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History and Ourselves: Story, The Past, and Responsibility

History and Ourselves: Story, The Past, and Responsibility

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 2:15 am by Wyatt Reynolds

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History and Ourselves: Story, The Past, and Responsibility 2025-01-14T02:15:00-04:00 Wyatt Reynolds

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The Muse of History

David Blight, the eminent Civil War historian, begins every class he teaches in the same way: by quoting from Herodotus’s histories. “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other… I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.”

Since Herodotus, everyone who writes history does so with a dream. Many such dreams are noble. For others it is a nightmare from which to wake or which we impose on the past. The consequences of these dreams are often insufficiently examined. We cannot remove human nature from those we write about or from ourselves as we write. The historian is the lens through which the past is seen. Instead of attempting to be perfectly objective, we work to explain our own subjectivities. History in this way functions as the central pillar of the humanities, upholding and explaining what is human. Winston Churchill once (and at least partially correctly) commented that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. Churchill’s claim is both shockingly humble and narcissistic. By giving his own account of events, he both opened himself to the criticism of posterity and to some degree assumed a charitable reading from them.

It might have been with this comment in mind that the Cambridge historian E.H. Carr argued, one ought “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” As I’m studying for my comprehensive exams, I have found myself, perhaps unsurprisingly, reflecting consistently on the researching, writing, and production of history—that is the craft of my discipline. I have on this blog stumbled towards a why of doing history. Here, reflecting on a year of writing at The Anxious Bench, I want to wonder aloud the how question. How do we historians go about writing the past, shaped as we are by our own histories? Once again, I will turn to a few historians I admire and examine their lives and methods.

First though, we must make sense of what history is, again. I believe for a piece of writing to qualify as history it must fulfill three criteria. First, the author must use what I will call the historian’s toolbox. Every discipline has one of these. It doesn’t require professional training, although that can help. Second, the text must be about the past. Technically, this might allow most journalism to qualify; however, I am dramatically skeptical that history and its tools allow for writing about the past while eyewitnesses remain alive. Seventy-five to one hundred years is often tossed around as the boundary for writing history. I don’t believe there’s a hard and fast rule here, but again, thinking along a vector can help us. Finally, it must be recognized by the profession as history. Thus, a work like David Barton’s is not history; nor is most soviet propaganda history. Carr again, “I am reminded of Housman’s remark that ‘accuracy is a duty, not a virtue.’ To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function.”

We historians quite often write and research along a particular vector because of questions raised by our own lives/stories. This is natural and human. This was driven home to me across several readings and discussions in a graduate seminar with David Blight. Here I first encountered Michael Kammen, who has come to shape my own view of historiography. Kammen was obsessed as a secondary project with the personal biographies of American historians: who was religious and why, what was their class background, who was particularly shaped by their advisor or cohort mates, and similar questions shaped a variety of essays and a book which he published. For anyone who wanted to know, Kammen provided a version of how particular historians were shaped by their stories in how they told the stories of the past. I’ll return to Kammen, but for now I want to shift to a more direct examination of how our lives shape the histories we tell and write.

A recent essay from Matthew Avery Sutton, “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right” has become the most read piece in the history of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion—and the subject of raging debate within the field of American religious history. Indeed, several at the bench have weighed in. I turn to this piece, because Sutton makes an important claim about a group sometimes known as the “Evangelical historians” (Sutton prefers the term “consensus historians.” This group includes George Marsden, Mark Noll, Grant Wacker, Nathan Hatch, and Harry Stout.) were shaped by their lives and faith to reshape the historiography of Evangelicalism since the 1980s. There are other claims in the essay and other perspectives worth examining. It remains a live question whether we can term believers from Jonathan Edwards to Billy Graham to Donald Trump supporters with the same moniker of “evangelical.” Can such a term retain any sense of a stable meaning? How does Sutton’s own history as an ex-vangelical shape his understanding of this history and historiography? I’m not particularly interested in these questions here, but I want to acknowledge their importance. Instead, I want to agree with Sutton that there is an important point worth digging into around how the Evangelical historians were shaped by their beliefs and what influence this may/did have on the larger field. Someone (spoilers, I hope it’s me, eventually) needs to write at least an article and maybe book to answer this question.

