Photos of the Wild West

The Daily Mail has published a gorgeous series of photos taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, a member of the Wheeler expedition that traversed the American West in the 1860s and 70s. Check them out here.

The Cyrus Cylinder

The Trashing of History

KC Johnson laments that little useful [in a policy sense] history has been produced since the 1970's. He notes:

The study of U.S. history has transformed in the last two generations, with emphasis on staffing positions in race, class, or gender leading to dramatic declines in fields viewed as more "traditional," such as U.S. political, constitutional, diplomatic, and military history. And even those latter areas have been "re-visioned," in the word coined by an advocate of the transformation, Illinois history professor Mark Leff, to make their approach more accommodating to the dominant race/class/gender paradigm.

 In other words, feminists, gay activists, race hustlers, and the like have taken to the study of themselves and their entry into the profession has crowded out more general [and for that reason more useful] areas of research and writing. I was witness to this during my academic career and, if anything, Johnson seriously understates the baneful influence of these navel gazing studies.

Read Johnson's piece here.

History Wars Heat Up

For the past half century and more students in Western educational institutions and indeed the general public have been subjected to an unrelenting stream of calumny and abuse on the subject of "imperialism" -- specifically, the two or three centuries in which Western nation states dominated non-Western peoples around the globe. Imperialism, we were told, was everywhere destructive of native cultures, stultifying them and degrading the populations subjected to colonial rule. Often it was genocidal. The legacy of colonialism included political and economic dislocation, psychological enervation, and a sense of cultural uncertainty against which post-colonial peoples are still struggling, and which accounts for the abysmal performance of many post-colonial regimes. What is perhaps worse, imperialism was in itself a manifestation of deep and abiding defects within Western culture itself, a manifestation of racism, a fear of "the other", a product of predatory capitalism, or a way of exporting antagonisms produced by domestic oppression onto other peoples.

Elements of this critique are drawn from many sources -- from the exuberance of non-Western nationalists, from the propaganda efforts of communist regimes, from the mystical dreams of cultural and religious radicals -- but they lead to a common conclusion:

So poisonous has the experience of Western imperialism been, critics argue, that non-Western societies can only advance by divesting themselves of that heritage. Anti-colonialism has thus adopted anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, and indeed anti-"white" positions and programs while indulging in extravagant visions of a return to the virtues of primitive simplicity, the restoration of a glorious period of past dominance, or a new, indigenous form of social organization.

With few exceptions academics, journalists, and cultural and intellectual elites throughout the West have embraced this criticism. Few, whether from matters of belief or fear of criticism, have stood up to oppose or correct it. It has become the received wisdom of our academic and political cultures. One of those few brave souls who have mad the case for imperialism has been Naill Ferguson, one of today's most prolific and popular historians. In a series of books and articles he has argued that, despite the undoubted abuses and occasional horrors associated with imperialism, many aspects of imperial rule, particularly in the British empire, were benign and beneficial to subject peoples. He laments the great Twentieth Century wars that ended the period of Western domination, and calls upon the United States to pick up the banner of world leadership that Britain no longer is able to carry. For this, he has been viciously attacked and among the most prominent of his antagonists has been Indian scholar Paskaj Mishra, who wrote a blistering critique of Ferguson's recent writings in which he portrayed his subject as a reactionary Atlantic man who writes "white people's histories" rife with unapologetic neoimperialism and more than a touch of racism. Most insultingly, he repeatedly compared Ferguson's views with those of early Twentieth Century racial theorist T. L. Stoddard.

[Read Mishra's review and Ferguson's letter in response to it, and the back-and-forth charges that ensued in the London Review of Books here.]

Outraged by the personal attacks in Mishra's review, particularly the suggestion that he was a racist, Ferguson [who left his Scottish wife to marry Somalian political activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali] struck back with a series of letters which forced Mishra to back away to some extent from the charge of racism [admitting that nobody, not even Ferguson, these days thinks quite like Stoddard]. Not satisfied, though, Ferguson has since threatened to press his case in court stating "If he won't apologise for calling me a racist, I will persecute him until he does." [here] So the controversy stands now. It's a fine dust-up in which articulate spokesmen representing radically different world-views go at it hammer and tongs.

Gad! I love this stuff!

UPDATE:

For a sympathetic review of Prof. Ferguson's book check out Donald Kagan's piece in the NYT here.

Kagan's review earned him this attack by economist Brad DeLong, who wants to write historical villains out of the Western Heritage.

DeLong's rant engendered this response from Ross Douthat in the New York Times. He points out that it is not so easy to separate heroes from villains, that good and evil coexist within the human soul, and that claiming a civilizational affiliation with the good guys necessarily entails a link to the bad guys because both are part of the same culture.

It just keeps getting better and better.

