historying

In April of 2008, noted historian and sociologist Charles Tilly died of lymphoma. In addition to the 51 books or monographs and over 600 articles, he left behind a legion of friends and admirers. By all accounts, Tilly was a prolific and highly influential scholar whose work encompassed a staggering breadth of subjects. Back in April I decided I should at least acquaint myself with some of his writing, and filed away a recommended article for later reading: “How (and What) Are Historians Doing?” in American Behavioral Scientist (1990) 33: 685-711.

The article covers several different topics, but begins by addressing the question: what distinguishes history from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences? Tilly lists a six-part answer:

1. Time and place are fundamental characteristics
2. Historians specialize in specific times and places
3. The most dominant historical questions are rooted in national politics
4. The blurry line between amateurs and professionals
5. A strong focus on written documents and sources
6. A narrative style that focuses on the motivations of characters as supported by textual evidence

I think some of these characteristics already feel dated, eighteen years after he wrote them. For instance, the popularity of transnational history weakens the case for Numbers 2 and 3. Historians are increasingly straying outside the traditional specialties bound by time period and geographic location, and into more thematic realms such as diaspora and women’s studies. In many ways, this is a good thing. Without the constraints of specific time and place, scholars are able to tackle problems and questions from a radically different perspective.

On the other hand, I would contend that number 4 remains stronger than ever – historical writing consistently maintains a level of common popularity that is largely out of reach for many other disciplines (although a similar case could be made for sociology and, especially today, economics). Journalists, genealogists, librarians, curators, reenactors, armchair enthusiasts – all are contributing to the field of history as much as those within the academy. Finally, even though digitization projects are making sources such as print media, maps, video footage, and material culture more accessible, I would agree with Tilly that the solid majority of historical research is conducted using written documents and sources.

Later in the article, Tilly starts to systematically analyze common approaches to historical study. To do so, he uses a simple chart outlining these different approaches:

On the vertical access is the scope, or the size of the lens being used by the historian. On the horizontal access is a continuum of methodological/philosophical approaches. Like any good educator, Tilly then uses specific examples of historical monographs to illustrate the “Four Corners” of historical approach. For his sample, he selects Carlo Ginzburg’s (1980) The Cheese and the Worms, E.P. Thompson’s (1963) The Making of the English Working Class, E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield’s (1981) The Population History of England, 1541-1871, and Olivier Zunz’s (1982) Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920. After discussing each one individually, he charted them visually:

Although I have not read any of the works, Tilly did a great job of explaining them in terms of four different approaches to historical analysis. I was left with the urge to create my own charts using works I had actually read in the past year or two:

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

The graph for Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is largely concentrated in the large-scale, humanistic quadrant, as the book delves into the traumatic effects on the American psyche caused by the Civil War’s unprecedented slaughter. Its line extends down to the small-scale, humanistic corner in order to represent Faust’s use of individual experiences (such as those of Walt Whitman and Ambrose Bierce) to illustrate her broader points.

David Oshinksy, Polio: An American Story

David Oshinsky’s Polio covers a wide area of scope and approach, but it leans towards a large-scale, social-scientific book, given his detailed narrative covering America’s medical struggle against polio in the twentieth century.

David Blight, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom

David Blight’s A Slave No More maintains a relatively tight focus on the small-scale and humanistic approach. Blight uses the narratives of two escaped slaves to explore their decisions, motivations, and actions – all within the larger context of slavery’s death throes and national emancipation.

Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic

Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place takes a small-scale, more social-scientific approach to chronicling several generations of a slave family and a slaveholding family on a Georgia plantation. The scope is kept relatively small, with a huge amount of detail that draws upon a range of quantitative and qualitative sources.