Perry Miller

Perry Miller was a strange man, and some may criticize me for calling him a historian. Afterall, his doctoral work was in English and he spent his career in American Studies. He is most remembered for popularizing the phrase “city on a hill” as a means of describing the United States and dragging John Winthrop’s forgotten sermon along against its will. Regardless, Miller defies simplification. He defined himself as an “atheist for Niebuhr”; while Reinhold Niebuhr eulogized him as a “believing unbeliever.” He was a soldier, a historian, a scholar, a teacher, writer, reader, literary scholar, O.S.S. officer, world-traveler, messy-eater, social critic, academic, alcoholic, atheist, spiritualist, philosopher. In explaining his turn towards history, Miller described a moment in West Africa while working as a merchant marine, watching oil drums float in a river. In this instant, he felt the globalness of America and its influence. He wanted to understand where it came from, and claimed this was the beginning of his interest in the Puritans. To borrow from Alfred Kazin, “What he had seen that day in Africa was the revelation of his own strength, his own urge. What is unusual about this is only that the identification was complete, yet never explicit.” Of course, this event most likely never occurred. Rather, Miller was trying to position and model himself after Edward Gibbon’s Capitoline moment which inspired The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. More than anything else, Miller, as a prophet of American exceptionalism, shaped more than one generation of young scholars and students at Harvard.

I became a historian to make sense of my own story. This project of recontextualization is something I have touched on here before. As long as I can remember, I have wanted to know “why?” And these questions of why most often were about people’s stories and their past. I think I became a historian because of three stories though. When I was four, my grandmother gave me a set of history channel documentaries called “Frontier: Legends of the Old Northwest.” I already knew I was an Indian and had questions about what it meant and how it happened, but from then on, when playing in the backyard, I was always the Indian and never the cowboy. Another great example of this is my relationship to the Civil War. I was taught as a child that the South fought the Civil War to defend itself against the bloody tyranny of Northern aggression. There’s no one in particular to blame for this; it’s merely a fact. I believed this for years. It was only when I began to study more widely and actually took a class on the period surrounding the Civil War that I was confronted by the truth: the Civil War was always about slavery. I learned this because a historian in college was gentle enough with me not to argue but rather point me towards the past to read for myself and discover the truth that had been waiting for me to be curious enough to dust it off. He also pointed out that my great-grandparents were old enough to have known veterans of the Civil War—this is how small the history of the United States is. Finally when I was in high school, I worked at a military history museum. I was fifteen and had just finished giving a group of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam veterans a tour of the museum. One of the vets began to cry. He told me that he though no one in my generation cared about their stories. “You have to be a bridge.” He told me that my job for the rest of my life was to be a bridge for their stories—the generations after me would never know anyone who fought at D-Day or survived the Bataan death march or the Battle of the Bulge. But I could teach them the stories. This was the first time in my life that I was not simply talented or gifted at something: rather, my gifting was transformed into a calling. The responsibility of this calling has shaped how I consider my historical work. The past is much more unstable and complex than I ever could have imagined. What does it mean to bear that commitment, not only for this lone veteran, but also the forgotten and misremembered dead who I study?

Me in high school touring a veteran’s group.

The medieval historian John Arnold has commented, “In many ways, history both begins and ends with questions; which is to say that it never really ends, but is a process.” And so it must be with this essay. I have a few thoughts and a couple observations from historians more erudite than myself, but no real conclusions except that we must continue to wrestle with the angel of history—including the our own history. This is the humanness—the humanity of history. Arthur Schlessinger Jr. wrote to Richard Hofstadter that “A whole series ought to be done on the concealed social presuppositions of our recent American historians as these presuppositions come out in the history.” The guild of historians continues to need such volumes, although Kammen’s Life in the Past Lane, has helped fill the gap. Kammen himself writes of earlier generations of historians that “In addition to feeling profound ambivalence, even uncertainty, about the relationship between their personal identities and their vocational productions, they suffered from a range of anxieties in — sometimes verging upon despair — just as we often do.” Peter Brown offered in an interview that “this is one of the primary things a historian can really teach people — that people are different, and that it’s your duty to understand them.” To which I would add that sometimes, those people we must understand are our peers, our colleagues, and our academic ancestors.

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