Jenkins on regionalism and contingency

One of the best perks of teaching is the opportunity to review examination copies of textbooks. This morning I received a copy of the new sixth edition of A History of the United States, by Philip Jenkins, part of Bloomsbury’s Essential Histories series. Jenkins is a historian of religion whose work I’ve greatly appreciated over the years, and I was excited to discover that he’s also written a short, one-volume American history text. I’m reading it with a view to replacing the late Robert Remini’s Short History of the United States in one of my online adjunct courses.

So far it’s off to a good start. One of the challenges of teaching history is trying to draw attention to recurrent patterns or themes. The standard multi-author committee-produced textbook—what you think of when you hear the word—usually does this clumsily, if at all. A single-author text that pays a bit more attention to literary qualities, like Remini’s Short History or Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope, can develop these themes and throughlines narratively as it goes—which is also, not coincidentally, how I teach the subject.

Jenkins begins by explicitly laying out the themes he wants the reader to notice in a dedicated introductory chapter. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my favorite approach, but it allows Jenkins to describe some of the peculiar parameters of American history very specifically, priming the reader to detect them. I especially liked what he had to say about two in particular:

First, having established “the tyranny of distance” as one of the key factors in the story, he points toward the differing trajectories and cultures of the US’s many regions, the two earliest and most important of which are the north and the South:

Different regions produced their own distinct cultures, the exact nature of which has given rise to much debate. The question of “Southern-ness” has been a popular topic for such works, though the very term betrays the prejudice that it is the south that is untypical from an American or even world norm. In terms of its history of slavery and racial hierarchy, the American South closely resembles the worlds of the Caribbean and of much of Central or South America. We could equally well argue that it was rather the north of the early nineteenth century that produced a set of cultural and intellectual assumptions that were bizarre by the standards of the contemporary Western world, while the aristocratic, rural, and deferential south was a much more “normal” entity than its egalitarian, urban, and evangelical neighbors. For anyone acquainted with the astonishing social turbulence of the Northern cities before the Civil War, it is startling to hear claims that it was the south that had a peculiar tendency to violence.

This is not just about geography but about culture and historiography. For a long time, the extent to which New Englanders have portrayed their story as normative, as the story of the US to which recalcitrants and rebels have to be brought into conformity, has been invisible. (Why, for example, did the entire country just celebrate a holiday inspired by the Pilgrims?) This can lead to especially warped interpretations since, as Jenkins points out, the culture that arose in the northeastern US is such a weird historical outlier. Restoring a broader perspective creates a better understanding not only of north and South, but of the whole.

Even more crucially, Jenkins pushes back against whiggishness, the assumption that history moves determinedly along toward a particular endpoint, both of the present and the past:

Yet when we tell the story of US expansion, it is tempting to describe a natural and even inevitable process, by which the Lower Forty-Eight acquires its predestined dimensions and natural borders. That was certainly how Americans thought, and how they recorded events, and we still use the phrase that was commonly cited to describe this process. . . . 

The speed and seemingly irresistible weight of American expansion make such a narrative of Manifest Destiny tempting. US histories can look like a map on a television documentary, with an illuminated core region along the East Coast, which spreads swiftly and inevitably over those hitherto dark regions, which in turn become lit up as they achieve their authentic destiny of being included in that United States. It is hard not to write the story backward, as if the ending was always predetermined. The problems with such an account are many[.]

Among these problems is the implied sense of inevitability Jenkins mentions, a sense rooted in the most subtle and insidious bias of historical study, historian’s fallacy, which erases the fog in which historical figures operated. Jenkins emphasizes contingency and the fact that historical actors didn’t know the end of the story. Here’s an example I mentioned, with reference to this piece by Jeremy Black, in my Substack digest over the weekend:

For much of American history, many Americans were convinced that the lands that became Canada would inevitably fall into the possession of the United States. That was a real prospect during the War of 1812, and frequent later tensions between the United States and Great Britain made it highly likely that Canada would someday be a theater for American conquest and annexation.

