History is What Historians Write
On the first day of my first graduate seminar in history at California State University, Long Beach, Dr. David Cressy posed a question. It was disarmingly simple. “What is history?” A long silence fell over the room. Uncomfortably so. We all were historians, our B. A.s said so. But when we were confronted with the challenge of defining exactly what we had mastered as undergraduates we were left struggling. Before long, one of us chimed in – it is the story of the past. Another opined that it was a story of societal progress. And on and on. Dr. Cressy stayed silent. The more we talked, the more it seemed that none of us really knew what the hell it was that we had been doing.
After what seemed like an eternity of fumbling, half-formed, ill-expressed pronouncements, Dr. Cressy leaned back in his chair, tapped his pen on the seminar table and said in a casually simple way, “what if I said, history is what historians write.” We were thunderstruck. It seemed so simple. And at least to me it sent a thrill of power through my mind. Today, I thought, I am beginning a journey to CREATE history, starting on the path to conjuring the TRUTH about the past, and setting off to become an AUTHORITY in American life.
Ah, if it were so simple. If the specially trained, credential holding authorities defined the truth about the past, defined the stories that matter, and wrote up the meaning of all that had gone before it would all be so easy. History would be like handing tablets down for the people to hold in awe and take in with respectful gratitude. AHH, THIS IS WHAT IT WAS AND WHY IT MATTERS everyone would say with deference. But looking back over 30 years of being a real-life historian both as an academic and as a museum professional, I’ve come to conclude that HISTORY is in fact not that simple.
The fact of the matter is that history is not simply what historians write. History is written all around us – on sidewalks, in landscapes, in monuments, in movies, and on YouTube. People have their own family histories. Communities of all sorts have their own histories that circulate informally and explain their own experiences (or at least the experiences of those who were a part of these communities). Poets conjure the past. Novelists teach us about what has gone before. In each, a connection to the past is forged, meaning from experience ventured, and claims of truth exercised.
Digital content production has further expanded the canvas on which the past is rendered. On the interwebs one can find a dizzying array of historical content from crackpots holding their iPhone on a selfie stick opining on everything from the Battle of Hastings to the Tea Pot Dome scandal; to scholars trying to add their considered voices to the welling up of digital history; to institutions that have adroitly learned to use short form, quick hit, get-to-the point content to provide entertaining, educational, and profitable (especially when connected to fundraising appeals) content. And of course, there is history that is written for digital consumption that is overtly political – aimed at using the past to support a contemporary political agenda. On and on it goes.
As a working historian, I think far too little time is spent by scholars and others in thinking about what history is and too little effort is invested in reflecting on the complex and complicated nature of who “writes” history, where history is produced, and how we all come to know something of the past. Reconciling the contradictions and tensions between what scholars say, what amateurs say, and what the internet says, however, is vital for our understandings of where we’ve been and where we might want to go. No one position, I suspect, can entirely encompass what “history is” and who rightly “writes” the past but thinking about the tension, examining the places where history is “written”, and thinking about how this all combines to “make” our pasts is something worth doing.