Manning Marable, RIP

Manning Marable, a prolific historian and essayist, died yesterday. His passing is particularly sad because he did not live to see the publication of his long awaited biography of Malcolm X, which will happen on Monday and will inevitably change the way we think of his subject.

America Aflame

I guess it's been a week for promoting Friends of dcat. May as well continue the friend trend. David Goldfield, my MA advisor, who also sat on my dissertation committee and for a while was the series editor for my book until the press got a serious case of Dipshit-itis, got a great review for his latest book from this week's New York Times Book Review.

When I was in Charlotte a couple of years ago we visited for a while and he told me that his next book was going to be about how "the Civil War was not worth the cost." Naturally my jaw dropped. My thoughts then (and now had he fully written that book as opposed to the much subtler work that appears to have emerged) were not only that he was crazy and wrong, but that he was crazy and wrong in a way destined to ruin his reputation in many circles in the profession. But it appears that what did emerge is a fine example of counterfactual and speculative history, among other things.

Off to DC, Defending Ben's Chili Bowl, and Assorted Self Indulgence

I am off to Washington, DC tomorrow for this year's Organization of American Historians annual meeting where I'll be giving a paper on a panel (1:45 Wednesday if you're in the area) with a couple of names familiar to my regular readers. I'm going to try to hit a lot of my favorite haunts in the city where I wrote my dissertation in a state of pretty much absolute poverty. One of those haunts is Ben's Chili Bowl, which is featured in a recent Guardian (UK) blog post.

But listen, my limey friend, you watch yourself when you write: "Sadly, the only problem with Ben's Chili Bowl is that while the atmosphere is great, the food is mediocre, even by fast food standards." I will find you and I will beat your arse.

Burning Scholarship

When I saw this story, about a Columbia University historian who lost a decade's worth of research to student radicals in the 1968 uprisings at that campus I experienced pangs of what can only be called sympathetic pain. For all of the legitimacy of protest in the 1960s, some of the worst and most indulgent excesses of the late years of that decade seriously undermined the legitimate claims.

Howard Zinn, Not a Good Historian, RIP

Perhaps now is not the time. And so I'll gladly time stamp this for any future date that readers find more appropriate. But with Howard Zinn's passing this week I think we need to keep one salient fact in mind: He just was not a very good historian.

Zinn was an incredibly popular historian whose advocates somehow pretended had been overlooked despite the fact that he wrote one of the all-time best-selling works of history in A People's History of the United States. But popular is not the same as good. Bad books sell all the time while good books languish on shelves and in Amazon's warehouse. This is especially the case with works of history, where the best-selling book on a subject has literally nothing to do with its quality as a work of history.

A People's History is not only not very good, it is quite bad (this 2004 takedown by Michael Kazin in Dissent is a pretty damning indictment). It is thesis-driven history that is selective with its evidence and manages to be condescending and to deny agency to the very people it purports to celebrate (essentially: You've all been duped by corporate interests and the elites). It is cartoonish in its shallowness and lack of complexity.

Zinn was a polemicist. He could be a remarkably good reporter. (His insider's account of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is still useful for historians even if it is not in any meaningful way a work of history.) And he wrote well. But as a historian he fell far short. And he could be an incredibly shoddy thinker. His simplistic leftism (and by any measure I am what would have been called in another time "a man of the left") substituted ideology for historiography and agitprop for scholarship.

In the Service of Clio

For those of you in the historical profession, and especially early in your careers, I direct you to "In the Service of Clio," a blog that describes itself as providing "essays on career management in the historical profession." The professor who runs the blog recruits history PhD's working in various aspects of the profession -- various subdisciplines in the professoriate and in different types of schools and departments, archivists and librarians, public historians, foreign service officers, and the like.

An Uncivil Civil War War

The other night, Sally Jenkins was on The Daily Show touting a new book on Civil War Era America, The State of Jones. Jenkins is a Washington Post sportswriter (and generally a fine one at that) and so my teeth were set on edge when she started in on that great journalistic cliche that her book was one that explored a topic that historians had not only ignored but had intentionally kept hidden. People who say things like this generally speaking do not know what the fuck they are talking about. There are topics that could use more exploration, there are topics that have been mishandled by historians, and there are topics that could use reappraisal. But there is no topic in the historical profession where there has been collusion. When you hear people say that historians have ignored topic X or Y you can be certain that the person spouting off has an agenda that has nothing to do with what historians have actually written.

