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My first problem with Jill Lepore's argument on histories of the nation is that it rests on what I think is a historically inaccurate claim about the relationship between demagogic narratives of American nationhood and the attention of academic historians on nationhood. 1/
In fact, you can see this inattention in her essay "A New Americanism". She gets into the 1960s-1970s and she is very careful to play proper court to the rise of social history, "history from below" and so on. For which, thanks. 2/
However. The piece posits a pretty simple causal relationship: as American historians pay attention to the global, as they pay attention to women, people of color, etc, as they pay attention to anything but the nation, the nation loses a sense of its history. 3/
Lepore suggests: when Americans lose the steady supply of liberal histories of the nation, when they are left without expert guidance, they drift, bereft, into the hands of illiberal, irresponsible, ethnonationalist storytellers who give them what they are missing. 4/
It's a somewhat similar argument to the recently published History Manifesto, in which the golden age was historians talking big subjects and consequential policies to power and being heard, influencing outcomes. 5/
The problem is that I think neither are true historically in any rigorous sense. In Lepore's 'golden age' of liberal supply of national history to a demanding citizenry, I see little evidence that Americans adopted that narrative in any deep, powerful or persistent way. 6/
Indeed, Lepore's own argument would almost suggest this. How persuasive or powerful or deeply set could the good liberal history have been if it died so quickly on withdrawal? What sort of identity needs a daily fix from an intellectual pusher to hold its sway? 7/
In this supposed golden age, McCarthyism dominated public culture. The mendacity of Lost Cause thinking reigned supreme as the South fought desegregation. What liberal history of the nation held national power? 8/
If Lepore wants to say that liberal elites believed in the history offered by liberal elites, felt lost as historians moved to other interests, now that? That I would buy. But all this means is that liberal elites lost their own confident sense of dominating public culture. 9/
Who generally was the first to join in the melancholic complaint of people like Arthur Schlesinger that we were losing a common history? People like Arthur Schlesinger. Because it was only "common" in their own worlds and frames of reference. 10/
As historians moved on, maybe what happened is that educated elites who bought into the "common" history of Degler et al were compelled to discover that it had never been common: that it was a history of expulsion and excision. 11/
That many Americans weren't in that history, and more devastatingly, had never believed in or shared its narrative. That endless amounts of civic training had bounced off of them like bullets off Superman, or that they always saw that as a message for someone else. 12/
So maybe what historians studied in the 1970s, 80s, 90s up to now WAS national history. It was the history we have lived, all of us. It was no longer history dragooned into "partially coercing" a social contract of belonging. 13/
Ernst Renan is credited with saying that "nations have to have a history, and they have to get it wrong". That national history has to be a history of forgetting, excision, diversion. Maybe historians supplied a different kind of national history that rejected that idea. 14/
I do not think that this new, more honest, more true to life history, told in fragments and pieces rather than a single story, creates demagogues, tyrants and scoundrels. They have been here all along, telling their histories--and have been heard by some. 15/
Historians are not garlic to authoritarian vampires. We are not the makers of myths that create unities that never existed, that bring people together by throwing some of them out. Or maybe we were, but that accomplished nothing. 16/
To quote a character in a YA book that my daughter and I both love, "there is no way out but through". There is a story of this nation that's good and bad, life and death. It is a story that cannot be told as one story. 17/
If we cannot rise as a just and good nation out of the story we actually have, the one historians have studied so well for 50 years--then we will not rise from unifying liberal mythmaking either. "We" did not rise from it in our past. That story never brought us all together.
Ok, done. That probably should have been (and probably will be) a blog entry.
