Teaching Resource: Historiography 101

I: FRAMEWORKS

A. Introduction 

Historiography–The critical examination of the various philosophies, theories, and methods that influence historical scholarship.

Historical Agency–This concept refers to whom or what a historian believes to be the primary agent of historical change.

Historicism—The aim to understand the worldview of the culture that produced the primary source materials. Embedded in this concept is that idea that the past is a different world that needs to be studied in its own terms.  

Famous Schools of History…

• Empiricist
• Idealist
• Progressive
• Marxist
• Consensus
• Nationalist
• Annales
• New Left
• New Social History
• Post-Structuralism
• Post-Modernism

B. Philosophy of History Trends

Popular History–Based on entertainment value; emphasize drama and excitement

Academic History–Critical analysis and investigation

Nationalistic–Seeking to build a sense of national unity and patriotism among citizens by teaching them about a common past

Moral–History as a means to instill values and moral beliefs

Identity–Historical research as a way to understand beliefs, lives, and ourselves by comparing our lives to those from different places.

Enlightenment Contributors…

Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794)

• Idea of Progress
• Modernity
• Linear Time

Gottried Herder (1744-1803)

• “Volk”
• Organicist (history as an organic process)
• Cyclical patterns

II. NINETEENTH- CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRENDS  

A. Key Players  

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

• History– progress of the consciousness towards the ultimate goal of freedom
• Dialectic à how history unfolds
• Thesis vs. anti-thesis = synthesis

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

• Desire to see the past as it essentially was.
• Empiricist–Reconstruct reality through critical analysis of primary sources specific individual facts
• Idealist– understand the internal essence or spirit (or Zeitgeist) of the past

• Seminar Method
• Rankean Historicism–Each historical age had its own Zeitgeist, which maintained political, religious, and cultural institutions.
• Historians must be objective as possible in order to recreate the past
• “Otherness of the past”
•  Study the past for its own sake, rather than some present minded speculative reason.

• Narrative style
• Objective authority
• Observe from a distance
• Historian as truthful, objective, all seeing storyteller of the past.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

• Positivism–human knowledge developed through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive
• Positive stage–all knowledge based on empirical truths, rather than superstition and prejudices.

• Truth from pure facts
• Influenced social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics).

Gustav Droysen (1808-1884)

• Hermeneutics–attempt to understand the true meaning of a text as its authors had intended it.
• Place source in its literary and historical context
• Words often have multiple meanings, so one must place the words within the context of the whole literary work and the cultural and historical context
• Emphasis on mental world of the past to understand worldview of past actors

 Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Communist Manifesto (1848), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1859), Das Kapital (1867)
• Historical Materialism
• Mode of Production à socioeconomic structure of a society
• i.e. industrial capitalism, feudalism, etc.

• Superstructure– all the ideas of human societies (politics, philosophy, culture, religion, morality) are determined by socioeconomic structures.
• Changes in mode of production= changes in superstructure

• Communist Societyà equal relations to the mode of production will create progress, contentment, freedom

 B. Nineteenth-Century Historiographical Trends in America

Professionalization–Gradual process by which trained historians, usually university professors, began replacing amateurs and philosophers as the leaders of historical theory and publications.

Key Aspects of this Trend…

• Influenced by Ranke seminar method
• By 1870s, American universities increasingly began creating undergraduate and graduate history programs.
• History as a factual science, which contributed to civic virtue and supported the authority of the nation-state.

Examples…

American Historical Association (AHA)

• Founded in 1884
• A way to ensure legitimacy in academia by stressing high standards, objectivity, research, and documentation.
• Follow Ranke’s scientific analysis of documents
  • American Historical Review
  • Focus on international and national interests of academic historians in the US

Organization of American Historians (OAH)

• Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA)
• Founded 1907 by Midwestern historical societies
• Regional focus remained untill 1940s

• 1964 changed to OAH
• Journal of American History
• Focus on history of the US

Nineteenth-Century National Consensus Historians–In this trend, there was an emphasis on national political history- a focus on national institutions and trends rather than local and regional politics.

C. Romanticism and Nationalism in American Historiography

George Bancroft (1800-1891)

• Romantic nationalist approach
• Emphasis on unified progress of democracy of the United States
• Focus on political elites
• Theme of national consensus and promise of American democracy
• Sweeping tales of US History as the unfolding of God’s plan

Francis Parkman (1823-1893)

• Like Bancroft, emphasized liberty through warfare, adventure, and conquest of the wilderness
• Both examples of “drum and bugle” histories

Rise of Academic/ Professional Historians–This development witnessed a desire to establish history as a scientific discipline that was independent from rhetoric, philosophy, and literature.  