I enjoyed the process of creating these graphs. Information visualization is a growing field, and one that I believe will become ever more important to historians. Although the above graphs are imprecise and subjective, they forced me to really consider the content of the books in a new perspective. Most of these books probably touched every corner of the graph at some point during the course of the monograph, but visually plotting their content necessitates a careful aggregation of the author’s central themes and points. Where do the books cross the two axes of scope and approach? Where is their “centroid” on the graph? Just how far along each axis do they go? It’s a refreshing exercise, and one that I think could work in the classroom as a visual and quantitative supplement to a traditional book review.

I’d recommend anyone reading this to sit down with a pencil and paper, channel your inner Charles Tilly, and try to sketch out a graph for a favorite historical monograph. For those of you who have read the above books, I’d welcome any and all criticisms and disagreements regarding their graphs.

I stayed at home sick with food poisoning yesterday, and spent much of the afternoon experiencing the joys of day-time TV. While flipping through channels, I landed on ESPN’s First Take in the middle of a discussion between Jemele Hill and Skip Bayless on the role of race in college football coaching hires. This issue centered around claims that Florida Gators defensive coordinator Charlie Strong hasn’t received a head coaching offer (especially from southern schools) in 25 years of coaching due largely to the fact that he is a black man with a white wife. This, of course, follows hotly on the heels of Auburn University’s recent deplorable decision to hire Iowa State head coach Gene Chizik, who is white, over the far-more qualified University at Buffalo head coach Turner Gill, who is black and, like Strong, has a white wife. Charles Barkley threw even more fuel on the fire by publicly and stridently denouncing his alma mater’s decision as blatantly racist.

Jemele Hill basically argued that Strong’s interracial marriage played a huge role in his inability to land a head coaching job, particularly in the south. Bayless countered that he was, and I’m paraphrasing, disheartened to hear this kind of talk despite the fact that Barack Obama was just elected president, as the son of a black father and a white mother. Furthermore, he said he could make the argument that being a black coach with a white wife might actually help a someone like Strong land a coaching job in the south, as it would make those white athetlic boosters and white AD’s feel more comfortable interacting with them.

Jemele Hill handled this comment extremely well, saying that she firmly disagreed, and that to understand this you really have to know the history of the south. That up until fairly recently, interracial dating was illegal in the south, and that there’s a long legacy of extremely emotional resistance to interracial relationships. I’ve been a long-time fan of Hill’s columns on ESPN (see her coverage of a racially-charged LeBron James photoshoot), and was even more impressed to hear her thoughtfulness on television.

So, to recap: Skip Bayless thinks that a black man having a white wife would actually work to put white southerners at ease.  I’m always cautious about getting up on my historical high horse and saying “you need a history lesson,” but in this case? Skip, you need to get yourself a f’ing history lesson:

Emmit Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman 53 years ago.

Loving v. Virginia overturned state anti-miscegenation laws 41 years ago.

The list of states whose laws were no longer enforceable due to the decision? Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Do you notice a pattern there, Skip?

Alabama officially removed its ban on interracial marriage 8 years ago.

The final tally in the Alabama Senate? 60-40. As recently as eight years ago, FORTY senators in the state of Alabama, home to the above-mentioned Auburn University, voted AGAINST removing a ban on interracial marriage.

Barack Obama’s election was uplifting, and has the potential to do more to bind this nation’s racial wounds as any event in the past forty years. But it’s frustrating to hear (mostly white) people like Skip Bayless using it as a trump card to de-legitimatize claims of racism. “What do you mean someone wasn’t hired because they’re black? Didn’t our country just elect a black president?” The results of one election cannot magically erase centuries of racial trauma, and our country still has a long, long way to go.

It’s history. Learn it, Skip.

My final day at the AHA began with Building the Future of History and Computing, sponsored by the American Association for History and Computing. It consisted of four presentations, two focusing on GIS, the third of data analysis, and the fourth on podcasts. I liked what the speakers had to say, although the presentations weren’t quite as sharp or engaging as I had hoped for. It was interesting to hear Brian Rizzo’s impressive efforts at the University of Mary Washington to build its GIS program, and made me a little itchy to import some shapefiles again. I was also reminded at how widely applicable mapping skills are in general, as Rizzo mentioned that he counted at least 12 departments at UMW that could directly benefit from integrating a GIS component into their curriculum. An admittedly biased viewpoint, but one that is probably true.