There’s what word inevitably again. (A helpful rule: when trying to understand a past culture, look at what the movers and shakers thought was inevitable at the time.) Jenkins expands on the problems of assuming inevitable outcomes, of “arcs” “bending” toward particular results:

Quite apart from any cultural or racial biases, the whole idea of “inevitability” is shaky. The emergence of the continental United States with its boundaries, that Lower Forty-Eight, was contingent, dependent on the outcome of political struggles and social movements. It is easy to imagine scenarios when the United States would have acquired a very different shape, and this is no mere issue of speculative alternative history. We are dealing with what well-informed people believed or hoped in those earlier eras. Most basically, it was far from obvious to contemporary observers that the United States would have resisted multiple serious efforts at secession or partition, which reached their peak during the 1860s. In retrospect, we know that the nascent Confederate States of America created in 1860 would not endure as a major New World power, or that the remnant United States of America would not be confined to the north-east and Midwest; but Abraham Lincoln could not take that fact for granted.

What happened was not inevitable, things could have turned out differently, and uncertainty is an important part of every historical story. Conveying these facts is an important part of my approach to teaching, and I’m hopeful that the rest of Jenkins’s book will underscore these themes.

For what it’s worth, I’d still recommend Remini’s book, but Remini’s narrative is a little too complacently satisfied with the postwar liberal consensus—the idea of America as an idea, gradually developing its doctrines to ever fuller and broader degrees—which is itself a kind of whiggishness. And when initially selecting a text for this course I considered McClay’s book, but its otherwise excellent narrative has a few too many major omissions (the Plains Indians Wars)—yet another historiographical and teaching problem.

The most helpful marginalia in my library

I mentioned this on a podcast once upon a time and recently told one of y’all about it in correspondence, but I want to jot it down for easy future reference in this commonplace book: the most helpful item of marginalia I’ve ever run across in a used book.

The book is JE Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts, an excellent history of war and combat in the Greek and Roman worlds. In an early chapter, Lendon writes of the heroic ethos of Homer’s Mycenaean characters and the role of competition therein:

But by far the most important arena for competition is the individual heroic fighting itself. It is in battle that a hero wins the admiration, the glory—the kleos, the kudos—that conveys high rank, honor, worth, or worthiness: timē. In the epic formula, battle is “where men win glory.”

Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action. Heroes compete in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai, which include strength, skill, physical courage, and fleetness of foot, but also cunning and wisdom and persuasiveness in council. The heroic epithets the poem applies to heroes reflect many of the Homeric excellences:

…the son of Tydeus, the spear-famed, and Odysseus,
and Ajax the swift-footed, and the brave son of Phyleus.

I got my copy of this book used. The previous owner never wrote his or her name on the flyleaf and made very little marking or underlining in the book at all, but the last sentence of that first paragraph has a long squiggle of felt-tip pen underneath it, and the entire second paragraph is in a big bold bracket with the following in the margin:

Reputation, pedigree, expectations based on past performance, peer evaluation—that scrawled Sports offered me a one-word epiphany. I remember reading Soldiers and Ghosts eleven years ago, in the breakroom during my weekend shifts at the sporting goods store where I was picking up extra work between my two adjunct jobs. I don’t know if I slowly looked up from the page with a wide-eyed look of realization but that’s how I remember it feeling.

The next time I taught Ancient Greece I used precisely this comparison. I still do. It makes the alien world of Homer legible to my students instantly and, with the benefit of that understanding, offers a good point of departure for talking about what was distinct about the world.

Soldiers and Ghosts is an excellent book and one I benefited greatly from, but I wouldn’t have benefited quite as much as I did without my copy’s previous owner. I’m still grateful. I don’t write in my books very often. I probably should. If I can offer even a fraction of the insight of this one note for some future reader, it’d prove worthwhile.

All those names and dates

Here’s a good brief Substack note posted by Joel Miller over the weekend:

In my experience, people who make this complaint have usually had a bad history teacher in high school—stereotypically, but often enough in reality, the football coach. This teacher did not teach so much as test on memorization. And what historical material lends itself most readily to memorization? Not why, the basic historical question, but who and when. Names and dates.

Such an approach has burned many, many people who might otherwise have been led into an appreciation—if not a love—for history, which is a shame because people are, by nature, historical beings.