Herbert Baxter Adams (1850-1901)

• One of the 41 founders of the AHA
• Focus on development of political institutions
• “Teutonic Germ Theory”

John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937)

• President of the AHA at the turn of the century
• Encouraged historical research on national and international political problems

 D. America’s Historiographical Break from Europe

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932)

• American Exceptionalism
• The Frontier in American History (1893)
• Speech to AHA
• “Frontier Thesis”
• American sense of democracy came more from the frontier than from a European tradition.
• Masses of people struggling with each other and their environment were the primary agents of change

• Struggle and conflict rather than consensus

• Influence of environmental and socioeconomic forces as opposed to influence of great men

“Mint-Julep School”—This term efers to the drink associated with the culture of the Old South Ulrich B. Phillips (1877-1934)

• White southern historian
• Exemplified and popularized racist interpretation of Southern History
• Slavery had helped “civilize” African Americans and saw African Americans as genetically inferior
• African Americans were happy slaves who were dependent on whites for their livelihood

• Antebellum period as golden age for south with large plantation owners ruled with benevolence
• Civil war was caused by irrational abolitionists
• Slavery was unprofitable and would have eventually ended on its own

William A. Dunning (1857-1922)

• Dunning School
• Built on Philips’ premise that the South was better off under slavery
• Portrayed northern whites as “carpet-baggers” and southern allies as “scalawags”
• Argued that white southerners, led by the “courageous” KKK overthrew northern aggression after 1877

III. EARLY-TO-MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY: PROGRESSIVE CHALLENGE AND CONSENSUS RESPONSE

A. Intellectual Currents of the Turn-Of-The-Century

Pragmatism–All knowledge was provisional and that a community of scientists must constantly test all hypotheses to find the truth.

• First emerged in 1880s and became an influential American philosophy of the 20^th century
• Led by John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James
• Belief in progress and ability to obtain objective knowledge, but progress was obtained through conflict rather than consensus or unity.

 William James (1842-1910)

• Introduced pragmatist approach
• Taught at Harvard University
• Exposed Turner to this philosophy
• Contributed to Turner’s emphasis on economic and social forces and conflict

• Taught W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Relativism–Questions observable reality, existence of a common time frame, and shared reality. Implies the existence of multiple realities, perspectives, and truths for every moment in time.

o   Sprung from Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1913)

o   Widespread disillusionment with prewar values and ideologies following WWI made Americans and Europeans receptive to this theory.

o   Influenced pragmatistism claim that all truth was man-made

Progressivism–Began as a reaction against the political corruption, social chaos and economic turmoil of the late 19^th century.

• Attacked corruption in politics and big business, demanding reforms to make the government more democratic and responsive to the needs of the people

New Social Science Disciplines–Took a lead in this movement using methods of economics, political science, sociology and history to explore the roots of problems.

• Influenced by pragmatism and to a smaller extent Marxism.
• Saw economic factors (like class inequalities, capitalism, and imperialism, as the root of most of these problems).
• They concluded that greater government regulation was necessary to control these potentially destructive forces to ensure progress.

While not all progressive historians were pragmatists, and few were pure relativists, these ideologies influenced progressive histories. As a result, these intellectual trends led some historians to challenge the more traditional version of U.S. History…  

B. Progressive Historians

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)

• Ph.D. from Harvard- studied African American slave trade
• Influenced by William James’s pragmatism
• Studied race relations and African American culture following the Civil War
• The South of Black Folk (1903)
• Challenged Dunning School
• Emphasized racism and conflicting economic interests of whites and blacks American shaped politics.

• Helped to spear head a revival of African American interest and pride in their heritage and culture.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950)

• Ph.D. history from Harvard
• Helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915)
• Journal of Negro History (1916)

James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)

• Worked with Dewey at Columbia University in early 20^th C
• Applied pragmatic philosophy

• The New History (1912)
• Emphasized the interpretive nature of history

• Truth is relative
• Truth changes according to the constantly increasing amount of historical data
• All conclusions tentative because they would eventually be supplanted by new conclusions based on accumulated evidence.

• Use history to help people understand themselves and the contemporary world
• With Charles Beard and Dewey he founded the New School for Social Research in 1918

Charles Beard (1874-1978)

• Also worked with Dewey at Columbia University
• Influenced by pragmatism — all knowledge conditional and relative to the individual truth-seeker.
• Critical of American capitalism
•  An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)

• Selfish economic motives behind the constitution

• Elected president of AHA in 1935
• Inaugural Addressà the “noble dream” of purely objective scientific history was nothing more than a dream.

o   All historians are shaped by their own time and place in history, but historians should search for historical truth.

• Brought historical relativism to the wider historical profession
• The Rise of American Civilization (1927)
• Written with his wife, Mary Ritter Beard (1856-1958)
• Emphasized conflict between capitalist and agrarian interests
•  Civil war as an economic struggle
• American expansionism was imperialist with negative consequences

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965)

• Charles Beard’s student.
• Carried progressivism into the middle of the 20^th C

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1918-2007)

• Son of senior
• Carried on progressive tradition with publications in the middle to late 20^th C
• The Age of Jackson (1945)à reform movements were the key to American progress and improvement o   The Cycles of American History (1986)à elaborated on the role of liberal reform and developed an overreaching pattern to American history.

• Rather than seeing progress as continuous, he argued that America went through alternating periods of liberalism and progress, and conservatism and retrenchment.

Significance of Progressive Historians–These historians exposed the economic and social origins of modern institutions, revealed economic and class conflict, and questioned the objectivity of the profession. As well, they highlighted the importance of diversity and conflict in American history

Progressive Retreat–Progressive History came under attack during and after WWII, retreating during the 1950s. Why?

