(Roughly) Daily

Scott Spillman on the uses– and abuses– of popular history…

The story of popular historical writing since the middle of the twentieth century is often told as a narrative of decline: there were giants on the earth in those days, but now academic historians have forsaken their responsibility to write for a broader public, which in any case doesn’t really care what they have to say. Back in the golden days, or so the story goes, great scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward could make field-defining contributions—such as Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945), Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) and Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)—that also crackled with energy, reached a wide audience and informed public debates. But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain.

This story is obviously a caricature. Like all caricatures it gets certain major features right, albeit in exaggerated or distorted form. It also leaves a lot out—not only the details that would bring our gauzy image of the golden days into sharper focus, but also a better sense of what popular history actually looks like today. Because history remains popular. As I write, in the spring of 2024, Erik Larson’s new book about the start of the Civil War, The Demon of Unrest, is the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, while David Grann’s The Wager, about an eighteenth-century shipwreck, has consistently ranked in the top fifteen for more than a year. These are particularly fine examples of a certain genre of history—heavy on character and plot, somewhat lighter on analysis—that is perennially popular and, in the hands of a Larson or a Grann, can be quite rewarding.

But I want to think about a different kind of popular history. What books by writers like Larson and Grann don’t offer, at least not usually, is a broader interpretation of the world, a new perspective on the past that also leads to a new understanding of the present, something that is accessible to a reasonably broad public and offers at least the potential to rearrange a reader’s mental furniture. That, or something like it, is what people mean when they refer with nostalgia to the mid-century moment of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward.

This kind of serious but popular history does still exist. Our most well-known academic historian in this mode is probably Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor whose snappy essays in the New Yorker have won her a large and admiring readership for the way they put a human face on the historical antecedents of our own time. Yet if Lepore represents the liberal center, the driving force of contemporary interest in history has been the challenges we have seen to the liberal order from the left and the right, symbolized originally by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and more recently by Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter—challenges that have sent readers searching through the past for lessons about revolution, capitalism, fascism, racism and liberalism itself…

… In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?…

[There follows a fascinating– and enlightening– historiography of the last 75 years or so.]

… One major role of the humanities, in addition to enabling us to understand ourselves, must surely be to open our minds to lives and perspectives that are very different from our own. It should come as no surprise, then, that the ongoing half-century decline in humanistic education, which has only accelerated in the past fifteen years, has been accompanied by a striking decrease in our ability to understand ideas that diverge significantly from our own, or to imagine ourselves in the position of the people who hold them. Sometimes it seems as if we no longer believe in the possibility of such an act.

Contemporary academic historians who aim to influence public debate often make the problem worse. In the postwar period, Hofstadter could criticize the reform movements that shaped his own political education, while Woodward could express sympathy for both civil rights activists and aristocratic slaveholders. In contrast, historians today are more apt to take sides with their historical heroes lest they give any comfort to their present-day enemies. Often in their books you see a neat division of the past into two teams, such that history becomes little more than a spectator sport…

In the work of these authors, the people whom they supposedly care about are too often depicted as passive creatures who would choose correctly (that is, support civil rights and gun control and national health care) if only they weren’t being hoodwinked and manipulated by nefarious forces beyond their control. If only everyone knew the correct story of American history—namely, the story told in these books—then they would all see the light and be proper liberals. The books often lack any acknowledgment that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or that, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it…

… The purpose of serious popular history should be to make people more self-conscious about their society, to unearth its underlying values and assumptions and to show how past events, in all their contingency and subterranean logic, managed to produce the world we live in today. With the neoliberal order having come to an end, we are at a moment when the meaning of American society is up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been since the late 1960s and 1970s. It was in that earlier period when many of the writers we think of as the great postwar historians—Hofstadter and Woodward above all—sold tens of thousands of books a year, helping Americans make sense of who they were and what they wanted their society to be. Particularly with the 250th anniversary of independence arriving soon, we may be entering a similar period today.

