Thinking about Feel-Good History

At the Panorama, the blog of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Princeton professor Michael A. Blaakman just shared an essay titled “How Should History Make Us Feel?”

While Blaakman’s remarks were prompted by David McCullough’s book The Pioneers, which is the focus of the latest issue of S.H.E.A.R.’s journal, and by the flimsy “1776 Report” from the last Presidential administration, his concerns can apply to other history projects.

This was snowflake history—history designed to inspire, delight, or comfort, while sheltering its imagined audience from challenging questions about the past. [It] embodied an idea that is not going away anytime soon: that history’s purpose is to make people feel good. . . .

For most historians, meanwhile, the primary goal is not to make us feel one way or another, but to help us think: to understand prior worlds, to discover why events unfolded the way they did, and to explain how all of it has shaped the present. . . .

Stories [that center on the origins and character of the nation] carry a lot of baggage. They implicate a primary and deeply political category of their reader’s personal identity, in ways that do not bear as heavily on biographies, microhistories, and global histories, at least not by definition.

Is it inevitable that any nation-centered history will necessarily alienate whole constituencies, even within the nation itself? The optimist in me would like to think it’s not, because it seems more vital than ever for scholars of the early republic to help broad audiences understand themselves and the nation in historical context. As the United States’ semiquincentennial approaches, we will be called on increasingly to do so.

Blaakman sees the appeal of history books like McCullough’s lying in “drama,” and he suggests foregrounding the authors’ investigative process to produce that.

I think those books’ appeal comes from narrative, which includes moments of drama but goes beyond that one ingredient. The historian can indeed be the protagonist of a narrative, but so can the historical actors, even when the author concludes that history is shaped by larger forces and trends beyond individual actions.

“We should be suspicious of stories.”

And as long as I’m going all theoretical, I might as well quote economist Tyler Cowen on the danger of storytelling at an event unpronounceably named TEDxMidAtlantic:

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they're a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few stories. . . .

There was a study done, we asked some people to describe their lives. And when asked to describe their lives, what's interesting is how few people said, "mess". It's probably the best answer; I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that's a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel," 5% "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show."

Again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and when something is in the form of a story, often we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that's exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that's exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories.

We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read nonfiction books, we're really being fed stories. Nonfiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but everything's taking the same form of these stories. . . .

The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. . . .

Another set of stories that are popular - if you know Oliver Stone movies or Michael Moore movies. You can't make a movie and say, "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching movies. This, again, is reason to be suspicious.

As a good rule of thumb, "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think, "Wow, that would make a great movie!" That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking more in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess.

Another common story or storyline - the claim that we "have to get tough". You hear this in so many contexts. "We have to get tough with the banks." "We had to get tough with the labor unions." "We need to get tough with some other country, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with." Now, again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is a story we fall back upon all too readily. When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say, "We need to get tough with them!" as if it had never occurred to your predecessor this idea of getting tough. . . .

How many of the stories of the American Revolution we hear take the form of good v. evil, a conspiracy, or finally getting tough? Basically all of them. After all, that’s how the two sides interpreted events for themselves.

I think there are some other archetypal stories in our standard accounts as well. But they all derive from the same assumptions Cowen points to here: that one trend is superior to another, that human intent drives events, and that something happened because someone finally wanted it hard enough. Of course, sometimes those things are true.

The “Noble Dream” of History as a Science

Having quoted briefly from Gordon S. Wood’s Washington Post essay on writing history, I want to add his further analysis of why so many professional/academic historians write books that don’t appeal to the public as many narrative histories do. I liked how Wood’s article didn’t follow the common pattern of simply lamenting that many historians write opaquely on obscure topics, but analyzed why they come up with their books:

Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. . . .

Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past that the works of previous historians have exposed; or to resolve discrepancies between different historical accounts; or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored.

In other words, beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in or build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past.

The writing of these sorts of historical monographs grew out of the 19th-century noble dream that history might become an objective science, a science that would resemble if not the natural sciences of physics or chemistry, then at least the social sciences—economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology—that were emerging at the same time as professionally written history.

Wood thus recognizes the limitations of both approaches to history, but sees potential for a synthesis of the insights gained from narrowly focused studies applied to narratives that reach outside academia.

Wood also rightly puts the emphasis on subject rather than language; it doesn’t help much to write clearly if your topic doesn’t grab readers outside of the field. The sciences, social sciences, and literary studies have developed specialized vocabularies, either because they need greater-than-everyday precision or because there’s value in seeming obscure to the non-initiated. In contrast, the study of history doesn’t really have jargon, except for a few terms like “agency” and “contingency.” So it all comes down to the topic and the approach.

History and the Narrative Fallacy

Yesterday I discussed the appeal of narrative history that offers the same ingredients as a good fictional story: protagonists, goals, obstacles, resolution through internal forces. The protagonist can be a historical figure (or several) trying to achieve something, or a historian trying to answer a question. Either way, such a narrative structure turns a sequence of events into more than “one damned thing after another,” as Arnold J. Toynbee once characterized some other historians’ work.

