Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition for the best essays published in Historically Speaking

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Announcing . . .

The Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition for the best essays published in Historically Speaking during 2011 in the following areas:

Intellectual History or the History of Political Thought

Military or Diplomatic History

The prizes are $1000 each and will be awarded in January 2012. Essay submission guidelines for Historically Speaking can be found at www.bu.edu/historic/hs/ guide.html. Direct all submissions and questions about the prize competition to: Donald Yerxa at historic@bu.edu.

The Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, educational organization dedicated to strengthening the teaching of America’s founding principles and history.

Questioning the Assumptions of Academic History

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A lively forum in the January issue of Historically Speaking critiques some of the assumptions of academic history. Here are selections from the lead essay by Christopher Shannon and a comment by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.

"From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past"
Christopher Shannon

The last forty years have witnessed a tremendous expansion of the range of historical topics deemed fit subject matter for professional academic historians in America. Beginning in the late 1960s, social historians concerned to recover the experience of common people led a revolt against the perceived elitism of the then-dominant fields of political, diplomatic, and intellectual history. The pioneers of social history, particularly those rooted in the field of labor history, soon came under attack for focusing on white male historical actors. This critique gave birth to the flourishing of studies of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and most recently, sexual minorities. Even those sympathetic and supportive of these developments at times wonder if any principle of unity or synthesis remains in the wake of so much diversity, or if those seeking to make sense of the past must give up on History and rest content with the proliferation of histories.

This diversity of subject matter masks a fundamental uniformity of method. For all its openness to new subjects for inquiry, the historical profession in America has refused to accept any fundamental questioning of its basic assumptions about how we gain meaningful knowledge of the past. Despite various philosophical challenges over the past century, most historians remain committed to a common-sense empiricism rooted in the philosophical assumptions of the physical sciences that dominated the intellectual landscape of the West at the birth of the historical profession in the late 19th century. This consensus is, moreover, at once epistemological and political: common-sense empiricism must be defended because it is the epistemology most appropriate to liberal modernity. The epistemological alternatives are historicism and relativism; the political alternatives are fascism and totalitarian communism.>>>

"Comment on Christopher Shannon"
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

. . . . In his 2009 book God, Philosophy, Universities, Alasdair MacIntyre paints a portrait of the modern university as fragmented beyond coherence by specialization into the various disciplines. No overarching understanding of how the disciplines are connected exists. Whether “professedly secular or professedly Catholic,” universities today are no longer informed by “a notion of the nature and order of things.” It is the same with the subspecialties. Shannon may be assuming too much unity of perspective in suggesting that it is the liberal world-view that informs most historical writing today. Autonomy is a common enough theme, but it is not necessarily any longer part of a unified view of the world. Agency is more a mantra than a well-articulated intellectual framework or philosophical system. It appears adequate to conclude a study of this or that marginal group with the suggestion that the group, however oppressed, exhibited agency. Why that matters is assumed, not defended.

This diversity of subject matter masks a fundamental uniformity of method. For all its openness to new subjects for inquiry, the historical profession in America has refused to accept any fundamental questioning of its basic assumptions about how we gain meaningful knowledge of the past. Despite various philosophical challenges over the past century, most historians remain committed to a common-sense empiricism rooted in the philosophical assumptions of the physical sciences that dominated the intellectual landscape of the West at the birth of the historical profession in the late 19th century. This consensus is, moreover, at once epistemological and political: common-sense empiricism must be defended because it is the epistemology most appropriate to liberal modernity. The epistemological alternatives are historicism and relativism; the political alternatives are fascism and totalitarian communism.

The pluralistic tolerance of all views as equally valid is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with either traditions or histories possessing value judgments of any kind. Herein lies the problem. If the welcoming of Catholic history is to bear any fruit, we will need to confront head-on the fundamental clash between a totalizing pluralism, which only results in nihilism, and any normative story. As Shannon writes, it is not enough to concede that “objectivity is not neutrality.” But neither is it enough to let all flowers bloom. We have to confront the huge intellectual obstacles that arise when traditions are incompatible. I think this is what Shannon intends in his worthy embrace of “a new norm for historical inquiry, one less geared toward the industrial production of information about the past and more directed toward a philosophical reflection on human nature through the study of the past.” Moving toward this kind of reflective activity might be foreclosed by the unbridled embrace of traditions. It matters what those traditions are, their content, practices, and quality. I’m not sure I’d like to see “the ability of Enlightenment institutions like the modern history profession to open themselves to distinctly Catholic interpretive traditions” made into “a good test of their ability to include other nonliberal traditions.”>>>

Jack Miller Center-Historically Speaking Prize Essay Competition

Randall Stephens

We are happy to report the inaugural winners of the Jack Miller Center-Historically Speaking Prize Essay Competition. At a recent Jack Miller Center reception held in conjunction with American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Boston, Pamela Edwards, the Miller Center's director of academic initiatives, and Donald Yerxa, senior editor of Historically Speaking, announced the winners of the 2010 Miller Center Prizes (of $1000 each) for the best essays published in Historically Speaking in the areas of (1) intellectual history and the history of political thought and (2) military-diplomatic history.

Christopher Shannon, associate professor of history at Christendom College, won the intellectual history prize for his essay: "From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past" (January 2011). Peter Paret of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton won the military-diplomatic prize for his essay "Two Historians on Defeat and War and Its Causes" (June 2010). The Society thanks the Miller Center for its support of historical scholarship in the service of improved public understanding. We are delighted with the partnership being forged between the Historical Society and the Jack Miller Center. It promises to be a very congenial and mutually beneficial collaboration.

January 2011 Issue of Historically Speaking Online

Randall Stephens

Browse the January issue of Historically Speaking on Project Muse from your college or university computer. Leo Ribuffo's lead essay in the issue gives "Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right Is Trendy." A little bit from that:

There is a boom in the study of the Right, broadly conceived. Subtitles of books that not so long ago would have ended with “and the persistence of capitalist hegemony” or “and the pervasiveness of status anxiety” now end with “and the rise of conservatism.”

This is the second such boom since World War II. The first discovery of American conservatism involved many of our favorite straw-man targets, including Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Typically those scholars involved in the first discovery of the Right traced the story back at least to the Constitution. Typically, too, they paid close attention to government, economics, nationalism, foreign policy, and war at the expense of race and gender. Despite their mistakes, the best of these self-consciously centrist historians and social scientists were very smart and worthy of serious engagement.

Moreover, the intellectual cohort of the first discoverers extended beyond the “vital center” (in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s famous phrase) to include the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills and sometime conservative political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Most important were the rival grand narratives of American history offered by William Appleman Williams in The Contours of American History (1961) and Schlesinger everywhere. When I make this point to newly minted experts involved in the second discovery of the Right, the usual response, accompanied by a blank look, is something like: “I don’t know what you mean. I’m writing a thick description of fifty Birchers in Binghamton.”

The first discovery of the Right petered out during the High Sixties. There was nonetheless an in-between cohort of about forty historians, most now in our sixties, who did terrific work. Names will be provided on request—except for one scholar who deserves to be singled out for praise: George Nash. . . .