With that in mind, it’s worth looking ahead to a more hopeful project, still in progress, from the Princeton historian Matthew Karp. Like the popular mid-century historians, Karp’s political and historical outlook was forged by a few searing experiences in young adulthood: America’s failed adventure in Iraq, which shaped the questions he asked in his first book (a look at the expansive foreign policy of another group of conservatives, the slaveholders of the Old South), and then the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, which turned him from a liberal into a Marx-quoting Democratic Socialist. “I was really swept away by the ideas and the energy behind that campaign in 2016,” he later recalled. “It felt distinct from anything I had experienced in my life not just in terms of what the campaign stood for, but the extent to which it felt like it had developed a mass base for what it was fighting for.”

In addition to his day job as a historian at Princeton, Karp became a contributing editor at Jacobin, where he has been a sharp analyst of election returns. In contrast to historians who merely pretend that their expertise affords special insight into contemporary electoral politics, Karp has actually put in the work. His chief concern has been what is known as “class dealignment,” with upper-class voters now breaking more Democratic while lower-class voters trend Republican. Karp has prodded his readers to honestly grapple with this phenomenon precisely because it poses such a deep challenge to his preferred form of class-based politics, at least insofar as that project might be pursued through the current Democratic Party. Refreshingly, he does not regard the mass of American workers as former or future fascists, but instead as voters who, just like the rest of us, can be won over with better politics and policies. “Underneath the partisan fear and loathing,” he wrote in his first Easy Chair column for Harper’s, published in June of this year, “‘a wide and arduous national life’ still murmurs on, linking city and countryside, crossing lines of race, gender, and culture, waiting to take hold in our politics.” The column used the novels of George Eliot to suggest some of the moral and political limitations of the typical urban Democrat’s condescending attitude toward rural workers.

For his next project, Karp is looking at the greatest example in American history of a political party that assembled a winning coalition around radical class politics: the Republican Party of the 1850s, which managed to go in six short years from nonexistence to control of the federal government by rallying Northern farmers and workers around the politics of anti-slavery. Karp published the first overview of his new research in 2019, just as the presidential campaigns were gearing up, in Jacobin and its more scholarly companion Catalyst. The piece made no present-day comparisons, but it did note that slaveholders in the 1850s made up only one percent of the American population and that the Republicans were successful in overthrowing their power and completely reorienting the policies of the federal government precisely by “building a mass movement to overthrow a ruling-class oligarchy.” “The Republican achievement in the 1850s,” he declared, “was not to isolate moral, cultural, or economic arguments against slavery, but to combine them into a compelling and victorious whole.”

Here, in other words, was a road map for radical movements today, a precursor that people could be proud of and from which they might take some inspiration. Notice that this does not require Karp to whitewash the past or to pretend its arc has always been progressive. More historians might follow his example of reminding readers that American history is at heart not a Manichean tale of good versus bad, or a deterministic tale based on some original sin, but a story of real people struggling to make moral and political decisions in a complex world. Perhaps then more of us would realize that we can exercise a similar agency and responsibility, humor and hope, in the choices we make in our own lives.

This is, and has always been, part of the promise of America—the promise that our inheritance need not define our experience, and that even as we rely on the past for our models we might also begin the world anew. The past can be instructive and informative, but it is not determinative; it surely constrains, but it doesn’t coerce. History can tell us something about who we are and where we have been, but it cannot tell us everything. At its best, it does not consign the story of the present either to epilogue or to tautology, but rather prepares us to appreciate the irony, the unpredictability and the unforeseen possibilities of the chapter we are writing for ourselves…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Popular History” in @thepointmag.bsky.social.

* Hajo Holborn

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As we ponder the past, we might send side-eyed birthday greetings to Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay; he was born on this date in 1800. A historian and politician, Macaulay’s hugely-influential The History of England, which manifest his belief the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, was an exemplar of the sorts of history against which Spillman argues.

As a Whig politician, Macaulay put the “lessons” of his history to work: he served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841 and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848; he also played a substantial role in determining India’s education policy.