Edward Grey: Historians used to fight about much larger topics
[Edward Gray is associate professor of history at Florida State University and editor of Common-place.]
I have a friend who’s always ranting about the fact that historians can no longer handle a good scholarly fight. Mea culpa. Wimp. Coward. That’s me. I have never written anything that put a shot across another historian’s bow. My first book was about a subject historians don’t much care about: language. Insofar as it got any play, it was among the lit crit crowd. And my subsequent work has been tame to the point of cowardly solicitude. I would place most of it in a genre who’s origins lay with the very curse my friend believes to have been visited upon historians. That genre—usually referred to as microhistory—has little ambition at all when it comes to disproving another scholar’s thesis. It is, abashedly, about telling stories that, much like short stories, somehow move the reader by evoking distant experience and place. It also inclines toward the blatantly antiquarian in its relish for the small particulars of the past. Old things, long-vanished turns of phrase, antiquated behaviors, small cul-de-sacs of culture—these tend to be the stuff from which microhistorians forge their stories.
have, of late, been greatly taken with this approach to the past. It has seemed the perfect home for the sheepish among us who’d rather putz around in an archive and toy with their prose than dethrone some betweeded historical titan. Fortunately, I’m not alone. One only has to read this journal, whose very founding and survival have depended on a similar interest, among those of us who write about the past, in just publishing well told stories.
But, in keeping with my general lack of conviction about many things, I have to confess to having had some doubts about the enterprise. I’ll spare you the autobiographical part of the story and simply say that I’ve begun to miss those good old days when big questions were all the rage and when some Harvard or Yale professor would happily trundle out a book explaining the origin of the American Revolution or the meaning of Progressivism—at the expense of whatever poor sap had previously tackled the problem.
I’ve even started to look back fondly on what has become the most absurd and laughable of all modern scholarly trends: the original American Studies movement. Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean? And yet, I’ve found myself drawn to the writings of Leo Marx, Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, and others. For all their exceptionalism and reductionism, for all their dependence on the canonical, for all their quaint idealism, there is much in what they did that I find myself admiring....
Read entire article at Common-Place.org
I have a friend who’s always ranting about the fact that historians can no longer handle a good scholarly fight. Mea culpa. Wimp. Coward. That’s me. I have never written anything that put a shot across another historian’s bow. My first book was about a subject historians don’t much care about: language. Insofar as it got any play, it was among the lit crit crowd. And my subsequent work has been tame to the point of cowardly solicitude. I would place most of it in a genre who’s origins lay with the very curse my friend believes to have been visited upon historians. That genre—usually referred to as microhistory—has little ambition at all when it comes to disproving another scholar’s thesis. It is, abashedly, about telling stories that, much like short stories, somehow move the reader by evoking distant experience and place. It also inclines toward the blatantly antiquarian in its relish for the small particulars of the past. Old things, long-vanished turns of phrase, antiquated behaviors, small cul-de-sacs of culture—these tend to be the stuff from which microhistorians forge their stories.
have, of late, been greatly taken with this approach to the past. It has seemed the perfect home for the sheepish among us who’d rather putz around in an archive and toy with their prose than dethrone some betweeded historical titan. Fortunately, I’m not alone. One only has to read this journal, whose very founding and survival have depended on a similar interest, among those of us who write about the past, in just publishing well told stories.
But, in keeping with my general lack of conviction about many things, I have to confess to having had some doubts about the enterprise. I’ll spare you the autobiographical part of the story and simply say that I’ve begun to miss those good old days when big questions were all the rage and when some Harvard or Yale professor would happily trundle out a book explaining the origin of the American Revolution or the meaning of Progressivism—at the expense of whatever poor sap had previously tackled the problem.
I’ve even started to look back fondly on what has become the most absurd and laughable of all modern scholarly trends: the original American Studies movement. Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean? And yet, I’ve found myself drawn to the writings of Leo Marx, Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, and others. For all their exceptionalism and reductionism, for all their dependence on the canonical, for all their quaint idealism, there is much in what they did that I find myself admiring....