The second session was CHNM’s third session of the weekend, “Teaching History in the Digital Age.” The room was encouragingly packed, with people lining the walls, and the presenters didn’t disappoint. Although I thought there was probably one or two more panelists than necessary, it was a fascinating panel. Jeffrey W. McClurken kicked things off by speaking animatedly about his course at the University of Mary Washington that required students to complete a digital project in place of a term paper. He aptly described his intentions of keeping his students in a perpetual state of discomfort, but not paralysis, a description I’ve heard before about teaching students in any kind of new technology. There is a fine line between pushing people to experiment outside of their technological comfort zone and making them completely overwhelmed. Some of the semester projects his students completed were quite impressive displays of digital production.

Also of interest, Jeremy Boggs shared his experience teaching at George Mason University, and his attempts to break down traditional barriers between students-teachers and students-students. I was in awe of his willingness to make himself “radically transparent,” and distribute his AIM screename, friend his students on Facebook, and encourage them to text him. That takes a lot of courage, and is not a route that 99.99% of teachers out there would be willing to take. He also spoke about the successes and challenges of using a blogging platform to organize the class, and having his students make posts and make comments. I absolutely loved his assignment of having each student compose a 500-word Wikipedia article on a historical subject, and then attempt to keep it from being deleted by the Wikipedia community. It not only forced students to delineate between writing an argument and writing historical “fact,” but also educated them about collective intelligence and online collaboration.

As I sat in the session, thrilled to be hearing so many people speaking fluently about digital history, I thought about the self-selective bubble that academic conferences frequently create. The majority of the sessions I attended were on digital history. In that sense, it was a great weekend and one in which I not only met people with similar interests, but heard about new projects and got new ideas. On the other hand, I never sat in on a session that was on a historical topic on which I was completely unfamiliar. In that sense, I didn’t even come close to following McClurken’s advice to his own students at stretching their horizons and making themselves uncomfortable. In retrospect, it would have been healthy to at least take a shot at listening to “Immigrants, Identity, and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires,” or “New Trends in Medieval Spanish History.” One of my problems with the current state of history is an overemphasis on narrow specialization, and these types of conferences, despite a superficial exposure to thousands of historians with different interests, can often create an even greater degree of academic insularity.

Sitting on the bus back to DC that afternoon, I reflected on the singularly strange nature of the AHA Annual Meeting. I fully understand the perspective of its detractors. Sessions can be numbingly boring, self-obsessed, and esoteric. One peek in the job interview room, filled with terrified and resigned looking younger types, was one peek too many for me. I’ll cross that bridge when I have to, and not a moment sooner. The massive scale of the conference makes it unwieldly and inefficient. Despite all of this, I genuinely enjoyed myself during the weekend and felt recharged at the bustling energy of thousands of badged historians scurrying across Manhattan. More importantly, I had taken a drink straight from the historical profession’s biggest firehouse and lived to blog about it.

I’d like to tell myself that it was the high quality of writing in yesterday’s post that caused an influx of site visits, but I’m afraid it’s due more to the link from a certain popular Historiann’s blog…

I enjoyed Saturday’s events at the AHA just as much as Friday’s, but in different ways. After meeting and having a very enjoyable conversation with Sterling Fluharty of PhDinhistory, I spent a couple hours at the morning session of the National History Education Clearinghouse Workshop. It was good to hear about teaching history in a pre-college setting, and made me think a fair amount about what the role of primary sources should be in, say, a high-school classroom. Many kids can probably handle reading excerpts from an eighteenth-century manuscript, but the question is: would they want to? I think the process could gain a lot from an interactive, exploratory platform – the first example that comes to mind is the Library of Congresses’ engaging use of touch-screens to display samples of primary sources, which allows people to click on nodes to see more information, or to overlay a transcribed version on top of it if they need help deciphering “necefsary for one people to difsolve.”