Hofstadter’s catch phrase “paranoid style” should be buried in a deep hole with nuclear waste. When coined in the mid-1960s this phrase encapsulated a comprehensive social-psychological theory of politics in which rational people defended—as they always should defend—the sensible center against status-anxious outsiders and temperamental oddballs on the right and left “extremes.” The conceptual validity of this politically self-serving formula has been debunked countless times, not least because it was glibly used to discredit radical critics of the Cold War and accompanying hot wars. But to Hofstadter’s credit, “paranoid style” was part of his creative effort to use psychology to interpret political behavior. Nowadays “paranoid style” has sunk to the level of a pure and simple epithet employed whenever radicals, liberals, and progressives panic.>>>

Historically Speaking (January 2011)

Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right Is Trendy
Leo P. Ribuffo

What Makes Civilization?: An Interview with David Wengrow
Donald A. Yerxa

Questioning the Assumptions of Academic History: A Forum

From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past
Christopher Shannon

Response to Christopher Shannon
Daniel Wickberg

Liberal History and Historical Style After Virtue
Mark Weiner

Comment on Christopher Shannon
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

From Histories to Traditions: A Response
Christopher Shannon

The Golden Age of the 'Abbasid Empire
Muslim City Life during the Era of the Great Caliphs
Amira Bennison

An Interview with Amira Bennison
Donald A. Yerxa

For a Classroom Craving Certainties, a Theory of Importance
Ralph Menning

China, the West, and Pearl Buck: An Interview with Hilary Spurling
Randall J. Stephens

Deconstructing the Discourses of Roman Imperialism
David J. Mattingly

Is Mahan Dead?
John T. Kuehn

Religion and the Founding of the United States: An Interview with Thomas Kidd
Randall J. Stephens

Antecedents of Neoconservative Foreign Policy
Paul Gottfried

An Interview with Hilary Spurling on Pearl Buck

Randall Stephens

The January issue of Historically Speaking will soon be up on the Project Muse site. In the meantime, here's a selection from my interview with Hilary Spurling, which appears in the issue.

In 1932 Pearl S. Buck, daughter of American missionaries in China, won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth (John Day, 1931). Set in rural China, the book chronicles the struggles of a peasant and his slave-wife. In 1937 the novel was adapted into a Hollywood film. One year later Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The British biographer Hilary Spurling—Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett (Knopf, 1984); The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (Counterpoint, 2004); Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 (Knopf, 2007), winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Biography prize—takes up Buck’s story in Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth (Simon & Schuster, 2010). Focusing on Buck’s first four decades, Spurling stresses the American author’s intimate familiarity with China. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently spoke to Spurling about her study of Buck.


Randall Stephens: Why has Pearl Buck’s reputation suffered in recent years?

Hilary Spurling: She had many critics in her own day, too. Her success was so sudden and so enormous, and she was a complete outsider. She was a nobody. She had no contacts, no backup and no track record. When The Good Earth was published at the beginning of the 1930s by a publisher about to go bankrupt, it immediately became not just an American best seller but a global best seller. She won a Pulitzer Prize right away, and a few years later she won the Nobel Prize. Literary critics said, what is The Good Earth? An agricultural history of China? They couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

She had lived in China all her life. Buck never felt at home in America, in the 1930s or afterward. Brought up in China, she spoke Chinese fluently and her childhood friends were Chinese. When she was young, she didn’t know any other Westerners. She imagined she would spend her whole life in China.

When she lived in the United States, Buck was alienated by American politics. She knew and loved China so well that she became in a certain sense an apologist for China, trying to explain China to the West. As America moved sharply to the right in the 1950s, Buck was branded as a communist sympathizer. In communist China, however, she was a public enemy, and her books were forbidden. People were punished and humiliated if they’d even heard of her, let alone met her. She got flack from all sides throughout the second half of her life.

I wrote the biography partly because I wanted to write about China. I wanted to explore China and how it reached the state it is in now. In addition, I think that Pearl Buck is one of the great Americans of the 20th century, and I hope that Americans might look at her again and recognize her achievements as quite extraordinary.

Stephens: How would you sum up her relevance today?

Spurling: Think of how Western attitudes toward China have changed in the last four or five years. When I wrote the proposal for this book four years ago, publishers both in American and in England weren’t very interested. They saw no trace of the shock and awe I think we all feel now on both sides of the Atlantic about China. We understand now that China is a very large part of the future for all of us. And I think it no exaggeration to say that Buck was initially responsible for the West’s change in outlook. Nobody since Marco Polo in the 13th century has opened up the East to the West as much as Buck did. We can see the seeds of our attitudes toward China now in what she wrote so long ago. She was the first to foresee China’s future as a superpower. She was a young woman then. It’s extraordinary to see that as early as 1925 she understood that China would become the leader of Asia and that America needed to cultivate its relationship with China.

Stephens: Has she been reassessed in China today?

Spurling: Yes, she is being reassessed again on quite a large scale. In my lifetime she was officially regarded as a public enemy of the whole Chinese nation. Schoolchildren were told to denounce her. One of them was the Chinese novelist Anchee Min, who told me that as a student she was chosen to denounce Pearl Buck. She asked her teachers if she could read The Good Earth because she said it would give her more grounds. They said no Chinese citizen could read it because it was too toxic.

I finished my book last November, and that very month Buck was named on Chinese state radio—which of course is an official voice of the Chinese state—as one of the top ten international friends of China. I see that as a measure of the rate at which China and China’s opinions are changing. People now want to read Buck. The Good Earth was her farewell to China, the last thing she wrote before she left that country for good. No one else in the West was in a position to write such a book, and no Chinese person either. The Chinese writers who were Pearl’s contemporaries—young intellectuals, many of whom she knew and whose battles she fought—shaped and trained her far more than any American writers would. But the last thing such Chinese writers wanted to do was write about the village life they had struggled so hard to escape from. Roughly 85% of Chinese people were illiterate peasants. Chinese intellectuals at the time yearned to go to Beijing or Shanghai and to write about Eugene O’Neill.

Whiteness and WASPishness

Randall Stephens

Race in America has had a complicated history, to say the least. And in the 20th and 21st centuries, historians have grappled with the subject in a variety of ways. Scholars have analyzed the economic and social underpinnings of race and racism. They've scrutinized the power of race as a social construction. They've looked into how race and racism have changed over decades and centuries. They've examined the long-term effects of race-based slavery . . And they've looked into how "whiteness" developed as a counter to blackness and as a marker distinguishing whites from non-whites.

In 2001 Eric Arnesen wrote a piece on "Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination" for International Labor and Working-Class History. Historically Speaking published the essay in modified form in 2002. (I remember that this essay was quite useful for me as I slogged my way through historiography in grad school. And it's still a great read today.)

"The weaknesses of whiteness scholarship," observed Arnesen, "are particularly evident in its treatment of a subject that historians of the United States have chronicled for decades—the hostile encounter between Irish immigrants and African-Americans in the antebellum North."