Joel is right to find this criticism amusing, but it is amusing not only because to balk at names and dates is to avoid some of the basic components of history, but because the person making such a criticism will not mind names and dates at all in other areas. The example I’ve used before is someone’s favorite football team. Ask a guy how his favorite college team is doing and you’ll get a detailed narrative filled with sharply focused arguments about cause and effect—in recruitment, in trades, in the decisions of coaches, trainers, quarterbacks, the administration, and even fans—often covering the last several seasons. Bad luck like weather and injury will feature prominently, as will the advantages of changing material conditions and limitations and the folly and wisdom of good and bad leaders.

All of that is historical thought! And get two such guys together, ask them the same question, and they will differ in interpretation and emphasis. Guy 1 says that everyone knows Coach Blowhard is to blame for the bowl loss, but Guy 2 points out that Coach Blowhard had to use a lot of second stringers after the quarterback blew out his knee at practice (the ground crew overwatering the grass again) and those four linemen got academic suspension. And round and round we go. That’s historical debate!

One can do this with favorite TV shows, the arguments your kids get into, or local gossip. That’s because people are wired to view and explain their lives narratively, and reducing history to data doesn’t just undermine but works against that instinct.

Teachers have to pick their battles, and I don’t test on dates. (The students get plenty of names to remember, though.) I tell my students that memorizing dates to study history is like memorizing page numbers in your favorite book. Per Joel, the page numbers are definitely important—especially if you want to use what you learn and refer back to it—but they’re not why you pick up the book or what you remember afterward.

Lukacs on how not to talk about Hitler

Hitler in conference with senior commanders of the Eastern Front, March 1943

From the late John Lukacs’s 1997 historiographical study The Hitler of History, which I quote from at length because it is so good:

I must devote a few lines to a grave misunderstanding that has affected historians less than it has people at large. This is the popular view that Hitler was mad. By asserting—and thinking—that he was mad, we have failed twice. We have brushed the problem of Hitler under the rug. If he was mad, then the entire Hitler period was nothing but an episode of madness; it is irrelevant to us, and we need not think about it further. At the same time, this defining of Hitler as “mad” relieves him of all responsibility—especially in this century, where a certification of mental illness voids a conviction by law. But Hitler was not mad; he was responsible for what he did and said and thought. And apart from the moral argument, there is sufficient proof (accumulated by researchers, historians, and biographers, including medical records) that with all due consideration to the imprecise and fluctuating frontiers between mental illness and sanity, he was a normal human being.

This brings me to the adjective (and argument) of “evil.” (Again, there are people who are interested in Hitler because they are interested in evil: the Jack the Ripper syndrome, if not worse.) Yes, there was plenty of evil in Hitler’s expressed wishes, thoughts, statements, and decisions. (I emphasize expressed, since that is what evidence properly allows us to consider.) But keep in mind that evil as well as good is part of human nature. Our inclinations to evil (whether they mature into acts or not) are reprehensible but also normal. To deny that human condition leads to the assertion that Hitler was abnormal; and the simplistic affixing of the “abnormal” label to Hitler relieves him, again, of responsibility—indeed, categorically so.

It is not only that he had very considerable intellectual talents. He was also courageous, self-assured, on many occasions steadfast, loyal to his friends and to those working for him, self-disciplined, and modest in his physical wants. What this suggests ought not to be misconstrued, mistaken, or misread. It does not mean: lo and behold! Hitler was only 50 percent bad. Human nature is not like that. A half-truth is worse than a lie, because a half-truth is not a 50 percent truth; it is a 100 percent truth and a 100 percent untruth mixed together. In mathematics, with its rigidly fixed and immobile numbers, 100 plus 100 makes 200; in human life 100 plus 10 makes another kind of 100. Life is not constant; it is full of black 100s and white 100s, warm 100s and cold 100s, 100s that are growing and 100s that are shrinking. This is true not only of the cells of our bodies but of all human attributes, including mental ones. In sum, God gave Hitler many talents and strengths; and that is exactly why he was responsible for misusing them.

