Next month promises to be an exciting event for American historians and African American history buffs alike. The long-awaited David Blight biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, is something for which I’ve personally waited. While Blight is best known for his book on memory and the American Civil War, Race and Reunion, it is his work on Douglass which has been at the heart of his career as a historian. Meanwhile, Jill Lepore’s newest work, These Truths, will likely be a provocative narrative history of the United States. In short, it’s a good time to be a lover of history books written for the public—the very thing we historians tell each other we do not do.
There continues to be an insatiable hunger among the public for well-written accounts of the American past. I would go so far as to say that, when intellectual historians—perhaps in the 23rd century—look back on our era, they will comment on the public’s fascination with the past. Those historians, hopefully working at universities on Earth, Vulcan, and other worlds of the United Federation of Planets (if one feels overly optimistic about our future) will only speculate why the past meant so much to us (as it will mean equally as much to those in the future who care about our thoughts and arguments). Our battles over Confederate monuments, the media debates over the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, even the ways in which Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump diverged wildly in their interpretations of America’s past all demonstrate how much Americans still care about their history.
Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say histories due to the inability to reconcile certain histories of the past with other versions of those events. Again, take the Confederate statue debate. A question of whether they represent honoring military valor or white supremacy stands in for larger debates about what America means to different groups of people. Perhaps that’s what makes our debates about history so fiery, intense, and intractable. The stakes all feel high—beyond arguing over what is in our textbooks, but what is in our hearts and souls.
There’s not much more I wish to add this evening. Exhausted from a full teaching schedule, I do nonetheless find myself thinking harder about what we do every day in a class when we teach our students. Over at Teaching U.S. History, I thought out loud a bit about the charge I have at an HBCU. But, I suspect, we all think about our duty as historians to our students, to society, and to each other as scholars. That’s why I’m excited about these new books—they’ll give us more pieces of conversation to rope in more Americans to think with us about the usable pasts.
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