Arnesen continued:

Attempting nothing short of a paradigmatic revolution, whiteness scholars suggest that the necessarily prior question, is 'how did the Irish become white?' To pose this question is to assert that 19th-century Irish immigrants to the United States were not white upon their arrival—that is, they were not seen as white by the larger American society and did not see themselves as white. Over time, whiteness scholars argue, they became white. Yet early and mid-19th-century commentators on the Irish did not speak of whiteness per se but invoked a more diverse discursive apparatus, weaving considerations of religion (which virtually vanish in the considerations of the whiteness scholars), notions of innate and observed character and behavior, and yes, race too into their anti-Irish commentaries. Therefore whiteness historians must assume the role of interpreter, translating the 19th-century vernacular of race and group inferiority into the late 20th-century idiom of whiteness.>>>

In the November 2010 issue of Historically Speaking, Kevin Schultz casts a similarly critical eye on the neologism WASP. In "The Waspish Hetero-Patriarchy: Locating Power in Recent American History," Schultz traces the term's origins and later ubiquity. Some excerpts from his illuminating essay:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term WASP was coined only in 1962, when the civil rights movement required an oppositional force against which it could protest. Rather than simply choose “white” (which would come later, and subsequently destroy much of our historical memory), the social landscape of the early 1960s demanded a more inclusive term. WASP is what social scientists came up with.

What came before WASP as a descriptive term for the dominant American social and cultural presence? During the first three decades of the 20th century, the term “Anglo- Saxon” took on importance as a national social identity. The term has deep roots; the Anglo-Saxons are famed for a 5th-century invasion of the British Isles. But at the beginning of the 20th century there was a need in America for a term that would differentiate the social elite from all others. Anglo-Saxon
served that need. . . .

Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, historians have shown that it has been politically, socially, and economically useful in our society to be seen as white, to possess an identity affiliated with whiteness.9 But for the first three or four decades of the 20th century, whiteness was not enough. One had to be considered Anglo-Saxon to achieve this status. And, like today’s “whiteness,” the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” lost any specific meaning once it be- came a social necessity. Everyone tried to claim it, and it lost all coherence. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, for instance, defined Anglo- Saxon as “a person of English descent in its broad- est sense.” In 1925 Sinclair Lewis described his hero Martin Arrowsmith as “a Typical Pure-bred Anglo- Saxon American, which means that he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as ‘Jewish,’ and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of primitive Briton, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane and Swede.” Clearly the definition of Anglo-Saxon had become diffuse, even if the term’s importance had not.

Nevertheless, the abbreviated construction WASP picked up steam in 1963 as the civil rights movement progressed, appearing in that year in the New York Times and the New Statesman, although in each case the editors required a definition of the term to ensure that readers understood what it meant. Daniel Bell also paused to define WASP in his 1964 review of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot. By the middle of the 1960s, though, WASP no longer needed an accompanying definition. After just a few years in circulation, everyone knew what it meant. Baltzell himself did a good deal to popularize the term in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.

And we’ve been stuck with WASP ever since. Interestingly, the term became calcified as a permanent part of the American lexicon even as its sociological and historical accuracy demanded further refinement. Instead of continuing to be sociologically useful, it became a type, often to be castigated and derided. One reason for this might be that the sociological utility of all the markers inherent in the word WASP declined precipitously in the middle 1960s. . . .

And yet despite the rise and fall of the recognized power holders, the term WASP has remained calcified in its mid-century conception. Today, it typifies a stuffy type, someone in the cultural and social elite who disdains things popular and dresses preppy. It’s a much-maligned class identity more than it is a sociological descriptor. Indeed, the distinctions marked out by being a WASP are not necessarily bound by whiteness, Anglo-Saxonism, or Protestantism anymore. They signify an attitude and a manner of living. They have become commodified as “preppy” or what used to be called “Ivy League.” Today, it signifies an elitist snoot, a highbrow more than an actual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. For example, it’s not hard to imagine someone describing the manner of, say, W.E.B. Du Bois—who wasn’t white, Anglo-Saxon, or technically Protestant—as being WASPish.

Read more of Schultz's interesting critique here.

November Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The November issue of Historically Speaking should be arriving in mailboxes soon. Not long after that it will appear on Project Muse. The issue features essays on race and culture, "modernist" economics, the Viking Age, Byzantium, Arabs and Jews in Israel, and the philosophy of history. It also includes a forum on comparative ways of war and interviews with Donald Kagan and Richard Reinsch.

Nancy Marie Brown has an essay here, too, about an intriguing figure from the Dark Ages that I knew absolutely nothing about: "In Search of the Scientist Pope, Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 950-1003)." (Brown also supplied us with the striking photo of the statue for the cover.) This piece on a monk who would become Pope Sylvester II made me wonder how many other historical characters, perhaps lost to the ages, might make us rethink what we know about a given period. Brown writes:

Born a peasant in the mountainous Cantal region of France in the mid-900s, Gerbert entered the monastery of Saint-Gerald’s of Aurillac as a child. There he learned to read and write in Latin. He studied Cicero, Virgil, and other classics. He impressed his teacher with his skill in debating. He was a fine writer, too, with a sophisticated style full of rhetorical flourishes.

To further his education, his abbot sent him south with the count of Barcelona in 967 to the border of al-Andalus. Islamic Spain was an extraordinarily tolerant culture in which learning was prized. The library of the caliph of Cordoba held 40,000 books (some said 400,000); by comparison, Gerbert’s French monastery owned less than 400. Many of the caliph’s books came fromBaghdad, known for its House of Wisdom, where for 200 years works of mathematics, astronomy, physics, and medicine were translated from Greek and other languages and further developed by Islamic scholars. Arabic was then the language of science. It was from al-Andalus that the essence of modern mathematics, astronomy, physics, medicine, philosophy—even computer science—would seep northward into Christian Europe over the next 300 years. While Gerbert lived in Spain the first of many science books were translated from Arabic into Latin through the combined efforts of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars. Many of the translators were churchmen; some became Gerbert’s lifelong friends and correspondents.

Gerbert’s role in bringing these ideas from Cordoba to Rome is unclear. Writers in the 11th and 12th centuries made him the instigator. Gerbertus Latio numeros abacique figuras runs a verse on two mathematical manuscripts, meaning—as the illustrations clearly show—the Arabic numerals 1 to 9. Seven manuscripts (out of eighty) give him credit for the first Latin explanation of the astrolabe. Even William of Malmesbury, whose 12th-century history of Gerbert’s stay in Spain reads like The Arabian Nights, says he “surpassed Ptolemy in knowledge of the astrolabe” and “was the first to seize the abacus from the Saracens.” . . .

Gerbert also took an experimental approach in his study of music. He made a pipe organ and wrote a treatise explaining how to compute the length of organ pipes for a span of two octaves. He was searching for a mathematical truth: a law for computing the dimensions of an organ pipe that would sound the same note as the string of a certain length on the monochord. He came up with an equation, using what physicists call “opportune constants” (or “fudge factors”), that allowed him to switch, mathematically, from the monochord to organ pipes and back. His treatise shows an extraordinarily modern perspective. He did not simply theorize—or search out authorities. He collected data and made practical acoustic corrections. His solution is ingenious, though labor intensive, and stands up to the scrutiny of modern acoustics theory. (Read more in the print or the on-line version when it's posted next week.)