This is exactly right. I have cautioned my students for years against thinking of or describing Hitler—or other figures like him—as insane or monstrous. Lukacs lays out the best case against this line of attack—if Hitler was mad then his evil is merely pathological and it is pointless to investigate, much less criticize it. This attempt to condemn Hitler ends by exonerating him. Furthermore, treating Hitler as in some way morally exceptional ends the same way.

If I can dare gloss what Lukacs has to say here, an additional danger is that calling Hitler mad or a monster lets us off the hook. The temptation to call Hitler mad, to label him a monster, places him in a separate category from ourselves—which I think is often the root of the temptation. Hitler is, to our consciences, less scary as a monster, because there is a universe of separation between us and him. He believed and said X, did Y, killed Z millions of people; we never could, never would, cannot even understand it. We thank the Lord that we are not as other men, even as this dictator.

And suddenly we are guilty of the sin of pride.

It is uncomfortable in the extreme to consider that we are capable, under the right circumstances, given the right temptations, and presented with the right choices, of doing the things Hitler and the members of his regime, from its most ideologically committed leadership right on down to ordinary men in the ranks, were capable of doing—and did. It’s easy to deny this, but it’s important not to.

Lukacs died two years ago aged 95. I’ve written in appreciation of him here before. The Hitler of History is excellent so far, if you’re into historiography as much as I am, but let me recommend Lukacs’s book The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler to you if you’d like something a little more approachable to read. It’s excellent.

McClay on history as narrative

A Reading From Homer, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Last week I started reading Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, a new one-volume narrative history of the United States. I’m up to the post-Revolution period of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention, and so far it’s been measured, nuanced, and carefully balanced, with McClay falling into neither of the traps laid on either side of the historian’s path, traps that have caught (often quite willingly) a lot of other recent histories of the US—pathological suspicion and denunciation to the left, mindless jingoism and nationalism to the right. It’s excellent so far.

I started reading the introduction just for kicks and immediately knew I was going to dive into the book. Here’s McClay on the very first page, explaining the purpose of the book:

Its principle objective is very simple. It means to offer to American readers, young and old alike, an accurate, responsible, coherent, persuasive, and inspiring narrative account of their own country—an account that will inform and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. “Citizenship” here encompasses something larger than the civics-class meaning. It means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country.

McClay takes this as the jumping off point for explaining why he wrote Land of Hope as a narrative. Every semester I begin each of my classes with a short presentation on how I approach the past and how I plan to teach it, emphasizing—using quotations from Marc Bloch, LP Hartley, and Cicero—the past as the study of humanity (as opposed to endless eons of geological and biological forces) as it changes over time, with the ultimate purpose of expanding our own limited store of memories.

With that in mind, I read McClay’s introduction with greater and greater excitement. I quote at length so you can get the full import of his argument, and to enjoy his prose, which is elegant and economical throughout:

Let me emphasize the term story. Professional historical writing has, for a great many years now, been resistant to the idea of history as narrative. Some historians have even hoped that history could be made into a science. But this approach seems unlikely ever to succeed, if for no other reason than that it fails to take into account the ways we need stories to speak to the fullness of our humanity and help us orient ourselves to the world. The impulse to write history and organize our world around stories is intrinsic to us as human beings. We are, at our core, remembering and story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning in the flow of events. What we call “history” and “literature” are merely the refinement and intensification of that basic human impulse, that need.

The word need is not an exaggeration. For the human animal, meaning is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory, and without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are. Without them, our life and thought dissolve into a meaningless, unrelated rush of events. Without them, we cannot do the most human of things: we cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise children, establish rules of conduct, engage in science, or dwell harmoniously in society. Without them, we cannot govern ourselves.

Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows also have come and gone. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced. The incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future, thereby diverting us from an understanding of the human things that unfold in time, including the paths of our own lives.

McClay says here what I've been saying at the start of all of my classes for years, and says it far better than I ever have. No one, I tell my students, really hates or is uninterested in history, because if I asked one student about her favorite TV show or another about how his favorite college football team is doing, both would immediately give me a narrative history—with cause and effect, careful attention to context, discrimination between important and unimportant events, probably a few heroes and certainly some villains. That often seems to click, and for those for whom it doesn’t, I can always ask How did you get here this morning? The answer, again, will be a narrative.

