Barbara Weinstein: AHA president says the age of the Schlesinger-style historian is over
[Re: Sam Tanenhaus's meditation on Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the NYT, "History, Written in the Present Tense." In the article Tanenhaus chastised historians for failing to measure up to Schlesinger's stature.]
... Tanenhaus's critique of the historical profession, however, is substantially different. He readily acknowledges that "we live in what is often called a golden age of history and biography, when David McCullough, to cite the most obvious example, has attained fame and enormous sales." He also mentions the considerable success in the nonacademic market of books by Gordon Wood and James McPherson. None of these scholars, alas, meets the criteria that Tanenhaus has in mind for a historian of Schlesingerian proportions. According to Tanenhaus, Schlesinger "wrote with an authority not to be found among younger historians and political thinkers, who continue to borrow from their elders." He goes on to ask "why do current historians seem unable to engage the world as confidently as Mr. Schlesinger did?" And lest one conclude that contemporary politicians simply do not provide the stirring subjects of study offered by, say, FDR or the Kennedys, Tanenhaus assures us that "the point is not that our leaders have shrunk, but that, in some sense, our historians have."5
So is this the case of the incredible shrinking historians? Are we really "smaller" than we used to be? There are so many different angles from which to critique Tanenhaus's dyspeptic assessment of the state of the historical profession that I am hard pressed to know where to start. One easy and obvious criticism of Tanenhaus's lament is that it is redolent of nostalgia for an era when almost all major historians (not to mention politicians) were white males, and when it was possible to speak with the "natural authority" of a privileged sector about a "society" deemed to have certain essential and enduring characteristics. I do not think for a second that Tanenhaus believes only white male historians could be important public figures, but he does seem strangely unaware of the way in which the diversification of the historical profession, both in terms of who writes history and what we study, has made certain kinds of oracular statements seem inappropriate, even a bit absurd, and for excellent reasons. (Indeed, he quotes Schlesinger himself as saying, in 2000: "If I were writing ‘The Vital Center' today, I would tone down the rhetoric.")6 It is one thing to shrink from making grand generalizations out of excessive caution; it is quite another to refrain from doing so due to a heightened perception of the many debatable assumptions and ideologically loaded constructions that inform such declarations....
Read entire article at Barbara Weinstein in a commentary in Perspectives
... Tanenhaus's critique of the historical profession, however, is substantially different. He readily acknowledges that "we live in what is often called a golden age of history and biography, when David McCullough, to cite the most obvious example, has attained fame and enormous sales." He also mentions the considerable success in the nonacademic market of books by Gordon Wood and James McPherson. None of these scholars, alas, meets the criteria that Tanenhaus has in mind for a historian of Schlesingerian proportions. According to Tanenhaus, Schlesinger "wrote with an authority not to be found among younger historians and political thinkers, who continue to borrow from their elders." He goes on to ask "why do current historians seem unable to engage the world as confidently as Mr. Schlesinger did?" And lest one conclude that contemporary politicians simply do not provide the stirring subjects of study offered by, say, FDR or the Kennedys, Tanenhaus assures us that "the point is not that our leaders have shrunk, but that, in some sense, our historians have."5
So is this the case of the incredible shrinking historians? Are we really "smaller" than we used to be? There are so many different angles from which to critique Tanenhaus's dyspeptic assessment of the state of the historical profession that I am hard pressed to know where to start. One easy and obvious criticism of Tanenhaus's lament is that it is redolent of nostalgia for an era when almost all major historians (not to mention politicians) were white males, and when it was possible to speak with the "natural authority" of a privileged sector about a "society" deemed to have certain essential and enduring characteristics. I do not think for a second that Tanenhaus believes only white male historians could be important public figures, but he does seem strangely unaware of the way in which the diversification of the historical profession, both in terms of who writes history and what we study, has made certain kinds of oracular statements seem inappropriate, even a bit absurd, and for excellent reasons. (Indeed, he quotes Schlesinger himself as saying, in 2000: "If I were writing ‘The Vital Center' today, I would tone down the rhetoric.")6 It is one thing to shrink from making grand generalizations out of excessive caution; it is quite another to refrain from doing so due to a heightened perception of the many debatable assumptions and ideologically loaded constructions that inform such declarations....
It may well be that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., was a towering figure, but as a good historian, he would surely have recognized that he was also a product of his time. Today perhaps no individual historian is likely to tower above the profession or stride into the political sphere in the same way. But I'd like to think it's because we're growing, not shrinking.