Historically Speaking (November 2010)

Modernist Economics
Wyatt Wells

Winning All the Battles
Robert L. O’Connell

The Waspish Hetero-Patriarchy: Locating Power in Recent American History
Kevin M. Schultz

Empathy and the Etiology of the Viking Age
Robert Ferguson

Whittaker Chambers the Counterrevolutionary: An Interview with Richard Reinsch
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Byzantine Exceptionalism and Some Recent Books on Byzantium
Warren Treadgold

Comparative Ways of War: A Roundtable

The German Way of War Revisited
Robert M. Citino

The American Way of War Debate: An Overview
Brian McAllister Linn

The Many Ways of Chinese Warfare
Peter Lorge

Wending Through the Way of War
James Jay Carafano

Thucydides and the Lessons of Ancient History: An Interview with Donald Kagan
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

On the Liberation from the Tyranny of the Past: Arabs and Jews in Israel
Alon Confino

History’s a Mystery
Bruce Kuklick

In Search of the Scientist Pope, Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 950-1003)
Nancy Marie Brown

Become a Member or Contribute to the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Our Boston NPR stations are in the middle of pledge-drive mania. I like to make the occasional contribution to them and to PBS for the great work they do. (Or maybe just to make the pledge drive stop). Here at the Historical Society we also have to pass the hat, so to speak, now and then, and ask members and non-members for renewed support. I paste here part of current society president Mark Smith's recent email on the subject.

"The Historical Society continues to do good work as it enters its second decade. It is the institutional embodiment of history understood as a civilizing enterprise, focusing the talents of the academy outward to general readers, teachers, and the society at large. Our partnership with the National Council for History Education (NCHE), for instance, puts every issue of Historically Speaking into the hands of thousands of K-12 history teachers. The Society fosters venues for genuinely open conversations among historians and makes those conversations available to the larger public. . . . [Consider signing up and you will receive both Historically Speaking and the Journal of the Historical Society.]

But the Society faces considerable challenges, particularly in the current economic environment. Although we function on a bare-bones budget, we depend upon the generous contributions of friends and members who share our vision. To end the year in the black, we need to raise an additional $25,000. . . . our goal is reachable.

Please consider making a tax-deductible gift to the Historical Society. You can do so quickly and securely at www.bu.edu/historic/donate. If you decide to donate $50 or more, we will send you two volumes of your choosing from the University of South Carolina’s excellent Historians in Conversation book series, edited by Historically Speaking senior editor Don Yerxa and Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens."

Interview with Donald Yerxa on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Johns Hopkins University Press is now in the business of podcasts. You can listen to my interview with Historically Speaking senior editor Donald Yerxa here. (That page also includes interviews with Adeed Dawisha, Journal of Democracy, and Michael D. Wiatrowski and Jack A. Goldstone, Journal of Democracy.)

In the interview, I talk to Yerxa about our recent neglected fields forums, and the September naval history forum in particular. Yerxa also describes some of the ways that Historically Speaking has changed since he and senior editor Joseph Lucas came on board in fall 2001. HS aims for the general, educated reader, and tries to avoid jargon or the insider language of subfields, says Yerxa. He reflects on the niche the magazine fills and offers some examples of its success.

James Cobb on "The Necessary South" in Historically Speaking

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In the Latest issue of Historically Speaking, James Cobb writes about the role the South has played on the national political stage. Read his essay on the what pundits, historians, and others have made of the South. Here's an excerpt:

James Cobb, "The Necessary South," Historically Speaking (September 2010)

Since the earliest days of the republic the South has served primarily as what Jack P. Greene called “a negative example of what America had to overcome before it could finally realize its true self.” The struggle to transcend this burdensome regional anomaly would play out over the better part of two centuries, but by the time it appeared finally to have run its course, some were beginning to complain that, in the end, it was the South that had actually overcome, and, in the process, prevented the nation from becoming all that it could be. Even before 30 million Americans outside the South chose a bona fide representative of a racially transformed and economically vibrant Dixie to lead the country out of its post-Watergate funk in 1976, liberals were bemoaning the ominous “rise of the Southern Rim” and the insidiously conservatizing effects of the “Southernization of America.” That such rhetoric is still in vogue more than a generation later suggests that not all of the resistance to integrating the South into national life has originated in the South itself. For all the evidence that a once-recalcitrant Dixie is, for better or worse, now one with the rest of the country, many outside the region and even a few within it still cling to a static vision of a defiantly unchanged, indisputably inferior South, which, in turn, provides the negative counterpoint necessary to sustain their equally rigid and decidedly idealized vision of America’s “true self.”

Pointing to critical changes in the South, a veritable slew of pundits had suggested that the perceived differences between region and nation were disappearing long before John Egerton referred in 1973 to the “Americanization of Dixie.” On the other hand, Egerton was one of the first to argue that the South’s loss of distinctiveness had actually been accelerated by the concomitant “Southernization of America,” observing that “the North, for its part, seems more overtly racist than it had been; shorn of its pretensions of moral innocence, it is exhibiting many of the attitudes that once were thought to be the exclusive possession of white Southerners.”

Egerton used “Southernization” merely as a figurative description of what he saw happening in the 1970s, but a host of liberal commentators quickly seized on the term as a literal explanation, in which a sudden, aggressive, nationwide contagion of southern white values became primarily responsible for America’s pronounced tilt to the right during the last quarter of the 20th century. “Southernization,” wrote George Packer, “was an attitude that spread north—suspicion of government, antielitism, racial resentment, a highly personal religiosity.”

Catering to white Southerners’ resentment of Democratic support for civil rights advances, Barry Goldwater had carried five southern states in 1964, and by 1966 Richard Nixon was already assuring Pat Buchanan that the GOP’s future lay “right here in the South.” Yet in the “Southernization” version of events it was not until George Wallace, the presumed embodiment of the southern white mentality, had expertly manipulated the race issue in 1968 that the Republican Party was seduced into its infamous, racially coded “southern strategy.” This strategy, in turn, succeeded in forging southern white racial antagonism (not unlike the violent sentiments on shocking public display at the time in Chicago or Detroit or Boston) into such a sizable and solid core of Republican support in the South that the GOP was able to win the presidency four out of five times between 1972 and 1988. To be sure, the virtual certainty of strong support from southern whites allowed Republican candidates to concentrate their resources elsewhere. Still, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed at least 90% of the remaining electoral votes nationally in 1972, 1980, and 1984, and George H.W. Bush drew nearly 75% in 1988, meaning that all of them ran nearly as well outside the South as within it, and thus not a single southern vote had been essential to any of their victories. >>>

Larry Friedman on Erich Fromm and Public Intellectuals

Randall Stephens

See the new issue of Historically Speaking, now available on the Project Muse site. (Most will only be able to access the full issue from a university computer or with a university account.)

I excerpt here part of my review with Larry Friedman, professor of history in Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University. Friedman has published a variety of books and articles on the history of psychology, the history of race and racism, and the history of social reform movements. His books include: The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Prentice-Hall, 1970), Inventors of the Promised Land (Knopf, 1975), Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Menninger: The Family and the Clinic (Knopf, 1990) and a definitive study of developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson: Identity’s Architect (Harvard University Press, 1999). He’s currently working on a biography of one of the most influential psychologists and public intellectuals of the 20th century, Erich Fromm.

"Erich Fromm and the Public Intellectual in Recent American History: An Interview with Larry Friedman," conducted by Randall Stephens, Historically Speaking, September 2010.

Randall Stephens: The popular psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm was once one of the most influential public intellectuals in the West. Yet many are unfamiliar with his life and work today. Could you say something about his context and significance?