• Suspicion of relativist ideology
• WWII accentuated Americans’ sense of exceptionalism
• Desire to return to normalcy–define “traditional” American values
• Opposition to communism

 C. The Return to Consensus

New Consensus historians saw their progressive predecessors as too obsessed with conflict and divisions within American Society. For them, the absence of European-style class conflict shaped American institutions and ideas  

Louis Hartz (1919-1986)

• The Liberal Tradition in America (1955)
• America lacked a feudal tradition and consequently it escaped the struggles between reactionaries, liberals, and socialists that characterize European history.
• US had three-century long tradition of liberal consensus wherein all Americans subscribed to Lockean tenets…
• individualism, private property, natural rights, and popular sovereignty
• American differences were over means, and not ends
• Very little class conflict
• Ideological homogeneityà Liberalism the only continuous tradition in America

  Daniel Boorstin (1913-2004)

• Wrote three-volume epic on the history of settlement, westward migration, and community building.
• In some ways echoes Turner

• But describes characters that were uninterested in politics and ideology
• The people were pragmatic, “versatiles” ready to conquer the continent

• Rejected relativism and asserted the importance of objectivity and empiricism
• American Revolution was a conservative movement to protect democratic rights
• Downplayed any disagreements or differences among Americans during or after the war o   Emphasized unity of purpose and mission as the great driving force in American history

• Insisted that American history and culture were shaped by ordinary people and not elites
• Populist social history–Ordinary middle class people who want nothing more than to own their own house, drives American history

• Hints of conservative populism

 

Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970)

o   Strong critique of American liberalism o   Emphasis on Agrarian Myth and Paranoid American political style

o   Political conflict reflected the search by different ethnic and religious groups for a secure status in society

• Not as a result from a clash of economic interests

o   By the latter third of the 19^th C, the middle-class offspring of Anglo-Saxon Protestant families found themselves displaced from traditional positions of leadership by a nouvea-rich plutocracy, and urban immigration

• Consequently, the elite launched a moral crusade to resuscitate older protestant and individualistic values.

o   The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (1948)

• Reformers (populists & progressives) looked back with nostalgia for an era of self-made men rather than face the problems of an industrialized corporate America

o   The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955)

• Exposes what he sees as the blend of racism, nativism, provincialism, that shaped populists and would later manifest into paranoid scares such as McCarthyism in the 1950s.

IV. MARXISM, ANNALES, AND THE NEW LEFT  

A. Marxist Historiography in the Twentieth Century  

Prominent Question/Theme—Why the working class had not developed a revolutionary consciousness and had not overthrown the bourgeoisie in other areas of the world?  

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• Italian Marxist sociologist
• Explored the ways in which the superstructure operated to shape class consciousness and prevent revolutions
• Particularly interested in cultural institutions–churches and schools

• Argued that capitalism maintained control through cultural hegemony, imposing bourgeoisie values and culture on the masses.
• Thus, it produced a counterrevolutionary culture

• His theories would become popular among New Left historians.

Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

• Famous British Marxist historian
• Longtime member of the British Communist Party
• Dominated English Marxist historiography for the remainder of the twentieth century
• He asserted that the upper strata of the working-class became identified with the bourgeoisie and controlled labor unions, making them less revolutionary and more reformist
• With E.P. Thompson, founded the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946
• Published Past and Present o   Sought to understand the dynamics of whole societies and connect political events to underlying forces o   Journal became a focal point for neo-Marxists
• Helped to give birth to the New Left

B. Annales

This school of thought developed from a desire in the 1920s to explore new methods to describe the totality of the human experience. It was led by March Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956)  

Goals–Go beyond narrow political and diplomatic history, which was too brief and too short-lived.

• Uncover the nature of change and continuity
• Study broader agents of change–environment, demographics, and technology.
• Shaped historical approaches in US and England throughout the 1960s and 1970s

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985)

• Second generation Annalistes
• The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949)
• Analyzed political, social, economic, intellectual, and geographic perspectives to create a total history

• Conceived of time as moving at three different layers for different historical phenomena
  • Longue duree–Long duration change. change over large cycles of time i.e. How humans relate to their environment, or Geographic time
  • Conjonctures-Change at a faster rate- over 10/15 years o   Economic and demographic shifts
  • Event–Tip of historical iceberg; Specific events- political, diplomatic, and biographical; More linear sequence of events

C. The New Left  

Overview–A group of intellectuals who sought a third path between Soviet communism and American capitalism.

• Influenced by Marxism, but wanted to apply it in new ways.
• Like Progressives, they demonstrated the negative consequences of capitalism and imperialism and highlighted class conflict
• Looked for the reasons why there was a lack of communist revolutions in the US
• Focus on history of capitalism and working-class culture, experiences, and organizations.

E.P. Thompson (1924-1993)

• Part of the English New Left
• After leaving the Communist Party, he helped to found The New Left Review in the 1960s
• Desire to write “history from the bottom up”
• The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Focused on the formation of working-class consciousness in the late 18^th C and early 19^th C. o   Influenced by Gramsci and Febvre, he focused on the culture and mental world of the working class o   Also looked for continuities in the past as well as changes o   Rather than viewing working class as victims of industrialization, he saw them as historical agents in their own right

• He argued that they responded to changing conditions and maintained a distinct culture

While the British New Left influenced its American counterpart, and both shared a common origin in Cold War politics, the American New Left was additionally shaped by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. American New Left–Critical of capitalism but included a new interest in diplomatic history and racial conflict.