In any case, Jenkins wrote the book with a Harvard historian, so I at least assumed that she was out there for the salesmanship, and hey, she's on the Daily Show, my book didn't pass muster, so more power to her. Still, the assertions she made about her untold story did not ring true with me. But it had been a while since I had really focused on the Civil War and Old South, even if those topics made up a minor PhD field for me and a good hunk of my MA work as well.

And with reasons. Because of course Jenkins was wrong. And it appears that she was willfully wrong. For right down here in Texas, down at Texas State University in San Marcos (between San Antonio and Austin) a history professor named Victoria Bynum wrote a well regarded book on virtually the same topic and with practically the same title. And little did I know that percolating below the surface was a hell of a controversy, which came to the attention of most people in The New York Times and which Kevin Levin (with Ralph Luker's assistance) explicates in much greater depth and with loads of great links at Cliopatria. And wouldn't you know it -- Hollywood has a role in this fracas as well.

By the way, for what it's worth, I think Bynum wins the historiographical debate by a knockout.

Tilting at Strawmen

I am not certain with whom Arizona State University historian Stephen Pyne is arguing in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His basic point is that we need to teach history graduate students how to write well, and particularly how to write books. Yeah, thanks Doc. It might be a good idea to teach them to think clearly and to read closely too. But here is the thing: I do not see any evidence that we are not doing this as a profession.

There is an old canard out there that says that academic historians do not write well. And it has been repeated so often, not so much by folks like Pyne, who ought to know better, but by journalists who usually don't know what the fuck they are talking about. I read more academic history than any journalist. I would say that the hit-to-miss ratio is no worse than it is for columnists or reporters, or even for journalists writing books, for whom the writing really ought to be key since they are trying to sell to a non-specialist audience. And this is the key issue -- I am not certain what these critics mean by "bad writing." Sometimes it is actually ok for historians to write to other historians. All specialized writing is not bad, especially when that writing is geared toward specialists. And there is a huge number of very well written books that are no less well written because they do not make it big and end up selling primarily to other academics.

When I work I do so surrounded by piles of papers and documents and books and cd's and all sorts of other junk. I am going to pull out the smallest book pile next to me, without paring it, without even looking at any of the books. Ok, here is what I have: Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty, a book destined to win a number of awards and deservedly so, largely because of the force of the argument and certainly because of the felicity of the writing. Sugrue is a professional historian. He teaches at Penn; Peniel Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour. It was reviewed everywhere. I reviewed it for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Virtually every review commented on the high quality of the writing. Joseph is a professional historian. He teaches at Brandeis; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie. Again: Reviewed everywhere, widely praised, largely for the writing. Profesional historian. Yale; Two collections of essays, Freedom North and Groundwork, both edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard. Aimed mostly toward other historians. Like most essay collections the quality of the writing is uneven, but some of them are very good, and those that are not serve another purpose.

This is just a tiny slice of books, all interconnected because they touch upon a theme I am addressing in one small section of one chapter of a book I am writing. I could have pulled from a pile of books on South Africa in the 1980s or 1940s, another on sports and society, and another on race in the US in the 1940s. Putting forward that historians don't write well is a serial idiocy that has gone unchallenged for so long that the assertion has somehow become sufficient. Well it is not. I received an MA from one school, a PhD from another, and basically in between the two (I had started my first quarter at my PhD program first) was enrolled in a graduate program in South Africa for the purposes of a year-long fellowship. At all three of those schools, writing well was emphasized, writing clearly, even if not spectacularly, was a base-line expectation. Perhaps I was just lucky. But I suspect that the assertion of the absence of attention to writing lacks even the rudimentary evidence that a first-year MA student knows is required for an argument.

History's Uses, History's Abusers

The historians and historically-inclined reading this will probably want to check out Margaret MacMillan's new book Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. The distinguished historian David Kennedy reviewed it this weekend in The New York Times Book Review. Here is a sample of the review:

MacMillan lays about with rhetorical broadsword and with fearless abandon. She inveighs against the eclipse of “professional historians” by “amateurs.” She blasts the fall from fashion of political history in favor of sociology and cultural studies. She denounces identity studies of all sorts, particularly when they descend into what she calls the “unseemly competition for victimhood.” (She singles out certain Afrocentric histories for special scorn, as having “the same relationship to the past as “The Da Vinci Code” does to Christian theology.”) But she directs her most cogent criticism at the particular kind of historically constructed identity that is nationalism.