Larry Friedman: Yes, that’s true. But his influence is still felt in many quarters around the globe and, as you say, he was once a major public figure. . . .

Fromm is significant for a number of reasons. But, perhaps most importantly, he had a wide influence as a best-selling author. His first book, Escape from Freedom (1941), linked Nazi and authoritarian regimes with the individual’s fear of freedom and autonomy. To escape from freedom was to find a greater sense of order in sadomasochism and its cycle of degrading others. Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955) railed against consumerism and made the case for local face-to-face democracy. His most enduring and popular work, The Art of Loving (1956), called for the love of self as a central component in the capacity to befriend and love others. It sold a staggering 30 million copies globally and was available in airports, drug stores, you name it. In 1973 he published The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, which suggested that a conflict exists in all people between necrophilia and biophilia, a rage for death and annihilation on one hand and an affirmation and love of life on the other. To complete this book, Fromm took up the study of neuroscience, physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields far outside of his training in psychoanalysis to explain why some favored death and destruction while others preferred life and love. We might speculate that if mainline psychoanalysis had branched into other fields as Fromm had done, psychoanalysis might have escaped the doldrums of recent decades. . . .

Stephens: How relevant are [Erich] Fromm's interests and causes to the average educated reader today?

Friedman: For one, his writings on war and devastation are still remarkably discerning. Of course, in Escape from Freedom he was concerned with the perils of Nazism and Stalinism. But he also pointed to future developments, like McCarthyism and the Red Scare. And he is exceedingly relevant even to today's world. Take, for instance, his position on the Mideast, specifically Israel. He was very critical of Israeli belligerence. His views bear some resemblance to those of Noam Chomsky.

Stephens: Your historical work has had a heavy psychological component. What's your opinion of the psychohistory of the 1960s and 1970s?

Friedman: I thought much psychohistory had become reductionist by the late 1960s. I felt that it was giving psychological exploration a bad name. It overemphasized the psychoanalytical element and did not employ cognitive psychology or neuroscience. It tended to be ahistorical. Now what is sometimes called the new cultural history is heavily psychological, but less reductionist than the old psychohistory of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Stephens: Your next book is about Richard Hofstadter and the mid-century New York scene. I wonder if you'd say something about that.

Friedman: Hofstadter was one of the greatest historians of the modern era. You can say he's wrong on a number of points, but he's brilliantly wrong and always worth going back to. Current debates about the role of conservative religion in America or the influence of anti-intellectualism revolve around some of Hofstadter's basic ideas. His take on the American political tradition continues to influence high school curricula. He remains amazingly relevant. What interests me especially is mid-century New York City. His friends and associates who lived there, intellectual giants like Peter Gay, helped shape our basic understandings of history and culture. Hofstadter also interacted with Manhattan's theater community and art world. Hofstadter's New York in the 1950s and 1960s was a fascinating intellectual and cultural hub. >>>

September issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The September issue of Historically Speaking will be posted on Project Muse around the 15th. Before then, I thought readers might like to have a heads up on the content. This issue contains a forum on the neglected field of naval history; interviews with historians on psychology, military, and political topics; reviews essays; and articles on the South in recent history, Australian hucksters in the 19th century, and more.

I will be posting some excerpts from the September issue in the coming weeks. (Links to the full essays will be provided.)

Historically Speaking 11:4 (September 2006)

A Swindler’s Guide to the British Empire
Kirsten McKenzie

The Necessary South
James Cobb

The Neglected Field of Naval History? A Forum

Naval History: Division or Dialogue?
Andrew D. Lambert

The State of Naval History
John Beeler

Response to Andrew Lambert
Barry Strauss

The State of American Naval History in 2010
John B. Hattendorf

Reflections
Andrew D. Lambert

Remembering Nelson: A Review Essay
Donald A. Yerxa

Montesquieu, the Modern West, and Democracy’s Drift: An Interview with Paul A. Rahe
Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas

A Review of Paul A. Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar
John Dunn

Revisiting World War I: The Last Day of the Somme
William Philpott

Bloody Victory at the Somme: An Interview with William Philpott
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

The Myths of Gallipoli
Robin Prior

The Fall of 1941: A Meditation on History
Manfred Weidhorn

Erich Fromm and the Public Intellectual in Recent American History: An Interview with Larry Friedman
Conducted by Randall Stephens

From Custer’s Last Stand to Wounded Knee: A Review Essay
Paul Harvey

Innovation in the Age of Exploration

The following by Anthony Disney appears in Historically Speaking (June 2010). Recently posted to Project Muse, the full issue and this article are here.

Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India
Anthony Disney

In 1497-98 a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama made one of the most momentous communications breakthroughs in global history by successfully sailing from Western Europe to India via the Cape of Good Hope. Yet Gama’s breakthrough was neither surprising nor particularly sudden, for it came as the climax of a long, cumulative process of voyaging and exploration that had been set in motion some eight or nine decades before, in the early years of the 15th century. The person long regarded as most responsible for this process was Prince Henry, third son of King John I of Portugal, generally referred to in Anglophone historiography as Henry the Navigator. Henry is traditionally considered to have had more influence on the direction of world history than any other Portuguese, and he is certainly the best-known individual from his nation who has ever lived. But now, in the early 21st century, to what extent can his illustrious reputation still be sustained?

Henry’s involvement in voyages of exploration began as a by-product of a great amphibious expedition mounted in 1415 by John I against the Moroccan port city of Ceuta. While Portuguese fishermen seeking to exploit the rich fishing grounds off North Africa and Portuguese corsairs cruising in search of Muslim shipping to prey upon had probably already gained some experience of sailing in these waters before this major expedition, it was only in its aftermath that systematic, organized Portuguese voyaging off Atlantic Africa commenced. Ceuta, located on the African side of the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, was only a short sea passage from Portugal. It was both the hub of a flourishing agricultural region, and a well-known trading center serving as a clearinghouse for exotic goods from trans-Saharan and Near East caravans. Some Portuguese merchants also saw Ceuta as a potential source of wheat, which Portugal did not produce in abundance and therefore needed to import. Nevertheless, recent historiography has tended to view the main impetus for the expedition as coming less from the mercantile sector than from the Portuguese service nobility supported by elements from within the clergy. These groups saw attacking Ceuta as an extension of Iberia’s long tradition of Reconquest—a new stage in the war against Islam. In any event, in 1415 the Portuguese duly succeeded in occupying the city, and a long and draining period of Portuguese territorial involvement in Morocco then followed.

Soon after the 1415 conquest of Ceuta, Prince Henry, who had been one of the expedition’s most active participants and who remained a dedicated proponent of Portuguese expansion in Morocco for the rest of his life, began to sponsor voyages of exploration southward along the Moroccan Atlantic coast. The common assumption that, in doing this, Henry was specifically trying to reach the Indian Ocean by sailing around the southern tip of Africa, is not borne out by the evidence. Actually, his objectives are discussed in some detail in the much-cited seventh chapter of Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s classic Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné, the main contemporary source for his voyages, where they are placed into three broad categories.2 These may be summarized as (1) an economic agenda in which the pursuit of personal material gain was paramount; (2) a political-ideological agenda with the expansion of Christendom (particularly at the expense of Islam) as its principal component; and (3) a proto-scientific agenda that included, on the one hand, acquiring more geographical knowledge, and, on the other, refining ship design and improving techniques of navigation in order to make longer ocean voyaging possible. read on>>>

June Issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The June issue of Historically Speaking is now up at Project Muse. (We couldn't be more pleased with the terrific work the Muse people are doing. Readers can finally consistently read HS on-line. Scanning back issues is now in the works.)