The problem with a historical narrative is that it might not reflect real life. We all know that we do a lot of things every day because of circumstances, habits, or whims, not because we approach life with clear and unconflicted goals. We’ve all seen plans work out, or not work out, because of unforeseen outside forces or simple chance. We all experienced social, technological, or environmental forces that can overwhelm one individual’s ability to affect the world—what historians call “agency.”

Yet we still like narratives. We humans are pattern-spotting animals, and sometimes we even impose patterns on life to make it more understandable. A narrative is one such pattern, and a pleasing one. But that understanding of life may get in the way of real comprehension.

For example, the history of Paul Revere’s ride on 18-19 Apr 1775 is an exciting narrative. It offers:

• a protagonist: Revere and his comrades.
• a goal: warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams about the British troops marching west, and maybe warn the folks at Concord as well.
• obstacles: miles of road to cover, British officers in wait, Hancock’s stupidity.
• a clear resolution: the warning gets through!

Henry W. Longfellow made Revere’s ride a popular legend by squeezing out lots of the complexity. David Hackett Fischer wrote a much more detailed, accurate account in his own Paul Revere’s Ride, noting as he did so how the event had what Aristotle called “dramatic unity”—it took place within a relatively compact space and time. I myself recounted a Revere-centered version of the story for Boston National Historical Park last April.

And yet, as I’ve argued, Revere’s ride may not have really affected how the rest of 19 Apr 1775 turned out. Other warnings got through. The militia in Lexington and Concord had started to assemble even before Revere and his colleagues arrived, and spent hours milling around. The British troops weren’t really hunting Hancock and Adams.

Once those troops reached Concord, furthermore, the militiamen massed outside town weren’t sure how to respond; they spent more hours watching and debating, and pulled back after the first engagement at the North Bridge. Even after the shooting really began along the battle road, it’s not clear what the provincials hoped to accomplish. If they had cut off the regulars from Boston, would they have known what to do with them?

And then there’s the larger picture of whether what Revere did on 18-19 April, or even the whole Battle of Lexington and Concord, changed the split between Britain and its North American colonies. Was war bound to start somewhere fairly soon? (Had it already started in Portsmouth?) Was the political and economic conflict within the British Empire too far along to be patched up? Exploring those questions gets us into the realm of large social movements and economic trends, beyond the level of crowd-pleasing narratives.

And as for the alternative narrative form of historian as investigator, diligently gathering evidence to answer a stated question, anyone who’s done research knows that’s even more of a fiction. You determine the questions as you go along, evidence turns up in the most unhelpful order, and the end of the investigation is defined less often by your goals than by your deadlines.

Myself, I like narrative history. I like reading it, and when I plan a talk or article I almost always find myself thinking in narrative terms. I happen to believe in human agency, and in the meaning that accumulates from the sum of individual lives. But at the same time, I worry that narrative history can be a snare, a pleasant illusion of how events fit together that hides a more complex, messy picture.

(The image above is Grant Wood’s rendering of Paul Revere’s midnight ride from the Grant Wood Gallery.)

Gordon S. Wood on Narrative History

Last month leading early American historian Gordon S. Wood wrote an essay for the Washington Post on the state of history writing today. He said:

Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.

Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end.

Indeed, most professional historians use the term “narrative history” to mean a chronological telling of events, as opposed to other ways to extract meaningful information from the past: tracing different themes, for instance, or analyzing numbers.

I think that conception of “narrative” misses some of the key qualities that appeal to folks outside of the profession. “Narrative” has a more elaborate meaning for fiction writers, and specifically those who write within genres and/or for young readers—in sum, writers who have to create engaging plots.

When fiction writers discuss narrative, they’re not just thinking of one event after another (“The king died, and the queen died,” in E. M. Forster’s formulation). They’re thinking of an interesting plot with actors, interrelated events, and emotional meaning. That almost always requires:

• a protagonist or group of protagonists readers can follow—i.e., an individual person or small group of individuals. It’s harder to get emotionally involved with an entire population, however eye-opening the statistics may be.
• a goal that matters for that protagonist, whether it’s providing for her children or writing a constitution.
• obstacles or antagonists blocking the protagonist’s way to that goal.
• a resolution of the conflict for the protagonist, ideally growing out of forces or factors already established in the narrative.

A plot’s goal, obstacles, and resolution connect to Wood’s “beginning, middle and end,” but go well beyond. As he notes, stories of politics and wars are particularly useful for narratives. I think that’s because those events offer a clear sense of each side’s desires, stakes, and challenges, and a very clear resolution. For instance, at Yorktown we know what each commander wanted, what each faced, and how events turned out: the whites and blues won, and the reds lost.

Another popular form of history finds its narrative in the process of investigating the past. The author (or, on a television show, the host) is the protagonist, with the goal to find answers to defined questions. The historical investigator overcomes obstacles by unearthing obscure documents, interpreting difficult sources, and getting around preconceived notions. The resolution is a convincing answer to the original questions.

One interesting example of this form is leading early American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale—not the book, but the movie, written and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt. The book doesn’t offer a strong narrative structure: it traces Martha Ballard’s life over many years, with many events but no unified plot or satisfying resolution, much like real life. In contrast, the movie creates a narrative by using Ulrich herself as the protagonist, seeking a way to find meaning in Ballard’s diary. The result is an engaging, as well as informative, story.

TOMORROW: And what’s wrong with that?

Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the link to Wood’s article.