I am teaching our graduate historical method's class, "The Historian's Craft," this fall, and I wish this had come out a little earlier. But I also would not be surprised if MacMillan commits at least a few of the sins against which she inveighs, as it seems clear that she has her own ideological stances and politics that might inform the weay she sees the world and thus the practice of history.

Constructing the Monolith

On June 18 at 4:30 pm eastern time my friend Marc Selverstone will be a guest on the radio show "Charlottesville Right Now" on which he will be discussing his wonderful new book, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950. I have heard Marc speak about this book and I can assure you that his appearance will be first-rate.

[You will be able to hear the podcast by clicking on the link that will be posted on the CRN home page linked above.]

Chafe on Franklin

The new Organization of American Historians newsletter has a nice "In Memorium" to John Hope Franklin, the legendary historian who passed away in March. The author is Bill Chafe, himself a fine historian and a past president of the OAH.

John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009, Rest in Peace

I only met John Hope Franklin twice. The first time was at the Citadel Conference on the Civil Rights Movement in 2003. He was gracious and spoke with me for a few minutes and I naturally felt blessed just to have gotten him to acknowledge me. The second time was at one of the recent meetings of the Southern Historical Association. I just wanted to say hello, mentioned the Citadel conference, and because he was that kind of man, he fibbed and said he remembered.

Because of these two brief meetings, and because of the monumental nature of his work as the practical founder of African American history, it was with more than ordinary sadness that I learned about Professor Franklin's passing on Wednesday. He was 94.

Franklin holds a remarkable place in American historical scholarship. He is not known for any particular interpretive schools or historiographical debates, largely because he practically established the school and the historiography. His most famous book, From Slavery to Freedom, is still in use after several revisions. His memoir, Mirror to America, is a model of the historian's autobiography, with the added advantage that Franklin was a historian who made history, a thing so rare that you would excuse most people for thinking it nonexistent.

Ranking the Presidents, Again

Over at Cliopatria KC Johnson brings his insight to C-SPAN's second survey of presidential leadership. He is particularly interested in exploring why there was so much relative volatility in the assessments from the last survey to this one. Some of his examples do not bother me: Why did President Clinton leap past George H.W. Bush? I dunno -- probably because by just about any measure he was a more successful, a better, a more important president? But his larger point about the temporal, indeed presentist, nature of these rankings is well worth remembering.

These exercises, however methodologically sound or flawed, are best viewed as parlor games and cocktail party fodder and are not worth much more. I've always been more interested in presidential impact than on presidential "greatness." That said, here is my "top ten" list, with all of the vagaries that term implies, with the recognition of my own clear biases -- I am a 20th century historian and I am a liberal and a Democrat -- and which could be different tomorrow and may have been different yesterday:

1) Abraham Lincoln
2) Franklin Roosevelt
3) George Washington
4) Harry Truman
5) Theodore Roosevelt
6) Lyndon Johnson
7) Woodrow Wilson
8) Thomas Jefferson
9) Dwight Eisenhower
10) Andrew Jackson

One lesson I draw from coming up with my own list is that the depth chart for United States Presidents does not go all that deep. That surely speaks to the nature of the job more than it does to the men who have held it. The presidency is a position almost built to conquer those who attain it.

TPM Cafe Book Club

If you are looking for serious discussion about books, you could do worse than to bookmark the Talking Points Memo Cafe Book Club. Recent discussions have included Tony Badger, Alonzo Hamby, Andrew Bacevich, Nick Katzenbach, and many others.

Defending What (Ideally) Need Not be Defended

In The Chronicle Review Douglas Little reminds us why we need diplomatic history. He's preaching to the choir not only with me but with a goodly portion of dcat's readers. Nonetheless his is a message that needs to get out to a broad audience. We need more diplomatic history, and more military history, and more traditional political history. Not at the expense of much of the good work going on in the historical profession, but rather to strengthen and augment and provide context for that work.

Sweet Land of Liberty

One of the most significant trends in the study of civil rights in the last decade and more has been the expansion of our conception of what the movement was and when it happened. Serious historians long ago abandoned the 1954-1968, Brown-to-Memphis chronology of the movement. And thanks in no small part to historians such as the University of Pennsylvania's Thomas Sugrue we now know a great deal more about the ways in which the struggle for racial equality was not confined to the South. In this weekend's New York Times Book Review Alan Wolfe assesses Sugrue's important new book Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

From Colony to Superpower

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review Josef Joffe reviews George Herring's ambitious contribution to the Oxford History of the United States, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776. Joffe concludes that while Herring's synthesis is not perfect, "We have long been waiting for a single-volume history like this one, and “From Colony to Superpower” deserves a place on the bookshelf, if only for sheer effort and sweep."

