_______________IS HISTORY DEAD? BY SEAN McMEEKIN (01/11/99)

Sean McMeekin may well be onto something with his Jack Webb-esque "just the facts, ma'am" approach to history, but it is well to remember that much of the current vogue for textual analysis of history arose to correct the very real errors in the teaching of history prior to the rise of the various empowerment movements (black power, feminism and the whole rainbow of ethnic studies, for starters). I've had the displeasure of being taught from textbooks on American history that advocated a "Gone With the Wind" view of the antebellum South and a view of aboriginal Americans that owed more to John Wayne than N. Scott Momaday. Teaching the facts is all well and good, provided you know exactly who has chosen which facts to teach. Hell, David Horowitz ought to be proof enough of that. -- Michael Treece Mr. McMeekin's favorable review of "The Killing of History" can perhaps be excused on the grounds that a Berkeley grad student probably does hear more postmodernist cant than anybody ought to have to endure. On the other hand, a person with a sense of history should be aware that every philosophical movement ends in vulgarization. If 40 years of very original and extremely various work in history gets retailed as mere "Cultural Relativism," that only shows that American academics have trouble understanding philosophical arguments whether they are enthused about the authors they misread or choose to treat them as a threat to civilization. Many of the books that scandalize McMeekin were published more than a quarter of a century ago and have long since fossilized into cliché. It would sure be nice if people would seriously read these books with fresh eyes before they deify or demonize their authors. Dumping people as dissimilar as Ginzberg, Foucault, Darnton and Salins in the same roomy dumpster doesn't give me much confidence McMeekin has bothered to understand them. McMeekin is unhappy at the program of "approaching social practices and relations through textual analysis." He prefers building on "the bedrock of objective fact." Trouble is, last time I checked, every historian who wasn't just making things up had to approach the past through textual analysis. That's why historians are so frequently found in libraries and archives. Perhaps McMeekin has access to an objective fact mine, the rest of us will just have to read, even though reading is a complicated and chancy activity that doesn't automatically produce the highly desirable but rather mysterious objective facts McMeekin speaks of with the typical complacency of the juvenile Tory. -- Jim Harrison Sean McMeekin's essay on cultural history is tendentious nonsense, leavened with bouts of sheer cant. About which, a few points. 1. Traditional history. McMeekin seems to think that there is, or was, a time in which history was simply conducted in some uniform manner -- that historians as diverse as Ranke, MacAulay, Namier and Troeltsch were all doing the same thing. Perhaps he should read Namier's classic critique of Whig history, or Troeltsch's work on Historicism, before he jumps to such an odd conclusion. The idea that history is a collection of facts, organized by a chronology, is an 18th century one abandoned by the 19th century positivists, who construed their task as the adumbration of thematic meanings within the flow of the historical experiences of such entities as the nation, the people, the language, etc. 2. McMeekin's own analysis of the one example of history he criticizes, Inga Clendinnen's structural study of the Aztec-Spanish encounter, shows that, far from employing the arts of the accountant, adding up figures and coming up with a definite plus or minus, the historian balances probabilities and inferences, and never uses a fact without implying a meaning. McMeekin never disputes Clendinnen's "facts," which concern the tactics of Aztec warfare. He simply employs other facts, and searches for counterfactuals that show more Aztec flexibility than Clendinnen can account for. Fair enough, but the oddity of McMeekin's case comes out in the way he immediately moralizes the argument, making it one about the rightness or wrongness of the Spanish conquest. Long ago, Namier's study of the Whig historians pointed to the similar dominance of a moral/political agenda in the 19th century recounting of English history. At least, in those more robust times, the partisans of different historical methods had the decency to declare an agenda. The contempt into which the "traditional" historians, of Windschuttle's ilk, have fallen stems partly from their unexamined use of the term "fact," into which they have instilled a polemical meaning at odds with their surface appeal to objectivity. To use Sartre's term, this is bad faith. Almost a textbook example, in fact. 3. To employ McMeekin's conceit, someone who fell asleep in 1968 and woke up in 1999 would find the historical studies of such as Clendinnen a logical extension of the Annales school of the 1930s. She would actually see such things as Marcel Detienne's study of Greek mythology and culture, or Pierre Nora's examination of lieu de memoire, as an exciting intermingling of sociology and history. -- Roger Gathman Sean McMeekin's invocation of Herodotus and Thucydides as the originators of the "tradition of impartial historical investigation" is unfortunate. Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century B.C., tells his readers that gold in India is mined by trained ants slightly smaller than dogs; that parts of modern-day Russia are inhabited by a race of completely bald men and women; and that a famous musician of the sixth century B.C. was transported from one Greek island to another on the back of the dolphin who had saved him from drowning. These anecdotes (among many, many others available in Herodotus) frustrate any legitimate attempts to regard him as the father of fact-based history. Thucydides, a generation later, routinely put eloquent and historically inaccurate speeches in the mouths of his characters. Of course both writers are invaluable sources for Greek history, but McMeekin cannot, try as he might, make Classical Greece into a land before theory, when fact was fact and fiction was fiction. By making Herodotus and Thucydides straw men in his argument with cultural studies, he has given readers a distorted and impoverished picture of their writings. I'll leave another reader to comment on why the author of a call for empiricism and rigor finds support in writers he apparently has not read with any care. -- Alexa Jervis Sean McMeekin gives the respectful attention it deserves to Keith Windschuttle's "The Killing of History" or the mugging of Clio by practitioners of historical relativism, in its currently trendy postmodernist and poststructuralist guises. Windschuttle's critique is devastating, though arguably less so than David Harlan's "The Degradation of American History" (University of Chicago Press, 1997), an inside demolition job by a philosopher of history who convicts the new historicists of betraying many of the aspirations he shares with them. In one respect, however, McMeekin seems unaware of the depths of nihilism to which the profession has already descended. Citing the "paeans [that] were in fact composed earlier this decade to indigenous American cultures that brutally dismembered innocent human subjects in ritual sacrifice and then ate them," McMeekin asks: "Might historians yet compose laudatory odes to Adolf Hitler, champion of a gloriously anti-rational, anti-Western culture?" In fact, the edge of that precipice has already been reached by "new historians" on both sides of the Atlantic. David Stannard's "American Holocaust" (1992) pictures Columbus as a greater practitioner of genocide than Hitler. Tzvetan Todorov's "The Conquest of America" (1985) adds for good measure that 16th century European witch burners were also more genocidal than Nazis. And Andreas Hillgruber, far from the most extreme revisionist fighter in Germany's "Historikerstreit," has sought to "normalize" the Third Reich as part of German history by writing a multi-volume hymnody of praise to both the Wehrmacht and the SS on the eastern front. The point is not that the new historicists are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. The point is that their creed offers scant resistance to the disease. Hence, Hayden White, the doyen of the school, was morally revolted by apologetics for the Third Reich yet could find no theoretical reason to reject Hillgruber's "emplotment" of Germany's war in the East as "a tragic story" that could be told to "have a hero, to be heroic, and thereby to redeem at least a remnant of the Nazi epoch in the history of Germany." This takes us depressingly far from Tolstoy's searingly moral indictment in "War and Peace" of Napoleon as the antihero of a monstrously grotesque war and perilously close to Molotov's colossally cynical observation during the Hitler-Stalin pact that "fascism is just a matter of taste." -- Harold Brackman N E X T+P A G E+| Sean McMeekin responds