The June issue includes a lively forum on Charles Joyner's classic Down by the Riverside. It also contains interviews and the usual fare of insightful essays.

In "The Art of History" popular historian Ian Mortimer throws down the gauntlet. Academic historians, in his estimation, don't care all that much about writing, narrating, and dramatic story telling. "Most professional historians do not understand the art of history," he asserts. "Quite what constitutes the 'art' seems to be the problem. Is it originality of thought, a distinct literary voice, innovative writing, sensitivity to public perceptions and assumptions about the past, or clarity of expression? Or something else entirely? Whatever the answer, these suggestions by themselves indicate that some of the activities associated with the 'art' do not figure prominently in university departments. Literary skill is almost always downgraded by academics to a supplementary role—supporting an analytical process but always subordinate to it. Originality is surprisingly rarely valued in academic circles: when it is most clearly displayed, it often proves to be the catalyst for its protagonist to be declared a 'maverick.' No historical departments (as far as I know) encourage their members to be sensitive to public perceptions and assumptions. Few historians have actively explored what drama, suspense, and literary conceits can add to a narrative. Creative writing is never discussed in historical journals, even though it is implicit in the very act of writing something new. All in all, historians seem generally oblivious to the basic fact that when expressing ideas about the past, the way one writes is as important as what one writes."

I disagree with Mortimer about some of these assumptions. Seems too broad a generalization, I think. Still I find it an interesting, provocative take. See Donald A. Yerxa's interview with Mortimer in the June issue for more on the subject.

Historically Speaking (June 2010)

"Two Historians on Defeat in War and Its Causes"
Peter Paret

"U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929"
Allison Sneider

"Ian Mortimer: Making History More Meaningful to Society"

"The Art of History"
Ian Mortimer

"In Search of New Narrative Frameworks: An Interview with Ian Mortimer"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community A Panel Discussion"

"Introduction"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Learning from Charles Joyner"
David Hackett Fischer

"The Influence of Down by the Riverside"
Sylvia R. Frey

"Two Journeys: Honoring Charles Joyner"
James Peacock

"Creolization, Decreolization, and Being 'at Home' in the Diaspora"
Stephanie J. Shaw

"Response"
Charles Joyner

"Writing Historical Crime Novels: An Interview with Jenny White"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India"
Anthony Disney

"Faith and the Founding of Virginia"
Lorri Glover

"Letters"
Stanley Sandlar
Vivian R. Gruder

"In Grateful Memory of Max Palevsky, 1924-2010"

Economic History: State of the Field in Historically Speaking

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"But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on," Frances Perkins lamented in 1934. "No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way." How did this thing happen and when will it end? Common questions back in the Dirty Thirties.

Today, journalists, historians, policymakers, and so many others are grasping for some handle on the current economic slump. What's the historical context of economic trouble? What went wrong? Could it have been avoided? "Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics," says David Brooks in the NYT, "because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today." Brooks' speculates: "One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the economists who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction."*

Others disagree. Over a month ago Diane Coyle penned an essay for the Chronicle on how "Economics Is on the Verge of a Golden Age." "An astonishing explosion of creativity and intellectual progress has been under way for years in a number of areas," observes Coyle. "Consider competition economics (should the Department of Justice challenge the Google Books settlement on antitrust grounds?), the application of game theory or the use of market design (what's the best system for matching newly qualified doctors or Ph.D.'s to jobs?), development economics, the economics of technological change and network markets (what prices should mobile-phone companies charge for access to one another's networks?), and the study of long-term growth."*

The latest issue of Historically Speaking (April 2010) features a forum on "The Neglected Field of Economic History?" Senior editor Donald Yerxa organized the forum with a generous grant from the Earhart Foundation. I paste below Yerxa's intro to the forum and short excerpts from each essay. (Read the full forum and other material from the new issue of HS at Project Muse.)

No graduate student in history in the 1970s could escape economic history. One of the major professional debates of that era—about the cliometrics of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross—went well beyond historiographical interpretation to encompass seemingly fundamental differences over the nature of historical methodology. But where does economic history stand now? In this our third in a series of four forums we asked several leading economic historians to assess the state of their field. Robert Whaples gets our conversation started with the forum’s lead essay. Philip Hoffman, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, and Werner Troesken respond, followed by a rejoinder from Whaples.

"Is Economic History a Neglected Field of Study?"
Robert Whaples

In the fall of 2008 and early 2009 it looked to many weary and wary workers, investors, policy makers, and analysts as though the U.S. economy was about to fall off a cliff into an abyss as bottomless as the Great Depression. What on Earth was going on? Everyone wanted to know, and many turned to history—economic history—for answers. The press burgeoned with interviews and insights from economic historians who were called to Washington and New York to offer advice. Indeed, Christina Romer, an economic historian from University of California, Berkeley, whose pioneering early research examined historical trends in economic volatility and who has done influential research on the causes of the Great Depression and the recovery from it, was tapped by President Barack Obama to be chair of the Council of Economic Ad- visors. And Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton University economist and author of Essays on the Great Depression (2000), held—and still holds—the most powerful economic policy making position in the world as chair of the Federal Reserve.

In these turbulent times, it became obvious to almost everyone that understanding economic his- tory is useful, indeed essential, and economic historians are indispensible. And yet many economic historians have the sense that their discipline is a neglected field, a field on the margins, caught in a no man’s land between two disciplines: ignored and underappreciated by economists and misunderstood, feared, and perhaps even despised by historians. Most economic historians sense that the discipline has almost always been on the margins and that this marginalization has increased appreciably since the end of a brief golden age that glimmered during the 1960s and into the 1970s.

To understand this situation, I’ll begin—as economic historians almost always begin—by doing some counting. . . . read on>>>

"Response to Robert Whaples"
Philip T. Hoffman

To make the picture even more depressing, Whaples (being the good economic historian that he is) backs up his assertions with solid evidence. One could easily add to it. To judge by the titles of articles in mainstream history journals (the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Modern History, Past and Present), interest in economic history is vanishing.1 Dissertations in economic history in history departments are rare.2 And citations suggest that major works of economic history can pass unnoticed by the history profession even when they address issues that once fascinated many non-economic historians.3

My personal experience, if it is worth anything, suggests much the same. Older historians I know who were trained in the 1970s may not write economic history, but they do seem willing to pay attention to it. They also seem open to borrowing from the social sciences and to the possibility of generalization—in other words, to the notion that what they have unearthed in the archives is not necessarily a special case. . . . read on>>>

"One More Step: An Agreeable Reply to Whaples"
Deirdre N. McCloskey

I agree with every word of Robert Whaples’s elegant and well-grounded essay.1 Whaples doesn’t say things until he has the goods—and as he says, we people from the economic side tend to think of the goods as numbers. It’s very true, as he also says, that our numerical habits have repelled the history-historians, especially since they have in turn drifted further into non-quantitative studies of race, class, and gender (it is amusing that the young economic historian Whaples quotes gets the holy trinity slightly wrong, substituting “ethnicity,” a very old historical interest, for “class,” a reasonably new one; it is less amusing that historians believe they can adequately study race, class, and gender without ever using numbers, beyond pages 1, 2, 3).