Minor rant: I have always thought that academics were the primary culprits of using Q&A sessions to not actually ask questions, but to IM (intellectually masturbate) in front of a captive audience. It turns out the NHEC workshop, despite a lack of pretentious university academics, was not immune to a corrolary of IM-ing: personal anecdote-ing. I don’t mind hearing some personal context, or even a relevant experience. However, I have a low threshold for listening to every detail of the hiring process and administrative politics in your particular high school. Asking pertinent, concise questions in front of a large group is a pretty important skill, but one that people, across the board, tend to lack.

I absolutely loved the afternoon session I attended: Neogeographies/Neohistories: Analyzing, Creating, and Publishing Maps, put on by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. Four graduate students (Karin Hill, Ammon Shepherd, Christopher King, and Martin McGuirk) presented projects they had completed that grew out of a course under Paula Petrik on historical mapping and cartography. A brief run-down: Karin looked at the tattoos of an American sailor, and in a fit of visual creativity all to rare in historians, ended up actually drawing a map of East Asia using characters from a maritime font that incorporated information and elements from the sailor’s records. Christopher King innovatively examined closet space throughout American history, and charted its growth as a lens for viewing a wide array of other factors – class, cultural, economics, etc. Ammon mapped out underground munitions manufacturing that the Nazis had been planning towards the end of WWII, and spoke extremely thoughtfully on the nuts-and-bolts challenges of dealing with copyright issues (always an issue with graphics).  Finally, Martin McGuirk analyzed military maps from the Battle of Monmouth, and recreated his own, presumably more accurate diagram of the battle’s proceedings.

One aspect that I was impressed with, in all of their projects, was their skill in graphic design and their use of relatively basic software in order to produce extremely clean, good-looking visualizations. As someone with a background in ArcGIS software, I was intrigued by the fact that they created these products using some much simpler (and much, much, much cheaper) applications. Additionally, I was blown away at how genuinely collegial the graduate students were. When an audience member asked a specific question to one of them regarding their topic, it became immediately apparent that all of them knew the ins-and-outs of each others’ projects almost as well as they knew their own – certainly a testament to the benefits of academic collaboration. Following the session, I had the chance to sit down in the Hilton bar and talk with Paula Petrik and Christopher King, who generously gave their perspectives on a range of topics, from the state of the field in digital history to applying and deciding on graduate school. They both gave me a lot to mull over, especially regarding graduate school.

The final event of the day was the General Meeting that night, at which Laurel Thatcher Ulrich handed out the annual awards and Gabrielle Spiegel gave her presidential address. Spiegel is a seriously gifted historian and, by all accounts, a phenomenally nice person (and she went to Bryn Mawr, a school I hold quite dear to my heart as my big sister’s alma mater). But between my own lightweight background in historical theory and a massive, beer-infused dinner at Heartland Brewery, I had some trouble keeping up with all of the “irreducable otherness of the past” and “merely fictive postulates” that marked her speech. I then further gave myself away as a mouth-breathing clod, when I gracelessly gorged myself on several plates of tasty (and free – always important on an AmeriCorps budget) food at the reception, and waddled off into the streets of Manhattan.

I managed to find some free wireless in the lobby, which I count as a major success. The past 24 hours have been somewhat of a blur, but in a good way. After taking a bus from DC to NYC, I made my way to the Hilton hotel and was promptly overwhelmed at the number of history types with AHA badges filling the hotel. The first session I attended was The Promise and Pitfalls of Writing for Readers beyond the Academy, at which I was that guy who embarrassingly enters late and bumps into people while finding a seat (in this case, on the floor). It was a relatively informal panel, with none of the typical reading of papers in a monotone voice, and with a lot of back-and-forth with the audience. I found it interesting that for the first part of the session, blogging was never touched upon. Then an audience member brought it up, and the panelists began to fervently speak about it for a fair amount of time. What surprised me was the relatively positive attitude many of the panelists carried towards blogging. This might be a kind of self-selective mechanism, as panelists for a session on popular writing are probably not the stuffy academic types that look down their noses at blogging. On the other hand, I got the sense that blogging as a whole has become much more mainstream and accepted within the academy. The panel also reminded me of the kind of “exercise” aspect of writing on a blog – in that it forces you to write and is a great tool for experimentation and self-improvement.

