What's Wrong with the New History: An Interview with David Kaiser

This interview was prompted by a discussion on H-Diplo about the decline of diplomatic history. Professor Kaiser, a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, blogs at History Unfolding. His latest book is The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Harvard University Press, 2008).

I thought we could start with your post on H-Diplo of March 20th. Here, you express your concern for the "nearly total eclipse of the study of politics" over the last 30 years in the historical profession. What do you mean by this?

As I tried to make clear in my post, the relative eclipse of diplomatic history is one facet of a much larger problem: the near-disappearance of the study of what modern governments do, and how what they do affects their societies, based upon archival research.  One rarely sees books about the passage of domestic legislation or the effects of government economic policies anymore.  Compare the extent of scholarship about the New Deal era in the 1950s to the extent of historical writing about the Reagan Administration today--and keep in mind that the Reagan Administration is as far away from us now as the New Deal was then.  Compare Drew Faust's The Republic of Suffering to James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom--both books which were widely reviewed and at least briefly made best-seller lists. McPherson wrote a highly sophisticated political and military history of one of the great crises in American life, taking advantage of recent scholarship.  Faust took a social phenomenon--death--and analyzed it from various economic, social, and cultural aspects.  Not surprisingly, her book was far less interesting to the general public. Now in fact, American foreign policy remains a relatively robust field--journals are still devoted to it, it has a professional association, and books on various topics continue to appear dealing with the actual behavior of the American government.  But the whole idea of "international history" seems to me designed to provide an alternative to the study of government policy which will be more in line with the prevailing trends of the last thirty years.

To illustrate what I'm talking about by analogy I'd like to refer readers to a book that recently appeared, The Purpose of the Past, a collection of reviews and essays written by the colonial historian Gordon Wood.  He treats quite a few recent works about the colonial era to show how the scholarship of the last 20-30 years has projected contemporary concerns--especially concerns about race, gender, and the supposed political power of language--onto that era.  Often, as he makes clear, that can only be done by making very selective and creative use of evidence.  The result--and this is one of the things that concerns me the most--are books that will not have much resonance outside of the historical profession itself.

Do you feel that our study of history is becoming less objective through these new methods?

What you have to understand is that the new history has given up the idea that the past can be recreated as it really was. If you believe that every view of the past is political, then one view is just as good as another from the standpoint of accuracy. The new history uses the past—usually pretty small snippets of it—to try to illustrate contemporary concerns, not the concerns of the past. Wood wrote very eloquently about this not too long ago in an article about recent books about slavery and the Constitution. He began by noting that we’ve been obsessed with race for the last forty years, and then noted several recent books that argued, in effect, that one of the main purposes of the new central government was to be able to deal with possible slave rebellions, and that the future of slavery was critical to many of the decisions reached in the Constitution. He showed that the latter contention in particular was a misreading of the evidence—but this is typical of what is going on.

Do you fear that the new methods, such as gender, are steadily replacing instead of assisting in our study of the interactions between states?

I hate to revisit past controversies but they do make my point.  One of the first major debates on H-Diplo on these issues involved an article by Frank Costigliola about George F. Kennan's long telegram.  Pointing out that Kennan repeatedly used the word "penetration" to describe Soviet behavior in Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of the Second World War, Costigliola argued that this was gendered language characterizing the Soviets as rapists.  In a long exchange I asked him to say whether he was actually arguing that Kennan had that in mind, or whether he was just, in effect, adapting the word to his own purposes.  I don't think he ever clearly answered that question. And that's a problem with post-modernist history, looking for "gendered" language and such in the past: they are not studying the past as such, not asking what words meant to those who used them.

Meanwhile, with respect to what the new "international history" means in practice, I can't do better than to quote William Hitchcock in our recent exchange about how "international historians" would discuss President Obama's visit to the G-7 summit:

I was thinking today as I read the news coverage of President Obama's trip to Europe: how would "international historians" write about it? Of course, we'd want to read the State Department records that will have been created in preparing for the G-20 meeting, and those will be fascinating: the Obama effort to engage Russia, the tensions between the US and Europe over global monetary and fiscal policy, the influence of China in the meeting halls. But I think we'd also want to explain the "Obama effect" - how his image has been constructed and deployed in Europe; the transatlantic (mis)-understandings about race; the gendered readings of Michelle Obama's public role; the significance of Obama's gift to the Queen - an iPod - the ultimate emblem of American consumer and popular culture. (Will the Queen use it, I wonder?) And surely we'd want to address the intensity of the riots in the streets of London's financial district, the youth-generated anti-globalization movement, and the cross-cutting understandings at elite and popular levels of the origins of the world financial crisis.

 Now let me suggest a third alternative.  My hope would be that in 30 years, when archives are, I hope, open, that meeting would be studied like the World Economic Conference of 1933: one episode in a long story of global economic meltdown and, I hope, eventual recovery.  As William Hitchcock bows to traditional approaches in the second sentence of that paragraph, he does so with a very narrow focus on this meeting itself. That's one problem I see. But then (with considerably more enthusiasm, I would say), he raises a number of concerns which no one outside professional academia would be likely to understand.  Essentially he's talking about how postmodern academics would riff (I use that word advisedly) about today's headlines, just as they riff on isolated incidents from the past.  That, to me, is the essence of the "new history" of which international history is a part, and I do not find it inspiring.