Academic Bullying

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had a feature and a related article on the issue of "academic bullying," a phrase I hate but that probably works as description. It came as no surprise to me that the university featured most centrally in the main article is Minnesota State University-Mankato, where I had my first job before an utter nightmare of a situation drove me out. MSU has had to confront the issue of widespread senior faculty assholery in the years since I left because indications were that such bullying was widespread. It is nice to see that President Richard Davenport's testes have finally dropped, albeit far too late for me.

That MSU features so prominently about poisonous academic environments should tell you something about just how awful MSU has been. And suffice it to say that I could tell you the identity of one or two of those bullies, since they were well known to populate the history department, which at the senior ranks was populated largely by third-rate historians and fourth-rate people who were talented at playing second-rate Machiavellian politics, their toadying junior allies, a gutless and blindingly mediocre chair, and a number of folks too cowed or feckless to stand up to them. There were some good people there as well, but they had long since been marginalized.

The reason I shy away from the term "bullying" is because of its roots in physical intimidation. There is one member of the MSU department in particular who had better hope his and my paths never cross again. It could be at the Presidential lecture at the American Historical Association's annual meeting and I would be inclined to jump across tables to tear this fucker's lungs out through his nasal passages. And there are not a whole hell of a lot of people in this profession who'd be able to stop me, and I'd surmise even fewer who, if they know this guy, would feel compelled to do so.

Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III, RIP

Ambrose Hofstader Bierce III, who brought us the occasionally amusing historical rumor-mongering at The Broad-Gauge Gossip has bid us adieu. Those wagons have been circling for several days now as Bierce's anonymity had become an issue. And when a blogger's anonymity becomes an issue, a blogger's anonymity tends not to remain a reality.

In his brief moment in the spotlight, Bierce drew a large following among historians who, let's face it, love to read about ourselves and better yet, about our betters. Bierce wrote well and amusingly about a pretty small sample of the profession, the elite swaths ensconced in the Ivies, the research I's, and an occasional elite liberal arts college or an aspirant to one of those categories.

I enjoyed Bierce's ruminations. I really did -- I blogrolled him largely because it provided me with an easy way to check up on him a couple of times a week. He tended not to drop a lot of revelations -- most of his information was not new, but it consolidated the inside skinny on his chosen prey in an easily digestible form. He provided one-stop-shopping for shop talk.

And his (choose a male pseudonym and I'm referring to you with a male pronoun) anonymity always seemed to me to be problematic for at least two reasons. For one, I fail to see its necessity. Yes, he was dishing on historians, but my understanding is that he has tenure. And if grad student and untenured professors overstate the jeopardy they put themselves in when they speak out (blogging, writing op-eds, what have you) tenured professors have almost no leg to stand on other than cowardice when they claim that they need the protections of anonymity. Unless of course they desperately want to ascend into the rarefied air of the very places their work criticizes. Bierce's pithy skewerings always gave a hint of aspiration: He had a notable tendency to shed light on those elite departments in supposed decline. And of course what better way for them to rise again than to hire someone insightful and engaging and in tune with the profession and able to write for both scholarly and educated brtoader audiences? In short, I wonder if he got the sense that he was biting a hand that he sort of hoped would feed him.

But the second problematic aspect of his anonymity comes down to the root of my problems with anonymity to begin with: If you are saying things that need protection, should you be saying them? And if you should be, what right have you to say them without the targets being able to face their accuser? Which brings us right back to the issue of cowardice. (For those of you relatively new to dcat, you might think that I am anonymous. But given that I link to books, op-eds and other publications on the side, that I have never hidden my identity, and that my name is Derek Catsam and I am a history professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, you would be mistaken.)

Perhaps we'll see an unmasked Mr. Bierce someday in a glorious but accountable return. But for now this seems like the best course of action.

The Broad-Gauge Gossip

Over at Cliopatria Ralph introduces many of us to The Broad-Gauge Gossip, whose psedonymous keeper Dr. Luker describes as "The Wonkette of the history blogosphere." Tidbits equal parts news and gossip abound at the B-GG. It's obviously a bit inside baseball, but for those of you in the biz the blog will be worth reading for its tasty tidbits about departments across the country, especially some of the big dogs. I've added it to the blogroll.