After dropping my bags off at a friend’s apartment, I returned to the Hilton for the evening session. Being a hopeless history nerd, I made sure to arrive to the opening ceremony roughly half an hour early, snagging myself a prime-time, fourth-row seat directly in front of the podium. The first portion was a presentation to Adam Hochschild for the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Public Service Award. Hochschild proceeded to speak thoughtfully about the award, and I thought did a great job of highlighting the recent Russian police raid on the offices of the history/human rights group Memorial. He used it as a testament to the fact that, in many parts of the world, history still remains a perilous and radical practice, and that governments and regimes are wary of its power.

The night’s plenary session was a murderer’s row line-up of historians speaking about The Pleasures of the Imagination - Linda Colley, Natalie Zemon Davis, John Demos, Jane Kamensky, Jill Lepore, Robert A. Rosenstone, and Jonathan D. Spence. I felt a lot like a giddy sports-obsessed kid at an All-Star game, the difference being that instead of saying, “Wow, Chris Paul is a lot shorter in person!” I was saying “Wow, Jane Kamensky is a lot taller in person!” Like I said, I’m a hopeless history nerd. The panel itself was impressive, as each historian spoke briefly about the role of imagination in the historical process. For a more content-based recap, take a look here. Even more interesting than the content, being so close to them, I found it infinitely fascinating to study them all as they and their peers spoke. I decided I’d record those observations here, as one of the most valuable aspects of the conference so far has been being able to put faces, voices, and personalities to these famous names.

I often look at speakers and try to imagine what my impression would be if I couldn’t hear a thing. All of them took the podium with a degree of confidence and charisma that was startling – everyone seemed quite obviously comfortable with commanding attention and engaging a room. During the entire two-hour panel, Natalie Zemon Davis sat perched on the edge of her seat and 100% locked in to the speaker. I don’t think her attention wavered for a single second, and she continually looked like she was ready to leap up and offer her thoughts on the subject. Jane Kamensky spoke in down-to-earth, but carefully measured words that seemed meticulously planned and polished, and also ended with a casually stated, “Thanks,” which I found interesting. Meanwhile, Linda Colley picked up considerable steam as she progressed, and by a couple minutes into her talk, had completely hit her stride and ceased to look at her notes, sweeping her thoughts along with expansive gestures and a rising cadence. John Demos spoke in a more anecdotal and unhurried style, and did a great job of incorporating a couple of physical artifacts into his talk when speaking about material objects. I had absolutely no trouble picturing him in an intimate Yale seminar, telling stories and asking questions.

All I can say about Jill Lepore is that she spoke almost exactly how she writes, with a degree of accessibility and eloquence that lulls you into contentedly listening, until you realize with a jolt that she just said something incredibly important and intelligent. Robert Rosenstone was thoughtful and forceful, and it was fun to picture him in a CalTech classroom getting hardcore science and math students to think about story-telling and history. Finally, it was interesting when Jonathan Spence took the podium. At this point, I felt attention lagging a bit both in the room and on the panel itself. But there was a noticeable change when Spence began speaking in a remarkably soft voice. Everyone seemed to straighten up (besides NZD, whose attention never flagged an iota during the two hours), and many of the panelists began taking notes as if they were back in a lecture hall. Again, if I were watching a video of the panel with the sound turned off, I would still be able to assert with complete confidence, “This guy is important.”

That’s it for now, I look forward to recapping the rest of the weekend.