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990)

• A leader in New Left diplomatic history
• Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)
• Laid the groundwork for the New Left interpretation of foreign politics
•  Argued that economic motives had guided American foreign policy at least since the end of the 19^th C

• Not democratic ideals as motives
• Imperialistic search for foreign markets shaped most foreign policy goals in the twentieth century

Gabriel Kolko (1932-2014)

• Critical of American actions in the Cold war
• The Limits of Power (1968)
• Reduced American foreign policy to materialist quest for imperial domination o   Blamed American greed and capitalism for financing counterrevolutions against communism, which cause political unrest and the cold war.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

• Look at history from the bottom-up
• Look at history through the eyes of marginalized peoples who had been left out of traditional history
• History to inspire and support progressive movements
• A People’s History of the United States (1980)
• Challenges the white-elite, male-focus of dominant narratives
• Seeks to understand the mechanisms of oppression and how they control working-class individuals and marginalized people to preserve capitalism and prevent social revolution.

• History as the key to understanding social injustice and eliminating it.

V. NEW SOCIAL HISTORY  

A. Overview

Study the people who are left out of most traditional histories. Show how political events affect the masses, and how social and economic trends affect politics.

• Reflection of the larger societal shifts from the 1960s and 1970s.
• Encouraged new methods borrowed from the social sciences

o   Desire to comprehend large-scale social and economic processes

• Less of a focus on narrative and more analytical and scientific

o   Replaced narrative-based consensus history as the new orthodoxy  

Relation to New Left– Like the New Left, the social movements of the 1950s, and 1960s influenced new social historians.

• Less theoretical and more empirical than New Left history.

The desire to study large groups of people- many of whom had not left behind written records- led to the development of new types of history.   These new types of history drew heavily on social science methods, especially those of psychology, sociology, and economics.   New Social History Conclusions…

• In 1971 Hobsbawm grouped social history into six categories…
  1. Demographic and kinship
  2. Urban studies
  3. Classes and social groups
  4. Mentalities or culture
  5. The transformations of societies
  6. Social movements

Despite its lack of popularity in popular culture, New Social History changed the academic historical profession by bringing in a new emphasis on diversity and critical thinking, explicit ideological perspectives, and new topics to the forefront of the profession.

There are four main genres of New Social History: race histories, women’s history, historical sociology, and quantitative history or cliometircs…  

B. Race Histories

The Black Power movement, together with the efforts of African American historians, prompted the creation of Black Studies programs at hundreds of universities across the nation.

• Encouraged more interdisciplinary research on the field of African American history.
• The 1970s and 1980s witnessed tremendous outpouring of African American histories on a wide variety of subjects.
• Prominent leaders–Ira Berlin, Leon Litwack, and Herbert Gutman

  John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

• One of the most well-known of these historians
• Was president of the OAH and the AHA and awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
• From slavery to Freedom (1947)- one of his most famous works
• His early writings (1950s) reflect a desire to bring balance to American history by adding African American history
• By the 1970s, his works reflected disillusionment, which shaped the Black Power movement. He grew increasingly critical of racism, which infused all of America’s past.
• By the 1990s, however, his works focused more on the efforts of African Americans activists throughout history to challenge racism.

C. Women’s History  

A branch of new social history, which blossomed as a result of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s.  

Background…

• Mary Beard had pioneered this field, but since few women were admitted to graduate history programs or were hired as history professors, the historical profession remained male-dominated.

• Attention to women’s history surged as the civil rights movement and other social movements of the 60s inspired thousands of young women to explore the historical origins of sex discrimination.

• Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) were extremely influential in the early phases of the new feminist movement.

• Feminist organizations (National Organization for Women and Women’s Equity Action League) demanded an end to sex discrimination in higher education.These organizations also pushed politicians to support Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1972, which banned sex discrimination in higher education.

• By the 1970s, these efforts resulted in large numbers of women entering male-dominated fields, such as law school, medical schools, and graduate programs.

Early Goals–Trace the history of patriarchal oppression and how women contributed to American history.  

Gerda Lerner (1920-)

• A leader in the early historiography
• Focused on the origins of patriarchy
• This emphasis helped shape the agenda of women’s history in the 1960s and 1970s

• “Compensatory” History–Uncovering as much knowledge about women in the past as possible in order to compensate for the centuries of neglect of women’s history.

• Search for a Usable Past–To achieve political goals; Helped found NOW
• Professional Activism–Created first graduate program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College; Charter member of the Coordinating Committee of Women in the Historical Profession

“Radical Feminists”–Lerner and others believed that patriarchal oppression pre-dated capitalism and would continue even if capitalism was overthrown.

• They looked for other keys to understanding and dismantling sex discrimination and oppression.
• Some believed that family structure itself and men’s control over reproductive power was the root of oppression.
• Others looked to cultural and religious origins of patriarchy.

Pioneers in new women’s history–Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly, Linda Kerber, Nancy Cott, Alice Kessler-Harris.

Beyond Victimization–emphasis upon the strength and accomplishments of women despite their oppression.   Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1939-)

• “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975)- one of her most famous works.
  • Explores the “homosocial” relationships of women in the 19^th C, which resulted from the separate gender sphere of that era.
  • She argued that in some ways, gender ideology actually empowered women.
• Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1986)
  • Explores psychological theories and gender constructions

Diversity of Women’s Experiences–By the 1980s and 1990s shift towards exploring how race and sexual orientation affected women’s lives.

• Emphasis on the diversity of women’s experiences.
• Examplesà Deborah Gray White, Jacqueline Jones, Paula Giddings, Theda Perdue, Vicki Ruiz, Sarah Deutsch, Lillian Faderman, and Estelle Freedman.