But it’s also true, as is shown by the fierce and ignorant quotations he reports from other economists and economic historians, that quantitative social scientists don’t get the point of the humanities. “Whenever I read historians,” said a young economic historian to Whaples, “my response is: How can you say that without a number? Do you have a number?” Many social scientists, and especially those trained as economists, believe adamantly that, as Lord Kelvin put it in 1883, “when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science.” The young economists nowadays believe this so fervently that rather than deviating ever from their faith they insist on collecting sometimes quite meaningless numbers (such as what is known as “statistical significance,” or what they are pleased to call “calibrations” of a hypothetical model unbelievable on its face). . . . read on>>>

"On the Supposed Decline and Fall of Economic History"
Joel Mokyr

Much like the West, the field of economic history has experienced endless lamentations of its imminent decline and fall. Whaples’s basic argument that economic historians as a group are disrespected by economists and feared and despised by historians is typical of this kind of premature eulogy. The Cliometric Revolution had all been so promising back in the 1970s, and now all we are good for is telling a few stories about past economic crises to entertain our fellow economists or supply them with a telling historical anecdote to decorate the first paragraph of some technical paper. How bad are things, really?

It has never been easy to be an economic historian. Much like Jews in their diaspora, they belong simultaneously in many places and nowhere at all. They are perennial minorities, often persecuted, exiled, accustomed to niche existences, surviving by their wits and by (usually) showing solidarity to one another. They must work harder, and know more. . . . read on>>>

"Toward a Richer, More Diverse Intellectual Marketplace? A Response to Whaples"
Werner Troesken

Mostly I agree with Robert Whaples. Economic history is a neglected field in both economics and history. I have only two concerns. First, Whaples quotes a historian who characterizes cliometrics as generating “trivial” and “unreliable” results. I spent nearly fifteen years in a history department producing work in cliometrics. While I often felt isolated, which is the reason I left, my experience was nothing at all like that implied by the quotation. With a few unimportant exceptions, I always felt that my colleagues in history respected my work. I realize that my experience might not be representative, but I want to offer that qualification up front. Second, I think Whaples overstates the degree to which economists reject historical evidence and the broader enterprise that cliometricians call economic history. Although economic history could be held in higher esteem by economists than it currently is, there is evidence to suggest that economic history still has its place in economics departments.

But, whatever my quibbles, Whaples raises an important question: What is it about the field of economic history that undermines its position among both economists and historians? What follows is a crude and preliminary attempt to answer this question. . . . read on>>>

"Is Economic History a Neglected Field of Study? Final Thoughts"
Robert Whaples

There is considerable good sense in the comments of my four colleagues. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that economic history is “ready for hospice care” and “doomed to extinction,” or to deliver a “eulogy.” Rather, my fundamental point, which all seem to agree on, is that, despite manifest evidence that economic historians continue to produce a high-quality product that more historians and economists should go out and read, the current amount of output in the economic history industry is below the social optimum. The demand is too low.

I don’t blame economic historians for this. Collectively, we are not as haughty as some of my quotes may suggest. And although we may not have all the breadth, polish, and ability to marshal evidence suggested by my commentators, economic historians are immensely practical. . . . read on>>>

Cahokia: Donald Yerxa's Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat and the January issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The January issue of Historically Speaking is now up on Project Muse. As a preview, I post below a part of Donald Yerxa's fascinating interview with Timothy R. Pauketat on Cahokia, site of a sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization near the Mississippi river.

The landscape and burials there long perplexed American settlers. In 1826 poet Micah P. Flint wrote these lines on the enigmatic mounds. His romantic soliloquy still resonates all these years later:

Ye mouldering relics of departed years!
Your names have perished; not a trace remains;
Save, where grass-grown mound it's summit rears,
From the green bosom of your native plains
Say! do your spirits wear oblivions chains?
Did Death forever quench your hopes and fears?

Cahokia: An Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Almost 1,000 years ago the city of Cahokia emerged with amazing suddenness on the edge of the Mississippi River where only a few small towns and villages had once existed. Cahokia became the hub of a major pre-Columbian Indian nation, but by 1400 the sprawling city had disappeared. Only the giant earthen mounds remained. Timothy R. Pauketat’s recent book, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Viking, 2009), reconstructs this mysterious culture, drawing on the work of a number of archaeologists, including his own. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Pauketat, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, on November 13, 2009.

Donald A. Yerxa: Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of the rise and fall of Cahokia?

Timothy R. Pauketat: Cahokia’s rise has been a particular interest of mine, and it remains a work in progress, since the more we know, the better questions we ask and the more we keep developing our explanation. The fall of Cahokia isn’t as dynamic of a research topic, but we still have a good general idea of what was happening. So here it goes.

Cahokia’s rise can be broken down into the slow growth of what I’ve called “Old Cahokia,” and the abrupt transformation of that big village into what I call “New Cahokia.” It’s New Cahokia that you see today, the city with pyramids and plazas. Old Cahokia was a very large agricultural village, possibly the seat of a loose confederation of villages or perhaps regional communities of people who minimally ranged across most of the northern American Bottom (which is the large patch of Mississippi River floodplain east of modern-day St. Louis), and maximally might have included other agricultural villages farther up and down the Mississippi. Farming was good in the American Bottom, and especially around Old Cahokia, which began to attract immigrants around 800 A.D. By 1000, in fact, Cahokia was probably the largest village in the Midwest, with perhaps 1,000-2,000 residents. That might have been it, end of story.

But—and we’re not really sure why—around 1050 the Cahokians redesigned their village into a city, with numerous large earthen pyramids surrounding one large plaza, and lesser pyramids enclosing smaller plazas to the north, east, and west. Many immigrants poured in, both local farmers from nearby villages and people from as far away as southern Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Something was attracting them, and it had to have truly tugged at their sensibilities, because Cahokia swelled pretty quickly to about 10,000 people. And that population estimate doesn’t include Cahokia’s suburbs, outlying towns, and new satellite villages, many of which were also being founded and populated in the years immediately after 1050. All of this gives one the impression of a great expansive new culture, which is why I’ve dubbed it ancient America’s Big Bang.

We have found and analyzed massive deposits of refuse from giant religious festivals dating to the decades after 1050. At one of these festivals Cahokians butchered 2,000 deer, cooked large fish and vats of pumpkin and sumpweed soups and stews, ate many berries, and smoked large amounts of strong tobacco. Unprecedented sacrificial rituals began shortly after 1050. These seem to have involved the sacrificing of young adult women every decade or so; the exact timing is still speculative. Such activity suggests that Cahokians were building a new religion that attracted followers from surrounding regions.

Yerxa: How has our understanding of Cahokia changed in recent decades?

