history was one of the most popular courses of study because history classrooms at UCT were a place where truths were told that were otherwise silenced in apartheid South Africa.  But since the collapse of apartheid, courses of study that were seen as more professionally practical had grown in popularity. Work on film and history at Cape Town dated back to the early 1990s when the department was looking for ways of establishing a new kind of relevance for a new era.

These days in the U.S., we are in the midst of a decade-long decline in the number of history majors. But in other ways, the situation of history in America today is beginning to resemble the place it apparently played at UCT under apartheid. We have a monumentally dishonest president, who lies about everything as a matter of course. His most enthusiastic followers, including would-be intellectuals like Dinesh D’Souza have bolstered the dishonesty and simple ignorance that flows from the White House with falsified versions of the American past, in books, on video, and in social media.

In this environment, history, good history, takes on a vital civic function.

I’ve only recently been drawn onto Twitter. And what drew me there was the vigorous work of #Twitterstorians like Kevin Kruse, who’ve been meticulously taking apart the phony views of the past offered by folks like D’Souza. Online publications like Public Seminar, which is co-edited by longtime S-USIHite Claire Potter, as well as the editorial pages of more traditional publications have also provided a spaces in which historians can expand the scope of public history during this moment of need.  Podcasts by professional historians that relate the present to the past are also proliferating, among them Trotsky & the Wild Orchids, which is produced by former USIH Bloggers Ray Haberski and Andrew Hartman, and Past Present, whose creators include long-time S-USIHites Niki Hemmer and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela.

This sense of history’s sudden civic significance can also be felt in our classrooms. This semester I’m teaching a pair of classes that I’ve also taught the past three falls. One is a course on World War II memory, in the U.S. and around the world, which touches on such things as the nature of the stories we tell about the past, the forms and functions of American patriotism, and Holocaust denial. The other is a Reacting to the Past course, that teaches history through role playing games.  This semester the three games we’re playing are the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Yalta Conference, and the 1968 Democratic convention. These are good and popular classes (which is why I keep teaching them). But their disparate topics now feel – to me and, I think, to my students — more urgent and pertinent than they have, even in the recent past.

Most of us who end up as historians go into the field for a variety of reasons. But especially for those of us who end up as U.S. historians, among our reasons have tended to be an interest in figuring out how we got where we are today. In this moment, many more people who are not historians seem interested in that question. They should be. And we are, as a profession, uniquely positioned to intervene in public attempts to understand how our current moment came about.

But even as I am enjoying this new status of history, which I see as a fairly significant silver lining around a very dark cloud, some notes of caution come to mind.

First, as the great radical historian Jesse Lemisch, who passed away late last month, reminded us on this blog last year, there are problems, even from a left perspective, in the notion of a “usable past”:

Beyond the historian’s critical role, I believed and continue to believe that the better society that we seek to build will include play and other things that may have no immediate relevance — a society that doesn’t reduce art, science, music, history, truth, etc. to the merely instrumental, one that provides room for the joy of those who practice these things, include those who take joy in doing history. . . .History that seeks truth is a worthy endeavor and one that should be very much a part of our vision of the good society. So I see the pursuit of a ‘usable past’ as perhaps a good thing, but also as a limiting goal.

Let’s not allow the importance – and pleasure – of our new civic significance lead as away from the significant and interesting things we work on that lack that immediate relevance.

But, secondly, with any luck, this moment will pass and with it our momentarily boosted public importance. And we may find ourselves in something like the place in which historians found themselves in the post-apartheid University of Cape Town. That will bring a new set of challenges for our discipline. But my guess is that, like the South African historians I met in Cape Town in 2002, we will feel that losing our civic significance is a very small price to pay for the changes that will bring about that reduced change in public status.