C. Historical Sociology  

Sociologists–focus more on contemporary social structures and phenomena

Historians– Look at past societies  

Historical Sociology–Unites sociology and historical studies by bringing sociological perspectives to the practice of history   Both historical sociologists and social historians study past societies and social phenomena…

• BUT they differ in that Historical Sociologists generally focus on models and general patterns of social events, and social structures
• Social Historians pay more attention to causes and effects, as well as individual actions, and historical context.
• Became very popular in the 1960s and 1970s
• Encouraged by interdisciplinary studies of the Annalistes and the New Left

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• One of the most influential historical sociologists of the 20^th C
• Studied history, politics, economics, theology, and sociology
• The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism (1904)
• Went beyond Marx’s emphasis on economic origins of industrial capitalism o   Weber asserted that cultural developments in Western Europe, specifically Protestant rationalism, were the distinguishing feature of the countries that developed modern capitalism
• Comparative Historical Sociology–Use of comparative methods to explore social developments and phenomena.

• Especially focused on the development and structure of modern capitalist societies, revolutions, and social movements.

Charles Tilly (1929-2008)

• One of the most famous historical sociologists since the 1960s
• As Sociology Meets History (1981)
• Noted for his investigations of collective actions in Europe and use of quantitative methods to gather enormous amounts of data to support his conclusions.

Theda Skocpol (1947-)

• One of the most famous historical sociologists since the 1960s
• States and Social Revolutions (1979)
• Known for her studies of revolutions using a structuralist approach of comparing the social structures which caused revolutions

D. Quantitative History or Cliometrics

Overview–Refers to the statistical use of quantified data to support historical arguments.

• Historians have always made quantified statements, but quantitative historians want to precisely define “most,” “widespread,” and “significant.”
• These historians attempt to state precise questions and define relevant variables, build models, and use evidence to re-create the past exactly.

New computer technologies have helped historians to gather and organize the data they need to reveal the experiences of large groups of people and economic trends.

• Data can be gathered from censuses, business records, etc.

Usually these histories do not conform to traditional approaches, which are narrative, historicist, and idealist.

• Complaints–Too positivist, too analytical, and too reliant on mathematical models; Relies too much on jargon, quantification, and large trends

Grew popular after the 1960s as social and economic history became dominant in the profession  

Robert W. Fogel (1926-)

• One of the most famous promoters of new economic history
• A positivist who sought to eliminate all bias and allegiance to overreaching theories from history.
• Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964), and – with Stanley Engerman- Time on the Cross (1974)

Serial History and Demographic History–Social and popular historians that seek to reconstruct the thoughts, experiences, and beliefs of large numbers of people have turned to these forms of statistical analysis.

• Serial History refers to histories which attempt to track long-term changes in quantifiable phenomenon.i.e. changes in wages, prices, crimes, and literacy rates

• Demographic History analyzes series of data over time, but it focuses on questions of population (birth, marriage, death); Consensus and parish records are essential to this type of history.  

VI. THE LINGUISTIC TURN, POSTMODERNISM, AND NEW CULTURAL HISTORY  

A. Overview

At the same time scholars turned to new social scientific methods to study history from the bottom-up, others borrowed new theories and methods from the fields of linguistics, literary analysis, and cultural anthropology.  

• Similar to the historians in the 19^th C that sought to understand past societies in their own terms and context, these New Historicists closely analyzed literary and nonliterary texts to reconstruct the mental world of the authors.

• Inspired by E.P. Thompson and the Annalistes, these historians were especially interested in cultural and intellectual history.

• Some New Historicists rejected empiricism and, instead, preferred Constructivist Philosophy.

• Constructivist Philosophy– the belief that truth and reality are constructed by individuals and all observations are consequently subjective. o   Empiricists–believe that truth and reality exist independent of individuals and consequently may be objectively observed.

• The Constructivist trend reflects disillusionment with science following its extensive use in WWII to exterminate masses of people. As a result, many intellectuals began to question scientific claims to objectivity and even reject the Modern worldview created after the Scientific Revolution. Questioning all claims to objectivity, these intellectuals searched for new perspectives on knowledge and asked new questions.  

B. The Turn Toward Relativism

Origins– Can be traced back to the 19^th C with the questioning of the Enlightenment’s master narrative of modernity and progress. Especially claims to objectivity and truth.

Karl Marx challenged the master narrative by positing that the superstructures of capitalism created and controlled literature and knowledge to support class hierarchy.

• Marxist historians in the 20^th C (Gramsci and Louis Althusser), further explored the idea by tracing how ruling elites controlled the superstructure of knowledge and culture in support of class interests.

o   In effect, creating “Cultural Hegemony.”

• Yet, Marxist historians end up creating their own master narrative. Nonetheless, their theories imply that even scientific or historical literature was constructed and thus relative and subjective.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• Argued that all forms of truth and knowledge are created by humans in order to obtain and maintain power.
• Thus, all forms of knowledge is never objective. For him, the past is actually a series of disjunctures and disruptions, with no rational pattern such as cause and effect.
• Historians merely impose order on facts to create truth.

Following WWI and WWII, more Europeans and Americans began to question the objective benevolence of modern science.

• Science had contributed to the increased killing efficiency of weapons, technological genocide, and atomic weapons.
• The disillusionment with science and established worldviews led to a flowering of a countercultural movement in Europe and the US in the 1960s and 1970s.

