Making History Podcast: The Blog

Last week “The Writing of History,” my graduate course, got underway.

Once the logistics were arranged – Who is presenting when? What are the assignments? How does the Blackboard site function? – we settled into a conversation about the motivations for writing any history, and the motivations for writing history differently.

Among the published pieces we read, Virginia Scharff’s 2008 Western History Association presidential address received the most attention, for her call to action, her valorizing of Fawn Brodie — and for the lobster.

“Professors like me,” Scharff writes, work at “dissecting term papers and senior theses and master’s theses and dissertations like somebody eating a lobster. The cracking of the claws, the slicing open of the tail, … probing the legs and crannies for that last piece of succulent meat.” Hoping her students were laughing as they heard this, she nevertheless wondered while “wielding that bloody red pen” whether “they wish, perhaps, that someone had stroked them between the eyes until they fell asleep, before being dropped into the pot of boiling water.”

“Yes!” one student exclaimed, and the stories came pouring out – the papers dripping with red ink, the insistence on more theory or fewer descriptions, the choice to include the first person or the tortured efforts to argue without personality. My students revealed tears, and frustration – and the desire to learn the language of the discipline. The students concurred that history has its forms and formats – and, if one is to succeed in expanding the audience and meaning of history papers, one also has to learn those strictures.

The class admired the courage and efforts of Fawn Brodie, the desire to tell a new story, using new evidence. Yet we also acknowledged her years spent outside of the profession – and, seemingly, outside of the stream of regular income. Must experimental history be done by freelancers, by the independently wealthy, by loners? I hope not! Brodie is thus a double-edged example, of how to expand the realm of what history can be, but to pay a price in historians’ disapproval (and the limits placed on professional women.) As Scharff notes, after a contentious battle Brodie was tenured at UCLA. Who was discouraged, further back along the path to radical change?

We also discussed the genre of these readings. The pieces from Marjorie Garber, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Virginia Scharff were all talks – not conceived as closely argued articles as much as exhortations, delivered by tenured women who, in two of three cases, spoke as presidents of their organizations. While it is encouraging for such a call for innovation to come from the top – “in Salt Lake City?!” one student gasped, on looking closely at where Scharff vaunted the work of Fawn Brodie – I wonder if the exhortatory address ends up as another ephemeral call for better history writing.

“What academic revivalists worthy of the name would fail to establish a journal?,” James Goodman wondered, in another of the readings for last week, written early in the life of Rethinking History. “Or fail to ensure that at every major meeting numerous sessions were devoted to the practice of narrative? Or fail to hold meetings of their own in the hope of converting graduate students (and other untenured historians), the future of the profession, to the faith?” As I hinted before, I share this concern – and would be happy to hear from those willing to participate in workshops, sessions, and side meetings on innovative history writing at future conferences.

Is writing history with pizzazz merely the work of outsiders, or the pleasant dream of a fond conference nightcap? Surely it is not. But shouldn’t its proponents have more to say to one another?

Tomorrow night my graduate course on the writing of history has its first meeting. With the students pre-registered and the syllabus pre-circulated, we plan to jump right in, reading many of the influential essays and articles on the choices made when writing history.

Yet, as the prep time ends and the course begins, I have circled around and around the question: What do we teach when we teach “The Writing of History”? Should it be advanced mechanics — taking the word-mincing beyond citation, argument, and evidence analysis to voice, metaphor, pacing, irony, character? Or should it be more theoretical — reading epistemologies of history writing, defenses and attacks on the politics of narrative, and research on linguistic preconceptions?

For all my other classes, there are model syllabi galore, but here I find myself more alone. I know the courses John Demos and the late Robin Winks once offered at Yale, and I have found a smattering of other such courses taught from NYU to UC Irvine, Cornell to Harvard to Caltech. Some are for undergraduates, other for grad students – though, as Martha Hodes, Marjorie Garber, and Virginia Scharff have noticed year after year, as a profession we seem to warn graduate students off the truly imaginative until they have attained the truly remunerative job.

The more I have dedicated myself to facing out from the academy and writing about the past in newspapers, on blogs, and for museums, the more I find the choice requires its justification to skeptical colleagues. And often the justification requires an anatomizing the process of writing history.

So I have built the course as a hybrid – a few weeks of the tough questions to consider when writing history, and then a repast of exemplary innovative histories. And then there is the requirement—not merely the chance—for my graduate students to experiment in their own writing and to receive feedback.

I hope to return here regularly this semester, to report on how the course is going – and to hand over the reins to my students, when their take on the readings or their experiments in writing history call out for a wider audience.

I welcome those teaching, taking, or pining after similar courses to chime in as well!