Pauketat: Cahokia was misunderstood for a long time, even into the 1990s. Many archaeologists didn’t stop to think of the historical impacts that Cahokia and Cahokians might have had on the entire middle of the continent. Now archaeologists think about history differently, and they are beginning to appreciate that Cahokians had tremendous effects on American Indians’ identities and heritage for centuries, even impacting the ways in which Europeans colonized North America and then Anglo- Americans expanded the young U.S. westward. Those Europeans and Anglo-Americans didn’t know it, but they were being alternately enabled or impeded by descendants of Cahokians and a landscape radically changed by Cahokians centuries earlier. >>> read on

Table of Contents, Historically Speaking, January 2010

A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation
Wilfred M. McClay

On Using History
Mike Rose

Murder by Duel: Welch, West Virginia, 2009
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Hidden Dimension: “European” Treaties in Global Perspective, 1500-1800
Peter A. Coclanis

How to Teach the Writing of History: A Roundtable

Riding the Melt
Stephen J. Pyne

Historians on Writing
Michael Kammen

How to Write a Paper for This Class
Jill Lepore

Response to Stephen Pyne
John Demos

Peter’s War: An Interview with Joyce Malcolm
Conducted by Chris Beneke

The American Archipelago
Kenneth Weisbrode

The Midwestern Historical Imagination

Beyond the Frontier: An Interview with David Brown Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Midwestern States of Mind: Regionalism in American Historical Writing
Ian Tyrrell

Patriotic Progressives
Paul Gottfried

Cahokia: An Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Letters

Season's Readings: Give the Gift of Historical Society Membership and Two Books for Only $50

With the holiday season here, consider giving a friend, colleague, student, or loved one the gift of membership in the Historical Society.

For just $50 you can sign up a friend to receive one-year subscriptions to both the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking. Your gift is tax deductible. The Historical Society is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization.

We want to make this offer even more attractive by adding two volumes from an exciting new series of books edited by Historically Speaking editors Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens. Historians in Conversation, published by the University of South Carolina Press, brings together interviews, essays, and forums from Historically Speaking that speak to a common theme (military history, historiography, early America, Africa and the Atlantic World, and more). These books are terrific teaching tools. Eight volumes have been published thus far, and we will send a choice of two to the recipient of your gift subscription.

Order by using this secure web form: www.bu.edu/historic/gift

The Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition

Announcing….

The Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition for the best essays published in Historically Speaking during 2010 in the following areas:

• Intellectual History or the History of Political Thought

• Military or Diplomatic History

The prizes are $1000 each and will be awarded in January 2011. Essay submission guidelines for Historically Speaking can be found at www.bu.edu/historic/hs/guide.html. Direct all submissions and questions about the prize competition to: Donald Yerxa at historic@bu.edu.

The Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, educational organization dedicated to strengthening the teaching of America’s founding principles and history.

Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Committees:

Intellectual History/History of Political Thought:
Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chair
Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
Jean Yarbrough, Bowdoin College

Military/Diplomatic History:
Dennis Showalter, Colorado College, Chair
Brian McAllister Linn, Texas A&M University
Marc Trachtenberg, UCLA

"Military History: The State of the Field" in Historically Speaking

[The full forum will be available at Project Muse. Subscribe to HS to read more.]

The uncertain status of military history in the academy has been the subject of considerable debate over the last decade. With John J. Miller’s 2006 National Review Online piece, “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired,” the debate went public. It surfaced again as part of a broader assessment of the discipline of history in Patricia Cohen’s June 2009 New York Times article, “Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?”

Here several leading historians assess the state of the field of military history. Brian Linn and Dennis Showalter, current and past presidents of the Society for Military History, offer their opinions. Prominent military historians Robert Citino, Victor Davis Hanson, and Roger Spiller respond, followed by brief rejoinders from Linn and Showalter. This forum is funded by a generous grant from the Earhart Foundation.

MILITARY HISTORY: REACHING BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL ACADEMY
Brian McAllister Linn, Historically Speaking (November 2009)

Military historians occupy a distinct position within the historical discipline. Some university faculty, particularly those in history departments, regard them with suspicion. At best they are wannabe generals, at worst warmongers and militarists corrupting the nation’s youth. In contrast, the public and the armed forces turn to military historians for entertainment, for insight, and for explanations of current events. Whereas many academic fields grow ever more specialized and narrow, the interests of military historians are as broad as in the days of Herodotus and Thucydides. Their purview remains the study of war and the institutions that fight it, a definition encompassing everything from a naval air squadron to a Stone Age tribe, from weapons development to national mobilization, and from the individual experience of combat to how societies memorialize their war dead. Marxists believe that history reflects mankind’s relationship to the means of production; military historians believe that it reflects mankind’s relationship to the means of destruction.

Military history defies academic trends in other ways as well. Despite much rhetoric about multidisciplinary approaches, academic history is becoming more exclusionary and inbred. Some historians are so specialized that their writings are all but incomprehensible to another historian, even one who studied that subfield two decades ago. And there are academics who would restrict the title of “historian” to the doctorate-holding faculty. In contrast, military historians are a wide and diverse lot—the more than 2,400 members of the Society for Military History range from graduate students to three-star generals—and some of the field’s most popular and influential authors are not academics at all. This has always been the case, for alongside its own “cuttingedge” and “paradigm-shifting” scholars, military history has also relied on “amateurs” such as Livy, Teddy Roosevelt, and Bruce Catton, as well as on warrior-scholars like Carl von Clausewitz and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Indeed, if today’s readers can tell a Mauser rifle from a javelin, they can readily immerse themselves in two millennia of military writing.

Much of the debate about the current state of military history has focused entirely on the distress of military historians who are faculty or graduate students at universities. Commentators as diverse as Professor John Lynn and the National Review’s John Miller have drawn attention to the perilous state of “the embattled field.” They note that for decades the two most prestigious professional journals essentially embargoed articles in military history (in fairness, recently the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History published review articles and the OAH Magazine of History did a special issue on teaching military history). They argue that universities are not replacing their retiring faculty, and the corollary, that graduate programs at top-rated universities are disappearing. They warn that if universities cease training students in military history, the public, the armed forces, and the nation’s policy makers will have to rely for their critical analysis of defense policy and war on ideologues, social scientists, former officers, and the ubiquitous celebrity historians.

Certainly the state of military history in the ivory tower is cause for concern. But what characterizes a successful historical field? For far too long, academic military historians have judged their specialty by the opinion of their colleagues and their deans, and then publicized their dismal findings. The result has been a widespread perception that the field is in precipitous decline. But is ephemeral and subjective academic prestige going to be our sole criterion for judging the state of military history? Perhaps as the child of an academic I was born cynical, but I often wonder if the average college department is capable of establishing consistent and verifiable indices for excellence. If there were such standards, why have so many departments hired so many faculty whose dissertation topics went from “cutting-edge” to “traditional” in the time it took them to come up for tenure? Why are faculty who “popularize” history, whether to enthusiastic students or the reading public, regarded as lacking in academic rigor? And why is publishing a 400-copy monograph that is favorably reviewed by another specialist in a journal with a circulation of a few hundred other specialists seen as the apex of scholarly achievement? I could go on, but the academic readers already know why so many murder mysteries, dramas of dysfunctionality, and vicious satires are set on campus, while the rest of you still would not believe what passes for normal in most departments. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of picking the battlefield, so why should military historians not heed their illustrious ancestors and look outside of the narrow confines of college departments to judge the state of the field? . . .

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