 C. The Linguistic Turn

In the first decades of the 20th C, French and Russian literary theorists began to move away from viewing texts as having static meaning and value based on unchanging standards of form and function.

• Rather, these theorists saw a more Structuralist theory of texts, which understands the meaning of texts and all reality as constructed by societies, and consequently changing over time.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

• French linguist who led the way towards Structuralism.
• Meaning of words and texts are fluid and changeable, since they are internally created by society and that society’s own structure.
• This is opposed to the Positivist claim that words are inherent, unchangeable, and closed.

de Saussre and other linguists expanded on structuralism by analyzing the relationship of words to the physical object to which they referred (the Referent).

• Since the sound and appearance of a word is merely a symbol for an object, rather than the object or idea itself, then the meaning of words and symbols are not fixed, natural, or universal.
• Rather, words are created by humans and reflect human conceptualizations- not reality in and of itself.

Semiotics–The study of signs and symbols of a culture to uncover the deeper mental structures, which give meaning to its communications.

• Cultures teach individuals the meanings of words through dictionaries, language classes, and other tools. But each individual uses words in their own unique way to signify reality.

• Since the meanings of language structures are culturally and individually determined, all meaning must be relative to the specific culture in which it is understood.

Reflexivity–Refers to the idea that reality reflects and is created by one’s own identity, assumptions, and worldview.

Despite his belief in language’s power to shape reality, de Saussure and, the Structuralists who followed him, did not completely reject empiricism’s attempt to scientifically understand reality and find truth.

But Structuralism and Semiotics did suggest the relativism of meaning and truth in language. For them, language is the root of all knowledge and this profoundly affected academia.

D. Postmodernism

Postmodernism– Encourages suspicion of hierarchy and investigation of so-called essential universal truths.

Callum Brown–postmodern historian who argues that reality is too complex, and historians can never completely replicate it or construct it.

• Histories that present themselves as purely facts and unchanging truths tend to also present morality as fact-based and history based.
• Thus, they use their history as a powerful weapon to support their own values and that makes history undemocratic and dangerous.
• Postmodernism for Historians (2005)

Post-Structuralism–A section of postmodernism that refers to theorists in the 1960s and 1970s who studied linguistic and social structures in order to uncover the way knowledge and truths are constructed.

• It emerged alongside and contributed to the social movements exploding in Europe and US in the 1960s.

• Student protests, gay and women’s liberation, Black Power, counterculture, anti-colonialism movements of this era all shared with post-structuralism a questioning of authority, traditional structures, and prejudicial language.

• While these social movements tapered off by the late 1970s, post-structuralism continued to spread through academia in the 1980s and 1990s.

 Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

• One of the first French theorists to build upon de Saussure’s structuralism and apply it to cultural studies.
• He argued that popular culture, including sign systems in everyday life (advertisements, tourist attractions, sporting events, films) created Knowledge Systems.
• These knowledge systems controlled society and normalized oppressive ideologies.

• His popular magazine articles deconstructing the signs of cultural manifestations, ranging from the preaching of Billy Graham to professional wrestling, brought semiotics and structuralist theory to a wider audience.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• Extended the theories of Nietzsche and de Saussure and explicitly applied them to historical studies.
• Political Economy of Truth–Belief that political and economic forces (like governments and the bourgeoisie) shape knowledge production for their own political and economic interests.
• By studying the production of knowledge through Discourses (words, phrases, ideas, and symbols associated with a specific topic), then historians could better understand the past.

o  Foucault argued that various cultural groups (political, economic, social) create and add to discourse to shape knowledge about a particular subject.

• Discourses then creates epistemes— mental structures that organize knowledge and prioritize new information as important/unimportant, true/false, scientific/unscientific.
  • These epistemes then shape identity of individuals and create the mental world in which individuals live.

o   Individuals, therefore, are products of discourses in their lives, rather than historical agents.

• “Archeology of Knowledge”– his method for studying history

o   Foucault contended that like an archeologist, the historian must painstakingly uncover the inner workings and structures of past societies. o   Because all texts are relative and reflexive, historians cannot simply interpret them and claim to have reconstructed the truth about what happened and why.

• Historians must Deconstruct texts- closely analyze them as if they were archeological fragments of the worldview from which they were created.
• He believed that historians could seek to understand how and why discourse changed by looking for beginnings of new discourses, differences in existing discourses, and ruptures and disjunctions in epistemes.
  • These changes and ruptures reveal the power and forces, which shaped the discourse at that particular moment in time, they help to reconstruct the history of knowledge.
• “De-Center” the Subject– examine the past from unexpected perspectives, from the “other,” the outside, the oppressed, the marginalized, and the anomalous.

o   Alternative perspectives may reveal a rupture covered up by conventional sources.

• For these reasons he studied “taboo” subjects like sexuality, madness, disorder, disease, and imprisonment.

 

More Relativistic Forms of Postmodernism…  

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

• Thought Foucault was still trapped in the cultural categories, which he had exposed.
• “There is nothing outside of the text.” Asserted that meaning cannot be determined or evaluated by reference to facts, and that truth and reality are impossible to discern because they can only be represented by texts.

• While reality exists, humans do not have the ability to reconstruct it, except by using texts, which are themselves constructed by humans (and thus, not reality in and of itself).

• To truly understand reality, intellectuals must get outside of societies’ trap and limitations on knowledge.
• Question everything.  Create new words and language structures to explain new ideas. Deconstruct all texts.

