As some of you know, I am working on a three-volume project, geared to a general reading audience, on evangelicals and politics in the twentieth-first century. Sometimes I don’t know if I am doing journalism or writing history, but I am enjoying trying to figure it all out. It seems like I can take a project like this in one of two directions. The first option is to write a generally straightforward history that does not inject, at least overtly, my political biases into the narrative. (Yes, yes, I realize this is impossible, but bear with me). The second option is to write with a sense of moral purpose. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am an evangelical Christian who has been very critical of the Christian Right. Should I use this book to let it rip? Should I produce a largely unnuanced narrative that reads more like cultural criticism than a generally detached depiction of “what happened?” In other words, should I write in the same way that Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States?
I thought about these options today as I read an excerpt, published at The Chronicle of Higher Education, of Nick Witham’s book Popularizing the Past: The Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America.
Here is a taste:
Today, there are a few professional historians who are willing to confront controversy in the way Howard Zinn did. Jill Lepore, for example, wrote her 2018 popular history These Truths to reignite the political imagination of American liberalism, and, in doing so, indicted the historical profession for its insularity from political debate. Writing from a different perspective, the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning was an active intervention in antiracist politics as well as historical writing which has garnered him vitriolic criticism from the right.
Nonetheless, when we think of popular history in 2023, we are less likely to think about professional scholars such as Zinn, Lepore, and Kendi, than of figures who stand at a remove from the historical profession: non-academic authors, journalists, filmmakers, podcasters. This is hardly surprising when the history bestseller lists are populated by writers such as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Bryson, and when work that attempts to bridge the gap between academe and the mainstream, such as the “1619 Project,” proves so controversial.
How, then, should the historical profession reassert the importance of its contributions to the world of popular history? One approach is to embrace controversy, which is what drove Zinn, and which he used to advance the cause of his discipline. When conservative critics lampooned his historical perspective, they only drew more attention to his famous book. In turn, Zinn was able use their criticisms to demonstrate the continued relevance of a radical, convention-defying approach to national history, which appeared as an iconic text in a decades-long debate between right and left, and thus as an archetypal popular history for a polarized America.
From the vantage point of 2023, we can appreciate A People’s History of the United States for what it was: a forthright, readable, passionate, and engaging piece of writing about the past that has subsequently inspired millions of readers to think differently about the United States. Zinn’s take on social history may be outdated, and his political biases clear for all to see, but for all his flaws he produced exactly the type of popular history the historical profession should seek to emulate.
Read the entire exceprt here.
Whichever persona you choose (and you can be the writer with historical distance in the main text and the let-er-rip cultural critic in the endnotes), a question that has always vexed me as a philosophy instructor is how historians and others who deal with populations of people make good generalizations while avoiding stereotypes.
Maybe polling can help, if results are available, but how do you (and all of us) fairly characterize “the tenor of the times”?
Dan
Without demographic evidence its hard to do, Dan. Indeed, sometimes historians make bold universal claims about this or that era based entirely on a collection of anectdotal evidence. So we argue about each others work in book reviews and online. A lot of those arguments focus on whether a particular work is “representative.” Or one develops a broader picture of an era based on multiple works on the same subject.
I wish you well. I suggest you make sure to give the reasoning of both left and right equally. The culture wars are, at their best, intellectual battles by highly intelligent and moral people. The left and right of the Supreme Court in the last century is a model, not of a political fight, but high minded moral theater about the most important questions of American hopes. Your project is somehow in your wisdom to restore intellectual history and the history of ideas back into popular and populist historiography. If anyone can do this, you can. Your own personal life is preparation.