New Perspectives on the History of American Indians

The Browser has a nice interview with historian Colin Calloway in which he discusses important contributions to our understanding of North American Indian societies and cultures. The subject of Native American history has undergone some major revisions in the past thirty years or so and Calloway presents a fair introduction to the subject. If you find the subject interesting check out the short introductions and then read the books -- you could find far worse ways to spend your time.

Check out the interview here.

History, The Customer Reviews

What if participants could write internet reviews of historical phenomena the way they rate restaurants? Patricia Pearson, writing in the New Yorker, tells us. An example:

THE ORACLE OF DELPHI COUNSELS GREECE
I took my daughter to see the Oracle for her sixteenth birthday, and, really, I did not feel that the visit was worth sacrificing a whole goat. If you’re going to predict the fall of Lydia, there should be better music. Also, the food at the entrance to the underground chamber was very substandard. The figs were withered, and I’ve found better-tasting olives under corpses. We definitely don’t plan to go back.
★

Read more here.

The Verdict of History

Time and again you hear people say that history will render judgment -- will vindicate, condemn, celebrate, etc. -- the people, policies, movements or other phenomena that compel our attention in the present. In a certain sense that is true. Historians of the future will, according to their various biases and interests, simultaneously praise, condemn, ignore, celebrate, etc. our contemporaries, and there most likely there will be no permanent consensus. History is an interpretive art, and the practice of history takes the form of an endless argument.

Endless indeed! Witness a recent review article by British classical scholar, Mary Beard. She surveys a number of recent books on Alexander the Great and notes that there is little agreement among them. More than 2300 years after his death, scholars are still arguing about the Macedonian conqueror and his exploits. What is more, as Beard notes, the main contours of the debate have not changed in more than twenty centuries. Sure, from time to time new points of argument have been introduced that reflect contemporary concerns -- British historians at the height of empire tended to interpret Alexanders conquests as a civilizing mission, reflecting their preferred understanding of their own imperial project; recently some scholars have focused on Alexander's sexuality, etc. -- but such nuances come and go and the basic arguments remain. And there is no final judgment -- no resolution to the debate -- and there never will be.

So it is likely to be with our contemporary concerns. Future historians will argue, revision will follow revision, and the dialogue will continue to the end of time. So much for the verdict of history.

More Historical Revisionism -- The Jefferson-Hemings Liason

More than two centuries ago, in the heat of a political campaign, it was charged that Thomas Jefferson kept a slave concubine. Generations of historians discounted the story as a standard political slur, but then the publication of Fawn Brodie's best seller, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, in 1974 rekindled the debate. Brodie argued that an analysis of Jefferson's movements showed that he could have fathered all of Sally Heming's children and posited a forbidden love affair between the President and the slave. In the iconoclastic climate of the Seventies Brody's romantic tale was seized upon by left of center scholars and race hustlers as proof of the essential hypocrisy of American culture. Then, about a decade ago, the story of the President and the slave girl got another boost from DNA tests that showed that Tom Jefferson [among others] could possibly have fathered one of Sally Heming's children. The story became conventional wisdom and any doubts expressed about its validity were denounced as evidence of a racist mindset.

Now Jefferson scholars are raising questions about Brody's tale. A new book, The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy, has just been released. It reports the results of an investigation conducted by a panel of thirteen distinguished historians that concludes that many of the points raised by Brody are wrong, and that the evidence most clearly supports the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson's brother, Randolph, was the father of Sally Hemings' child.

I have not yet read the book and can't judge the accuracy of its claims, but some of its points are certainly worth consideration -- for instance, during Jefferson's stay in Paris when the affair supposedly began [an allegation that formed the basis for a major motion picture] Hemings did not live with Jefferson. Instead she lived with his daughters at a boarding school far from his residence. Simple geography makes the intimate relationship posited by Brody and others unlikely. The study also contradicts the oft-made allegation that Jefferson showed special favoritism toward Sally's offspring.

And so the debate goes on, and on, and on. That is the nature of historical research. Politicians and pundits denounce revisionism, but real historians know that revisionism lies at the core of the historiographic enterprise and the Rankean ideal of constructing a picture of the past "as it was" is unattainable. Historiography is an interpretive art that produces endless dialogues. The past is fluid and imperfectly known.

History Notes -- A New Biography of Ethan Allen

Francois Furstenberg has a nice review in Slate of Willard Sterne Randall's new biography, Ethan Allen: His Life and Times. Allen is a problematic hero because many of his patriotic exploits were clearly motivated at least in part by calculations of personal gain. Furstenberg takes the opportunity to point out that much the same could be said of other prominent figures in the revolutionary conflict and raises once again the old "progressive" view of the revolution as a clash of class and economic interests. This is a familiar argument to professional historians, but general readers, for whom this book is intended, might find it interesting. Check it out, check it outers.