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)

• The Writing of History (1975) “The past is the fiction of the present.”
• Critiquing post-structuralists, de Certeau argued that all histories were manufactured by historians and served to manipulate people in the present.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Argued in the 1980s that sets of discourse created meta-narratives, or overreaching stories and explanations of reality.
• i.e. the concept of historical progress.

• Meta-narratives limited creativity and were not grounded in reality.
• In reality dissensus prevailed. Multiple values persisted, and truths competed with each other.
• His beliefs represent radical skepticism

E. Gender, Identity, and New Cultural Histories  

The Literary Turn…  

As French theorists spent time in American Universities, and their works were translated into English, their theories took the American academy by storm in the 1970s and 1980s.

Hayden White (1928-)

• Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973)
• Challenged empirical history’s claims to objectivity and narrative history’s claims of being distinct from fictional literature.
• History and literature had a lot in common – both were imaginative representations of reality.
• Historians and novelists select information, organize it, and interpret it to make a coherent story.

• Tropes– Theory to explain how underlying linguistic structures shaped all of narrative history.
• All historical accounts use one of four literary tropes

1. Metaphor
2. Metonymy – use of one concept to explain another.
3. Synecdoche- use of a part to explain its larger whole.
4. Irony- use of a term to explain its opposite.

• Three categories of explanation

1. Emplotment
2. Formal argument
3. Ideological implication

  The Anthropological Turn…  

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)

• Cultural anthropologist and specialist in Native American cultures.
• Used linguistic theories to challenge the then dominant anthropological paradigm, which viewed Western Civilization as superior to all others.
• Considered all human cultures to be systems of symbolic communication. He argued that to understand how each culture constructed reality, scholars must study symbols.

o   Cultural Relativism–Each culture had its own way of communicating reality and meaning.

• As judges we are limited by our own cultural constructions, thus there is no objective way of determining which view of reality is more true or accurate.

  Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

• Inspired by Levi-Strauss.
• In the 1960s and 1970s, he created a new symbolic anthropology built upon the foundation of Cultural Relativism.
• Believed that all human cultures are equally important, and that values and behaviors should be understood only within the culture from which it originated.
• Pioneered “Thick Description”–a method of deconstructing and analyzing cultural symbols to decipher how different cultures construct truth and reality in their own meta-narratives.

 The Cultural Turn…

Since the 1970s, elements of cultural anthropology, literary analysis, and post-structuralism have found their way into every field of history. But, they have caused profound transformations in the fields of cultural and ideological history.

Greetz’s symbolic anthropology has led cultural historians to view culture more broadly as an interworked system of construable signs and as the whole body of practices, beliefs, institutions, customs, habits, and myths.

New Cultural Historians–seek to understand how past cultures shaped identity and created knowledge and reality.

• Viewing all groups in a society as equally important, cultural historians now study a myriad of different events and peoples, connecting all of them to the production of discourse and knowledge.
• Rather than looking for cause and effect, new cultural histories decipher meaning from the discourse of the past.

Microhistories

• Popular form of new cultural history.
• Rather than studying institutions and large-scale socioeconomic structures, micro-histories focus on specific people, cases, and cultural phenomena.
• Examples of new cultural historians with microhistoris are Carol Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert Darnton.

Gender and Identity Histories…  

Impact of Geertz– many social historians have moved away from studying behavior and material status toward analyzing meaning and symbolic representation through discourse.

Impact of Foucault– His ideas about how discourse constructs identity especially appeals to those who seek to understand how racial and gender categories were constructed in the past and changed over time.

• Knowledge of gender and sexuality socially constructed…

If concepts such as masculine and feminine and black and white were not based on essentialist unchanging biological definitions, but instead were historically constructed and changing, then these categories have inherent political implications.

• As a consequence, much socio-cultural history since the 1980s has focused on how language and discourse have historically constructed and set limits for people of different genders, races, and ethnicities.

  Joan Wallach Scott (1941-)

• Famously applied Foucault’s theories in her support for using gender as a “useful category of historical analysis.”
• Developed and demonstrated the methods of gender history be deconstructing gendered discourses and uncovering how these have shaped identity, social institutions, and social relations.

  Gender history to a large extent has replaced women’s history.

• Many women’s historians realized that studying women in isolation from men tended to ghettoize women’s history, making it a small segment of the larger discipline instead of fully integrated into the historical narrative.
• Women’s history is intimately related to men’s history, and neither can be fully understood without reference to the other.

  Natalie Zemon Davis– called for the integrated historical analysis of both sexes.

• “Women’s History in Transition” (1976)

Noted Gender Historians/Intellectuals–Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Lynn Hunt, Judith Butler, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Ruth Bloch.

Many historians since the 1980s have explored the ways in which race, class, and gender discourses shape historical events and experiences and, ultimately, how they reveal power relationships.

Since the 1990s, these identity histories have moved on to exploring the construction of masculinity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, whiteness, as well as adding new perspectives on imperialism, diasporas, and all aspects of historical study.

VII. World Histories  

A. Overview

Global Perspective–No historical event or process exists in isolation. A global perspective improves our ability to understand historical phenomena and processes across boundaries and broadens our historical vision.  

Why a shift toward global perspectives?

• Over the course of the 20^th C, the American historical profession witnessed not only philosophical and methodological revolutions, but also a gradual shifting away from nation history focus to a more global perspective.