That said, I only add two short glosses or comments, because I can’t really improve on McClay.

We need history because we need a story with which to frame our lives, otherwise we are stuck in those “incessant waves,” that “unrelated rush of events.” We become stuck in the present—not just the present era but the present year, even, thanks to the brain-eroding forces of social media, the present day and hour and minute. That’s how animals live and perceive the world, which is why animals don’t meaningfully change. History is a critical part of what makes us human and is, I think, part of the mysterious imago Dei.

But I’m not going to draw any facile conclusions about how “relevant” this is, because worrying about relevance is another symptom of being enslaved in the present. Narrative history is “relevant” the same way bedrock, or the ocean, or our own skeletons are relevant, as things that support and give shape—and will outlast us.

McClay has much more to say in his introduction, and the history itself, as I said, is great so far. I definitely recommend it if you are at all interested in the past in general or the American story in particular.

CS Lewis on translating expertise

From Lewis’s 1945 address “Christian Apologetics,” collected in God in the Dock:

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. ”

This passage has haunted me for years.

Lewis was addressing a conference of Anglican priests and youth leaders on the challenges facing them in presenting and defending Christianity. This passage follows immediately after a list of terms which mean one thing to theologians and something almost totally different to even educated laymen. The jargon has been barbarized, and so miscommunication is a grave danger.

I’ve long had an allergy to the kind of arcane scholarly jargon—academese—that characterizes a lot of humanities scholarship nowadays. Such writing and specialist vocabulary has its uses as does all technical language, but more often than not it obscures meaning and functions as a code for initiates, the privileged few who have been admitted to the higher mysteries of the “studies” disciplines. This doesn’t educate students or ordinary people, which is its gravest failing. But an additional, hidden danger is that, in the enclosed hothouse of academic journals and conferences and ever finer splitting of hairs, communicating so often and so exclusively in jargony “educated” language will obscure not only your subject but the failures of your own mind. Compare Orwell.

“[Y]ou must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular,” Lewis writes. “This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought.” I find I have learned as much by teaching, by striving to make my subject understood to my students, distilling complicated historical argument into understandable classroom language, as I ever learned through my own study. On my own, in my yet smaller bubble of interest and study, I might miss something, misunderstand something. Communicating it to them has caught me out more than once, to my benefit.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay here. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics is an excellent, wide-ranging collection of Lewis’s writings and well worth owning. You can find it on Amazon here.

Polybius on the value of learning history

The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 BC) on a stele of the 2nd century BC.

From The Histories, I.35:

“There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful.”

— Polybius

The most difficult task I undertake as a history instructor is not preparing tests, lecturing, or even grading essays, but convincing my students that history is worth learning for its own sake—gratuitously, regardless of its "practical value." (There's a sinister phrase we're far too used to.) I don't know how well I have succeeded—the students who come out of my classes loving history usually loved it or were at least interested in it when they arrived—but one "practical" application that persuades at least some of them that history is worth studying is the concept of history as memory. 

I introduce this idea at the beginning of every semester with another quotation from the classics, in this case Cicero:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the worth of a man’s life, unless it is interwoven with the memory of ancient things from a greater age?”

— Cicero, Orator Ad M. Brutum 120

To make this more explicit yet, here's the excerpt from Polybius's Histories above in its full context, in which Polybius explains one of his purposes for writing:

I record these things in the hope of benefiting my readers. There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful. One should never therefore voluntarily choose the former, for it makes reformation a matter of great difficulty and danger; but we should always look out for the latter, for thereby we can without hurt to ourselves gain a clear view of the best course to pursue. It is this which forces us to consider that the knowledge gained from the study of true history is the best of all educations for practical life. For it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.

I've been horribly burned and injured by things and, if my daughter and son, who haven't lived through anything like that yet, will listen to my stories, they don't have to. In the same way, if you can't find anything else to "get out of" history, realize that you can at least learn from others' mistakes and, with wisdom and judicious application to your own life and circumstances, avoid them. History, rightly studied, is acquired maturity.

A bit more practical, realistic, and—I think—moral and hopeful than the grim pragmatism of Santayana's axiom, which has become a modern cliche: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."