Mulling over yesterday's discussion, I was better able to articulate my own, and perhaps others', frustration with the limits of popular historymaking. The participants surveyed in Rosenzweig and Thelen almost universally lamented the facts-and-figures driven nature of traditional high school courses and their texts. If we consider the five W's (Who, What, Where, When, and Why) and accept them as useful points of inquiry, it becomes clear that high school textbooks and standardized curriculums have a tendency to stress the first four of these (Who, What, Where, When) and do a satisfactory job relaying those findings (depending on the texts), but do so in disservice of the last and arguably most important question (Why? i.e. structual and historical context). Anyone who has encountered the work of sociologist James Loewen is familiar with this criticism.
Applying this dilemma to those surveyed in Presence of the Past, it seems that popular historymakers have a similar tendency to stress the Who, What, Where, and When, but neglect the Why. They're simply exchanging political and economic data with social and familial data. The Why is nowhere to be found, which is where the professional historymaker comes in. If nothing else, historians are trained to consider, interpret, and reinterpret the Why, this is what we offer to an engaged public, this is the value of our contributions.
This isn't to deny the value of anyone's personal Who's and What's - this is often the fun stuff of history, the utility of the Past. Nor am I suggesting that cataloguing such material is a fruitless endeavor. The mission of many oral histories is precisely this, a cataloguing of a particular group of historical actors' four W's. But without the Why that material ceases to be historical and is simply in service of the various personal fulfillments I discussed in my previous post (dare I call it past-urbating?). Historians are here to answer the Why, and it would seem then that one of the central goals of the public historian is the marriage of this professional methodology with the personalized contributions of the popular historymaker. A tall order, but one I look forward to exploring further.
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Yes--the 5 Ws framework is a great way to explain the problem and, as you do here, initiate a conversation about solutions. One of the big problems is that, until recently, professional history makers of the university variety have been painfully bad at explaining the Why or, at least, making it clear why anyone but other academics should care. This is changing slowly, but perhaps one of our challenges is to identify more ways that the Why can be expressed in historical writing, exhibit building, interpretive design, and etc. toward avoiding excessive pasturbation (copyright this word asap--I think it's going to catch on!).
ReplyDeletePatrick, are you saying that public history has been too much like stamp collecting?
ReplyDeleteJust riffing here, but could it be that the "Royal Why" is often omitted because it is usually uncertain, complex, and dependent on controversial value-judgments? There generally are pretty well accepted answers to the "Four Lesser and Less Virtuous of Each of the Five Fucking Ws." A decent effort at tackling the "One W to Rule Them All" for any historical event of importance could be an 800 page ordeal. Is it a fair expectation or aspiration that public historians should be able to take on this task with a lay, often casual, audience?
"Is it a fair expectation or aspiration that public historians should be able to take on this task with a lay, often casual, audience?"
ReplyDeleteWell, that's the big question here. Public historians are certainly equipped to try. Their work shouldn't be held to the same standard as a 200-page academic monograph, but they can work with much of the same material and generate similar interpretations. Exhibit planners have to decide what, and what not, to show. Exhibit literature, though often brief, can suggest quite a bit, and can certainly contribute to the all-seeing, all-knowing Why.
I'm not likening public historians to stamp collectors - the term "popular historymakers" comes from Rosenzweig and Thelen's book Presence of the Past, and refers broadly to non-professionals interested in and engaging with historical material. It's a nice umbrella term that gives a little more agency than say "the public" or "the general reader." Popular historymakers are, well, stamp collectors. Public historians are professional historians.
So which one is Sheldon Hool?
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