• Reflects America’s transition to an interventionist and international worldview during and after WWII.

• Organizations such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization encouraged scholars to move beyond national histories to explore international connections in the past.

• Anti-colonial revolutions following the war led to renewed interest in the histories of imperialism and colonialism.

• Increase globalization in the last decades of the 20^th C, has led to a dramatic rise in the demand for global history courses.

Background…

National Histories

o   National histories began to dominate historiography in the 19^th C, as modern nation-states developed and shaped the emerging historical profession. o   19^th C historians consequently conceived of the nation-state as the most important historical object of study. Their histories reflect this framework. o   National histories remained dominant until the 1960s.

 

Early World Histories

Still, some historians did look for universal patterns across national boundaries.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

• Studied civilizations rather than nations.
• The Decline of the West (1918)
• He determined that 8 “high cultures” had dominated world history

1. Indian
2. Babylonian
3. Egyptian
4. Chinese
5. Mexican
6. Arabian
7. Greco-Roman
8. European-Western

• “Physiogmatic”– Rather than looking at specific facts and details, he sought to see the forest through the trees -to find the essence of the overreaching or universal pattern.
• Argued that pattern of history was organic and cyclical, rather than progressive and linear.

• Each culture passed through birth, development, fulfillment, decay, and death.

 

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975)

• Argued that national history was unintelligible without putting it into its wider global context.
• A Study of History (1934-1961)
• Compared 23 civilizations throughout the world. o   Found that each civilization rose to greatness and progressed by responding creatively to challenges or obstacles. o   Civilizations stagnated when their leaders failed to invent solutions to obstacles.

• “Civilization is a product of wills.”

• His work was popular in the 1940s and 1950s

B. Modernization Theory  

• Built upon Enlightenment ideas of progress
• Nations and cultures progress through universal stages of development.
• The wealthiest and most powerful nations of Europe and America were the most developed
• Poorer, less powerful countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America were less developed and less modern.
• All countries could become developed, wealthy, and powerful if they passed through the stages of modernization.

  W.W. Rostow (1916-2003)

• The most famous modernization theorist.
• Worked the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson administrations
• The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
• Used economic history of Britain and the US as role models for how countries should develop.
• Pre-industrial (“traditional”) economies needed certain preconditions (such as technology, markets for raw materials, etc.) before their economies could achieve industrial “Take-Off.”
• After industrialization, an economy would mature and eventually advance to a consumer based “modern” economy.

C. Postcolonial Histories  

Post colonial histories– Refers to histories written during and after the mid-twentieth century wars of independence.

• Overtly political in their intent and focus
• They rejected Eurocentric histories and focused on telling history from the perspective of the colonized.
• Focuses on colonized nations and global systems.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

• First generation postcolonial theorist
• The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Challenged imperialist ideology–Argued that colonized peoples need to rewrite history and create a new world  

Immanual Wallerstein (1930-)

• American historical sociologist
• Sought to understand the problems facing postcolonial societies in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The Modern World-System (1974)
• Divided the world into three regions

1. Capitalist core
2. Semi-periphery
3. Periphery

• He asserted that after the 15th C, northwestern European countries in the core exploited raw materials from the peripheral countries in order to develop their own capitalist systems.
• Western capitalism required the economic exploitation and political domination of the non-Western world.
• He concluded that the global imperialist capitalist system generated wealth for core countries while political and economic chaos for the periphery.  

Subaltern Studies–A branch of postcolonial history. Study imperialism from the eyes of the colonized.  

Ranajit Guha (1923-)

• Leader in Subaltern Studies
• Explicitly criticized earlier “elitist histories”- those written from the perspective of the colonial elite and the nationalist indigenous elite.
• Argues that these previous histories ignore the contributions of ordinary people of the lower classes.

• Borrowed ideas from neo-Marxists and New Leftists (such as E.P. Thompson), he specialized in reconstructing the histories of peasant insurgencies in India.
• Indian history from the bottom-up.

• In more recent years, subaltern historians have begun to adopt methods of post-structuralism using literary analysis and anthropological “reading against the grain” to deconstruct colonial discourse.

  Edward Said (1935-2003)

• Adopted post-structuralist linguistic and postcolonial theories.
• Explored how imperialism shaped European ideas and discourse
• Orientalism Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978)
• He uncovered the European construction of knowledge about the Orient and how this knowledge served to justify European colonization of the Middle East and Asia.
• Through close textual analysis, he traced how European scholars in history, ethnology, and comparative anatomy created knowledge about the “Oriental Other” as opposite of the “West.”
• By analyzing European texts about Egypt and other colonies, he demonstrated how this knowledge was biased by European prejudices, yet continued to dominate European discussion.
• Highlighted the intellectual roots of imperialism and how it shaped history.  

D. Global History  

Histoire Croisee–Entangled history. Transnational History.

• Opposed to treating national histories as independent and self-contained, histoire croisee refers to histories, which are intercrossing, intersecting, interconnected, and entangled.
• Not about comparing similarities and differences, but about exploring interconnecting global processes.

 William McNeill (1917-)

• The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)
• Challenged Spengler’s and Toybee’s assumptions of separate histories of distinct civilizations.
•  Found extensive interconnections between civilizations.

Thomas Bender (1944-)

• Places American history in a broader global framework
• A Nation Among Nations (2006)
• Explores major themes in American history placing them within a global context and highlighting the limits of American exceptionalism.