I was in grad school when social history was having an impact.  It--like women's history, the history of sexuality, etc., later--was sold as a way to broaden out history by adding previously understudied topics.  But no, that isn't the way things have turned out. There's only so much room in the garden, and the new species are crowding out the old, and replicating themselves much faster, and "international history" is, as far as I can see, part of that process.

 I might add, by the way, that Professor Hitchcock reported that his Temple undergrads are very enthusiastic about the new approaches. Perhaps they are; but I found as a visitor at Williams College two years ago that undergraduates there were delighted to do detailed, and quite traditional, investigations of the American role in the two world wars and of the Vietnam War. I had one student whose ambition was to go to grad school and study 19th-century European diplomacy—but he knew what a tough time he would have finding a place to do it, much less a job, and he has not yet decided to give it a go.  I also found that, with the help of the web, I could teach those topics more effectively than I had at Harvard in the 1970s or Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s.

Courses on traditional subjects like American diplomacy, the Second World War, and the Civil War still survive on some elite campuses, and they are usually very popular. However, those who teach them are generally nearing retirement, and there will be no younger folks to replace them.

Why do you think students are seemingly more enthusiastic towards the traditional approaches?

History is real-life drama. Yes, it is more often tragic than comic or heroic; but there is an intrinsic interest to studying decisions that affect the lives of millions. Personalities of people like Wilson, Roosevelt, LBJ, Nixon, Westmoreland, etc., are also inherently interesting, as are the reactions of the Americans and other people. If you pay attention to such things it’s not difficult to show students how the events of the last century shaped the world in which they live. Students also love working with primary sources, which are now readily available at their computer. There’s not too much mystery to any of this.

On April 2, Sally Marks stated that the AHA program committee has lacked for sometime a diplomatic historian (according to her, 17 years); she goes on to list other areas of neglect by the AHA towards the diplomatic field. Do you feel that other historians have largely abandoned diplomatic historians?

All that is true. Sally Marx is (she’s retired) a European diplomatic historian, which is what I started out as. That field is completely dead as far as I can tell, with the exception of a few older people who are still hanging on. You could look through a great many catalogues without finding a course on European diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century. I don’t think very many diplomatic historians belong to the AHA any more—I quit after the program committee had turned down two panels I submitted, one in the 1980s and one in the 1990s. That’s all discussed in an article published in Academic Questions in 2000 that I wrote called “My War with the AHA.”

You study one facet of a narrative that seems to revolve around big names. Whether it is Metternich, Talleyrand or Kissinger; foreign secretaries, envoys and diplomats have become immortalized in the study of history - World War II is in fact a perfect example of this. With so many famous and 'great' actors do you support the 'great man theory' in some shape or form?

To say that they have become "immortalized in the study of history" is to give in to the postmodernist assumption that history is simply a matter of valorizing certain people over others. The issue is not whether such men are great, the issue is that they the ones who, by virtue of the positions they occupy, make decisions upon which the lives, property and happiness of thousands, and sometimes millions of people depend. To be sure, they don't make them with complete freedom of action, but sophisticated historians have always understood that. In Politics and War I looked at four periods of general European war and concluded that in two of the four--including the last and most destructive one, from 1914 through 1945--the powers were fighting for unachievable goals. I think that was an important conclusion to reach. In American Tragedy I showed how one President, Kennedy, had refused to get into full-scale war in Southeast Asia while another, Johnson, thought he had to do so. If that doesn't prove that who is President is important than I don't know what would.

Here and elsewhere you’ve stated the problems in academia, and specifically with your field of history. I'd like to ask you if you have any possible solutions. Is it as simple as going back a few decades in practice? Is there an alternative you'd like to propose? What would you like to see changed within your profession and within universities in regard to the study of history?

Some of the faults of the historical profession actually go back half a century--particularly specialization--although they have gotten worse. I would like to see significant numbers of historians return to the study of national and international political institutions, how they work, what their impact on society is, etc. One irony is that, as I have proven in my last book (and am now at work proving again), breakthroughs in information technology, including on-line data bases and Microsoft Excel, actually can allow a historian to record, process, and make use of information on a scale that would have been impossible even twenty years ago. But to use them, you have to want to do the research in the first place. (I have offered to demonstrate these techniques to one or two history departments but so far there have been no takers.) Most of all, if history is ever going to have any broader impact, we have to encourage and reward people who think big. That would be an enormous change.

Ironically, seeking out people who are really remarkable teachers as well as scholars would also have a good effect. Great teachers have to be able to understand many things and make them comprehensible to lay people. Those are actually critical intellectual skills. No one knows this any more, but around 1950, when James Bryant Conant started General Education at Harvard, he actually hired some stars for the purpose of creating these new courses--including David Riesman. Not even a liberal arts college, much less a major university, would make an appointment like that today. And as Alan Kors pointed out not long ago in the Wall Street Journal, a school that actually oriented itself around serious teaching would be on top of the world within five years.