Quote:
Originally Posted by KClapp
Interesting. At that time, I was young (early 20's) and stationed in the FRG, so I guess I was insulated from that turmoil.
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Sir--
I've been thinking intensely about your posts over the last few days. Your comment about the types of history books you read and when you read them especially caught my attention.
Here's some information that is the short version of what would have ended up being a long winded comment. I hope this abbreviated post is useful. [References are available on request via PM.]
By and large, works of history seek to present a 'usable past.' What makes the past usable are interpretations and methodologies that make sense to the people writing the histories and the audiences reading their works. To paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner, every generation reinterprets the past for its own ends.
The interpretive framework for a given generation is usually established by professional academic historians through a process of intense, peer reviewed debate. Scholars who end up on the wrong side of this debate often end up howling in the wilderness or leaving the profession to do other things. The debate is informed by previous interpretations but also by contemporaneous concerns. For example, since the end of World War II, German historians have been driven by the question "What is it about German history that led that country to start two world wars?"
We in America have lived through two interpretive frameworks offered by two generations of historians. (A third is having issues taking root. These issues are detailed below.) The older interpretation known alternately the American Exceptionalism/ triumphalism/Consensus school. Broadly, this school of thought took root after World War II. Members of this group, having lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, sought to answer the question "How did America not become a authoritarian militarized state with a 'command economy' like Japan, Germany, or Russia?"
In a nutshell, the Consensus school drew on previous interpretations of the American past that pivot on the notion that, for a variety of reasons, America is exceptional--it has strengths that allow it to avoid the pitfalls that ensnare other nations. The benefit of this interpretation is that it helped many Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s to understand the domestic and international issues that they were facing in terms they could understand. America did not travel the path of Germany because in the U.S. there was broad agreement over basic values and practices. (Politically, this was the "middle way" embodied by Ike's presidency.)
The second group, however, did not agree with this interpretation. The American they were experiencing did not seem very exceptional. They were concerned with the consequences of American anti-communism in its most virulent form (McCarthyism). They were unhappy with the institutionalization of anti-democratic practices (such as racial segregation). They were, above all, worried about the Cold War.
This group offered an interpretation known as the "New History". This trajectory of scholarship presented works that argued there had never been consensus in American history. Instead, power, in all its forms, was contested endlessly. This group argued that America 'worked' because ruling elites found ways to control other groups of Americans by measures short of brute force.
Much of the disconnect between the left and the right that we continue to experience to this day is shaped by these two competing schools of thought. Unfortunately, historians and other academic intellectuals screwed the pooch and allowed the debate to get completely out of hand.*
The New School, dominated by the Generation of 1968, screamed and shouted their arguments when they could have engaged in passionate but civil debate. The New School, failing to understand that much of what they were doing wasn't actually "new", sought to remake the entire profession in their own image so that the craft of history would be about "telling truth to power" rather than propagating self serving national myths. (Here, they didn't do their homework: folklorists, anthropologists, and historians had already established that national myths may play a positive, necessary, and appropriate role in maintaining social cohesion.)
When it was time for a third post-War interpretive framework to take form (and here, I'm using the Hegelian model of synthesis, antithesis, synthesis), the New School, now largely in control of the historical profession, continues to display poor form and began enforcing a degree of censorship that suggested they were becoming much like the elite groups they claimed to abhor. Traditional approaches to history (politics, biography, diplomacy, and war) are marginalized in favor of other approaches.**
In short, a broad, national approach to history (what does the forest look like) has given way to a focus on individual trees, branches, and leaves.
And now, we don't really have a 'usable past' that helps us to understand the post-Cold War world. We are instead still re-fighting many of the intellectual battles of the 1970s. The fact that the left wants to discuss Iraq as "another Vietnam" does not suggest a high degree of intellectual rigor or curiosity. At the very least, the statement reflects an egocentric racist perspective which the New History school attributed to the Consensus school.
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* That Americans can, without irony, argue that the president elect is either a communist or a fascist--or both-- testifies to the complete and utter collective failure of American historians to do their jobs competently and present their fellow citizens with accurate, usable information. The president-elect's campaign was rooted not in Berlin or Moscow but in good old 19th century American political pageantry.
** Some years ago, one of America's most revered military historians retired from his professorship. His department changed his slot from military history to women's history. From a business standpoint, this was a lousy decision. Undergraduates pack in classes in military history. From a professional standpoint, the decision is lamentable--the most enriching intellectual debates come from talking to someone with a different perspective.